A new competitive grant program at the University of Colorado Department of Medicine seeks to foster research projects that draw on interdisciplinary collaboration across the department’s divisions and even among other departments and schools on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.
Of two projects that are among the first to receive support through the CU Department of Medicine’s Collaborative Opportunities for Advancing Research and Translational Efforts (COLLABORATE DOM) program, one deals with understanding the impact of sepsis on hearing, and the other focuses on measuring gait speed as a vital sign for older people living with the human immunodeficiency virus – HIV.
The key rationale behind COLLABORATE DOM is that making scientific discoveries in medicine and bringing the results to the clinic increasingly requires a “team science” approach among basic, translational, and clinical researchers with expertise from diverse fields.
The program, which began accepting applications last year, also seeks to provide crucial early support to researchers while they develop data that can help them apply for major grants later.
“This kind of collaborative grant is incredibly helpful for starting new research partnerships,” said Kristine Erlandson, MD, a professor in the CU Division of Infectious Diseases who is helping to lead the gait speed study.
“In some cases, people think, ‘This project would be great to do, but I don’t have any preliminary data, so how do I get this started?’ Even a small grant can help get a project going, so we get excited about opportunities like this. It prompts people to take those initial steps, reach out and talk to potential collaborators, and come up with a plan, which makes it a lot easier to move forward,” Erlandson says.
COLLABORATE DOM offers financial awards in two phases – team formation awards and pilot awards – with the aim of spurring research endeavors until they reach the point where investigators can apply for major grant funding, such as an R01 Research Project Grant from the National Institutes of Health or funding through the internal CU ASPIRE research incubator program.
The team formation awards are $3,000 over six months. They help researchers develop a proposal detailing team members, their roles, specific aims, preliminary data, and a timeline for submitting a major grant application.
The pilot awards are $40,000 over 12 months. They help cover the costs of developing preliminary data supporting grant applications.
Up to three awards are funded annually. In the program’s first year, there were 15 applicants for team formation funding and four for pilot funding.
Under the program, awardees must submit a manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal within 12 months of the start of a pilot award, and submit a grant application within 12 months (for ASPIRE) or 18 months (for an R01).
The program also is designed to encourage projects with multiple principal investigators (PIs), and to involve one or more junior faculty members, a PhD, and an MD in leading the projects.
For example, Joseph Hippensteel, MD, an assistant professor in the CU Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine, is one of three PIs on the sepsis project, along with Achim Klug, PhD, a hearing physiologist and professor in the CU Department of Physiology and Biophysics, and Tim Lei, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at CU Denver with a focus on neural signal processing.
Hippensteel’s project received a team formation award from COLLABORATE DOM. “It’s a small grant compared to the full pilot, but it’s a nice way to get things cooking and get some momentum,” he says. “We didn’t have enough data to justify the full pilot, so we wanted to get more data and establish ourselves as a team more fully.” Hippensteel and his colleagues recently applied for COLLABORATE DOM pilot funding in the next cycle.
Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening emergency involving an extreme reaction to infection, affecting nearly 50 million patients each year worldwide. “We’re looking at sepsis and its effects on hearing, which is a poorly explored area, so we’re seeking to fill in the knowledge gap,” Hippensteel says. The skimpy data that existed previously, he says, suggested that sepsis is associated with a significantly increased risk of premature hearing loss, and that hearing loss after sepsis is a major risk factor for poor functional outcomes in survivors.
It's a study where the team science approach is critical, Hippensteel says. So far, through support from the COLLABORATE DOM award, the team has gathered data that strongly suggests sepsis can directly impact the auditory system, setting the stage for further study.
A gait speed measuring device installed in a hallway at the UCHealth Seniors Clinic is seen in an image from a presentation slide. Photo provided by Kristine Erlandson, MD.
In Erlandson’s project, which received COLLABORATE DOM pilot funding, she is collaborating with several other faculty members from other Department of Medicine divisions – including her co-PI, Jacob Walker, MD, an assistant professor in the Division of Geriatric Medicine – and from the CU Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. Their study seeks to develop a toolkit for an automated gait speed system that can be used by clinics to assess the health of people aged 50 and older with HIV.
The project reflects Erlandson’s longstanding research interest in helping people age successfully with HIV. She notes that some people with HIV experience a form of “accelerated aging,” facing complications of aging at an earlier age than people without HIV, and that assessing gait speed can provide insight into overall health status.
“We want to treat gait speed as a routine vital sign,” like blood pressure and heart rate, for older people with HIV, she says.
An automated gait measurement system already is in use at the UCHealth Seniors Clinic at the Anschutz Outpatient Pavilion. “It’s a device on the wall. The medical assistant hits a button to start the timer, the patient walks past two sensors to mark a 4-meter course, and the system automatically populates their gait speed on a monitor that the medical assistant can record in Epic,” Erlandson says, referring to the electronic medical record system used at UCHealth facilities. “It helps to speed up the measurement, it’s fun for the patient, and we don’t lose quite as many stopwatches.”
Erlandson’s team worked with physical therapists to get the same kind of system installed at the HIV clinic, and there’s talk of installing it at other specialty clinics as well, such as oncology. Further grant funding could lead to expanded use of the system elsewhere across the UCHealth system.
The new COLLABORATE DOM program is part of a suite of targeted funding opportunities for researchers from the CU Department of Medicine, including the Research Investment in the Scientific Enterprise (RISE) program and a match of the CU School of Medicine’s bridge funding initiative.
“As this program becomes more well known around campus, I think it will prompt people to think about new creative collaborations, which makes science more fun and productive,” Erlandson says.
Photos at top: Left, Kristine Erlandson, MD, and Jacob Walker, MD. Right: Joseph Hippensteel, MD.