December CHRI Research Bulletin

Research Bulletin

News from the Child Health Research Institute

December 2022

Inaugural CHRI Conference Brings Together Advisory Board and Members for Groundbreaking Presentations

The Child Health Research Institute hosted our inaugural Scientific Conference highlighting the outstanding work of our child health researchers on Nov. 3 and 4. The conference showcased the impactful research being done by CHRI’s membership, and it was the final event in the first visit and assessment of CHRI by our National Scientific Advisory Board (NSAB).

The conference began at Children’s on Nov. 3 with a keynote address to CHRI’s members. NSAB member Phyllis A. Dennery, MD, professor and Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Chair of Pediatrics, Brown University, gave an honest and inspiring presentation on “The trials and tribulations of the physician-scientist.” As CHRI aims to grow our research platform, recognizing and working to overcome these challenges is of significant relevance.

The next morning, for the full-day conference kickoff and pediatric grand rounds, fellow NSAB member Kevin Johnson, MD, vice president of Applied Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, set the stage for highly engaging discussions with his presentation “Envisioning our future partner in children’s health care: Could it be the EHR?” With his expertise and pioneering role in biomedical informatics as it impacts research, healthcare systems, healthcare delivery and efficacy, Dr. Johnson’s thoughtfully crafted lecture brought to the forefront opportunities and potential pitfalls in how we interact with and design systems for the future.

Following Dr. Johnson were our CHRI speakers. These presentations were chosen by senior scientists within CHRI who judged all the submitted abstracts. The top scoring abstracts were presented in the general session, and all presentations generated significant discussion and follow-up queries from attendees.

The first group of speakers focused on brain injury and development. Presenting were Xin Wei, PhD, research assistant professor, Pharmaceutical Sciences, UNMC; Gurudutt Pendyala, PhD, Robert Lieberman MD PhD Endowed Professor of Anesthesiology, UNMC; and Gwenn L. Skar, MD, assistant professor, Pediatrics, UNMC. In our second group, UNMC PhD candidates Matthew VanOrmer and Taija Hahka, along with UNMC MD/PhD candidate Rebecca Slotkowski, discussed nutrition in perinatal medicine.

Next were current CHRI Scholars Jeffrey Salomon, MD, assistant professor, Pediatrics, UNMC and Eric Peeples, MD, PhD, associate professor, Pediatrics, UNMC. Their presentations on microbiome and brain injury capped a morning of fabulous science.

In the afternoon, the conference attendees split-off into CHRI Areas of Emphasis (AOE) subgroups for poster discussions. These presentations were also judged to be top in their respective areas. Each room was led by AOE Champions who moderated sessions filled with questions, conversations and potential new collaborations.

The Conference was the first fully in-person event for CHRI since the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, and each presentation was met with great interest from the fellow scientists in attendance. CHRI Executive Director Ann Anderson Berry, MD, PhD, believes the event was a great success and strong building block for conferences to come.

“Our goal with the conference was to highlight the amazing, top-quality science of our faculty and senior graduate students and to bring our scientists together for engaging conversation and team building,” she said. “I’m excited by the robust conference attendance, the quality of the science presented and the excitement with which it was greeted. And beyond the research, it was wonderful to see how being together in person enabled connections and collaborations. We will be excited to host this event again in 2023. Feedback from the NSAB members on the conference presentations was that we are performing world class child health research at CHRI.”

Thank you to all the presenters at the CHRI Scientific Conference:

Phyllis A. Dennery, MD, professor and Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Chair of Pediatrics; professor of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry, Brown University; and pediatrician in chief, Hasbro Children’s Hospital

Kevin Johnson, MD, MS, FAAP, FAMIA, FACMI, vice president of Applied Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Health System and David L. Cohen University Professor of Pediatrics, Informatics, Engineering and Communication, Perelman School of Medicine, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania

Xin Wei, PhD, research assistant professor, Pharmaceutical Sciences, UNMC

Gurudutt Pendyala, PhD, Robert Lieberman Endowed Professor of Anesthesiology, UNMC

Gwenn L. Skar, MD, assistant professor, Pediatrics, UNMC

UNMC PhD candidates Matthew VanOrmer and Taija Hahka

UNMC MD/PHD candidate Rebecca Slotkowski

Jeffrey Salomon, MD, assistant professor, Pediatrics, UNMC

Eric Peeples, MD, PhD, associate professor, Pediatrics, UNMC

All the presenters in the AOE breakout groups

Thank you as well to the CHRI Conference Planning Committee, particularly event organizers Jackie Ostronic and Analisa Peyton.

