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In this episode our host, Sue Marasco, PhD, Assistant Director of Research Programs and Proposal Development for the CTSC sits down with Umut Gurkan, PhD, CTSC Annual Pilot Lead and Wilbert J Austin Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. They discuss CTSC funding opportunities and the collaborative efforts that have advanced Dr. Gurkan's research and international clinical studies on sickle cell disease.
Plus, learn more about the CTSC's Annual Pilot funding as well as other funding opportunities available through the CTSC.
Links:
- Become a CTSC Member
- 2025 Annual Pilot
- Get your research started here: submit a SPARC Request
- CTSC Dissemination & Implementation Symposium
- Umut Gurkan's research lives here: CWRU School of Engineering Case Biomanufacturing and Microfabrication Laboratory
Transcript
“It's such a good point that you made, $50,000 may not sound like a lot, but it is a stepping stone and it is a starting point for much bigger opportunities.” - Umut Gurkan, PhD
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[Intro]
From Research to Real Life, a podcast by the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Northern Ohio.
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Sue Marasco:
Hello, and welcome to episode three. From Research to Real Life. I'm your host, Sue Marasco, Assistant Director of Research Programs and Proposal Development at the CTSC of Northern Ohio. Today, we are thrilled to have a very special guest Umut Gurkan. He is the CTSC Pilot Module lead Umut, thank you so much for being here.
Umut Gurkan:
It's nice to be here. Thank you Sue.
Sue Marasco:
So we're here today to talk about some of the funding opportunities and the resources available at the CTSC, as well as the new RFA that has just been released: Annual pilot for people listening. It is important to note that we have several funding opportunities through the CTSC. And here they are. The annual pilots are up to one year for $50,000, but the projects must be completed within that 12 month cycle. We have up to eight grants available in that $50,000 range.
We also have core pilots, which are meant to be used within six months, and those are up to $10,000 apiece. Those are approved on a rolling basis and are designed to support the use of core facilities and services at Case and our affiliated institutions.
We have themed pilots that, are around a year to use that range from $20,000 to $50,000 around specific themes, every year.
And then we have vouchers, that can be used within a three month period that are $7,500 apiece. Those are proof of concept dollars meant to be used for necessary costs for a project. All of these are in service, we hope, of larger NIH grants, which I am happy to support you with. So, it let's discuss this year's pilot RFA and how the $50,000 is just one of the things that you get when you engage with funding from the CTSC.
Umut Gurkan:
Thank you, Sue. It's such a good point that you made $50,000 may not sound like a lot, but it is a stepping stone and it is a starting point for, much bigger opportunities. I would like the potential interest of the applicants, and I would like people who are interested in applying for CTSC to know that the pilot awards are just a small piece of the puzzle in translational research.
In my opinion, it is about team building and identifying potential roadblocks in, bringing your ideas or your inventions or discoveries from, from the lab to the to the world. If you can identify a certain roadblock in the translation process and be creative about building a team around it, and then tell the story in a brief application that you submit to CTSC, CTSC will be happy to fund you with a $50,000 direct cost, project budget.
But in addition to that, you will have access to many resources that the CTSC offers. And, by using the funding, by creating a team and by using the resources provided by CTSC, the hope and the goal is that your project, your team will be able to be will be much more competitive to for bigger funding opportunities, maybe licensing opportunities down the line.
NIH grants, large NIH grants, maybe starting companies based on the invention and the intellectual property that you will generate along the way. And this a quick summary of the hope and expectation of the CTSC annual pilots.
Sue Marasco:
Fantastic. So that's lovely for you to mention how this really is a stepping stone. And it's a way of building teams and, giving you an opportunity to really understand, the potentials of your project. So we have Annual Pilots, and we are hoping for eight annual pilots for up to $50,000 of funding this year. Would you like to tell us some of the details of this new funding cycle?
Umut Gurkan:
Yes. Starting this year, we would like to have webinars, that will be broadcasted as well as recorded, during which we will explain the RFA or the request for applications in detail. So this will include, the letter of intent deadline for this year. It is November 15th, 2024. And, the expectations in terms of, how to put together the proposal, how to how to put together the budget, a formal definition of translational, research versus translational signs and the stages of translation that we would like to see.
Or, translation effort efforts that we would like to see in the applications. And, this year, something new that we would like to implement is consultation sessions for the investigators or the teams. So we will be available, for those project specific questions after the webinar. And the goal is to have the teams put together the most comprehensive and the most successful, proposal that they can.
