The college has implemented an educational program for first-year medical students that explores racial disparities in medicine. The college has also incorporated manikins of color and melanated suture pads in clinical simulations.

“We’ve purchased a number of manikins and devices that are much more representative of underrepresented patients in our patient population,” said Jay Read, associate director of the Clinical Skills Education and Assessment Center (CSEAC) in the Ohio State College of Medicine.

Manikins replicate the full body or a portion of the patient, such as the head, neck and airway passage, Read said.

“In some cases, they can be augmented reality trainers, where it appears like a real torso and you’re doing, for example, an ultrasound,” he said. “There are computer sensors, so it can mimic a real case.”  

Manikins of color are important for medical students to become accustomed to tending to patients from diverse populations, said Sheryl Pfeil, medical director of the CSEAC.

“In simulation, the realism, or the suspension of disbelief, is very important to the learner. It’s important for students, learners of any sort — be they residents, students, faculty, anyone — to be able to care for patients that look like the patients they will be serving in the future,” Pfeil said. “Not just the ones that look like them, but that look like the patients that will be in the population that they are called to serve.”

Shane Scott, a fourth-year medical scientist trainee who was instrumental in the College of Medicine’s acquisition of manikins of color, said he noticed the lack of diversity in medical simulation equipment when he applied to and visited medical schools in 2019.

“When I arrived in a lot of these spaces doing medical simulation, what I found was that at all the schools that I went to, I couldn’t see a manikin that looked like my grandmother, that looked like the people who inspired me to be in medicine or some of my friends and colleagues who I know we eventually will serve,” he said. “I felt great courage here at Ohio State to ask, ‘Are there any manikins that look like me?’”

After enrolling at Ohio State, Scott said Pfeil; Read; Jennifer McCallister, associate dean of medical education; and Mark Landon, chair of the College of Medicine’s Obstetrics and Gynecology department, supported his advocacy for manikins that present a more realistic representation of patients.

“We said to each other, part of the realism is incorporating manikins that were of darker skin tone,” Scott said. “We’re going to see diverse-population patients. You go into the James, you don't just see white people coming into the James for care.”

While studying venipuncture, a medical procedure in which veins are punctured for intravenous injections or to draw blood, Scott said he discovered that the College of Medicine had only four simulation sleeves that resemble Black skin.

“I said, ‘If you have only four, they should be in every single session so people feel represented,’” Scott said. “I had to get evidence to support what I was going to bring to the student council and to Dr. Landon and Dr. McCallister.”

Scott gathered data to make the case for the College of Medicine to not only use dark-toned sleeves in every venipuncture simulation, but to purchase additional manikins of color. He campaigned on the issue when he was elected president of the medical school class of 2023 for the 2019-2020 academic year. He interviewed his fellow medical students, both those who were relatively new and those who were about to graduate, and found that few had worked with the dark-toned sleeves.

Scott also came across a study that found that 96% of the inventory that manufacturers market to medical schools only feature white manikins. He and his classmates who had made similar observations set out to effect positive change. 

“We’re looking for diversity – this is our education – and we’re invested in creating a more diverse educational space,” Scott said.   

Manikins of color are relatively new to medical training and only began being manufactured in recent years, Read said.

“Dr. Pfeil and I, and our team, have been really clear with our manufacturers, the people who we are purchasing from, that we want diverse options,” he said. “I think we’re not unique. This is a very common topic within simulation right now. A lot of the centers that are larger and have purchasing power like Ohio State, our stance on wanting more diversity is pushing these manufacturers to produce it.”

Melanated suture pads also mirror diverse patient population

Melanated suture pads also are essential in training future physicians to treat patients from different backgrounds, said medical students Jordan Haber, Onaopepo Kola-Kehinde and Safa Salem.

“When you don’t know what something looks like, you don’t know what to look for,” Kola-Kehinde said. “I remember shadowing in dermatology and my experience was, I saw a Black woman’s skin and I didn’t know anything was wrong with her. And then the dermatologist came in and explained that something that looked completely normal indicated something very severe.”

