UF college of medicine office of research
Two primary investigators were awarded for research exploring organ transplant and cancer immunotherapy advancements.
By Manny Rea
After winning 2025 UF Research Opportunity Seed Funds (ROSF) this June, College of Medicine investigators are already making headway on their innovative plans.
Administered by the UF Office of Research, the annual ROSF program funds select scientists leading cross-college, multidisciplinary research initiatives. This support helps spark new research synergies and lays the groundwork for innovative, long-term collaborations.
In late 2024, the college submitted its 10 strongest proposals. Of those 10, Sergio Duarte, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in the Department of Surgery, and Leighton Elliott, M.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, were selected for projects exemplifying the program’s emphasis on high-impact novel research.
Principal investigators Duarte and Elliott discuss how seed funds will support their work:
Tell us about your time at UF and your research interests.
I’ve been at UF since late 2019 and was recruited into the Transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery Division. Since then, I’ve been deeply involved in the division’s day-to-day research activities, working closely with our whole team of surgeons, especially Dr. Tiago Beduschi, the Chief of Abdominal Transplantation, and Dr. Ali Zarrinpar, who’s a co-PI on this project. My main research interests are in kidney and liver transplantation and the related conditions that lead patients to need transplants, such as fatty liver disease and liver cancer. But my core focus has always been on post transplantation events – including ischemia-reperfusion injury, immunosuppression management, and rejection processes in liver and kidney transplants.
Can you describe the focus and components of your project?
Traditionally, transplant teams have stored donor organs on ice after flushing them with protective solutions. Over the last decade, though, we’ve entered a new era: ex vivo machine perfusion. Instead of ice storage, we pump a preservation solution or blood through the organs, keeping them in a more physiological state. This technology preserves organ viability better, allows us to consider more marginal organs for transplant, and improves patient outcomes overall.
However, a big challenge remains. Deciding whether an organ is good enough to transplant is still subjective. Surgeons don’t have many objective tools to make this call. Recently, we published a paper showing that measuring soluble cell-free DNA (sDNA) in the perfusion fluid correlates well with how much injury a kidney has sustained and predicts how well it will function after transplant. Less sDNA means less injury and better early outcomes.
But in the fast-paced transplant setting, existing tools to measure sDNA, like PCR, take hours which is too slow. So, our goal now is to develop a rapid test that can deliver reliable sDNA measurements within 15 to 20 minutes.
And how does CRISPR technology fit into this project?
This is where our collaboration with Dr. Piyush Jain’s lab in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering comes in. His team is known for engineering CRISPR-based diagnostics. They’ve re-engineered CRISPR systems to detect tiny amounts of DNA or RNA which has then been used for things like viral detection during COVID, hepatitis, and other infections.
For our project, we’re merging their expertise with our transplant needs. We’re taking two of their platforms, called SAHARA and PICNIC, and adapting them to not just detect but quantify sDNA quickly and accurately in the perfusion fluid. The ROSF funding will let us do this and test the platforms on clinical samples we collect during transplants.
What parts of the project will the ROSF funding specifically support?
The award directly supports the work to adapt and refine these two CRISPR platforms for rapid sDNA quantification. It will cover technical development, troubleshooting, and validation with real transplant samples. We already have a lot of samples from previous studies, so we can start testing right away.
This award emphasizes cross-college collaboration. Can you describe your collaborative team?
On the engineering side, we’re partnered with Dr. Jain’s team at the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. On [the COM] side, it’s our transplant surgeons and myself, the Ph.D. scientist on the team and research fellows in the lab. Transplantation is inherently collaborative. It brings together surgeons, scientists, and engineers. We hope to give clinical teams a practical tool that improves decision-making and, ultimately, patient outcomes.
Do you see this technology extending to other organs besides kidneys?
Definitely. While we’re starting with kidneys, this approach is applicable to livers, lungs, and hearts too. Since the organ is isolated on the machine, there are no confounding factors from the rest of the body. We’ve seen that sDNA is a good marker for injury in multiple organ types.
Tell us about your time at UF and your role here.
