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Research News
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Geriatrics & Aging Researcher Awarded PALTC Research Grant
Monday, August 1, 2022
Brian McGarry, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine and of public health sciences, was awarded the Foundation for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine research grant to examine the impact of ventilation and indoor air quality on the spread of COVID-19 in nursing homes during the pandemic. Ventilation is thought to be a key tool for preventing the spread of COVID-19 in indoor spaces, yet little is known about the real-word effectiveness of strategies to improve ventilation for preventing COVID-19 outbreaks and protecting vulnerable nursing home residents. With support from this grant, Dr. McGarry will lead a study to determine what steps nursing homes took to improve their indoor air quality during the pandemic and whether these efforts help explain differences in resident COVID-19 cases and deaths between facilities. Results will directly inform ongoing efforts limit indoor COVID spread, particularly in the presence of new COVID variants and waning vaccines effectiveness.
Study Shows Impact of COVID-19 Outbreak on Nursing Home Staffing
Friday, July 22, 2022
A recent study, co-authored by Brian McGarry, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine and of public health sciences, published in JAMA Health Forum provides the most detailed description to date on the impact of large COVID-19 outbreaks on staffing within U.S. nursing homes. Using detailed individual level payroll data, the authors find that outbreaks were associated with large declines in the staffing, despite numerous efforts on the part of nursing homes to bolster staffing levels, including hiring new employees, bringing in contract staffing, and the use of overtime. About 4 months after a large outbreak, staffing levels remained 5.5% below pre-outbreak levels; a large decline for an industry that was already short staffed before the pandemic.
Read the full article: Staffing Patterns in US Nursing Homes During COVID-19 Outbreaks
Aging Research at Wilmot Cancer Institute Brings in $5 Million in New, Peer-Reviewed Grants
Thursday, July 21, 2022
Several researchers at Wilmot Cancer Institute have been awarded grants in the fields of aging and cancer. Director Jonathan Friedberg says the notable intake of new, peer-reviewed grants so far this year is due to growth and innovation among Wilmot researchers at all levels of their careers.
Among the projects funded were three focused on aging research.
- Laura Calvi, M.D., and Roman Eliseev, M.D., Ph.D., are partnering to study the mechanisms by which the bone marrow ages. This is significant because abnormal bone-forming stem cells in the marrow can not only lead to osteoporosis but also support the development of leukemia and other blood diseases. They received a five-year National Institute on Aging grant totaling approximately $2.3 million. Calvi has also been notified that she will soon receive a second large grant to study a different aspect of how cancer develops in the aging bone marrow.
- Kah Poh (Melissa) Loh, MBBCH, B.A.O., M.S., received a $200,000 career development award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology Cancer Foundation to support a randomized clinical trial for a new tool to improve communication between doctors and older patients with acute leukemia. She has also been notified by the National Institute on Aging that she will soon receive a grant designed for early-career investigators; this project involves analysis of patient blood and bone marrow samples for DNA methylation, a biomarker of biological age.
- Allison Magnuson, D.O., is studying how to improve communication between physicians and older patients. Her five-year National Institute on Aging grant that totals approximately $2.5 million, supports a project to help oncologists deliver better care to their patients who have pre-existing dementia. It is also her first R01 award as an independent investigator. This type of award is extremely competitive and requires strong preliminary data and goes to scientists with a proven track record of publications. It is an important milestone in the career of a scientist.
Researchers Receive $2.5 million NIH Grant to Study Potential Sepsis Drug Therapies
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Every year, nearly 11 million people around the world die of sepsis, and there is currently no FDA approved drug to treat the condition. URMC researchers are out to change that.
When Anthony Pietropaoli, M.D., first met Minsoo Kim, Ph.D., over 15 years ago, they found they had common scientific and clinical interests, and started a fledgling translational research project combining a small cohort of septic patients with preclinical investigations using a mouse model of sepsis. In 2014, they earned a $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how immune cells would penetrate blood vessels. Fueled more recently by a URSMD Scientific Advisory Committee Faculty Pilot Incubator award, they have continued to build on that work and grow their collaborative sepsis research program.
