Glycobiology Significant Achievement AwardThe Glycobiology Significant Achievement Award is given annually by Oxford University Press (publisher of Glycobiology) to honor new or mid-career scientists who have made key discoveries in their careers with the potential to have a substantial impact on the glycoscience community. 2025 Awardee - Dr. Ryan Flynn
Oxford is delighted to present the 2025 Glycobiology Significant Achievement Award to Dr. Ryan Flynn. Ryan is a New Jersey native who completed his undergraduate training at MIT, where he worked in the lab of Phillip Sharp on small noncoding RNA biology. He subsequently moved to Stanford where he completed his M.D. and Ph.D. with Howard Chang developing methods to study RNA-protein interactions, for which he won the Weintraub Graduate Student Award. Ryan changed fields to learn both chemistry and glycobiology with Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Postdoctoral Fellow. At the beginning of 2021, Ryan started his own lab as an Assistant Professor at Boston Children’s Hospital in the Stem Cell Program and Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University. The Flynn Lab is currently focused on advancing methods, mechanisms, and functions surrounding the glycosylated RNA (glycoRNA) molecule, which operates at the interface of RNA biology and glycobiology at the cell surface. Dr. Flynn has a long-standing interest in developing and implementing tools to understand RNA biology and its contributions to human health and disease. During his training, he focused on developing tools to discover mechanisms of nuclear, cytosolic, and viral RNA biology; however, his independent lab pursuits have moved into a new, essentially unexplored space in the context of RNA biology: the cell surface. His initial and surprising discovery that small noncoding RNAs (snRNAs, tRNAs, Y RNAs, and snoRNAs) are modified with complex N-glycans (Flynn et al., 2021) highlighted a large gap in our thinking about the cell surface. These glycoRNAs contained sialylated N-glycans, produced in the luminal spaces of the ER and Golgi apparatus and eventually positioned on the surface of living cells. Ryan’s group demonstrated glycoRNAs can interact with immune check-point receptors known as Siglec proteins, which positions glycoRNAs as key regulatory molecules in the extracellular space. Dr. Flynn’s lab takes a broad but focused approach to better define the scope of cell surface RNA biology. By developing new chemical biology tools, he has simplified the path to study native glycoRNAs, increasing the sensitivity and speed with which researchers can assay glycoRNAs (Xie et al, 2024). This work also led to the discovery of the first direct attachment site for an N-glycan to the RNA modification acp3U. Subsequently, he discovered that acp3U is itself a molecular signature recognized by the endosomal TLR system and that N-glycosylation of this PTM can shield it, rendering it immune silent (Graziano et al. 2025). Ryan’s group also discovered that RNA binding proteins are common members of cell surface proteomes and form nanoclusters with glycoRNAs. These glycoRNA-csRBP clusters form sites for cell surface binding of cell penetrating peptides like TAT, and loss of cell surface RNA reduces TAT’s cell entry capabilities (Perr et al. 2023). Interestingly, while most cells have glycoRNA-csRBP clusters, the composition varies dramatically. In the context of cancer, his lab discovered that NPM1, a classically nucleolar protein is selectively presented on the cell surface (George et al. 2025), offering a new class of surface antigens for therapeutic targeting. More fundamentally, Ryan is interested in defining why cells produce glycoRNAs and csRBPs. By leveraging genome-wide screening technologies, he discovered heparan sulfate binding growth factors like VEGF-A interact with glycoRNAs and their signal transduction properties can be controlled by cell surface RNAs (Chai et al. 2024). Thus, his work aims to fundamentally transform our understanding of the materials cells present to the extracellular milieu in both health and disease.
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The Glycobiology Significant Achievement Award is given annually by Oxford University Press (publisher of Glycobiology) to honor new or mid-career scientists who have made key discoveries in their careers with the potential to have a substantial impact on the glycoscience community.