“One experience that really stood out to us, was we were learning about keloids and how they are most common among the Black community, but the image they chose to show us in our lecture was on a white person,” Salem said. “I think a lot of us stood back and were like, ‘Wait a minute, this is something that we would identify among the Black community, but we weren’t being shown that.’”

Earlier this year,  Haber, Kola-Kehinde and Salem approached CSEAC administrators about incorporating melanated suture pads. Scott Winfield, a medical simulation specialist with the center, assisted the students in making their request a reality.   

“All of us had a discrepancy and weren’t really content with the lack of melanated skin representation,” Haber said. “There were only one or two simulated bodies that resemble melanated skin, and there were none with suture pads. All three of us decided to make an effort to implement those.”

Lecture addresses systemic racism in medical field

In 2020, amid the nationwide movement against racial disparities, medical students Deborah Fadoju, Hafza Inshaar and Abbie Zewdu created a lecture that addresses systemic racism that African American patients have historically encountered in the health care system. They received assistance from College of Medicine faculty members Philicia Duncan, assistant professor of clinical medicine, and Valencia Walker, associate professor of pediatrics.

The teaching module includes a pre-lecture survey to evaluate medical students’ knowledge and attitudes about racism and racist beliefs within the medical community. The survey is followed by a recorded lecture.

“The overall purpose of the lecture was to trace the roots of medical myths about Black bodies to all of the present-day health disparities,” Fadoju said.

The lecture covers topics that connect history to modern-day medical practices.

“Some of the topics that we talked about were things like the use of race correction in spirometry to identify pulmonary function testing,” Inshaar said. “We tied that back to history in terms of slavery and how enslaved Black people were seen as having lower lung capacities.”

The lecture also dispels the myth that Black patients have thicker skin and higher pain tolerance.

One objective of the lecture is to stimulate group discussions on how health care workers can become aware of and rectify subconscious biases, Zewdu said. Another objective, she added, is to counter the perception that when patients of color report disparate treatment, their experiences are not rooted in reality.

“These are not anecdotes; these are not subjective pieces of information. This is all gathered from peer-reviewed journals,” Inshaar said of the lecture. “This is not even data that we collected, this is national and international data. All these independent bodies are making this argument, and so I think it’s a little harder to dispute when you pose it that way.”

Initial results show that the lessons not only improve swim skills and make the water safer, but they also build physical, behavioral and social competency that goes beyond the swimming pool, said Erika Kemp, clinical assistant professor of occupational therapy at Ohio State’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.

“Every kid is a little bit different, and a lot of the big challenges of teaching children with autism have to do with being able to learn in the same way that their peers learn,” Kemp said. “When you think about typical swim lessons, often there is one teacher giving the same instruction to the whole group. That's where we get into some difficulty with kids with autism. Often, they need the instruction presented in a different way or in a one-on-one environment.”

Based on the success of the pilot study, Kemp received the American Occupational Therapy Foundation Intervention grant to continue this study. The grant comes as warmer weather signals the start of swim season for many families.

But for those with a child on the autism spectrum, swimming can be an intimidating and dangerous proposition. In fact, drowning is the No.1 cause of accidental death among those on the autism spectrum, meaning parents and caregivers need to be purposeful in teaching them water safety.

To give those learners the attention and specialized instruction they need, Kemp and her team hold individualized, one-on-one swimming lessons for children with autism ages 3-12 at a pool located inside West Central School, a Franklin County Board of Developmental Disabilities program for teen and young-adult students in Columbus.

During each session, occupational therapists tracked the children’s swim skills. In addition, qualitative interviews and a follow-up survey were conducted with parents to determine the impact on families and individual participants. Children who participated in one 10-week session can participate in additional 10-week sessions until they plateau in progress of swim skills, Kemp said.

“Every kid that we’ve put through the program has made gains in things like water adjustment, comfort in the water and their ability to go under the water and hold their breath,” Kemp said. “Then, we work on being able to maintain their balance in the water, maintaining a float and getting themselves to move through the water.”

