Email this pagePilot and Collaborative Translational and Clinical Studies 2007 Awardees
Laura Calvi MD
Laura Calvi, MD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology. She was honored as a Pew Scholar in 2005. Having been raised in Italy through much of High School, Laura attended Union College and then Harvard Medical School, where she took a year out to conduct research. This experience sparked a commitment to research as a career, which extended through training in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital en route to Rochester. In addition to her Pew grant, Dr. Calvi's work has been supported by NIH K08 and K21 awards. Although to date Dr. Calvi's research has mainly used transgenic mouse models, the aim of the pilot is to define changes in the bone and bone marrow in humans that occur as a result of in vivo treatment with parathyroid hormone (PTH). Patients receiving PTH for osteoporosis will undergo prospective bone marrow sampling, with analysis of stem cell and osteoblast compartments. Collaborators include Susan Bukata, MD (Assistant Professor of Orthopaedics) and Jonathan Friedberg, MD Associate Professor of Medicine). The goal is to confirm previous findings in mouse models that PTH exerts a myeloprotective effect. If these mouse findings are found to translate to humans, there would be exciting support for the therapeutic potential of parathyroid hormone (PTH) in a variety of bone and malignant diseases, including bone marrow failure states, and iatrogenic stem cell aplasia due to chemotherapy or radiation.
Jean-Phillipe Couderc PhD, MBA
Jean-Phillipe Couderc is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Couderc graduated with a MBA from the University of Rochester's Simon School. The title of Dr. Couderc's Pilot project is "A Proof-of-Concept Study for Assessing the Interest of Novel ECG Technologies in the Risk Stratification of Patients with End Stage Renal Disease: Using the Hemiodialysis Session as an Arrhythmic Challenge. Dr Couderc has dedicated the past ten years to quantitative electrocardiography focusing on the development of novel techniques for the analysis of the ventricular repolarization from the surface ECG in human and in various animal models. Dr. Couderc is the author or co-author of numerous publications in computational science and engineering, numerical analysis, and computer science applied to electrophysiological signals. He is holding a SGE position at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research for the US Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Couderc is principal investigator and a co-investigator in several federal-funded research grants. He has been invited for lectures at universities, laboratories, and industrial research centers in U.S. and Europe involving consulting experience with industry and national agencies (NIH and EPA).
Charles Duffy MD, PhD
Charles Duffy MD, PhD, is a tenured Professor of Neurology. He received an A.B. in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard College and went on to the MD-PhD Program at John Hopkins Medical School, earning his PhD in physiology. After an internship at Hopkins in Medicine, he took his Neurology residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He was recruited to Rochester as an Assistant Professor in 1993, and rose through the ranks to appointment as Professor in 2003. He is widely recognized for his work on visual-spacial orientation and processing by the brain in normal aging and in Alzheimer's disease. This work is currently supported by two R01 grants, both of which are in years 6-10 of funding. His pilot project, entitled, "VEP's in Aging and Alzheimer's Disease," uses visual evoked potentials (VEPs) to predict a patient's ability to navigate independently based on linked neurophysicological and psychological measures. The information from this pilot and follow-on studies may substantially improve the quality of life for patients who suffer from Alzheimer's disease, which is becoming increasingly important in our aging population.
Jennifer Gewandter
Jennifer Gewandter is a PhD student in Biochemistry and Biophysics. Jennifer will be spending 4-8 weeks in the laboratory of Dr. Jenny Hinshaw at NIH. She will be focusing on the mitochondrial fission protein DLP1 (dynamin-like protein 1), which is critically involved in the severing of mitochondrial membranes that plays such an important role in mediating the pathologic effects of reactive oxygen species (ROS). In order to target DLP1 as a potential therapeutic agent for conditions caused by ROS, we must understand the mechanism of action of DLP1, which is exactly what Jennifer will be attempting to do at NIH.
