This hands-on workshop, hosted by the Taubman Health Sciences Library, will present an overview of MetScape (used to visualize and interpret metabolomics and gene expression data in the context of human metabolic networks) and Metab2MeSH (which annotates compounds with concepts defined in MeSH). 

Register here.

Illumina Sequencing Seminar

Friday, February 21

9:00 AM - 12:30 PM

NCRC Research Auditorium,

Building 10,

2800 Plymouth Road

Next Generation Sequencing is transforming our understanding of genomics, driving new research, and helping to improve human health. Discover how next-generation sequencing is driving advances in research through the Illumina NextSeq 500.

Registration is free, but space is limited.

Register here.

CONNECT: Innovation Mob - Health IT

Saturday, February 22

8:00 AM - 4:00 PM

School of Public Health,

Room 3755

Interested in Health IT? Have a great Health IT idea but need help getting started? Then you will want to attend the Health IT Mob, a one day hands-on accelerator.

Click here for more information and to register.

Joe M. Piffaretti is the new Senior Director, Corporate and Foundation Relations (CFR) for the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS). Prior to joining U-M, Joe spent nine years at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where he held several positions in Corporate and Foundation Relations, most recently serving as Executive Director for the function. 

In his new role, Joe will oversee the newly created UMHS CFR team. He will work strategically with all areas of our organization, and other departments across campus and beyond, to build and expand upon partnerships that will increase the philanthropic support for UMHS from corporations and foundations. One of the critical goals of CFR will be to build strong relationships with Faculty and Staff in UMHS. 

The Research Basics for Study Coordinators series is designed for any research team member who has less than two years of research experience or is new to U-M. Please note that all information discussed in the series is tailored to the University of Michigan's available resources.

This course is taught in a three-part series to enhance your learning experience. Maximum benefit will be gained by attending all four sessions, but it is not required. The three-part series begins Monday, March 3, with an additional session available online. Participants are not required to attend all three sessions, but it is strongly recommended.

Series Schedule:  

• CITI - Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (online session)
• Session 1 (Monday, March 3) - Best Practices & Essential Documents for Clinical Research
• Session 2 (Monday, March 10) - Recruitment and Retention
• Session 3 (Monday, March 17) - Conducting & Obtaining Valid Informed Consent 

Registration links and additional details are available here. Please note that participants must register separately for the online session.

All MTA requests are now processed via the eResearch 

system, along with the other types of Unfunded Agreements (UFAs).

Log in to the Proposal Management module (eRPM) of eresearch.umich.edu and "Create a New UFA" to start your request. 

Please check out the UFA Quick Reference guide or the question-specific Help Text within the system if you are unfamiliar with the system. (Help Text can be viewed by clicking on any underlined question in the UFA worksheet.) 

Any lab member can submit the MTA request, but a Principal Investigator (PI) must be associated with the record.

Why do double entry or work on multiple

spreadsheets when the Michigan Budget Enrollment Calendar Tool (MBECT) already has all of your data? 

Learn about MBECT's new versatile reporting capabilities when our vendor, eThority, is on-site the week of February 24th. 

We expect to offer hands on training to show you how MBECT's Data Books can handle what users are doing in Excel without the need to export or enter data in additional systems. Reports can

automatically update as new data is available.

Sign up for a training session here.

We already have your data, now let MBECT do the work for you! 

The Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care (MCIRCC) hosted its first annual Grand Challenge event over the course of two, half-day sessions on Friday, January 24 and Saturday, January 25. Nearly 50 MCIRCC members attended this inaugural event, braving blizzard conditions to attend the program all in the fight against sepsis.

"As a young organization gaining its foothold, this level of member representation at our first Grand Challenge event is exciting and encouraging as we strive to push research beyond the idea stage for real-world impact," stated MCIRCC's Managing Director Janene Centurione.

The Grand Challenge targets the most pressing problems in critical care by leveraging integrated science teams to engage, develop, and deliver technological solutions to key critical care health problems. For its inaugural event, MCIRCC zeroed in on sepsis because of its complexity, impact, and far-reaching implications across the critical care spectrum.

With more than a million cases each year in the U.S. and 250,000 deaths annually, sepsis poses a serious public health problem. 