With the success of the pilot program, Ohio State is expanding Kemp’s research and the adaptive swim program, with the goal of implementing similar programs to help the millions of children with autism safely experience the joys of swimming.

“We set individual goals for everyone,” Kemp said. “One child that we’ve been working with wouldn’t even come into the pool at first, and now she willingly gets in, can move through the water and is starting now to lift her feet up off the floor, which is a really big skill gain for her.”

“Diversity and inclusion efforts do not directly address long-term exposure to unequal and unhealthy living conditions,” Valdez said during a Dec. 6 visit to visit to The Ohio State University. “Including more diverse people in clinical research is no doubt a worthy and necessary cause, but I argue that to address issues of equity as distinct from diversity requires much better analysis.”

During her talk, presented by Ohio State’s Department of Anthropology, Valdez shared findings outlined in her new book, “Weighing the Future: Race, Science and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era.” In her research, Valdez said she reviewed hundreds of clinical trials involving expectant mothers across the United States and the United Kingdom over the course of three years.

“I interviewed scientists and staff, I learned about their methods and procedures in implementing clinical trials and I participated as a staff member on one of the trials,” she said.

Valdez said her research found that clinical trials often fall short when not factoring in issues faced by participants of color and those from lower income levels. Those issues include housing instability, difficulty accessing prenatal care, and the disproportionate rates of premature birth and maternal and infant mortality among Black women.

“Black women in the United States have two to three times the rate of premature birth and maternal mortality compared to white women” for reasons that have not yet been fully determined by the medical community, Valdez said. “The U.S. racial disparity in premature birth and death has not changed in the past 60 years, and some trace this disparity back further to slavery.”

Racial disparities among pregnant populations also exist in the United Kingdom, Valdez said.

“Black women in the United Kingdom have a much higher chance of maternal mortality and pregnancy complications than white British women,” she said. “In addition, both the U.S. and U.K. have similar rates of obesity during pregnancy.”

To discourage a pregnant woman from gaining too much weight, a clinician may have good intentions when suggesting that a trial participant should snack on an apple instead of a candy bar and wear a pedometer to track her daily steps, Valdez said. Her research, however, determined that the root causes of obesity during pregnancy and gestational diabetes are far more complex.

“We already have a strong indicator for gestational diabetes, and it actually is homelessness or houseless-ness. Pregnant people who are houseless or have unstable housing have higher rates of (gestational diabetes), but that’s rarely studied in a clinical trial,” she said. “And there are such few forms of evidence-based methods for saying, ‘Instead of investing $10 million to $7 million into the clinical trials, we might be able to invest in providing stable housing for pregnant people, and that might have a better impact on avoiding gestational diabetes.’”

Programs like Ohio State Wexner Medical Center’s Moms2B aim to reduce racial and economic disparities among expectant mothers in Columbus by providing them and their families with food, education and support. Such programs advance a theory that is gaining traction that pregnant populations shouldn’t be solely responsible for fetal health, and that environmental and societal factors also play a significant role, Valdez said.

“We all contribute to the social, institutional and environmental circumstances that shape each pregnancy, birth and child,” she said. “Framing the maternal environment as only pregnant bodies and behaviors rather than understanding that it is everything that could influence a growing fetus like systems of poverty and racism entails social and material consequences for everyone – and particularly, vulnerable populations.”

Valdez said her research indicates that one strategy that could make a major impact in improving the health of expectant mothers is including them in the design of the very clinical trials that aim to help them.

“It’s the process that might generate different outcomes,” Valdez said, “so that people who are targeted for interventions get to make the decision about what those interventions are.”

Biden visited the OhioState Wexner Medical Center and Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital & Solove Research Institute to recognize the 11-year anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the recent passage of the American Rescue Plan. Biden was vice president when the ACA became law, and the rescue plan is the first major legislation passed during his presidency.

Funding from the ACA supported the university’s commitment to expanding access to cancer care in Ohio. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded the Wexner Medical Center a $100 million grant in 2010 to fund the addition of a floor in the new James dedicated to radiation oncology.