It will satisfy the expectations and the requirements. And also it would highlight the strengths and, the novel and innovative aspects of the project. So the consultation sessions can be scheduled through expert requests. More information is available on the CTSA. A request for applications web page. In addition to that, this year we would like to, have the investigators think about intellectual property.
They may already know that they have intellectual property associated with their projects, which is great. And they can talk about that, or if they are not sure if they if their project has protectable intellectual property, they can state that also in their applications and they can request help from the CTSC to evaluate if their project has a potential intellectual property.
The reason why this is important is, if there is an intellectual property that can be filed to a technology transfer office at their institution, it might lead to patent applications, provisional patent applications, and patent applications. And that's what companies and the startup companies need, for the translation process to happen. So we would like to help with those aspects of the translation projects as well.
And one more really important detail, that I would like to mention, since the CTSC funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, NIH, they require that all the IRBs are in place before the project starts. So, we have clear recommendations and requirements for having the IRB processes underway or already approved, before the project starts.
And more information will be available at the webinar. Please watch the recording of the webinar after it is posted.
Sue Marasco:
And you come to this with a lot of experience, and I'm really interested in hearing you talk about your specific interests in micro technologies and how that's led to some really interesting work on blood.
Umut Gurkan:
So, I would like to mention that the CTSC Annual Pilot Award was one of the first awards that I received when I started here at Case is an assistant professor, is an early stage investigator. I knew that I was interested in translational research. And, I became aware of the pilot program, and I would look I would like to also emphasize that, pilot program review, review Committee is interested in seeing applications from early stage and investigators and, they have a slight advantage compared to more senior investigators in the review process.
So at that time, my research was focused on understanding things at micro scale in small scales, especially inside the human body and particularly in human circulation. By any chance, have you read the book Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov?
Sue Marasco:
I have not read the book Fantastic Voyage.
Umut Gurkan:
So in Fantastic Voyage, a group of four men and one woman, I think a group of scientists, they are shrunk into a size of a tiny, you know, microbe. And they get inside, something like a spaceship, but designed for, operating in small scales. And with this small ship, they navigate in a human's circulation. And the goal is to go and find a tiny micro clot that formed in this person's brain and go and break it up so that this person can live.
So I don't want to give many other spoilers about the book in case you are interested in reading it, but the idea here is, or the curiosity that we have is can we see and visualize and measure and interact with very small events that are happening? This is small interactions that are happening inside human body. A cellular scale.
For example, how does a tiny red blood cell passes through a small capillary in the, most critical parts of the body, for example, in brain circulation or in, in the kidneys or in the lungs, how does a single red blood cell pick up oxygen as it passes through the, capillaries lock? So these are the type of things that we are curious about.
And, our research, since I started here at Case, focus on that. Trying to understand, trying to visualize, trying to measure these small phenomena in, scales much smaller than a single human hair. So think about the single human hair and try to slice it. Maybe into ten small pieces. And it's, you know, along its length.
That's the small scale that I'm really talking about here. So at that time, I was interested from a scientific point of view. I was interested in those at those scales phenomena. That happens at both scales. But of course, we have to link it to, to humans and to diseases and the patients eventually and ultimately, one of the first projects that I focused on here was developing a basic understanding of red blood cells and hemoglobin.
That's the red protein that gives the blood its reddish color. And how does hemoglobin, how does red blood cells, work inside the body? And in the case of a disease, for example, in the case of a sickle cell disease, which is an abnormal hemoglobin leading to abnormal red blood cells and abnormal circulation, we were interested in understanding how those abnormal interactions happen.
The good thing about blood disorders is you don't have to really put a spaceship inside the human circulation, or you don't have to put the camera inside circulation, or blood vessels. You can just take a small volume of blood, and measure many things on on that blood sample in the lab about ten years ago, we didn't really have the tools that we have right now in terms of measuring those small animal phenomena in, in, in blood.
So we had to develop the micro technologies and micro scale tools to be able to probe, measure, image, analyze, the, the normal and abnormal properties of those cells in small scales. The first pilot award I applied for was, technology that we developed in our lab, we called microchip electrophoresis. So it's a micro scale electrophoresis method, which is a way of separate, proteins.
And in this particular case, hemoglobin. And we can actually separate time using these micro technologies based on their charge. So if, for example, a certain hemoglobin has a different charge, we can separate it based on that. And we have shown that we can actually separate and abnormal hemoglobin from a normal hemoglobin using this technology.