U-M Pediatric Intensivist and MCIRCC member, Timothy Cornell, M.D., describes it as, "...one of the most common situations that bring both previously healthy patients, and patients with prior diseases (i.e. cancer) into our intensive care unit. Sepsis is either the primary issue causing critical illness, or can be the result of treatment for other conditions that result in immunosuppression."

Day 1 of the Grand Challenge program examined the complex science, incidence, economic and non-economic costs, diagnosis and treatment challenges attributed to sepsis; potential models for new therapeutics, diagnostics, devices or digital health solutions to support the septic patient and healthcare provider were also presented. Day 2 introduced MCIRCC members to internal U-M resources and entrepreneurial fundamentals to support the development of solutions suitable for future commercialization.

The two-day program ended on a high note with the release of the MCIRCC Grand Challenge Funding Opportunity that will support high-impact proposals up to $100,000 per project for milestone driven research to take place over the next 18 months. Taking a unique "team science" approach, each proposal must have a joint PI from the University of Michigan's Medical School and the College of Engineering.

Even if a research team doesn't receive funding this time around, the learning from the Grand Challenge could give their solution the jumpstart that it needs. MCIRCC Director Kevin Ward, M.D., noted, "The gift that might keep giving from the Grand Challenge is not just the technologies that come out of it and are funded, but the collaborations that result, the fact that we are able to educate people working in this area to think differently about potential projects and funding opportunities."

For more information about MCIRCC, becoming a MCIRCC member, or the Grand Challenge, please visit the MCIRCC website. 

The U-M Coulter Translational Research Partnership Program is pleased to announce the 2014 Call for Proposals.

The U-M Coulter Program is funded through proceeds of an endowment from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation and supports collaborative translational research projects that involve co-investigators from the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and a clinical department.

The goal of this program is to support research collaborations between biomedical engineers and clinicians in order to accelerate the development and commercialization of new medical devices, diagnostics, and other biomedical products that address unmet clinical needs and lead to improvements in health care.  Projects are supported and mentored by a team of industry-experienced experts who proactively work to accelerate Coulter Program objectives of developing new product concepts to the point of partnering with industry or forming start-up companies with 

follow-on funding to commercialize new products envisioned from research efforts.

Distinctive aspects of the Coulter Program include business assessment work that dovetails with technical milestones for each project.  Specific benefits to each project include: 

• Business Development support
• Intellectual Property advice and legal support
• Regulatory guidance
• Follow-on funding guidance
• Mentorship from Oversight Committee 

Contact Thomas Marten, Coulter Program Director, at tmarten@umich.edu or 734-647-1680 to explore the commercial potential for your project and fit for Coulter funding opportunities.

For more information, visit the Coulter Program website or download the Coulter proposal application here.  

Proposals must be submitted by 5:00 PM on Monday, 

March 3.

University of Michigan School of Public Health Professor Richard Hirth, Ph.D., recently received AcademyHealth's 2014 Health Services Research Impact Award for work that contributed to the development of a prospective payment system that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services employed to improve patient choice and quality of care, and potentially reduce costs in the treatment of End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD).

For more than 40 years, Medicare has been a near single-payer for ESRD patients. For many, dialysis is the primary, life-saving treatment, yet these patients experience both high mortality rates (up to 20 percent in the first year of dialysis) and very high costs. In fact, ESRD patients represent about 1 percent of the total Medicare population but account for more than 6 percent of Medicare spending. For these reasons, understanding and addressing the incentives built into the Medicare payment system could significantly impact both the cost and quality of care received by this highly vulnerable population.

Hirth and colleagues conducted research that provided Congress and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with the evidence needed to develop a more efficient bundled prospective payment system. The new system saves taxpayers money by creating incentives to reduce inappropriately high doses of medications and the use of higher cost medications when lower cost options exist. Early evidence indicates the new system is also preserving, and in some cases enhancing, patient access to care.

"Professor Hirth is a leading authority on the economics of kidney disease in the financing of dialysis care through the Medicare program. This award recognizes his major contributions to national health policy and practice," said Kyle Grazier, professor and chair of the U-M Department of Health Management and Policy.

Hirth is professor and associate chair of the Department of Health Management and Policy; research director of the Center for Value-based Insurance Design; and associate director of the Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center, all located at the U-M School of Public Health. He also is a professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the U-M Health System, and member of the U-M Institute for Health Care Policy and Innovation.

"The HSR Impact Award is presented annually to health services research studies that make a clear impact on health policy and practice," said AcademyHealth President and CEO Lisa Simpson. "In this case, Dr. Hirth and his colleagues provided the evidence policymakers needed to make decisions that made care for critically ill patients more efficient. In doing so, the work exemplifies the important contributions health services research makes to health and health care."

AcademyHealth is a national organization that brings health services and policy stakeholders together to address the current and future needs of an evolving health system, inform health policy, and translate evidence into action.

A full description of Dr. Hirth's winning research can be found here.

The Cancer Biology Program, which began in 2010, welcomed its first graduate at the end of 2013. Heather Walline, Ph.D., defended her graduate thesis on the role of HPV in Head and Neck Cancer while becoming the first person to graduate from the University of Michigan with a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology.

One of 14 foci in the Program in Biomedical Sciences (PIBS), Cancer Biology is the only program that focuses solely on disease. The program specializes in exposing students to more feasibly translational research, allowing them to have a greater impact on cancer treatments and developing personalized medicine. The Cancer Biology curriculum spans many disciplines including microbiology, immunology, genetics, bioinformatics, and biochemistry. In combination with both educational and training activities, the interdisciplinary nature of the program allows students to be exposed to the full breadth of cancer biology.

Research topics that students can focus on include: tumor immunology, viral oncogenesis, cell biology, genetics, epidemiology, pathology, and bioinformatics. Projects in these areas then range from studying basic biological processes to translational research that aims to move basic findings into the clinic. Faculty mentor Thomas Carey, Ph.D., states: "Students who interviewed for the program expressed interest in translational research. The program is the perfect way of bringing a student into the study of a serious clinical problem that can be addressed in laboratory." In addition to having access to collaborative and interdisciplinary faculty, students also benefit from resources provided by the U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

Students in the program have the ability to work with clinical specialists and, occasionally, specimen resources to assist in their research and discoveries. Student Jillian Boden boasts of her experience in the program saying, "I think the size of the program and the willingness of the faculty to accept student feedback makes our program unique. We know all of the students in our program as well as most of the faculty. This provides a great environment for young scientists to develop their careers."

While still relatively new at U-M, the Cancer Biology program continues to grow at a rapid pace, already beginning the interview process for potential Cancer Biology graduate students for the 2014-2015 academic year. The program has also begun interviews for their undergraduate Cancer Research Summer Internship Program (CaRSIP) which will run for 10 weeks in the summer of 2014, and will expose students to cutting-edge cancer research. "We have great enthusiasm and excitement for where the people that are trained in this program will go and what they will contribute to the future of cancer biology," said Dr. Carey.

Kidney disease poses one of the greatest burdens for people with type 1 diabetes. As many as 10 to 15 percent of diabetes patients develop end-stage renal disease (ESRD), requiring hemodialysis or a kidney transplant to survive. Diabetes is the leading cause of ESRD, and the number of people with type 1 or type 2 diabetes and kidney failure rose by 61 percent between 2000 and 2010.

Currently, tight control of blood sugar and blood pressure are the only tools to prevent kidney disease. However, as many as 50 percent of people with diabetes cannot achieve optimal blood sugar control - and blood pressure control is only partially effective against ESRD.

Eight institutions comprising the Preventing Early Renal Function Loss in Diabetes (PERL) Consortium, including the University of Michigan Medical School, were recently awarded $24.3 million by the National Institutes of Health for a novel clinical trial to study a potential kidney disease treatment for people with type 1 diabetes. This is a five-year randomized clinical trial that will evaluate whether allopurinol, an inexpensive and safe FDA-approved drug for treating elevated uric acid (gout), is effective in reducing or slowing down kidney function loss among people with type 1 diabetes.

