TraCS offers pilot funding in field of translational science

PIs: Malia Blue (Exercise & Sports Science, UNC College of Arts & Sciences) Shelby Baez (Exercise & Sports Science, UNC College of Arts & Sciences)

Barrier: (1) Very low adherence to wearable monitors for Physical Activity (PA) / Sleep studies, (2) Participant access to data through apps can bias results

Translation Science approach: Evaluate compact, user-friendly and researcher-manageable physical activity (PA) /sleep tracker (Oura Ring) and compare with "gold standard" ActiGraph

Advantage: Enables collection of non-biased PA/HRV/sleep data while reducing need for participants to travel to central lab setting. Applicable to a variety of PA- based studies and interventions

PIs: Aysenil Belger (Psychiatry, UNC School of Medicine) & Alper Bozkurt (Elec & Comp Eng, NC State)

CTS Goal:

• Development of a digital health platform that integrates real-time dynamic measures of physiological and psychological well-being and stress exposure with cloud-based data processing and pattern generation.
• Platform will use EMA to assess fluctuations and enable delivery of targeted clinical and behavioral interventions in real time.
• Provides a more accurate and nuanced understanding of an individual's mental health experiences compared to traditional retrospective assessments, which rely on individuals recalling their experiences from memory.

Aims:

• Develop the wearable low-powered sensor to monitor stress markers, including movement of the body and activity levels, electrodermal activity, heart rate and heart rate variability in real time.
• Validate the operation of new sensor against a gold-standard ECG and EDA recording system in the lab with diverse cohort (n = 24) ages 18-21.

PI: Elizabeth Corteselli (Div Allergy & Immunol, Dept Peds, UNC SOM)

CTS Barrier:

• Lack of preclinical models for pulmonary therapeutics. Animal models do not fully recapitulate human disease and are impeded by species differences, while in vitro cell models typically rely on submerged monocultures and/or transformed cell lines.
• Drug candidates that show good efficacy in vitro can fail in clinical trials due to systemic off-target effects and poor patient tolerance.
• Aerosolized drug delivery can prevent this issue, as inhalation avoids systemic distribution and metabolism and is instead delivered directly to the site of disease, enabling much lower dosing and avoidance of adverse side effects.
• However, testing of compounds for aerosolized delivery is difficult using current preclinical models and requires an organotypic system with an air-cell interface.

Aims:

• Validate an Air-Liquid Interface (ALI) co-culture model of primary patient-matched lung fibroblasts and epithelial cells.
• Use the Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis drug pirfenidone to determine the efficacy of aerosolized treatments on the ALI co-culture model.

PI: José Gaston Guillem (Div GI Surg, UNC SOM)

CTS Barrier:

• The Latino population bears a disproportionate burden of cancer morbidity and mortality relative to other racial and ethnic groups. However, Latino individuals are underrepresented in cancer clinical trials, which limits the generalizability of study results and healthcare advancements, particularly in this community.
• A fundamental barrier to trial recruitment is low health education, specifically regarding cancers affecting the community, such as colorectal cancer (CRC), a commonly diagnosed cancer in the US Latino population.
• Study will examine the utility and feasibility of a church-based outreach effort in identifying and recruiting Latino individuals to participate in a cancer-specific educational intervention and the assessment of Latino-perceived barriers and willingness to participate in CCTs.

Aims:

• Design an educational outreach project that builds upon the unique relationship that exists between the Latino community and the Hispanic Ministry at St. Thomas More Catholic Church and addresses the large burden that CRC poses on the Latino community.
• Develop an educational video in Spanish that improves Latino health education on CRC, screening, and willingness to participate in clinical trials.
• Translate into Spanish and pilot test three health knowledge questionnaires as a preliminary step to examining whether willingness to participate in trials is mediated by levels of cancer-specific health knowledge.

PI: Laura Milko (Genetics, UNC SOM)

CTS Barrier:

• Substantial underrepresentation of racially minoritized, marginalized, and lower-resourced individuals in genomic medicine research studies.
• Unequal representation of diverse ancestral backgrounds in genomic research reduces diversity of genomic data, impedes accurate sequence variant interpretation and generalizable patient care, and perpetuates exclusion of marginalized groups from the benefits of medical research.
• NIH-funded Age-based Genomic Screening (ABGS) study established a Community Research Board (CRB).
• With funding from a TraCS $2K Stakeholder Engagement Pilot award, the NIH-funded Age-based Genomic Screening (ABGS) study (ABGS) and Community Research Board (CRB) co-developed a set of six Genetics and Genomics Educational Modules comprising fundamental concepts from genomic medicine described in plain language that are intended to be engaging and clear to individuals with a 6th to 8th grade health literacy level.

Aims:

• Present content from different modules at six community engagement events and evaluate the impact of different genetic research information content and delivery methods on expressed interest in participating in genomic medicine research.
• Test whether community members prefer to learn about genomic medicine research from genetic researchers or community members.