This new grant from the NIH is for $2.5 million over four years, and will allow Pietropaoli, a professor of Medicine in Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, and Kim, the Dean’s Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, to conduct research for their ambitious proposal: determining whether a specific blood complement factor could be used as a drug treatment for sepsis.
With funding from previous grants and their intense study of blood markers, they discovered that the complement protein C1q, which occurs naturally in our blood and is one of the bacteria fighting molecules, has other functions, such as promoting resolution of inflammation. They aim to do a deep dive into C1q to see if harnessing its functions can lead to a new therapeutic treatment.
Drug therapies for sepsis have been difficult to obtain so far because the patient population is so diverse. There is no one treatment for the wide variety of situations of septic patients.
“The goal of this new research,” said Pietropaoli, “is to determine whether the production of C1q by neutrophils in septic patients is an important prognostic marker in our cohort of critically ill patients with sepsis. If we can show this is true, independent of other things like age, and comorbidities, then we have something that might be a relevant target for therapy. Our preliminary work suggests that when neutrophils don't or can't produce C1q, they can't be effectively cleared, and thus they continue to promote organ failures and sepsis. We want to both prove that it's prognostically significant, and further investigate the reasons why neutrophil C1q is so important.”
Their work is also a very timely topic as we continue to see COVID cases in hospitals. “A lot of COVID patients,” said Kim, “they don’t really die because of the virus, they die because of the overall inflammation response. It’s not the virus that kills them, it’s what it does to their bodies, and a lot of COVID patients are dying of sepsis.”
Pietropaoli and Kim stress that all of this work is made possible by the enthusiastic assistance of the clinical ICU teams of nurses, respiratory therapists, and providers, and the selfless generosity of their patients and their families.
For the time being, their treatment studies will be conducted with lab mice, providing pre-clinical data that will be used to build rationale for potential human clinical trials down the road. Should their work prove successful, URMC may present the world with a new drug treatment for sepsis.
HIV Vaccine Researchers Turned to COVID During the Pandemic. Now, They're Returning to HIV with New Knowledge
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Researchers like Michael Keefer, M.D., professor of Medicine, and Stephen Dewhurst, Ph.D., vice dean for Research, applied their HIV data to the development of RNA vaccines for COVID. "It's a bit of a renaissance," Keefer says. "We're going back to the drawing board, and our blueprint is mRNA vaccines. COVID has given us a lot of safety data that we can use now, and our understanding of vaccine development has grown."
Learn why HIV is a more difficult virus to develop a vaccine for, and how they'll take lessons learned from COVID to conduct new clinical trials.
Angela Branche Co-Chairs NIH Study of Second COVID Booster
Thursday, March 31, 2022
University of Rochester Medical Center researchers are leading a new national COVID vaccine study that will evaluate a second booster dose. The study will include the current approved vaccine and new doses that target the Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants. The goal of the study is to determine which individual or combination variant vaccine provides the broadest protection during potentially future outbreaks.
“For the past two years, we have been playing catch-up with the virus as new variants emerge,” said Angela Branche, M.D., an associate professor of Infectious Diseases and co-director of the URMC Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit (VTEU). “COVID will continue to evolve over time, potentially leading to new variants that cause periods of higher incidence of symptomatic disease. The goal of this study is to move from responsiveness to preparedness.”
Branche – along with Nadine Rouphael, M.D., with Emory University – is national co-chair of the phase 2 clinical trial, known as the COVID-19 Variant Immunologic Landscape (COVAIL) trial. The study is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and will seek to recruit up to 600 volunteers at 24 sites across the U.S., including Rochester.
The approved COVID vaccines provided durable protection against severe COVID during the Omicron wave, but were less effective in preventing infection and mild illness. The concern is that a new variant could build upon Omicron, other variants, or even emerge from new branch of mutations altogether. Omicron demonstrated that existing vaccines provide a foundation of protection, leading researchers to believe that strengthening this existing immunity, or even broadening it, could help boost protection against emerging variants and future waves of infection.
