NC TraCS Pilot Program Funds Investigators from Multiple Schools and Diverse Disciplines

Since NC TraCS launched its pilot grant program in 2008, the institute has handed out over $8 million to fund innovative or high-risk translational research ventures at UNC.

Even though often those awards go to School of Medicine researchers, a recent analysis of the NC TraCS Pilot Program found that among schools who have submitted more than a handful of proposals, most enjoy a higher percentage of funded principal investigators.

As a result, the NC TraCS Pilot Program has fostered clinical and translational research collaborations across the entire UNC research community, from basic translational research to community-based participatory research.

Below is a sampling of the diverse research projects undertaken by NC TraCS pilot awardees:

School of Pharmacy faculty member Mary Paine, RPh, PhD, used a $10K pilot award to explore how grapefruit juice interferes with the body’s ability to process medicines. Grapefruit juice has been shown to decrease the absorption of some drugs by blocking a class of drug transporters in the intestine called organic anion transporting polypeptides (OATPs). In her pilot study, Paine used a grapefruit juice removed of two classes of compounds, termed furanocoumarins and polymethoxyflavones, and looked for changes in the interaction between this modified grapefruit juice and the original grapefruit juice with respect to the antihistamine fexofenadine (commonly known as Allegra). Her findings, presented at a national meeting of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, led to the renewal of an RO1 grant and may assist health care providers in making informed decisions about managing potential dietary substance-drug interactions appropriately.

College of Arts & Sciences faculty member Otto Zhou, PhD, used a $50K pilot award to test the feasibility of developing a novel radiation imaging device to advance basic cancer research and clinical applications. His approach was based on a unique form of radiation called microbeam radiation therapy, which is technically difficult to produce but has the potential to eradicate tumors while sparing healthy tissue. Based on the preliminary results from this award, Zhou and his colleague X. Sha Chang, PhD, a School of Medicine faculty member, won a $2 million contract from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to develop a prototype for the first compact laboratory-size microbeam radiation therapy device. The MRT research is now a major project within the NCI-funded Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence program at UNC. In addition, the initial pilot study won the Best in Physics Award from the American Association of Physicists in Medicine two years ago.

School of Public Health doctoral student Lindsey Haynes-Maslow, MHA, and postdoctoral fellow Lucia Leone, PhD, used a $2K pilot award to uncover the best ways to increase fruit and vegetable consumption among low-income North Carolinians. By conducting 8 focus groups with low-income individuals living in Orange and Durham County, the researchers identified six major community-level barriers to access to fruits and vegetables: cost, transportation, quality, variety, changing food environment, and changing societal norms on food. Their results, published recently in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease, will be shared with community partners and used to develop new programs and promotion strategies to decrease diet-related disparities, such as the development of a "Veggie-Van," a program run by Community Nutrition Partnership, a non-profit for which both Haynes-Malow and Leone serve on the Board of Directors.

School of Social Work faculty member Mimi Chapman, PhD, used a $50K pilot award to create “Yo Veo” or “I see,” a project designed to expose teachers to the experiences of Latino youth and how those experiences might affect the academic success, mental health and well-being of immigrant children. The project brought teachers from Chatham Middle School to the Ackland Art Museum to view “Dream of the Rich North,” a series of images chronicling a family before and after immigration to the United States. The teachers were asked to react honestly to the photographs and consider their own attitudes with respect to poverty, class, and the decisions faced by immigrant families. The findings, which were recently accepted with revisions in the journal Qualitative Social Work, will help further develop this intervention for dissemination to other schools facing demographic shifts.

School of Medicine faculty member Nigel Key, MD, used a $10K pilot award to identify possible mechanisms of thrombosis in patients with sickle cell trait. He conducted a laboratory-based study of coagulation and inflammatory systems in samples from patients with the inherited blood disorder. Key found that tiny structures called microparticle tissue factor that circulates in the blood may be responsible for the activation of clotting and its associated risk of thrombosis in sickle cell trait. Results of the study were presented at the XXII Congress of the International Society of Thrombosis and Haemostasis and appeared in the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis.

School of Nursing faculty member Mi-Kyung Song, PhD, RN, used a $10K pilot award to systematically reconstruct and assess the daily burdens of patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). Her findings, which were published in the journal Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, indicated that dialysis patients spent approximately six hours a day in an unpleasant or undesirable state. The results of the study provided important preliminary data to land an R01 grant to identify trajectories of symptoms, physical functioning, psychosocial needs, and emotional and spiritual well-being in a sample of 200 patients with ESRD who are at a high risk of experiencing acute life-threatening events and mortality.