The RHeSUS initiative seeks to close the substance misuse treatment gap by improving treatment and care for people struggling with substance use disorders in rural Wisconsin. The team aims to enhance the care delivery capacity of rural primary care clinics and hospitals and the availability of peer recovery support to rural residents. The team aims to enhance the care delivery capacity of rural primary care clinics and hospitals and the availability of peer recovery support to rural residents. This initiative supports a new collaboration between Wisconsin Voices for Recovery, academic partner Dr. Randall Brown, professor of family medicine, and the Wisconsin Hospital Association, which will leverage its network of health systems to facilitate this work.

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.