More photos from the CHRI Conference

CHRI Priorities & Activities:

Update from Executive Director Ann Anderson Berry, MD, PhD

As 2022 comes to an end, I’d like to reflect on the past year and look forward to how CHRI is preparing for even greater success in the future. What an amazing year it was!

Highlights were:

Two outstanding National Scientific Advisory Board visits, including one virtual visit in September in preparation for the in-person November visit at Children’s and UNMC. The board was excited to see what amazing resources we have here in Omaha. They were impressed with the quality of the science shared at the Annual Scientific Meeting, and we will be excited to review and implement their recommendations in the upcoming year.
CHRI’s first Scientific Conference: The quality of the work presented was outstanding, and the opportunity to get our CHRI investigators in the same space for the first time in three years for robust conversation was wonderful. Thank you all for your participation.
CHRI seminar series: 2022 brought a wonderful group of investigators together to present at our CHRI seminar series. If you don’t regularly attend, add this to your calendar. The work presented here is worth the time investment.
Our CHRI Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in Research Journal Club launched to outstanding participation: The first two discussions have been very engaging. Catch us in 2023 for a three-part discussion of the book The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

Additional 2022 achievements:

CHRI DEI Grant Mechanism Launched
AOE meetings and mini summits
CHRI Pediatric Research Forum in May highlighted the work of our trainees across the Department of Pediatrics, Children’s and UNMC
Mentoring of Early Career Faculty program is expanding based on the experience in the CHRI Mentored Scholar’s Program
Continued year over year growth in clinical patient visits
Formalized recruitment process for child health researchers in conjunction with CSP and UNMC Basic Science Departments

As you may expect we have big plans for 2023 including:

Implementing recommendations from the CHRI National Scientific Advisory Board
Funding impactful internal CHRI grants for faculty, staff and trainees to provide meaningful data for extramural funding applications with the goal of innovation reaching the patient in the shortest time possible
Developing cores within CHRI to ensure that investigators have access to the services they need to grow successful child health research platforms
Continuing our DEI work to include evaluation of our internal and external work processes
Enhancing training experience of our students and medical trainees from the SURP, MMSRP and Step-Up programs through resident and fellow and graduate student engagement
Continuing to provide meaningful engagement with our community partners NorthStar, Girls Inc. and Completely Kids
Remodeling the Children’s clinical research space to be more functional and private
Growing the PC-Prep outpatient research program to serve more clinics and research subjects
Hosting our students and trainees at the CHRI Pediatric Research Forum and highlighting our faculty and advanced trainee work at the 2nd annual CHRI Scientific Meeting.

In summary, we are accomplishing great things together! CHRI is nothing without its members and the staff who are here to support your work. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all of you for allowing us to serve you in your research needs, and all of the CHRI and PRO staff for their amazing work. My door is always open, and I welcome your engagement and feedback as we continue to grow and offer more advanced and meaningful support of your research throughout 2023.

Pediatric Cancer Research Group Funding News

The CHRI Pediatric Cancer Research Group was among three organizations receiving $119,340 from Kiewit in connection with the Jakefest fundraiser held this summer. This is in addition to the donation of $180,000 given at the CHRI Pediatric Cancer Research Symposium this past fall. Congratulations to the Pediatric Cancer Research Group members. We are excited to see the impact these funds will make on your efforts.

NIH’s New Data Management & Sharing Requirements Go into Effect in January

Investigators planning NIH research grant proposals next year and beyond will need to be ready for the new Data Management & Sharing (DMS) policy. In recent months the guidance from NIH has come into clearer focus, and multiple offices at UNMC have taken proactive steps that should help CHRI researchers and staff to meet the requirements successfully.

How do I find NIH’s instructions and resources about the DMS policy?

The policy is spelled out formally in notice NOT-OD-21-013 and related announcements that are linked within.
Click here for a high-level summary in a one-page flyer.
Click here for discussion of what constitutes a suitable DMS Plan to submit with your proposal (including several examples), how NIH will evaluate your DMS Plan during the review process and how implementation and compliance will proceed after you receive a grant.

Where can I find UNMC-specific information and resources?

Several offices on campus provide complementary and sometimes overlapping information.

