Weil Institute innovations awarded MTRAC and Kickstart funding
The winning projects include a staging platform for predictive analytics and an antimicrobial mouthguard helping to protect patients on ventilators from infectious pathogens.
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Kate Murphy
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mukately@med.umich.edu
ANN ARBOR – The Michigan Translational Research and Commercialization (MTRAC) for Life Sciences Hub has announced the recipients of the 2022 MTRAC middle-stage and Kickstart early-stage funding awards. Among the 14 total winners are two Weil Institute teams led by Sardar Ansari, PhD, and J. Scott VanEpps, MD, PhD.
Dr. Ansari, a Research Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Weil Institute’s Data Science core, received a $121,000 MTRAC middle-stage grant to support additional development and testing on EMMIT, the “Environment for Model Maintenance, Integration and Tuning”. EMMIT is a unique software platform that helps teams deploy, monitor and maintain machine learning models and predictive analytics within a hospital environment.
“It can be difficult to integrate analytical models into a healthcare system,” said Ansari. “Typical integration with third-party electronic health record (EHR) systems such as Epic removes the team’s ability to see the flow of data going in and out, leaving them in the dark when it comes to monitoring how their models are operating and gauging whether the data transfer is effective. EMMIT removes this ‘black box’ effect by delivering operational monitoring dashboards such as uptime, alerts and error reporting to help teams ensure their systems are working as expected. In addition, there are currently no solutions for monitoring the performance of deployed models, which can lead to unexpected situations and harm patients. EMMIT also addresses this problem.”
Alongside Dr. Ansari and EMMIT, the MTRAC for Life Sciences Hub awarded $115,000 in Kickstart early-stage funding to Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Associate Director of the Weil Institute Dr. J. Scott VanEpps. Dr. VanEpps and his team are developing a specialized mouthguard that helps prevent pneumonia in patients on ventilators.
“Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is a deadly hospital-acquired infection that occurs when bacteria invade the lower respiratory tract and lungs after the endotracheal tube has been placed,” said VanEpps. “Studies have shown that VAP-causing pathogens originate from saliva and dental plaques. Our mouthpiece is coated in a natural antimicrobial material and completely covers the teeth and gumline to continuously absorb these oral secretions, preventing them from collecting above and slipping past the endotracheal tube’s protective cuff.”
The MTRAC for Life Sciences Innovation Hub is a statewide program that supports translational research projects in life sciences with high commercial potential. The hub is co-managed by the University of Michigan Office of Innovation Partnerships and the Medical School’s Fast Forward Medical Innovation Program. Previous Weil Institute MTRAC and Kickstart awardees can be viewed at the Weil Institute’s Research Projects page: https://weilinstitute.med.umich.edu/projects.
Further Reading
Disclosures
Dr. Ansari has intellectual property on the EMMIT platform discussed in this article. EMMIT has been licensed by AirStrip Technologies, Inc.
Dr. VanEpps has intellectual property on the antimicrobial mouthguard, which is also protected by multiple patents optioned from U-M Innovation Partnerships.
About the Max Harry Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation
The team at the Max Harry Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation (formerly the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care) is dedicated to pushing the leading edge of research to develop new technologies and novel therapies for the most critically ill and injured patients. Through a unique formula of innovation, integration and entrepreneurship that was first imagined by Weil, their multi-disciplinary teams of health providers, basic scientists, engineers, data scientists, commercialization coaches, donors and industry partners are taking a boundless approach to re-imagining every aspect of critical care medicine. For more information, visit www.weilinstitute.med.umich.edu.