New pilot grants will forge collaborations between researchers at Keck Faculty of Medication of USC and the Alfred E. Mann Division of Biomedical Engineering. Picture/USC Viterbi
The lifesaving medical discoveries and therapeutics of the long run will probably be one step nearer, due to a College of Southern California pilot grant initiative that goals to strengthen the pipeline between cutting-edge biomedical engineering analysis and medical functions.
The primary challenge bulletins for the Mann Engineering in Medication Pilot Grant Program will assist new analysis collaborations between investigators at USC Viterbi Faculty of Engineering and Keck Faculty of Medication of USC. The preliminary funding helps a variety of thrilling analysis collaborations, from enhancing outcomes for sufferers with aggressive blood cancers to a mind imaging approach to fight involuntary affected person motion.
The $100,000 pilot grants are doable due to the historic $35 million naming reward that in 2022 established the Alfred E. Mann Division of Biomedical Engineering.
Dwight C. and Hildagarde E. Baum Chair in Biomedical Engineering Peter Yingxiao Wang stated that the grants aimed to reinforce the division’s analysis collaborations by forging ongoing analysis partnerships throughout the 2 faculties, with every profitable challenge addressing a big analysis or medical software by harnessing novel engineering approaches.
“This system will allow the formation of interdisciplinary groups that leverage engineering instruments to provide novel insights or breakthrough applied sciences, facilitating vital advances in well being,” Wang stated.
“Since taking up the position of Division Chair, it has been a key precedence to advertise nearer and extra systematic collaboration between USC Viterbi and Keck Faculty of Medication, in order that we are able to make a distinction for sufferers. This pilot grant program wouldn’t have been doable with out the unwavering assist from each Deans Carolyn Meltzer and Yannis Yortsos,” Wang stated.
Whereas the present collaborations will deal with USC Viterbi and Keck Faculty, Wang stated that future funding rounds might additionally assist the enlargement of collaborations throughout different health-related faculties.
The preliminary tasks funded below this system are as follows.
An actual-time volumetric imaging system for the liver
In accordance with the American Liver Basis, greater than 100 million individuals in the US have some type of liver illness. If left untreated, these can result in liver failure and liver most cancers. Clinicians presently depend on ultrasound imaging to evaluate liver well being and performance, with contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) a standard detection and characterization technique for focal liver lesions. Nevertheless, as a result of these research are 2D, precisely quantifying and analyzing the entire lesion is troublesome and incomplete. The actual-time 3D characterization might assist long-term monitoring and in addition assess the consequences of therapy.
A collaborative crew from the Alfred E. Mann Division and Keck Faculty will work on a broadband, real-time, volumetric imaging system able to improved anatomic and useful imaging for the liver and different belly organs. The challenge will probably be led by Jesse Tong-Pin Yen, an affiliate professor of biomedical engineering, and co-PI Vinay Duddalwar, professor of medical radiology, urology and biomedical engineering at Keck Faculty of Medication.
Correcting movement artifacts and noise after mind imaging knowledge acquisition
A major problem in human mind imaging is correcting “motion-induced artifacts” — the noise or errors attributable to voluntary or involuntary head actions throughout scans. It’s a specific difficulty in infants and youngsters, in addition to sufferers with motion problems, and may result in misdiagnosis or misinterpretation.
New analysis will harness machine studying to fight this drawback by way of a Movement-Adaptive Diffusion Mannequin (MADM), a generative deep studying strategy that gives a extremely trainable probabilistic framework that may be taught extra lifelike and numerous patterns of human motion-induced artifacts. The framework would enable clinicians to retrospectively convert “unusable” knowledge into dependable info to help analysis and enhance affected person outcomes. The work will probably be led by Dean’s Professor of Biomedical Engineering Michael Khoo, and co-PI Ho Sung Kim an assistant professor of neurology at Keck Faculty.
Higher prediction of drug responses for sufferers with aggressive blood cancers
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a uncommon and aggressive most cancers of the bone marrow and the blood. Normal therapy for sufferers is intensive chemotherapy, which frequently results in drug resistance and relapse, in addition to a excessive mortality charge in older sufferers. Challenges stay for newer focused and mixture mobile therapies attributable to advanced genetic mutations and differing affected person responses.
New analysis goals to satisfy the pressing want for brand spanking new biomarkers and assays to raised predict therapeutic responses in AML sufferers. The crew will look into the metabolic conduct of cells to develop a complete library of metabolic optical biomarkers (MOBs) utilizing fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) whereas additionally making a drug therapy assay to foretell drug responses. The work is led by Keyue Shen, an affiliate professor of biomedical engineering at USC Viterbi, and Yali Dou, the Marion and Harry Keiper Professor of Most cancers Analysis at Keck Faculty.
Revealed on July sixteenth, 2024
Final up to date on July sixteenth, 2024
