Virginia Tech Researcher Wins $3.8 Million NIH Award

Wujin Sun will use the five-year grant to develop a skin patch that reprograms a patient's own cells inside the body.

Updated on Nov. 2, 2026 in Biotech

Virginia Tech Researcher Wins $3.8 Million NIH Award

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Would you trust a skin patch that reprograms your own cells to treat disease?

Wujin Sun, an assistant professor in Virginia Tech's Department of Biological Systems Engineering, received a five-year, $3.8 million NIH Director's New Innovator Award. Sun is one of 42 researchers selected for the 2026 award.

Why it matters

Current customized cell therapies typically cost $500,000 per patient and require weeks of wait time. The project aims to move cell modification from specialized laboratories to the point of care to reduce both cost and delay.

The transdermal bioreactor is a minimally invasive patch that attracts a patient's own cells into a soft material just beneath the skin. The patch reprograms those cells to fight disease or repair tissue before gradually releasing them back into the body, and its effectiveness and safety remain under study in mice.

The players

Wujin Sun

Wujin Sun is an assistant professor in Virginia Tech's Department of Biological Systems Engineering who leads the transdermal bioreactor project.

Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech is a public research university in Blacksburg, Virginia, where the biological systems engineering research is based.

The details

The transdermal bioreactor works by drawing cells into a soft material placed just under the skin, then reprogramming them to attack disease or repair tissue. The researchers will initially program cells to target melanoma and to generate skin cells for chronic diabetic wounds.

2021 through 2025: Only 9 percent of applicants received NIH New Innovator funding during this period.
2026: Sun was selected as one of 42 researchers for the New Innovator Award.
Five-year: The $3.8 million award runs over this duration.

Tech Race

The project competes with conventional ex vivo cell therapy manufacturing, which requires removing cells from patients and modifying them in specialized labs. Its in-body approach aims to shift that process toward point-of-care delivery.

If the approach succeeds, patients could receive cell-based treatments without the weeks-long wait and the roughly $500,000 cost of current customized therapies. The researchers have also said the method could later be adapted to autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

The takeaway

Lower-cost, in-body cell therapies could make advanced treatments far more accessible if early mouse results hold up. Readers should watch for the human trials that would have to follow.