TraCS co-directors among selected Creativity Hubs finalists for 2023-2024
The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR) is pleased to announce five finalists for this year's Creativity Hubs seed-funding competition. These interdisciplinary teams—representing the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, School of Data Science and Society, School of Medicine, Gillings School of Global Public Health, Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and NC State University—highlight the effectiveness of uniting diverse problem-solvers to tackle big challenges. Creativity Hub winning projects are expected to lead to large-scale extramural funding and/or commercial opportunities.
John Buse MD, PhD and Nick Shaheen MD, MPH (co-directors of the NC TraCS Institute) are part of the ALTER project team that has secured a spot as one of the five finalists.
ALTER - Autonomous Living Therapies for Extended Results
According to the CDC, six out of 10 adults have a chronic disease. Many of these conditions require strict drug therapies, yet successful medication adherence—such as frequent dosing—by patients is a global issue. In the U.S., poor adherence leads to 125,000 deaths each year and is estimated to cause more than $300 billion in avoidable health care costs.
Drug-delivery systems in the form of long-acting pills or sustain-release systems are a promising solution to mitigating obstacles to adherence. Yet, no clinical solutions exist that offer patient-specific autonomous dosing for extended use and disease monitoring. This research team proposes to engineer a set-and-forget drug delivery implantable technology that delivers a personalized medicine approach like no other.
While existing drug delivery implants require medications to be frequently reloaded, this new class of devices would include a cell pharmacy, where living cells make the drugs on site and on demand providing the patient with the right dose at the right time. To do this, researchers will take living cells engineered to produce therapies and put them in material manufacturing environments to make adaptive living therapies. This technology will alter the way we treat chronic diseases, putting treatment control into the hands of patients and their physicians.
Creativity Hubs program
To date, the Creativity Hubs program has yielded meaningful scientific progress, and contributed to extramural funding support to UNC-Chapel Hill exceeding $204 million and counting. The finalists for this round will prepare full proposals and present their project ideas in the spring semester. The winning team(s) will then be eligible for up to $500,000 in continued funding from the OVCR to execute their proposals over the next two years.
Creativity Hubs awardees receive proposal development assistance from the Office of Research Development to pursue large-scale, follow-on awards that build from the program's funding.
To see all finalists advancing to the next round of Creativity Hubs funding, visit research.unc.edu.
ALTER team: Ronit Freeman, College of Arts and Sciences, PI; Pietro Dotti, School of Medicine; Barbara Savoldo, School of Medicine; ; Abraham Vazquez-Guardado, NC State University; Michael Daniele, NC State University; Soumya Rahima Benhabbour, Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering ; ; Greg Forest, College of Arts and Sciences; Sorin Mitran, College of Arts and Sciences; Charles Gersbach, Duke University; Richard Loeser, School of Medicine; Nicholas J. Shaheen, School of Medicine; Shehzad Sheikh, School of Medicine; Ryan Balfour Sartor, School of Medicine; Chirag S. Desai, School of Medicine; John Buse, School of Medicine