“Because of our investments, this department has gone from being able to treat 60 to 70 patients a day to treating nearly 300 a day,” Biden said. “This place is a source of hope.”

Ohio State President Kristina M. Johnson worked with Biden when she was an under-secretary in the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama administration. She said she was pleased the president toured the cancer center and affirmed her commitment to a healthier community.

“Ohio State is committed to working with all our city, state and federal partners to provide access to outstanding health care in our communities,” she commented after the visit.

Biden said he wants to see the federal government invest in research and development in health care in the same way the U.S. Department of Defense invests in new technology. Those investments, he noted, led to the creation of GPS navigation and the internet.

“When I ran, I said I wanted to be the president who presided over the end of cancer as we know it,” he said. “When you see the strides we made, when you talk to the [doctors] and the researchers, I can tell you, it’s within our reach.”

The president highlighted the importance of the ACA in providing access to health care: The Wexner Medical Center has seen a 60% decrease in uninsured patients since 2014, and the state’s uninsured rate fell by almost half since the ACA took effect in 2010.

Tameka Hairston, associate director of the University Hospital East resource management and social work department, said she has seen the impact of insurance accessibility for patients in Ohio.

“We are now at a point to where patients and families do not need to use the emergency department as the primary entry into our health care system,” she said. “This, as we all know, leads to better outcomes for patients and their families.”

Biden said the American Rescue Plan builds on the ACA by supporting insurance premiums and benefits that reduce the costs of the portable insurance provided to people who have lost their jobs. The legislation also includes more funding for vaccines, for the health care providers who deliver the injections, and for the community sites that help put shots in arms.

The president called on the country to continue the public health guidelines that have become commonplace during the pandemic: mask wearing, physical distancing and proper hygiene.

“If we all do our part, after a long dark year, we can show we are still the United States of America. We’re going to beat this pandemic, and because of the great docs up this staircase,” he said, referring to Ohio State physicians who met with him today, “we’re going to beat cancer once and for all."

Ohio State University’s Thomas Wood, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, will investigate how fact-checking can effectively counteract misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines with a share of a $450,000 gift from Google.

This research project will support the Google News Initiative’s creation of a COVID-19 Vaccine Media Hub, which will bring journalists and fact-checkers the latest scientific information about the vaccines.

Along with colleagues Ethan Porter at George Washington University and Yamil Velez at Columbia University, Wood will survey citizens in 10 countries to determine what formats, headlines and sources best reduce false beliefs about the vaccines and whether they can increase willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine.

Wood studies political misinformation, and through his previous research — including his and Porter’s book “False Alarm: The Truth About Political Mistruths in the Trump Era.” He has shown that factual rebuttals can cause people to hold more accurate beliefs. Here, he discusses how he looks to bring this work into the arena of public health and COVID-19 vaccines.

How will your previous work around correcting political misinformation connect to correcting misinformation around COVID-19 vaccines?

Coming into this, we’ve had a lot of success working with the correction of political misinformation. Before we started working in this area, academics were fairly pessimistic about the ability to correct political misinformation. The idea is that as soon as a political idea or political claim is tied strongly to someone’s partisan ideology, they would be very aggressive in defending those corrections.

However, we’ve made a lot of headway demonstrating that is basically untrue. Political misinformation is just as correctable is other questions, and it actually is very amenable to correction. And from that work, we became preoccupied with this idea that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is going to be a significant public health problem of the coming year. In the publicly available data, the strongest correlations to vaccine misunderstandings are political identities. We feel quite well equipped to make a contribution in this area.

We’re in a politically divisive time during this pandemic, and even public health guidance has been polarizing. Is this reason to be skeptical of the impact correcting vaccine misinformation can have?

It is surprising that in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic that so many questions of public health are politically charged. I came from a background of studying attitudes about campaigns and candidates, and it has been surprising how attitudes about science have become politically polarized. That's obviously a deeper question that predates the pandemic in a bunch of ways.

