PI: Jennifer Collinger and Michael Boninger
Title: Neural Control of Dexterous Manipulation and Translation to a Portable System
Grant of the Month 2016
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | December 16, 2016
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | November 28, 2016
PI: Anne Robertson
Title: Improving cerebral aneurysm risk assessment through understanding wall vulnerability and failure modes
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | October 28, 2016
PI: Andrew Schwartz
Title: Enhanced Neural Prosthetics Using Shared-Mode Control
Description: This project builds on the world’s most advanced program in brain-controlled robotic arms and hands for paralyzed individuals. A group of Pittsburgh scientists and engineers will enhance the performance of neural prosthetics, allowing a paralyzed person to manipulate an object. A prosthetic limb will operate under an individual’s brain control, with a boost from an artificial intelligence component designed to predict what the individual intends to do. This shared-mode control will enable people who have quadriplegia to dexterously handle objects with a robotic arm and hand, and thus increase their independence in daily life.
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | September 28, 2016
PI: Timothy Corcoran and Robert Parker
Title: Building Multilevel Models of Therapeutic Response in the Lungs
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | August 30, 2016
PI: Amanda Gillespie
Co-I: Jackie L. Gartner-Schmidt, Clark Rosen, Jonathan Yabes
Title: Efficacy of Conversation Training Therapy
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | July 25, 2016
PI: Robert Parker and Gilles Clermont
Title: Endotypes of thrombocytopenia in the critically ill
Description: Thrombocytopenia is extremely frequent in critically ill patients. However, the role of acute platelet responses in critically ill patients is not well studied, and the multifactorial etiology of thrombocytopenia in the ICU makes it difficult to understand, or understand whether or not to treat it. In several situations such as traumatic injury or sepsis, very low platelet counts have been to bleeding, thrombosis and end-organ injury. Platelets have been extensively studied as a key component of hemostasis, but a rapidly emerging concept is that platelets are also key effector cells in systemic inflammatory processes as both instigators of local and systemic inflammatory reactions and also participants in the inflammation that contributes to tissue injury. The link between platelets and inflammation is complex and bidirectional, as inflammatory ligands have been shown to regulate platelet function and activated platelets induce inflammatory responses in other cell types. The overarching theme of this proposal is to study platelet dynamics in critically ill patients, construct clinical endotypes of thrombocytopenia in this population, and to relate these endotypes to underlying mesoscale mechanisms through computational modeling. We will use a large electronic health record-based database and a tri-state trauma database as source data to construct these endotypes. We define endotype as clinical patterns defined along four dimensions: (1) baseline information (demographic, chronic disease burden, severity of illness and admitting diagnosis), (2) features of the platelet count time series (rate of decrease, nadir, etc.), (3) concurrent interventions, and (4) outcome. The computational approach will attempt to root clinical endotypes in mechanistic interpretations (or collections of alternative interpretations), contributing to focus basic science investiagtions, and to close key knowledge gaps preventing the design and use of targeted anti-platelet-inflammatory therapies in the critically ill. Computational models will be developed at different levels of complexity, with a specific attention to tie underlying mechanisms to functional assays routinely performed in thrombocytopenic patients, such as prothrombin time, activated coagulation time, and thromboelastogram.
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | June 27, 2016
PI: Rocky S. Tuan
Co-I: Peter Alexander and Riccardo Gottardi
Title: A Microphysiological 3D Organotypic Culture System for Studying Degradation and Repair of Composite Skeletal Tissues in a Microgravity Environment
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | May 23, 2016
PI: Fabrisia Ambrosio, Bennett Van Houten
Co-I: Aaron Barchowsky, Mauricio Rojas, Donna Stolz
Title: The Anti-Aging Effect of Klotho on Skeletal Muscle Regeneration
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | May 3, 2016
PI: J. Peter Rubin, MD
Titles: PUMP
Description: PUMP is a solution aimed at reducing hospital-acquired pressure ulcers, affecting an estimated 3 million patients annually. The monitoring and alert solutions, using wearable devices and hospital bed sensors, will provide real-time documentation of patient repositioning and a process to improve compliance with these preventative measures.
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | March 24, 2016
PI: Fabrisia Ambrosio and Aaron Barchowsky
Co-PI: William Wagner, Antonio D’Amore, and Donna Stolz
Titles: Dysfunctional Muscle Remodeling and Regeneration in Environmental Disease
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | February 25, 2016
PI: Stephen Badylak
Title: IPA#14 – Development and Evaluation of Xenografts for Soft Tissue Reconstruction; IPA#15 – Development and/or Evaluation of Synthetic Materials, Synthetic/Biologic Material Composites, surgical hemostats/sealants/adhesives and/or Methods for Improving the Host Tissue Response to Such Materials; IPA#16 – Development and/or Refinement of In Vitro Methods which would Characterize and/or Predict the Host Response to a Test Article; and IPA#17 – Development / Refinement of Preclinical Models and Ex-Vivo Test Methods
By The McGowan Institute For Regenerative Medicine | Grant of the Month, Grant of the Month 2016 | January 28, 2016
PI: Xinyan Tracy Cui
Title: Inhibition of Neural Electrode-mediated Inflammation and Neuronal Cell Death