UF College of medicine
Faculty are engaged in six of the 14 UF Research ROSF awards — the most of any college.
By Manny Rea
Like their Gator Olympian counterparts who went for gold this summer, University of Florida College of Medicine faculty shined through this year’s UF Research Opportunity Seed Fund awards.
The ROSF awards, a university-wide grant program, are given to principal investigators on multidisciplinary, faculty-initiated research projects arising from partnerships across departments and colleges. Winning proposals push science to the next level and have strong potential for extramural support.
“The academic biomedical research enterprise is primarily fueled by grants awarded to investigators from private foundations and public agencies,” Todd Brusko, a professor in the department of pathology, immunology, and laboratory medicine and the assistant dean for basic research, said. “Successful grant applications typically require some compelling preliminary data demonstrating feasibility.”
Before biomedical proposals reach the UF Research office, the UF College of Medicine Office of Research vets applications from college faculty based on the following criteria:
- New collaborations: Proposals involve faculty from at least two different colleges. PIs and co-PIs are from different departments and have not worked together on a previously funded proposal.
- Novel research: Proposals involve new ideas and are not a supplemental grant to the PI’s or co-PIs’ existing research projects.
- Meaningful contributions: Proposals exhibit substantial engagement by all investigators.
- Funding potential: Proposals detail how the researchers will collaborate on the project after the ROSF award ends.
- High impact: Proposals address significant research questions in multiple disciplines and are understandable to nontechnical readers.
“The office coordinates an internal peer-review process to review, score, and select the novel proposals from our research faculty for funding to set the spark for research discovery and innovation,” Brusko said.
For 2024, UF Research received 60 proposals and awarded 14 projects — four led and another two contributed to by UF Medicine faculty.
We spoke with the PIs to get a sense of their projects and how their ROSF awards will contribute to new discoveries:
Norman Beatty, M.D., FACP, an assistant professor of medicine in the department of medicine, division of infectious diseases and global medicine, is a research leader on Chagas Disease in Florida. Chagas Disease, a widely understudied tropical illness estimated to be found in 300,000 people living in the U.S. but diagnosed in less than 1% of this population, stems from the triatomine bug, otherwise known as the “kissing bug.”
Kissing bugs dwell anywhere from human homes to rodent nests, biting on a variety of hosts, including people, other mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. Akin to bedbugs, they feed on host blood at night, but the health threat is the microscopic feces they leave behind. Kissing bugs excrete the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite responsible for Chagas Disease.
Although the parasitic condition is typically asymptomatic in the early infectious stage and can go undetected for years, it develops into chronic illness for some patients. Up to 45% of people with chronic infections eventually develop heart disease such as congested heart failure, while another 21% of people develop digestive complications such as enlarged esophagus or enlarged colon.
For Florida, the issue is growing for two reasons: urban development by humans is encroaching on areas inhabited by kissing bugs, and Latin American immigrants are being diagnosed at a notable rate because their conditions have gone undiagnosed.
Through the ROSF award, Beatty is collaborating with Carla Mavian, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of pathology, immunology, and laboratory medicine, to sequence the genomes of Trypanosoma cruzi strains in Florida. He is also working with Samantha Wisely, Ph.D., and Nathan Burkett-Cadena, Ph.D., to surveil potential disease transmission from opossum anal gland secretions to other animals and humans.
“The seed grant is going to accelerate our understanding of the risk for human beings to acquire an infection from Trypanosoma cruzi as well as the genetic diversity of the parasite in our state,” Beatty said.
Abbas Babajani-Feremi, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department of neurology and the inaugural director of the Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Laboratory at the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases, receives his ROSF award for a project focusing on pre-surgical brain mapping for epilepsy patients.
Epilepsy affects millions worldwide, with 25-35% of patients suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy. For these individuals, invasive brain surgery is often their last option to control their seizures, Babajani-Feremi said.
According to Babajani-Feremi, neurosurgeons rely on brain mapping techniques to plan epilepsy surgery. Traditionally, they perform a resective surgery, which is the removal of a small brain portion responsible for the seizures, without knowing exactly how much critical function loss there may be.
“When performing epilepsy surgery, it’s crucial to avoid outcomes where the patient is seizure-free but unable to walk or talk,” Babajani-Feremi said.
His project aims to provide a predictive map for neurosurgeons to determine the potential for language loss when operating on certain parts of the brain. The map will be powered by AI trained on previous patient data to give doctors a more accurate estimate of speech decline.
The map will equip an array of brain mapping tools including: intercranial recording and electrical stimulation mapping as well as diffusion MRI, functional MRI, EEG and MEG tests. At the heart of Babajani-Feremi’s lab, MEG is a cutting-edge technology that measures magnetic fields produced by the brain and the basis of his lab.