Matthews Jacob, PhD
Matthews Jacob, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Computational Biomedical Imaging Group. Dr. Jacob's Pilot project is entitled "Model-based MR Spectroscopic Imaging for Brain Cancer Treatment Planning and Prediction of Recurrence. The Computational Biomedical Imaging Group (CBIG) pursues research on the development of new algorithms for the reconstruction and post-processing of medical and biological images. Dr. Jacob's research interests include image reconstruction, image analysis and quantification in the context of a range of modalities including magnetic resonance imaging, near-infrared spectroscopic imaging and electron microscopy. He obtained his B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering and M.E in signal processing from the National Institute of Technology, Calicut Kerala in 1996 and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1999 respectively. He was granted his Ph.D. degree from the Biomedical Imaging Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 2003. His PhD dissertation was on parametric shape processing under the guidance of Prof. Michael Unser. He was a Beckman postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign between 2003 and 2006.
Suzanne Karan MD
Suzanne Karan, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology. Dr. Karan's Pilot project is entitled "Physical Therapy for the Airway to Treat Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea". Dr. Karan's research interests include Respiratory Physiology, Obstetric Anesthesia, Thoracic Anesthesia, Upper Airway Obstruction, Medical Student Education, and Medical Simulation. She was the recipient of a Research Fellowship Grant from the Foundation of Anesthesiology, Education, and Research (FAER) and was also chosen as a Diplomate by the American Board of Anesthesiology.
Anitha Krishnan MS
Anitha Krishnan is a PhD candidate in Biomedical Engineering who has completed her formal coursework. Her efforts are now concentrated on research towards her PhD thesis. Her proposal addresses a critical need for improved treatment of glioblastoma, which currently has a dismal prognosis with current chemotherapy and stereotactic radiotherapy. In particular, radiation treatment is ineffective in protecting against recurrences unless it also treats local spread. However, it lacks the precision required to treat local spread without also ablating a large amount of healthy brain tissue. Anitha seeks to develop and validate predictive models of local cell dispersion using datasets from high resolution in vivo MR diffusion tensor imaging (MR-DTI). It is hoped that such knowledge will lead to prolonged survival of patients with glioblastoma by treating tumor cells that spread out from the primary cancer site, without damaging health tissue.
Rebekah Loy MPH, PhD
Dr. Rebekah Loy is a Research Associate Professor of Neurology. Dr. Loy will be spending 3 weeks learning methodology related to epigenetic gene regulation in the laboratory of Dr. Simon D. Spivak at the Wadsworth Research Center. She will then develop techniques that will allow her to test the hypothesis that epigenetic mechanisms may contribute to psychosis and agitation in people with Alzheimer's Disease, as well as responsiveness to mood stabilizer therapy.
James McGrath MD
James McGrath, PhD, is Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering. After obtaining his B.S. in mechanical engineering at Arizona State University, he obtained his PhD in Biological Engineering from the Harvard/MIT program. He was recruited to the Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2001, and became Director of the Graduate Program in Biomedical Engineering in 2004. Dr. McGrath's pilot project, which includes several collaborators [Drs. Jessica Snyder (PhD candidate in Biophysics), Philippe Fauchet (Professor of Electrical Engineering), Alan Friedman (Director of Proteomics Core) and Jeremy Taylor (Nephrology)], will investigate the potential of a novel, silicon-based membrane material (silicon nanomembranes) to provide improvements in hemodialysis that are described as "revolutionary." These membranes are four orders of magnitude thinner (only 15 nm thick) than synthetic and biopolymer membranes currently used in dialysis, which should lead to vastly improved molecular discrimination. This pilot study is the first effort of this group to apply these silicon nanomembranes to solve a specific biomedical problem. It would indeed be a dramatic example of translational science if these ultrathin membranes could be used to improve the lives of patients requiring hemodialysis.
Walter O'Dell PhD
Walter O'Dell, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Biomedical Engineering. Dr. O'Dell received a Pilot Studies Conference Award for a scientific conference that he is coordinating entitled "Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy: Innovations and Directions for Clinical Applications". Dr. O'Dell also operates a lab focused on clinical applications of medical imaging in Radiation Oncology that includes novel approaches for screening, treatment and follow-up of cancer patients. Novel 3D tumor detection approaches are being applied for lung, brain and breast screening. Finite element modeling and deformable image registration are being used to quantify the deformation during needle biopsy and radiation damage to healthy tissue surrounding lung tumors. MR DTI is being used in both patient and animal studies to model microscopic tumor spread for treatment planning, with the ultimate hope of minimizing harmful radiation side-effects following high dose radiation treatment.
