TraCS announces new Innovation to Impact (i2i) Award recipients

The NC TraCS CTS Research Program is pleased to announce the second cohort of Innovation to Impact (i2i) Award recipients.

These awards support multi-year projects that address critical scientific and operational barriers in translational science, with the goal of accelerating the development and delivery of effective interventions at UNC Health and beyond.

Rapid Data Extraction from Clinical Reports Using Large Language Models

PI: Iain Carmichael, PhD (Assistant Professor of Pathology and Data Science in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine)

Manual extraction of structured data from unstructured clinical notes is slow, expensive, and requires specialized expertise, creating a major barrier to biomedical research. Carmichael's team aims to establish a proof-of-concept software system based on large language models to automate this task using UNC Health pathology and radiology reports.

The long-term goal is to develop a no-code interface for clinicians and researchers to run their own queries on clinical notes, which will reduce the cost and effort required to extract this information to enable large-scale studies and accelerate precision medicine.

CAR-T Beyond Cancer: Expanding Perceptions and Participation in Clinical Trials for Cell-Based Therapies in Lupus and Autoimmunity

PI: Saira Sheikh, MD (Linda Coley Sewell Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Director of UNC's Thurston Arthritis Research Cancer Clinical Trials Program)

Despite the promise of CAR-T cell therapy for autoimmune diseases like lupus, barriers such as cost, limited awareness and understanding of the therapy, and its association as a cancer treatment, have hindered the expansion of clinical trial participation outside of oncology.

Sheikh's team aims to develop strategies and resources informed by patients and clinicians to enhance engagement in CAR-T lupus clinical trials. This work will lay the foundation for promoting cell-based therapy clinical trials across a broad range of disease states and will be generalizable across various clinical trial contexts.

Learn more about the i2i Awards at tracs.unc.edu/i2i.