Biomedical engineers earn research funding from Pelotonia and DoD
Department of Biomedical Engineering Professor and Chair Samir Ghadiali and Assistant Professor Jennifer Leight received grants from the Department of Defense and Ohio State's Comprehensive Cancer Center Intramural Research program, respectively.
Ghadiali will collaborate with Dr. Josh Englert of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center on an 18-month, $312,000 study of ventilation-induced lung injury during hemorrhagic shock.
In military and civilian settings, patients who undergo blunt trauma often experience hemorrhagic shock, which can result in significant lung dysfunction. Although these patients often need artificial ventilation, the procedure exacerbates the existing lung injury (i.e., acute respiratory distress) and increases the mortality rate for this condition. The researchers will use a novel combination of lung-on-a-chip technologies and nanoparticle systems to investigate how modulating microRNA expression in specific cell types alters ventilation-induced lung injury during and after hemorrhagic shock.
Leight's two-year, $150,000 Pelotonia grant will fund development of a platform for the culture of human tumor tissue and measurement of cell function, enabling new drug screening and personalized medicine applications. Pelotonia is an annual bike ride that raises millions of dollars for cancer research at Ohio State.
The vast majority of druggable targets identified by in vitro screening using traditional cell culture methods on plastic plates do not translate to clinical success. To address this challenge, Leight's interdisciplinary team is working on a 3D cell culture platform in which one can culture microexplants of human tumor tissue while simultaneously measuring cell viability and matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activity. They will conduct a pilot drug screen to assess the effects of current treatments on MMP activity of human breast cancer microexplants cultured in an in vitro hydrogel system.
