Nicholas Shaheen, MD, MPH, has been named PI and director of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute. Shaheen, who has been acting as Co-PI since 2020, assumed the expanded role after John Buse, MD, PhD, stepped down as Co-PI.

While many children born with a cleft lip or palate may struggle to speak clearly, speech therapy can help them learn how to correctly articulate certain sounds. With the help of a FastTraCS grant followed by funding from the NC Biotechnology Center, Rishma Shah and colleagues have created a Bluetooth-enabled retainer that tracks tongue placement along the palate and encourages correct articulation.

Andrew Satterlee is a cancer researcher at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and an NC TraCS K12 scholar who studies brain tumors. His work involves studying tumor cell growth with brain slice technology, a unique research method that uses a thin layer of brain tissue from a rat to create a microcosm of the brain ecosystem on the lab bench.

A brain tumor may not sound like a difficult thing to grow in the lab, but once you remove the tumor from the brain itself, most of the time it fails to grow. This failure rate has sparked new research through an NCATS UO1 grant for Shawn Hingtgen, PhD and his colleagues, including fellow UNC cancer researchers Andrew Satterlee, PhD, and Albert Baldwin, PhD.