“This is the first grant in our division that involves all these modalities in a single project,” he said. “I’m very excited about the potential impact.”
Collaborating with Babajani-Feremi on this project are Shelley Heaton, Ph.D., who serves as Co-PI, along with co-investigators Giridhar Kalamangalam, M.D., D.Phil., a professor and the chief of epilepsy in the department of neurology, and Steven Parrish Winesett, M.D., a clinical associate professor in the division of pediatric neurology in the department of pediatrics. Together, they will spearhead the data collection and analysis efforts crucial for the success of this language mapping initiative.
Their ultimate goal is to equip neurosurgeons with a more informed understanding of the potential risks to language function, allowing for better decision-making and improved patient outcomes.
Helen Moore, Ph.D., an associate professor in the laboratory for systems medicine in the division of pulmonary, critical care & sleep, is leading a project that will optimize melanoma cancer therapies in dogs, eventually translating for human use through RNA sequencing and mathematic modelling.
Moore is a mathematician who spent 15 years in the biopharmaceutical industry before returning to academia three years ago. Her specialty is optimal control, a method she uses to computationally optimize combination drug regimens, which researchers can then test experimentally.
Upon arriving at UF, Moore looked for collaborations where her mathematical modelling could unpack other researchers’ novel datasets. This is how she got in touch with Bently Doonan, M.D., a clinical assistant professor in the division of hematology & oncology in the department of medicine, and Rowan Milner, Ph.D., a veterinary medicine oncologist, with the ROSF-backed idea.
Moore has been excited to engage in newfound partnerships empowered by the UF Medicine culture.
“Our laboratory sits around the corner from the clinicians,” she said. “It’s been powerful to be able to just walk around the corner, run into somebody and start a collaboration.”
Her project focuses on studying canine melanoma patients, whose tumors closely resemble rare human melanomas, allowing her team to obtain more samples than would be possible with human patients. The team will collect tumor samples from dogs before or after they receive a cancer vaccine and analyze them using bulk RNA sequencing, a technology that reveals which genes are expressed in a sample.
The ROSF award will support the costs for the collection and analysis of RNA sequencing to determine the presence and quantity of immune cells pre- and post-vaccination.
The team will use this data to develop a mechanistic mathematical model of the dynamic between a tumor and an individual’s immune system. Through more analysis, they will identify the most influential pathways, apply optimization methods, and determine the extent to which these pathways should be changed to achieve the greatest tumor reduction.
The future of medicine is quantitative, Moore said. Unlike AI which takes large amounts of data and finds patterns, quantitative methods incorporate mechanisms, use smaller datasets, and can be used to extrapolate beyond available data.
Following the completion of this grant work, the next steps will involve designing new cancer vaccines targeting the identified pathways and validating the results in animal models. With the help of Doonan’s research and clinical expertise, the team will eventually translate and test their findings in humans— breaking new ground in treating rare melanoma thanks to the help of mankind’s canine companions.
The fourth recipient, Joshua Wong, M.D., is an assistant professor in the department of neurology. He studies deep brain stimulation (DBS), a surgical procedure in which a neurostimulator device is implanted in the brain to send electrical stimulations that improve symptoms for neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. Wong also investigates ways that AI can optimize DBS practices — both precursors to his ROSF project that examines freezing of gait in people with Parkinson’s and how DBS can potentially mitigate it.
Freezing of gait is a symptom in people with Parkinson’s where they suddenly lose the ability to walk forward, Wong said.
“As you can imagine, that can be very dangerous if you’re in the middle of a busy street or even just at home as it increases risks such as falling, hitting your head or breaking a hip,” he said.
Noting that conventional DBS and medications did not successfully treat this symptom, Wong sought the help of Coralie de Hemptinne, M.S., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of neurology, and Julia Choi, Ph.D. Their aim is to find a brain signal biomarker that indicates when someone with Parkinson’s is about to freeze.
Choi brings expertise in gait kinematics, or the study of movement patterns of the body during walking, while de Hemptinne brings knowledge in pathophysiology of Parkinson’s, or the study of how physiological processes are altered by the disease.
Wong and his co-PIs will use the ROSF funding toward operational costs for the treadmills that will simulate walking scenarios and the recording technologies that will monitor the brain and other parts of the body involved in the experiment.
“We hope to use the DBS technology to detect this brain signal, deliver responsive stimulation, and potentially prevent them from freezing,” he said. “We can provide real-time on-demand help for something that is traditionally very difficult to treat.”
UF Medicine faculty are also co-PIs on the following ROSF projects:
