Feinberg students, staff, trainees and faculty celebrated scientific discoveries and presented their research posters and abstracts at Feinberg’s 19th annual Lewis Landsberg Research Day on Thursday, Sept. 11.
Rex Chisholm, PhD, vice dean for Scientific Affairs and Graduate Education, welcomed attendees to this year’s celebration and presented the Medical Faculty Council Mentor of the Year award to Allen Heinemann, PhD, professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. He also presented the Tripartite Legacy Faculty Prize in Translational Science and Education to Dimitri Krainc, MD, PhD, chair of the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology and Aaron Montgomery Ward Professor.
“The whole point of the day today is to celebrate the science that we do, to share it with each other and maybe find a new collaborator or a new technique. Let’s make sure to take full advantage of this day,” said Chisholm, who is also the Adam and Richard T. Lind Professor of Medical Genetics and a professor of Cell and Molecular Biology and of Surgery.
The keynote address was delivered by Jonathan Epstein, MD, dean of Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Epstein spoke about the potential and cost-effectiveness of using mRNA and CAR T-cells to treat cardiac fibrosis, the excessive accumulation of connective tissue in the heart muscle that can impair the heart’s ability to effectively pump blood.
“In vivo CAR T engineering may simplify immunotherapy at much lower costs,” Epstein said. “Targeted LNPs delivering mRNA may be a new and flexible therapeutic platform.”
During the afternoon, attendees explored more than 470 research poster presentations held across campus at the Louis A. Simpson and Kimberly K. Querrey Biomedical Research Center, the Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center and the Northwestern Memorial Hospital Feinberg Pavilion.
John Dalloul, a third-year medical student, presented his research project, in which Dalloul and his team developed and compared manual and semi-automated techniques for analyzing indocyanine green (ICG) fluorescence imaging signals under dynamic intraoperative conditions.
From their analysis, Dalloul found that quantitative ICG analysis from handheld surgical scopes was effective but is highly dependent on the motion and size of the region of interest, while larger and fixed regions of interest offered better stability despite loss of anatomical specificity.
“I have an interest in surgery and I really like the process of the operating room and that real-time decision-making, but I know a lot of it historically and even now is based off judgment in the moment. The more that we can introduce standardization, the better outcomes we can have consistently for all patient populations,” Dalloul said.
For her research project, JoJo Holm, a clinical research coordinator in the Department of Dermatology, performed transcriptomic and proteomic analysis of cancer cells from patients with T-cell lymphoma cells undergoing radiation therapy.
Using a multi-pronged approach, Holm discovered that patients with poor outcomes demonstrated increased expression of radiation resistance genes, including PGK1, LDHA, DDIT4, and S100A4/9, while patients who achieved remission expressed higher levels of IL6.
Holm said her findings suggest that low-dose radiation therapy not only regresses local lesions but may also promote an anti-tumor immune response in the tumor microenvironment.
“We’re seeing that shift from M2 to M1 polarization, we’re seeing that activation of the innate immune response post-radiation and we’re seeing lots of cancer markers in the pre-radiation cohort,” Holm said.
Kallista Zhuang, a second-year medical student and first-place poster competition winner for clinical research, presented her research which evaluated a new biomarker for diabetic retinopathy, called a retinal ischemic perivascular lesion (RIPL), which appears on standard, non-invasive eye scans that patients already receive during routine care.
From her analysis, Zhuang found that three or more RIPLs signaled higher odds of diabetic retinopathy and that RIPLs may also capture the additional retinal damage from hypertension, a common comorbidity in patients with diabetes.
“These findings suggest RIPLs could serve as a practical complement to current diabetic retinopathy staging systems, helping ophthalmologists identify patients most at risk and intervene earlier to prevent vision loss,” Zhuang said.
Poster Competition Winners
Clinical Research
- First Place: Kallista Zhuang, “Retinal Ischemic Perivascular Lesions Reveal the Impact of Hypertension in Diabetic Retinopathy and Stratify Risk of Vision Loss in Patients”
- Second Place: Tilda Carlelycke, “Development of Germline Variant Curation Guidelines for Myeloid Malignancy Associated Genes”
- Third Place: Morgan Kinsinger, “Elevated Serum GDF15 Correlates with Poor Growth among Children with Mitochondrial Disease”
Basic Science Research
- First Place: Mariia Denichenko, “Biallelic variants in RELCH, encoding a Rab11-binding protein, cause a complex neurodevelopmental disorder”
- Second Place: Jessica Christiansen, “Mutations in KALRN are Linked to Neurodevelopmental Disorders”
- Third Place: Josiah Hiu-yuan Wong, “Targeting SUV39H1/2-Mediated H3K9ME3 induces transposon element reactivation in acute myeloid leukemia”
Public Health and Social Science Research
- First Place: Jo Salvati, “Mortality among justice-involved youth: a 26-year longitudinal study”
- Second Place: Lauren Opsasnick, “Change in Cognitive Function Over 12 Years among Community-Dwelling Older Adults”
- Third Place: Augusta Zukauskas, “Cross validation of novel secondary executive functioning scores in the Mobile Toolbox for monitoring cognitive change”
Award for Excellence in Women’s Health Research in Basic Science
- Fangjia Tong, “Computational ranking identifies Plexin-B2 in circulating tumor cell clustering with monocytes in breast cancer metastasis”
Award for Excellence in Women’s Health Research in Clinical or Public Health Research
- Jaclyn Borrowman, “Estimating the proportion of adverse pregnancy outcomes prevented with improved early pregnancy cardiovascular health”
Medical Faculty Council Mentor of the Year: Allen Heinemann, PhD, professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab
Tripartite Legacy Faculty Prize in Translational Science and Education: Dimitri Krainc, MD, PhD, chair of the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology and Aaron Montgomery Ward Professor