Dear Colleagues,

FFMI's educational and funding programs continue to rapidly deploy and scale to our innovators - we received 28 proposals from faculty earlier this week for year three of our MTRAC mid-stage funding program, and the third round of our ground-breaking Early Technology Development Program will be kicking off in early October.

 

 

 

 

• Friday, September 18, 9:00am-11:00am, Palmer Commons, Great Lakes North Room 
• Wednesday, September 23, 9:00am-11:00am, Michigan League, Michigan Room
• Wednesday, September 23, 1:00pm-3:00pm, Union, Pond Room
• Friday, October 2, 1:00pm-3:00pm Pierpont Commons, Boulevard Room

Additionally, the Medical School and other collaborating schools are offering a session specific to biomedical innovation:
   
MCubed Health Brainstorming
Wednesday, September 23
4:00pm-5:30pm
Seminar Rooms, BSRB
CLICK HERE for more information
   
Watch the MCubed website for more details, and questions about the cubing process can be directed to mcubedinfo@umich.edu. Medical School faculty with specific questions can contact Jessica Durkin.      

Bipolar disorder (BP) is characterized by mood swings that can range from depressive lows to manic highs. In addition, BP can affect energy, activity levels, and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks.

 

The current standard of care and approach to BP management is regular clinical appointments where a health care provider assesses the patient to determine if current treatment is sufficient and effective. But there are currently no biological markers or measures that accurately and objectively quantify the severity of depression or intensity of mania.

 

University of Michigan researchers, Melvin McInnis, M.D., Emily Provost, Ph.D., Satinder Singh Baveja, Ph.D., and John Gideon, M.S., developed a program called Predicting Individual Outcomes for Rapid Intervention (PRIORI) that uses a smartphone app to record changes in acoustic features of speech (volume, speed, and pitch) as well as patterns of daily smartphone use among patients to predict impending mood changes.

 

The data is gathered from the patient's daily telephone conversations. The outgoing speech is recorded, encrypted, and sent over the digital network to a central processing server for computational analyses of speech acoustics.

 

Smartphone usage is also studied in order to assess any personal interactive patterns reflected by personal data usage features such as sites visited, calls, texts, GPS locales, and battery usage.

 

"Analyses will focus on identifying the feature with the earliest pattern change indication," says Dr. McInnis. "This will help develop the predictive probability for a mood change and prevent bipolar episodes. From a public health perspective, the impact of preventing episodes is considerable because it would effectively transfer clinical practice to a "prevention" mode from its current "intervention" mode."

 

The next phase of this research will be a large interactive and interventional clinical trial that will test the efficacy of using this device to guide clinical management.

 

"MTRAC support and business development guidance has been extremely beneficial in showing us how to move this device from trial to the public realm in order to help people suffering from mood disorders."

 

MTRAC is supported by the U-M Medical School, the U-M Tech Transfer Office, and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and works to "fast forward" projects with a high potential of commercial success, with the ultimate goal of positively impacting human health. The PRIORI project is just one of 11 projects in the 2015 cohort funded by MTRAC. In 2014, the program funded 11 teams for early commercialization development.

As part of the ongoing efforts to nurture a culture of innovation for U-M Medical School faculty at all levels of engagement, starting later this month FFMI team members will be piloting "Office Hours."

Featuring 15-minute block scheduling and a convenient location within the select department, Office Hour appointments will be considerably shorter than one of our Idea Consultation meetings and offer an extremely focused discussion with an FFMI commercialization expert. Faculty will come away from an appointment with a commercial assessment of their research and a suggested path of suitable resources here at the U-M, and beyond.

The Physiology Department will be the pilot department for Office Hours on Tuesday, September 29, 1:30PM-4:30PM in the MIP Library. Contact Nick DeHaan at nmdehaan@umich.edu to schedule an appointment in advance, or with any questions.