Everett Porter MD
Everett Porter, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine.
Dr. Porter's Pilot project is entitled "CD40 Ligand Mediation of Lung Inflammation and Fibrosis".
The project focuses on investigating novel cell to cell interactions responsible for myofibroblast activation, as well as attempting to identify novel biomarkers which can be used to monitor disease progression and response to therapy.
Dr. Porter is interested in the clinical management and the pathogenesis of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF). IPF is an incurable and invariably fatal illness, in which lung fibroblast-to-myofibroblast transformation and the pathologic development of fibroblast foci are believed to play critical roles. Myofibroblasts are believed to be the specialized cells responsible for collagen formation and the fibrotic destruction of alveolar lung units. The presence and numbers of fibroblast foci have been directly correlated with mortality in IPF. He is a previous recipient of a Kirchenstein NRSA grant investigating the role of Heat Shock Protein 70 as an anti-inflammatory agent in preventing myofibroblast activation.
Patricia Sime MD
Patricia J. Sime, MD is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Environmental Medicine. Born and raised in Scotland, she received her Bachelor's Degree and Medical Degree from the University of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Physicians. She then took her residency training in Medicine in Edinburgh, and a Fellowship in Pulmonary Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, where she became interested in adding basic and translational science to her clinical career in pulmonary medicine. She was recruited to Rochester in 1999, received a K08 Award in 2001 and an R01 in 2005 on the molecular mechanisms that explain lung scarring. In this project, Dr. Sime takes advantage of her recent identification of aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) as a previously unrecognized down-regulator of cigarette smoke-mediated inflammatory disease in mice. In the pilot, she and her collaborators (Sanjay Maggirwar, PhD (Assistant Professor of Microbiology & Immunology), Thomas Gasiewicz, PhD (Chair of Environmental Medicine), Michael Larj, MD (Assistant Professor of Medicine), and Richard P. Phipps, PhD (Professor of Environmental Medicine) will attempt to translate their animal model studies to humans by investigating lung tissue, fluid and cells from smokers with and without disease. They will test the hypothesis that activation of AhR dampens human cigarette smoke-induced inflammation. If so, these new studies will identify the AhR as a novel target for future therapy of lung inflammation, and possibly smoking-induced cardiovascular disease.
Xinping Zhang PhD
Xinping Zhang, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Orthopaedics. After receiving her M.D. from Shanghai Medical University and her M.S. in Molecular Biology, Dr. Zhang came to Rochester for her PhD training, which she completed in Biochemistry. Dr. Zhang Joined the Dept. of Orthopaedics in 2000 and finished her postdoc training with Dr. Edward Schwarz in 2001. Since then she has been a faculty member in the Dept. of Orthopaedics, Center for Musculoskeletal Research. Her project also has a translational nanotechnology focus, which is one of the innovative science programs emphasized in the URMC Strategic Plan. Specifically, to treat patients with large segmental bone defects, Dr. Zhang proposes a tissue engineering strategy to fabricate a 3D cellular scaffold. Although some work on tissue engineering for the repair of bone defects has been reported, a major limitation has been the lack of a cellular osteoinductive scaffold that could fit around a bone of any size and shape. Dr. Zhang and a multidisciplinary team proposes to use 3D tissue fabrication via electrospinning as a versatile and efficient technique for the fabrication of nanofiber-based scaffolds that match the structural characteristics of extracellular matrix. Included in the team are Dr. Zhang (a bone biologist), Dr. Hong Yang (Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, an expert in multifunction nanomaterials), Dr. Younan Xia (Professor of Chemistry, U. of Washington, an inventor and pioneer of electrospinning) and Dr. YanFang Ren, (Assistant Professor of Dentistry). Success in these studies on bone tissue engineering would hold much promise for the treatment of bone defects.