NIAID is racing to collect this data in part to help inform policy decisions, including which versions of the vaccine to recommend for future booster doses in the fall, when the combination of waning immunity, a return to school, and congregating indoors often spark the reemergence of respiratory viruses.
The COVAIL study is open to volunteers 18 years and older who already have received a primary COVID vaccination series and booster shot. Researchers will randomly assign volunteers to receive a second booster dose of either the original vaccine, doses engineered against the Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants, or doses that combine variants. Moderna will supply vaccines for the first stage and the clinical trial will expand over time to include vaccines produced by other manufacturers.
The study is being conducted through the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium, a network of NIAID-supported research sites, including the URMC VTEU, that have been at the forefront of the national scientific response to the COVID pandemic. The URMC VTEU is led by Branche and Ann Falsey, M.D.
For more information, visit: covidresearch.urmc.edu
$10 Million NIH Grant Funds Research on Treatments for Autoimmune Diseases
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
The Allergy, Immunology & Rheumatology division, along with other URMC collaborators, has earned a multimillion-dollar grant for five years to research autoimmune diseases. Jennifer Anolik, M.D., Ph.D., professor and interim chief of Allergy/Immunology & Rheumatology, and Christopher Ritchlin, M.D., M.P.H., professor of Allergy/Immunology & Rheumatology, will lead rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis/psoriatic arthritis research teams, respectively.
Learn more about this grant.
Dr. Anandarajah Awarded Grant to Reduce Racial Disparities in Clinical Trials
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Allen Anandarajah, M.B.B.S., has been awarded a grant from the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), funded through the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health. Funding will go towards developing initiatives that will reduce racial disparities in lupus clinical trials. The grant is titled TIMELY, which stands for Training to Increase Minority Enrollment in Lupus trials with communitY engagement. TIMELY is a two-year grant for $500,000, which will be split between URMC and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, both universities leading the efforts on this initiative. The grant will run through September 2023.
Anandarajah and URMC were chosen as leaders for this new program due to the success of a previous two-year program, Materials to Increase Minority Involvement in Clinical Trials (MIMICT).
In the US, lupus is more common in African American and Hispanic populations, however, patients from these populations are currently underrepresented in lupus clinical trials. The goal of the project is to increase clinical trial literacy for physicians and community health workers on phases, functions, and benefits, through educational materials woven throughout a multi-stage, interactive training program. This will lead to raising clinical trial awareness among underrepresented patients living with lupus in our region.
“This project will help us continue to be national leaders in providing high-quality care for patients from minority communities with lupus,” said Anandarajah. “We started a few years ago with the IQ-LUPUS project that was partly funded by the Greater Rochester Health Foundation (GRHF) and have continued to improve our efforts first with the MIMICT and now the TIMELY projects. In addition to serving our patients, these grants will ultimately help build better relationships with our community."
Read the press release from the ACR.
Hima Vidula Wins Grant to Develop Program Addressing Microaggressions
Monday, February 28, 2022
Hima Vidula, M.D., M.S., is an associate professor of Cardiology, and currently serves as the president of the New York State Chapter of the American College of Cardiology (ACC). Vidula has recently won funding from the ACC to develop a program that will train women and early-career cardiologists to recognize workplace hostility, develop effective strategies to navigate challenging situations, and become ambassadors and allies for others.
Interest in developing such a program was born from research the ACC conducted, which demonstrated that hostile work environments can be prevalent in Cardiology, where women and early-career faculty are more likely to experience microaggressions, bias, or discrimination. Vidula and other team members from the ACC have been awarded $13,000 in funding to develop the program, titled Microaggressions, Bias, and Toxicity: Navigating Difficult Interactions in Cardiology, which is a collaboration between the New York and Pennsylvania ACC chapters.
