The NC State Comparative Medicine Institute’s (CMI) mission is to provide clinical and research opportunities to professional students, graduate students, clinical residents, postdoctoral fellows, and undergraduates. The CMI fosters interactions between clinical and basic research groups within the university community by developing mechanisms that encourage and facilitate those collaborations.
The CMI is composed of interdisciplinary teams of more than 170 faculty from 23 departments, representing 6 colleges and 4 universities. Each year, led by CMI Co-Directors Professor Jorge Piedrahita and Ashley Brown, the CMI holds the “Think, Collaborate & Do” Ideation event. The goals of this initiative are to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations among research groups, provide seed funding to develop preliminary data that can be used to obtain extramural funding, provide graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with the opportunity to develop their own projects and get experience in grant writing and project management, and incentivize the development of larger collaborative groups that can be competitive for NIH program projects.
KIETS support is leveraged with funding from the CMI, Data Sciences Academy, Genetic and Genomics Academy, Office of University Interdisciplinary Research, Provost Office, Office of Research Innovation, Colleges of Veterinary Medicine, College of Engineering, College of Sciences, College of Textiles and College of Agriculture and Life Science. Projects selected for KIETS support in FY 2024-25 include the following:
- Enhancing Development of New Therapeutic Candidates for Neutrophilic Asthma through Experimental and Mathematical Modeling Approaches. PIs: Sarah Shelton (COE), Rosemary Bayless (CVM), Sharon Lubkin (COS).
- Machine Learning to the Rescue: Data-Driven Prediction of Radiotherapy-Induced Normal Tissue Injury in Canine Cancer Treatment. PIs: S. Mohammad Hosseinian (COE), Michael Nolan (CVM).
- Integrating Sequence, Structure, and Dynamics to Predict and Design Nucleic Acids. PIs: Xingcheng Lin (COS), Keith Weninger (COS), Yi Xiao (COS).
- Modeling Cellular Response to Fibrous Biomaterial Properties for Skin Tissue Engineering. PIs: Jessica Gluck (WCOT), Nathaniel Josephs (COS), Orlando Arguello-Miranda (CALS).
- Defining and Targeting Cancer-Associated Fibroblasts in the Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Tumor Microenvironment. PIs: Sarah Shelton (COE), Shawn Gomez (COE/UNC).
- Cell Biology and Topology Meet to Inform Models of Cell Migration Fluidization. PIs: Jason Haugh (COE), Kevin Flores (COS).
For FY 2023-24, the PIs reported 4 publications generated, one invention disclosure, 29 faculty members engaged, 15 undergraduate students, 22 graduate students, three post-docs, two K-12 teachers involved, 14 conference presentations generated, two companies PolyMed, Inc. & Cytosorbens/VetResQ partnered, and collaborations with UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University.