And this could be used as a way of screening for or diagnosing the abnormality of hemoglobin in this disease so that was the idea and the translational aspect of this project was testing if this idea would work with human patients. So our application to CTSC was, designing a small clinical study, to recruit patients who have, abnormal hemoglobin at, at the UH and, consent them to our study, receive blood samples and bring those blood samples to our lab and test if we can, use our technology to screen for and diagnose these abnormalities.
So, in basic terms, our curiosity in microscale and some ideas that we developed over the years based on that curiosity, lend itself to translational research. Once we engaged with university hospitals, physicians, patients, caregivers include them in our study so that they can consent them so that, contact the patient so that they can participate in our studies, receive blood samples from them, and test them in the lab.
So this was our pilot award.
Sue Marasco:
So you took the idea from an Isaac Asimov novel?
Umut Gurkan:
Yes.
Sue Marasco:
And developed a process to test for sickle cell. And that became the gazelle technology. Yes. And the gazelle technology is now used in how much of the world?
Umut Gurkan:
So the Gazelle technology, which is essentially the, commercial name of our microchip electrophoresis technology, is now available in more than 35 countries, available at more than 2000 sites. And it has already been used for more than 1.5 million times to screen for abnormal hemaglobin and in particular, sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia, among others, especially in newborns, babies and children.
Especially in India. This technology is now used as part of the national screening program, to screen all the babies, all the children for sickle cell disease and hopefully eliminate disease by 2047. So we are part of those, large scale screening efforts and elimination efforts.
Sue Marasco:
That's such an amazing story, because it takes it from ideation to experimentation to translation, so that now your micro technology issues are actually set to change the course of the sickle cell in the world.
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[BREAK]
Anita Misra-Hebert:
I am Doctor Anita Misra-Hebert. I'm a practicing general internal medicine physician at Cleveland Clinic and also an implementation science researcher. I am director of our Healthcare Delivery and Implementation Science Center at Cleveland Clinic, and also serve as the Cleveland Clinic site lead for our Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Northern Ohio, or the CTSC. Another role that I have with the CTSC is to be our dissemination and implementation research champion.
So I'm here to invite you to our inaugural Dissemination Implementation Virtual Symposium, which we delivered on Friday, October 18th from 8 a.m. to 12 noon. It's going to be a very exciting morning where we will have a really interesting conversations about the relevance of implementation research to the work that goes on throughout the CTC. We will talk about the entire translational science spectrum, starting from basic science all the way through to implementation of the research that is created to health systems, as well as to our local communities.
The goal is for our research to benefit our patients and community members as much as possible, and studying how we do this is really what defines in many ways the field of implementation science research. We have wonderful external speakers who will be helping to stimulate our discussions, and we also have panel discussions with local leaders within the CTC and our local health systems.
We are really excited to be talking about topics such as the alignment of implementation, research with operational work. And so for that panel, we will have operational leaders thinking about how they may collaborate with implementation researchers within the CTC. In addition, we've got a panel discussion planned on implementing for health equity. So what do we need to measure to make sure that we are implementing our research findings in an equitable manner to our populations, who can benefit most from our research?
So once again, I am really hoping that you'll be able to join us for our virtual symposium again. It will be Friday, October 18th from 8 a.m. to 12 noon, and I will look forward to seeing you there. We'll have lots of opportunity for audience participation with questions, and so come prepared to have a very exciting discussion that morning. Thank you so much.
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Sue Marasco:
So after your 2014 annual pilot, which you've described to us so well, tell us what the 2019 pilot did for you and what you did with it.
Umut Gurkan:
Our second CTSC annual pilot focused on the red blood cells. So our first annual pilot was on the hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen that is the most abundant protein in the bloodstream and in the red in red blood cells. A different research program in our lab was focusing on measuring the abnormal properties of red blood cells in certain diseases.
So their stickiness, for example, red blood cells are designed not to be sticky. We developed a new microfluidic test for measuring their stickiness. The second pilot project focused on evaluating if we can use this measure of red blood cell stickiness is biomarkers in sickle cell disease. For example, if a patient has a large number of sticky red blood cells, what does this mean?
Or does it mean anything in relation to the clinical state or treatment response? So this second pilot focused on, again, gathering a team around this project to evaluate if we can measure this new biomarker in a group of patients and see if it has useful information associated with it in relation to the clinical state of the patient.