"We have data indicating that moderately high serum uric acid levels predispose people to diabetic kidney disease," explained 

Rodica Pop-Busui, M.D., Ph.D., Principal Investigator for the University of Michigan site. "However, we don't know whether this is due to uric acid itself or to something else that goes together with it. That's why this study is important - to determine if uric acid is the culprit or not."

Dr. Pop-Busui, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Metabolism, Endocrinology & Diabetes and Co-Director of the Michigan Peripheral Neuropathy Center, is joined on the study by her co-Investigator, Frank Brosius, III, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine and Chief, Division of Nephrology, and Professor of Molecular & Integrative Physiology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Pop-Busui is also on the PERL Consortium's Steering Committee for the trial.

In addition, the Data Coordinating Center will be housed at U-M and led by Andrzej Galecki, M.D., Ph.D., Division of Geriatrics, and Cathie Spino, Sc.D., from the Statistical Analysis of Biomedical and Educational Research (SABER) unit.

Frank Brosius, III, M.D.

If the Consortium can demonstrate that allopurinol is capable of halting or slowing down loss of kidney function in people with type 1 diabetes by lowering people's levels of serum uric acid, it would be a major breakthrough for persons with diabetes. This relatively inexpensive drug could become a standard diabetes treatment, and an important tool preventing ESRD.

Candidates are being sought between the ages of 18-65 who have had type 1 diabetes longer than eight years and have abnormal kidney function or abnormal uric acid levels, verified by a specific lab test.

For more information, including patient sign up, visit the study website or contact Cynthia Plunkett, Nurse Study Coordinator, at cplunket@umich.edu or 734-936-8065.

Abstract

• State relevance of study to health: e.g., "Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is an exceedingly common disorder of the vaginal microflora affecting >30% of all women...."
• State how results may translate: e.g., "Thus, in addition to the discovery of potential drugs and drug targets related to metabolism and infection, which could impact the global burden of disease, our aims will yield open-source software for... scoring for a wide range of C. elegans image-based assays that are currently intractable."

Specific Aims

• Show importance of problem: e.g., "Apicomplexa are responsible for a number of important human diseases including malaria, toxoplasmosis, cryptosporidiosis and cyclosporidiosis." (The first sentence(s) of "Aims" section clearly lays out the significance.)
• "Payoff" paragraph: e.g., "In addition to discovering novel anti-infectives and genes involved in metabolism...work will provide the C. elegans community with (a) a versatile, modular, open-source toolbox of algorithms..., (b) new framework for extracting morphological features...(c) capability to discover disease-related pathways, chemical probes, drug targets...relevant to a variety of diseases."

Significance

• Show potential to advance science: e.g.,"Visual examination for a genome-wide RNAi screen takes 0.5 to 4 people-years; a large chemical screen1 requires ≥10 people-years. Using algorithms we will develop, screens can be analyzed in weeks or months."
• Include preliminary data to underscore feasibility: e.g., "In previous work we have shown that small changes control significant variation in the viral properties including receptor binding, host range, and antigenicity."

Innovation

• Highlight novel aspects of significance to health: e.g., "This is a new concept that will lead us to discover new biology and might have strong potential for drug development."
• Create vision of success: e.g., "We feel this investment has paid off (at times in unexpected ways) and taking the risk to develop new approaches in the future will keep our experiments fresh and will allow us to ask deeper and deeper mechanistic questions."

Approach

• Feasibility: e.g., "Our algorithms for accurate delineation of individual ...have proven valuable in a number of our own image-based biological experiments (refs)."
• Preliminary data and how built upon: e.g., "We recently published the first whole-animal C. elegans microscopy screen analyzed by automated image analysis."
• Anticipated results: e.g., "Disregulation of metabolism results in many common and expensive chronic health conditions; diabetes alone affects 24 million Americans ... screening with a strain of C. elegans with an RNAi-sensitive nervous system will likely reveal novel energy regulators of therapeutic and research value."
• Even with pitfalls, highlight significance: e.g.,
• "Even if we are unable to generate a VLY-deficient mutant...we will still have constructed a useful library for the future study of non-essential genes in G. vaginalis."
• "Either finding would represent a new understanding of toxin-induced epithelial response with implications beyond VLY and G. vaginalis."