Dear MCIRCC Member,

On behalf of the MCIRCC team we'd like to say welcome to Catalyst, our first e-newsletter!

Congratulations! You have opened the portal
to the MCIRCC Community's main hub of communication. Here, you expect to learn the latest news on MCIRCC's creative initiatives in critical care. Watch for information on new funding sources, like our $300K Challenge Event that is coming up, new industry and business collaborations, team research tools designed to foster MCIRCC product output, and the MCIRCC Connection, which will feature ways for MCIRCC members to connect in a variety of ways.

Robust communication among members through the clinical and domain expertise product lines can be found here, and will be the key to our success.

Since you're an MCIRCC member, you know that MCIRCC is unique in both its vision and strategy to address challenges that millions of critically ill and injured people face each year. We aim to integrate clinical, basic science, engineering, and other disciplines in a manner allowing for sharp translational focus of discovery to impact across the spectrum of critical care. By speaking and acting together as one team for the critically ill and injured there should be nothing we cannot accomplish. We are rapidly building an infrastructure to accelerate our mission to fully activate and express the innovation genotype for critical care.  

Thank you again for being a part of the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care, enjoy our newsletter, and feel free to pass it on to your colleagues.

Respectfully,

Kevin Ward & Shuichi Takayama

The work and mission of the MCIRCC encompasses what I find most exciting about working in healthcare and technology: it's optimistic. It truly has the potential to make an impact in people's lives and on how we think about health. I'm so pleased to be helping to lead this endeavor and look forward to amazing things to come.

We're pleased to announce the first grant awarded to a MCIRCC member. This is just the beginning...

Innovation Corps Grant

MCIRCC member, Dr. John Younger, in the Department of Emergency Medicine, whose lab is focused on sepsis and bloodstream infections, was recently awarded a $50,000 Innovation Corps (I-Corps) grant. I-Corps grants give the project team access to resources to help determine the readiness to transition technology developed by previously-funded or currently-funded NSF projects.

The grant support will help lab members Brandon McNaughton, Gwangseong Kim, and Prannda Sharma with a technology that the Younger lab has been working on for developing new ways of getting cells to stick to microscopic particles for the purposes of isolating them. Younger says, "That might be bacteria, it might be a cancer cell, it might be a food borne pathogen, it might be a water borne pathogen in a river. This grant will help us develop technologies that allow you to grab cells with microscopic particles and then you use those particles to aggregate those cells for diagnostics of a treatment."

For critical care patients, the long-term implications are great. Currently, culture methods that are looking for pathogens usually require several days to turn around, this method could offer the ability of turning a culture around in six hours. Developing this technology would expedite diagnostics in critical care and in some cases, be possible to perform at bedside.