Grant Type: Faculty Grant

The COVID-19 Response grants awarded by the Faculty Grant support UW–Madison researchers across campus in scientific, medical and public health approaches to lessening the impact of COVID-19 through improved testing, treatments and vaccine development, as well as projects that aim to protect the public and healthcare workforce from the virus.

The Wisconsin Partnership Program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH) has established the Wisconsin Partnership Program Scholarship Program – a four-year scholarship created with the goal of increasing recruitment of medical students at the SMPH from communities that are disproportionately impacted by health inequities and poor health outcomes. Funded by the Partnership Education and Research Committee (PERC), the scholarship program is designed to enhance the recruitment and retention of medical students in Wisconsin, and in doing so, help create and sustain a physician workforce that reflects and keeps pace with Wisconsin’s diverse population.

Heart failure continues to be a major health issue in the United States, characterized by 6 million adults affected in the years 2015-2018, according to the American Heart Association. Ischemic injury is caused by the absence of or diminished flow of blood, which can lead to heart disease and heart failure that affects the function of the heart by reducing its ability to pump blood effectively. This project explored new strategies to repair the adult human heart following injury caused by heart disease, which can cause irreversible loss of part of the heart muscle. The research team identified mechanisms that occur in heart regeneration in newborns that could be applied to adult hearts in order to aid in cardiac regeneration. These data support the possibility of people regaining cardiac function after injury.

Patients with unmet social needs —such as housing and food insecurity —need to be paired with available community resources. At two UW Health clinics since 2016, student navigators havehelped connect patients with resources. This study will determine whether student navigators’ training and experience enhances their inter-professional development.

Studies have implicated the failure of proper chromosome segregation, a process that is critical for cell proliferation and for maintaining life in all organisms, in both cancer and birth defects. This project explored the scientific premise that the kinetochore, a protein structure that forms during cell division, ensures proper chromosome segregation and prevents errors in mitosis. This project provided fundamental insights into cancer and developmental diseases by yielding new understanding of kinetochore functions. Through the work completed during this grant period, the researchers were able to make progress on developing a novel super-resolution imaging methodology which is not only well-suited to studying kinetochore dysfunction, but also can be utilized for broad research fields.

Lupus — an autoimmune disease that causes inflammation and organ damage — disproportionately affects patients of color and those of low socioeconomic status, who also experience higher rates of associated kidney disease and early death. Ensuring that patients get regular care could help keep symptoms in check, but retention predictors in lupus care are poorly understood. This study defined retention in care for different demographic groups in Wisconsin, finding that those from the most disadvantaged neighborhoods were the most at-risk of ~60% lower retention in care. The insights generated from this research have the potential to help providers reduce lupus outcome disparities in the future.

In Wisconsin, 750,000 people live with diabetes, and 25 percent of those individuals will develop a diabetic foot ulcer (DFU), a common complication of diabetes, in their lifetime. DFUs can remain open for a long time, and it can be difficult to predict which of these wounds will respond to treatment and heal or require amputation. Wound tissue supports the colonization of a diverse community of microbes referred to as a microbiome. The microbiome in the wound tissue is thought to sustain inflammation which impairs healing and tissue repair. There is a critical, unmet need to develop methods that predict if diabetic wounds will heal in response to treatment, or if they will remain open and healing will be stalled due to a complex microbiome. In this study, researchers hypothesized that the wound microbiome interacts with host healing pathways and genes that control tissue repair. Ultimately, they found that anaerobic bacteria species, which can survive and grow with no oxygen, are more abundant and transcriptionally active in the microbiome of persistent and amputated wounds. Therefore, anaerobic bacteria may serve as a predictive biomarker of wound healing. The research team has received a $26,000 Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) Technology Accelerator Grant and a $2 million NIH grant to expand their work.

Antibiotic resistance makes drugs less effective at treating infections, which can be very dangerous. This study explored the role that dietary fiber intake and the diversity of microorganisms in the gut may play in reducing the risk of colonization by multidrug resistant organisms (MDROs). The study found higher rates of MDRO colonization in older, low-income, and urban-living individuals and that increased dietary fiber intake may be associated with slightly lower rates of MDRO gut colonization. Further study using leveraged grant funding in underway.

In Wisconsin, people of Hmong ancestry are infected by a particular fungal lung disease at rates up to 100 times higher than people of European ancestry, a concerning public health disparity. The researchers identified the genetic basis for susceptibility to the fungal infection in people of Hmong ancestry, providing new opportunities for treatment and education.

Through the Badger Nurses Collaborating on Covid Vaccination and Education Delivery (BN-CoVED) project, the UW–Madison School of Nursing contributed to the statewide vaccination effort by training faculty and students to provide accurate COVID-19 information to the public and to safely give the vaccine. The School of Nursing collaborated with four UW System nursing schools: Green Bay, Oshkosh, Eau Claire, and Stevens Point, along with the schools’ community partners to staff vaccination clinics. Between February and June 2021, 648 nursing students and 68 faculty contributed a collective 10,196 hours of time to the vaccination effort. Sixty community organizations were assisted by nursing students and faculty during the vaccination roll-out. The success of this project has led to strengthened and new partnerships among many public health departments, health care centers, schools, tribal health organizations, and organizations involved in the state’s vaccination campaign, as well as prepared students for their career as nurses.