For example, if the patient is doing well, we would expect to see less sticky red blood cells. If the patient is not doing well, the the number of sticky red blood cells might go up with treatments. The numbers should go down. So this is what we wanted to evaluate in simple terms with the second CTC pilot. And this pilot led to many other funding opportunities or awards later on.
And we started a company here in Cleveland. BioChip labs is the name of the company that now can provide this new biomarker, to clinical trials, clinical studies and, many pharmaceutical companies have employed this new test and other tests, that this company has, developed over the years in, cell and gene therapy trials, for example, in sickle cell disease, one of the emerging treatment options is a curative therapy based on using gene therapy to correct the mutation associated with the disease.
So this company now offers these microfluidic tests to measure if the functional properties of the red blood cells improve. After such a therapy. So again, the CTSA pilot award was the starting point for much bigger and more substantial awards that led to commercialization. Eventually.
Sue Marasco:
That's amazing. Which also brings up translational science, translational research, and how that process works. Would you tell us a little bit about translational science and translational research?
Umut Gurkan:
Yes, I would be happy to, starting this year, CTSC’s annual pilot program will support translational research projects as well as translational science projects. The difference between translational research and translational science is translational research typically focuses on a particular, translational challenge for a particular project that is focused on a particular technology or a disease. So if you have a very specific idea or or a technology to diagnose or prevent or treat a certain disease, and if you have, let's say, come a certain way, along the discovery, invention, prototyping and maybe the next bottleneck or the next challenge for you is to engage with a community partner or certain physician group or a caregiver group, or maybe a patient group to test if your prototype or the idea or the, invention works. Identifying the challenge and gathering support or putting a team around the challenge to solve the challenge is the translational research. Is defined as it is translational research. Translational science, on the other hand, is typically project agnostic, or maybe I should say technology agnostic, disease agnostic.
It is essentially developing a framework of addressing translational research challenges. So, for example, translational science can be a particular way of testing a certain idea in a certain clinical setting. A science aspect would be to figure out what would be the best strategy to tackle the challenge, to tackle the translational research challenge. It might be a way of engaging with a particular patient group.
It might be a way of, it might be research on the way of engaging with a certain community partner. It might be a research project on how to collect a particular set of data from a particular set of group. That's kind of the distinction between the translational research and translational science projects.
Sue Marasco:
Fantastic. And finally, as you see, the future of translational science and translational research, what is your goal as the new pilot lead? See this vision grow in Case and the CTSA.
Umut Gurkan:
Yes. That's a good question. I can say that since I started my research program here at Case, I think, I was lucky to be successful in all different sorts of translational research programs. So I think we were able to receive support and funding from all different sorts of translational research mechanisms that you can think of, internal resources such as the CTSA, state resources, federal resources from the NIH and we also received support through experienced ETR programs after we started the company, based on the inventions and the technologies that we have developed.
What I have realized over the years is translational research supports translational research. Funding is much different than basic research funding. For example, a typical NIH role or a typical NSF project translational research support is much more than just the funding that you receive. For example, in the case of CT annual pilots, it is $50,000 in direct costs.
It's much more than that. It is to the mentorship and advice and the network and the fellowship of other investigators that were previously funded by this program or CTSC resources. And it is staff that can help you, guide you and support you, throughout your translational journey. So in my experience, the support that I received from translational research programs was much more than funding.
Funding was just a small piece of the puzzle. You cannot really get anything done if you don't have the funding. But more importantly, if that funding is, so-called smart funding, if it comes with some additional knowledge and experience, expertise and advice, mentorship, that's much more valuable. I think this what we will try to do with the CTSC pilot Awards, we would like investigators to feel supported.
We would like them. We would like them to know that if they need help or advice or mentorship or a new team member or a connection to some other institution or, to other CTSC programs or a particular expertise in, let's say clinical study design, regulatory support, other types of funding opportunities that, we can help them with.
So we would like investigators to be supported and we would like them to know that, $50K of funding is just a small piece of support that they will receive from the CTSC program.
Sue Marasco:
I think the term smart funding is my favorite new phrase. I really appreciate that. Thank you for sharing your experiences and your insights. We are so glad that you took this time with us. This is the best way to ensure that you are kept up to date. With CTSA funding and opportunities is to visit our website. And as always, please become a member. And with membership comes perks like great discussions like this. So thank you very much.
Umut Gurkan:
Thank you very much for having me here today.
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[OUTRO]
From Research to Real Life is brought to you by the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative of Northern Ohio. The views, recommendations and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the presenters and not necessarily those of the CTC or its partners.