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 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.

New R01 awarded for models of Multi-Tissue Immunity

We are excited that our work to build multi-organ models of immunity will be funded for the next five years by a $2.4 million award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. This award will fund exciting collaborations with the Throckmorton lab at Drexel University and Drs. Melanie Rutkowski and Anne Sperling here at UVA!

Interested in what we are studying? Read on below.

Communication between the lymph node and the organs it drains is imperative for predicting immune responses to vaccination, infection, and chronic disease, but have been difficult to study in vivo or in vitro.

To address this gap, we will develop a user friendly, microscale system designed specifically to co-culture intact samples of live tissue from the lymph node with other organs, while allowing recirculation of white blood cells as occurs in vivo. After determining the effects of various modes of fluid motion on intact lymph node tissue for the first time, we will generate a simple model of the response of the murine lymph node to vaccination, as a proof-of-principle of this new system for modeling multi-tissue immunity outside the body.

Congratulations to Katrina for winning the UVA Cancer Center Trainee Fellowship!

Katrina’s project, The impact of tumor-draining lymph node remodeling on tumor cell invasiveness, was selected as an awardee for the UVA Cancer Center Trainee Fellowship! This was a competitive process, and her significant and exciting progress on her research progress in the past year was cited as a major strength of the renewal application. Congratulations to Katerina on this well-deserved recognition of your accomplishments and plans!

Congratulations to Izzy for receiving the Lester Andrews Undergraduate Research Fellowship in UVA Chemistry!

This award will fund her work this summer, as she pivots from her nearly-completed project on analyzing the crosslinking of biomaterials, to using those biomaterials to advance cell responses in our lymph node chip system. She and her mentor Jon Zatorski took a big leap to write up the proposal on the next project, and it paid off. Congratulations Izzy on this great accomplishment! 

Congratulations to Hannah for winning the Department of Chemistry's Hecht Fellowship for 2023-2024!

This is a very prestigious award that recognizes her excellence in research and leadership in the department.  We are so proud of her many accomplishments!

Congratulations to Djuro for earning the Chemistry Department Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award!

Please join in congratulating Djuro for this well-earned achievement! Djuro has excelled as a teacher and as Head TA, a position that he was specially chosen for this year. Every week, Djuro helps oversee the learning of more than 1400 students and several dozen TAs. Great job Djuro!

Congratulations to Tiffany and Parris for the Harrison Fellowship!

This award will fund Tiffany's work this summer to look at the impact of oxygen availability and culture conditions on long-term human tonsil tissue culture.  It's an area that we are all excited to move into, and also synergizes well with the experiments that Sahana and Erin are planning in mouse tissue.  I am looking forward to seeing what we learn from these experiments! Congratulations Tiffany!

Congratulations to Morgan and Katerina for the Double Hoo Award!

This award will fund their work together this summer to look at how the tumor draining lymph nodes are remodeled before and after metastasis in a breast cancer model.  This exciting project will lay a foundation for understanding the factors that drive tumor cell invasion into the lymph nodes during metastasis, and enable improved models of metastasis and therapies in the future. Congratulations Morgan and Katerina!