I started here with a three-year clinical fellowship in hematology and oncology. I was selected to the research track in my second year, dedicating about 75% of my time to research. That’s when I started working on what I do now with my mentor, Dr. Elias Sayour. I stayed on as faculty just last summer to continue that work. Now as a medical oncologist, I get to help people by managing their sarcoma treatment while also trying to find a cure.
You focus on immunotherapies. Describe how you apply that to sarcoma or other types of cancer.
Part of my mission is to study sarcomas in my lab and improve the therapies we currently have for them. Right now, immunotherapy isn’t very effective for sarcoma because the tumors are what we call “immunologically cold,” meaning they hide from the immune system and don’t respond well to currently available immunotherapies like other tumors might. We’re researching new methods to help the immune system recognize sarcomas, developing novel therapies and improving how existing therapies work.
What benefits does immunotherapy offer compared to traditional cancer treatments?
Ideally, immunotherapy trains the immune system to kill the cancer. We’re enabling what God gave us to kill cancer. We all have mutations happening constantly, and normally our immune system destroys those abnormal cells. But sometimes cancer cells escape detection and survive. If we can retrain the immune system to recognize them again, it could provide long-term immunity, essentially a cure, whereas other treatments must be given continually until they stop working or become too toxic for the patient.
How does your latest project advance immunotherapy?
We’re working with iron oxide nanoparticles to improve how our vaccine works. Right now, the vaccine uses lipid nanoparticles similar to how some of the COVID mRNA vaccines work. But we use a special “onion-like” structure that allows us to load more mRNA into the particle. This helps turn a “cold” tumor into a “hot” tumor, making it more responsive to immunotherapy. We’re collaborating with Carlos M. Rinaldi-Ramos, Ph.D. from the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and his lab to use magnetic particle imaging and iron oxide nanoparticles to better understand how the vaccine works and make it work even better.
What sparked the idea to use magnetic particle fields in the first place?
There were some questions about the mechanism of our initial vaccine. Dr. Rinaldi already collaborates with Dr. Sayour and Dr. Duane Mitchell who have been major influences for me. I met Dr. Rinaldi at a UF Health Cancer Center retreat where he was discussing his work. This sparked an idea of potential collaboration as I saw an opportunity to improve upon our vaccine using magnetic nanoparticles which hold vast potential to impact immunotherapies. When the ROSF was announced, the collaboration just made sense and I’m excited to dive into this multidisciplinary approach to the cancer problem.
The ROSF is about multidisciplinary collaboration too. Are you working with any other collaborators besides Dr. Rinaldi?
For this project, it’s mainly with Dr. Rinaldi who is an expert in magnetic nanoparticles and magnetic particle imaging. We work closely within the Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program here, so there’s a lot of collaboration in general on immunotherapy for adult and pediatric cancers. Dr. Sayour invented the lipid particle vaccine we currently study in clinical trials and still works closely with me, but this is largely my independent project with Dr. Rinaldi.
Do you know what the award funding will specifically support?
It’ll mostly fund our animal studies. Basically, we’ll test this new concept in mice to prove it works and study the mechanism of our vaccine. Eventually, we plan to move to clinical trials in pet dogs and cats, and if that’s successful, to humans.
We look forward to following these ROSF projects as well as those of the following College of Medicine co-investigators:
- Matthew Gentry, Ph.D. and Craig Vander Kooi, Ph.D. for “Leveraging Generative AI to Advance Enzyme Replacement Therapy for Lafora Disease”
- Karyn Esser, Ph.D. for “Impact of circadian disruption on cancer-induced cachexia”
- Thomas George, M.D., FACP for “Discovery of Pancreatic Cancer-Specific Antibodies and Antigens”
- Artem Nemudryi, Ph.D. for “Programmable RNA targeting for curing RNA virus infections and biotechnology applications in plants”
- Barry Byrne, M.D., Ph.D. for Sweet Corn Phytoglycogen, a natural polymer with biomedical application to stabilize gene therapy drugs.
- Yi Guo, Ph.D. for Surveillance for Hepatocellular Carcinoma with Artificial Intelligence Risk-Stratified Processes (SHARP)