Sponsored Programs Administration (SPA) has a page devoted to the topic. The tabs on the left side of the page lead to info on topics like “Writing Your Plan (DMPTool*)” and “Choosing a Repository.”
*DMPTool is an online tool for building an NIH-compliant data management plan configured to UNMC’s research environment; log in with UNMC credentials.
McGoogan Health Sciences Library’s Research Data Management page offers a similar overview of the new NIH DMS policy, plus extra focus on principles of creating a good data management plan.
Research IT Office’s Research Data Management page offers guidance and access to tools for smart planning, storing and sharing of research data, whether for the new NIH DMS policy, another organization’s guidelines or general best practices.

Whom can I contact for assistance?

A general email where you can direct DMS-related questions is researchdata@unmc.edu.
UNMC's Data Services Librarian, Lisa Chinn, PhD, MSLIS, is available for consultation using the bookings page at the McGoogan Health Sciences Library.
CHRI members are always welcome to reach out to Matt Sandbulte, CHRI Grant Writer, who has been following developments in this topic for several months.

Drs. Becken and Deschamp

Receive CHRI Grant

Bradford Becken, MD, assistant professor, Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Ashley Deschamp, MD, assistant professor, Division of Pediatric Pulmonology, have received a one-year CHRI grant for their project, “Understanding the Role of Akkermansia muciniphila on the Health in Children with Cystic Fibrosis.” Congratulations!

Meet a Fellow CHRI Member

Don Ronning, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, in the College of Pharmacy at UNMC.

What is your primary area of research?

For most of my career, I have focused on Tuberculosis drug discovery and trying to understand the mechanism of action of some old TB drugs. After moving to UNMC in 2020, interacting with many cancer biologists and drug discovery research, I began thinking about starting some new cancer-focused projects. These ideas accelerated and expanded after participating in an NIH webinar that accumulated TB and cancer researchers to discuss the parallels in treatment strategies for TB and cancer. Both sets of diseases require months-long multidrug therapies that often result in toxic side-effects, the selection of drug-resistant cells and non-optimal outcomes that can require additional treatment with different drug regimes. In both these areas, my research employs biochemical and biophysical methods to assess the binding of potential drug compounds with protein targets of interest. Upon identification of such compounds, we use X-ray crystallography to visualize how these compounds are interacting with the cancer or microbial targets. Such information is central for us to then design compounds with better affinity for that target as well as guiding compound modification to improve pharmacokinetics.

Please share information on a current research project.

Our Medulloblastoma project in collaboration with the Mahato group encapsulates what my group is trying to accomplish. The Mahato group along with Yuxiang Dong, PhD, research associate professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, developed and tested a compound that binds and inhibits the epigenetic reader function of BRD2 and BRD4. My group determined the X-ray crystal structures of these compounds in complexes with the bromodomain targets to assess the modality of this inhibitory activity at the atomic level. In addition to this characterization, the determined structures highlight regions of the drug that can be chemically modified in future iterations of structure-guided drug design to improve the affinity for the target and potentially enhance drug efficacy in the patient.

Are you looking for a particular type of researcher to collaborate with?

Ultimately, we are interested in answering interesting biological questions that relate to protein structure and function in cancer cells. For practical reasons, our most productive collaborations have been with medicinal chemists who make compounds targeting proteins we are already working on. However, rapid success in the Medulloblastoma project and a new ovarian cancer project targeting DNA repair specific to cancer cells illustrate that success can come from many directions. The ovarian cancer project is a three-lab collaboration with a medicinal chemist Amar Natarajan, PhD, professor, Eppley Institute, and cancer biologist Adam Karpf, PhD, professor, Eppley Institute, who was interested in the DNA-repair mechanism. Such a collaboration represents an ideal set of complementary skills and tools to bridge the understanding of protein function at an atomic level to manipulating protein function in a patient tumor.

Nebraska Hospital Association Data Webinar - Dec 14th at Noon

The VCR office is working with the Nebraska Hospital Association (NHA) to create mechanisms for UNMC researchers to access NHA data.

The NHA will present a zoom webinar this Wednesday December 14th, from noon - 12:45pm NHA to describe the on-line tool that can be used to access the data with opportunities for Q&A with NHA staff.

Because we will be having live question and answer, we are restricting attendance to faculty and preferably faculty or leaders most likely to use the tool or access the data.

All potential attendees, yourselves, or others you share it with, should use this link to register, which you can share:

https://unmc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LTKPX6W4TwmU8kkobSyV7Q

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar that will also allow you to add it to your calendar.

If you have any questions, please contact Jennifer Larsen, MD, jlarsen@unmc.edu as she will be moderating this webinar on Wednesday.