Her goal is to create an interactive program that will equip participants with the skills to navigate difficult conversations and scenarios in the workplace. The program will include four 90-minute workshops, each including a 30-minute lecture from a professional coach, followed by a 60-minute open discussion, that may include role-playing scenarios.
Planning and development are underway, and Vidula aims to launch the program this summer.
Angela Branche Featured as One of Five Inspiring Women in Science
Friday, February 11, 2022
Angela Branche, M.D., associate professor of medicine in infectious diseases and co-director of the URMC Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit, reflected on her role as a woman in research as the University of Rochester Medical Center celebrated International Day of Women and Girls in Science on February 11. She was one of five researchers at URMC who shared their advice to other women and girls interested in science. “I’ll never accept the idea that I’m somehow starting off with a disadvantage because I’m a woman and I dare anyone to treat me otherwise. The only limitations I have are the ones I create and accept for myself,” Branche said.
Read the full story
Wilmot Cancer Institute Has Good Year of Clinical Trials Despite Pandemic
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
Enrolling patients in research studies is always a challenge, and the COVID pandemic brought new hurdles to recruiting clinical trial participants. While many cancer centers saw a decline in enrollment due to the pandemic, Wilmot Clinical Trials continued to treat a large number of individuals.
The entire division of Hematology & Oncology contributed to the success of clinical trials last year through teamwork and collaboration, keeping the impact of COVID at bay for their patients. Aram Hezel, M.D., division chief, says this is “an achievement the whole group can be proud of.”
Hezel makes it a point that for every patient, they look for a trial that fits their unique health situation. There are more than one hundred types of cancer, each with different stages, and so there are over 200 clinical trials open at Wilmot at any given time. Patient education is the key to enrolling participants: ensuring that the patient and their family know about available trials and understand the risk versus benefits. Approximately half of patients decide to enroll in a trial after speaking with their physician.
“Clinical trials are very positive for patients,” said Hezel, “because it offers them treatment options they might not otherwise have access to. Sometimes a trial will lead to the FDA approval of a new therapy. Trials are also positive for us as physicians, because there’s an exciting aspect of exploration, the freshness of trying something new, knowing that it could lead to finding better treatment options for our patients.”
The latest issue of Dialogue magazine offers a deeper dive in the article “Clinical Trials Office Steps Up Its Game.” Learn how the CTO has been instrumental in preparing for National Cancer Institute designation, and how it has been transforming processes while still providing care.
Anderson Laboratory Awarded Research Funding for Trans-Splicing Technology
Thursday, January 6, 2022
The Anderson Lab has been awarded over $850,000 in research funding through Scriptr Global Inc. Douglas Anderson, Ph.D., assistant professor of Medicine, Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute, is the principal investigator. The funding will be provided through October 2023.
The funding will go towards developing a novel RNA trans-splicing technology, called StitchR, into a therapeutic approach for treating Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) and other dystrophinopathies. StitchR, which stands for ‘Stitch RNA’, arose from the team’s serendipitous discovery that when two independent RNAs are cleaved by ribozymes (small self-cleaving RNAs), the resulting RNAs become trans-spliced, or ‘stitched’ together. Remarkably, if two halves of a protein-coding mRNA are used, the subsequent ‘stitched’ mRNA will be translated and express the full-length protein in cells. For this sponsored research agreement, Anderson’s group is using StitchR to develop a dual AAV-based gene therapy to deliver and express a large functional copy of the Dystrophin gene, which is normally too large to be encoded within the packaging limits of a single AAV vector. This project brings together their background in RNA and muscle biology, with the ultimate goal of making a positive impact for patients suffering with dystrophinopathies.
This work will also help validate the potential for StitchR-enabled AAV gene therapies to be utilized for other human diseases which occur from mutations in very large genes, such as hemophilia A, cystic fibrosis, dyferlinopathies, macular degeneration, and others.
Disclosures: The StitchR technology has been licensed from the University of Rochester to Scriptr Global, Inc., for which Douglas M. Anderson, Ph.D. is Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder.