b'Meet the 2023 Class of Boettcher InvestigatorsCOLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDERMegan R. Hill, Ph.D. Nuris Figueroa-Morales, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Department of ChemistryControlling andAssistant Professor, PhysicsMechanics of predicting hydrogel properties for biomedical applications. mucus organization and transport.Halil Aydin, Ph.D.UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO ANSCHUTZ MEDICAL CAMPUSAssistant Professor, BiochemistryCellular and molecular mechanisms Neel Butala, M.D., M.B.A. of mitochondrial form and function in human health and disease.Assistant Professor, Medicine-CardiologyEvaluating the use ofNick Bottenus, Ph.D.the electronic health record to extend the REGROUP Trial. Assistant Professor, Biomedical, Mechanics of Materials, Robotics and Caroline M. Dias, M.D., Ph.D. Systems DesignBinding kinetics of targeted microbubble agents.Assistant Professor, Department of PediatricsCharacterizing genetic and cellular heterogeneity inNATIONAL JEWISH HEALTHFragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome. Patrick Hume, M.D., Ph.D.Matthew Witkowski, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of MedicineInterstitial Assistant Professor, PediatricsTargeting TP53-mutant acute leukemiamacrophages and cigarette smoke-induced lung disease.to overcome chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy resistance.them to a centralized committee, doctorsHydrogel technology, regardless of what we review it, and theres a clinical events com- do, is going to change the field and being able mittee who determines if the event is orto predict those properties will be incredible, Hydrogels haveisnt a heart attack, for example, Butala said.says Hill. They have to make these calls that are often Butala also acknowledges how powerful and the opportunity tosubjective. Thats the traditional processitsuniversal natural language processing can be. time consuming, expensive, and you have to revolutionize manyhire these doctors. My thought was, can weThis research is applying innovative techniques and deep learning and natural language pro-aspects of medicalreplace some of this with real-world data andcessing to advance clinical trials in medicine, advanced analytics? which generates evidence in medicine. Thats treatment andButala is hoping to apply this technologypushing the boundaries of applying this novel directly to medical records of clinical trial disease targeting. patients in order to collect information forcomputer science, linguistics technology to clinical trials to generate knowledge.the trial. The plan is to experiment with this MEGAN HILL, Ph.D. technology by comparing the data it collects Assistant Professor of Chemistry TURNING CHALLENGES INTO CSU from medical records to that of an alreadyBREAKTHROUGHSwell-established, traditional trial. Butala is using a clinical trial of endoscopic vs. open- As apparent in many industries and everyday his award to explore the possibility of usingvein graft harvesting for coronary-arterycontexts, new technology, while exciting, pres-natural-language processing techniques tobypass surgery, known as REGROUP, as aents a novel set of challenges and complexities impact the way clinical trials are conducted.basis for this research.to work through. Researchers like Hill and The significance of both Butalas and HillsButala are well aware of the challenges that As it stands, Butala explains, there are manycome when pursuing cutting-edge medical factors that make clinical trials complex andresearch is that both are beginning with thesolutions. difficult. In fields like cardiology, trials needintent to test ideas on a relatively smaller scale. to be able to last over an extended numberHowever, the idea is to apply these sameActually controlling and predicting the prop-of years to see if any eventssuch as heartprinciples to broader contexts to impact moreerties [of polymers] is a big limitation in this attacks, strokes, or deathoccur after alives through biomedicine over time.field right now. There are all these potential certain surgery was performed.applications, but its really difficult to say we When it comes to both hydrogels and naturalhave this disease, we need this type of release, Right now, to see if someone had an event orlanguage processing in clinical trials, the pos- so this is the hydrogel we will use, and thats not, clinical trial sites fill out forms and sendsibilities are endless.because we really cant tune the properties the way we want to, said Hill.32 BIOSCIENCE COLORADO 2023-2024'