PHILADELPHIA—The University of Pennsylvania has been named a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A team of researchers led by Harvey Rubin, MD, PhD, director of Penn’s Institute for Strategic Threat Analysis and Response and a professor of Medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and of Computer and Information Science at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, will pursue a global health research project to investigate the use of “photoacoustic imaging” to better diagnose tuberculosis.
Diagnosing active tuberculosis remains a difficult prospect requiring assessment of sputum samples to confirm the presence of bacteria. A simple, cheap, and quantitative test for bacterial load would transform TB diagnosis and treatment, allowing a focusing of time and treatment resources on those with the highest bacterial burden, and therefore greatest likelihood of poor outcomes and high rates of disease transmission.
The researchers’ proposed “photoacoustic imaging” technique is based on irradiating a tuberculosis-specific molecule with photons to induce thermal expansion, which can be detected and quantitated with standard ultrasound equipment.
The team, which also includes Andrew Tsourkas, from Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Takahiro Yano, MD, from the division of Infectious Diseases, Chandra Sehgal, PhD, a research professor in the department of Radiology, and Takushi Kaneko from the TB Alliance, will develop a new type of photoacoustic imaging that can determine the total body burden and distribution of tuberculosis.
Grand Challenges Explorations funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can solve persistent global health and development challenges. To receive funding, Rubin and other Grand Challenges Explorations winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of five critical global heath and development topic areas.
Grand Challenges Explorations is a $100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, over 1,186 projects in more than 61 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants.
The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page online applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of $100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to $1 million.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
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