Congrats to Prof. Pompano, who was appointed to the Director’s Board of the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society. This Society organizes and sponsors the annual international microfluidics meeting, MicroTAS. See you at MicroTAS 2024 in Montreal!
NIH Challenge Fund Prize for human immune model
We are so honored that our team's idea won an NIH Complement-ARIE Challenge Prize!
“The National Institutes of Health has announced the winners of a crowdsourcing competition for innovative ideas on New Approach Methodologies, or NAMs to more accurately model human biology. The Complement Animal Research In Experimentation (Complement-ARIE) Challenge Prize competition offered $1,000,000 in total prize money to [twenty] diverse teams with ideas for new ways of using NAMs to conduct basic research, uncover disease mechanisms, and translate knowledge into products and practice.”
Our concept was an Organ-on-Chip system for Population Diversity in Responses to Vaccination, an area that we are passionate about exploring and look forward to opportunities to find funding for this exciting vision in the future.
A fantastic team came together for this idea:
Evangelia Bellas, Temple University
Aarthi Narayanan, George Mason University
Jennifer Munson, Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC
Chance John Luckey, University of Virginia Pathology
Rebecca Pompano, UVA Department of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering
All of the Challenge Prize winning ideas sound very exciting to advance models of human biology. You can read them all here:
https://commonfund.nih.gov/complementarie/highlights/nih-announces-winners-complement-arie-challenge-competition
Congratulations to Drs. Hannah, Jon, and Parris!
Please join us in congratulating our three brand new PhD titles for the spring of 2024! We couldn’t be more proud of all their efforts and accomplishments in lab!
Congratulations Yoojin for NIH Career Rentry Supplement Award!
Please join me in congratulating Yoojin for her successful application for an NIH Career Re-Entry Research Supplement Award! This award provides ~$600k to support Yoojin's future work on integrating a human lymphoid compartment into our multi-organ models of immunity, as well as strategic opportunities for career development. Big congratulations to Yoojin on this well deserved award!
Congratulations Rachel for Harrison Award!
Please join me in congratulating Rachel for her successful application to the Harrison award! Working with Sophie and Geane, Rachel is helping develop the blood-brain-barrier module to study neuro-immune communication. This award funds her to invest her full effort on this project this summer. Congratulations also to Sophie for her excellent mentoring of Rachel on her proposal.
Two new preprints!
The Pompano lab has been busy at the start of 2024! Check out our two new preprints on BioRxiv:
Ozulumba et al
One on biomaterials for immune cell photo-patterning:
by Tochukwu Ozulumba et al
And one on a bioanalytical method to map out oxygen consumption and hypoxia in live tissue explants:
Spatially resolved quantification of oxygen consumption rate in ex vivo lymph node slices
by Parastoo Anbaei et al
Anbaei et al
We welcome feedback on these manuscripts and look forward to sharing the revised versions again after peer review!
Congratulations Dr. Cook!
Congratulations to Sophie Cook on an excellent PhD and defense last week! Here are some pictures from the event. We are all very proud of her!
Yoojin joins the lab!
Before joining the Pompano Laboratory, Yoojin conducted her doctoral research in the department of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh studying extracellular vesicles in the ECM for tissue engineering. She then completed 2 years of postdoctoral research in the Cardiac Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh investigating cell-matrix mechanisms in the aorta during aneurysms.
Rally for Medical Research
On Sept 13-14, Professor Pompano traveled to Washington DC to participate in the Rally for Medical Research to help represent the American Association of immunologists (AAI) and biomedical researchers in Virginia. She worked with Jacob Schumacher, who is featured in the fifth photo and the Director of Government Affairs for AAI. On this day each year, biomedical researchers and patient advocates visit their Congressional representatives in the House and Senate to make the case for sustained and robust NIH funding.
If you are interested in advocating for this important issue, especially in an era of tight federal budgets, contact your representatives through the Legislative Action Center: https://www.votervoice.net/mobile/AACR/Home
BMES 2023!
The Pompano Lab had a great time in Seattle this year! Everyone enjoyed catching up with old colleagues and meeting new people. Here were the talk titles:
Tochi: Mitigating reactive oxygen species production and increasing gel porosity improves cell viability and spreading in photocrosslinked gelatin-thiol hydrogels
Sophie: A 3D-printed multi-organ-on-chip platform to model brain-immune interactions in neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration
Katerina: Breast cancer cells chemotact to specific regions of lymph node in an ex vivo model of lymph node metastasis
Jon: Building a microphysiological model of the human lymph node follicle border zone