However, it doesn’t seem to be the case that changes in political circumstance are a function of American psychology. They’re more a function of a disruptive set of American political institutions, changes to our political parties and the news media environment. To the best of my knowledge, the American public has never been more scientifically grounded. For example, we’ve never had a higher percentage of the American public who understand the scientific basis of evolution, who understand that anthropogenic climate change is an established scientific fact, who understand the impacts of diet and physical activity on their health.

Whenever we give an optimistic set of findings about factual interventions, people always have recourse to the “crazy uncle” as a reason for skepticism. That's a fairly misleading sort of analogy, because of course while the “crazy uncle” is ranting at the Thanksgiving dinner table, the rest of the family is awkwardly staring at their mashed potatoes. The people awkwardly staring at their dinner plates are the American public, but we fixate on the very aggressive adherence to misinformation, and that is of course beyond intervention, but that’s not who we experiment on. We experiment on the American public at large.

What role does misinformation correction have in conjunction with other public health efforts related to COVID-19 vaccination?

We have a ton of tools in our public health arsenal right now, and fact checking is just one small thing that news organizations can do. There is reason for optimism in the U.S., as Americans reliably report the utmost confidence in conversations with their primary care physicians when it comes to public health. And even in the midst of these times where you think that all these institutions become politicized, Americans report very high confidence in Dr. Anthony Fauci, very high confidence in the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), very high confidence in the NIH (National Institutes of Health).

And then finally, like just a social proof, we’ll be seeing celebrities in the same way Elvis got the polio vaccine on The Ed Sullivan Show. I imagine in the next couple months, we will have the most famous celebrities in America getting jabs on TV. That will do a tremendous amount in demystifying the process and revealing that the American public is not a guinea pig. In fact, it’s an incredible privilege that we have to be at the front of the line of the global vaccine production.

The vaccine was co-developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, a biopharmaceutical company. Results from a large early-stage clinical trial in the United Kingdom showed the experimental vaccine is safe and prompts a strong immune response, producing both antibodies and T-cells, which find and attack virus cells.

The trial will enroll approximately 30,000 adult volunteers at 80 sites in the United States to evaluate how well the vaccine, called AZD1222, can protect people from COVID-19.

Ohio State researchers plan to recruit about 500 adults for the randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled trial. Study participants will receive either the experimental vaccine or a placebo, have blood samples drawn, and follow up with medical experts over two years.

“The Wexner Medical Center is at the forefront of the COVID-19 fight,” said Ohio State President Kristina M. Johnson. “We have been and will continue to be part of the solution.”

Results from this and other clinical trials being conducted through the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN) are critical in getting a COVID-19 vaccine to market, said Dr. Rama Mallampalli, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. 

“We’re thrilled that Ohio State can bring this COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial to central Ohio,” Mallampalli said. “Our hospitals and researchers are uniquely qualified to conduct these trials with the aim of saving lives in our community and beyond.”

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) created the CoVPN, using the infectious diseases expertise at four of its existing clinical trials networks. This has allowed CoVPN to work quickly, setting up COVID-19 clinical trials at sites with a long history of research and collaboration.

Ohio State’s AIDS Clinical Trials Unit is a member of two of those NIAID-funded networks.

The vaccine uses a non-replicating chimpanzee adenovirus to deliver a SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to induce an immune response, according to the National Institutes of Health. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.

“Time is of the essence to develop a vaccine and/or drugs that can halt the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and reduce the serious health effects and deaths caused by COVID-19,” said Dr. Susan Koletar, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Wexner Medical Center and principal investigator of this study.

“This requires an unprecedented amount of collaboration. Our top-notch and well-established infectious diseases staff works hard with pulmonologists, epidemiologists, other medical experts and the community to find ways to effectively treat and prevent this widespread disease. This is just one of many critical COVID-19 clinical trials happening at Ohio State, allowing us to treat patients at all stages of the disease.”

The study seeks volunteers who are at higher risk of exposure such as teachers, first responders, college students, factory workers, restaurant employees and those age 65 or older. More information about active COVID-19 clinical studies is available at https://www.coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org/understanding-clinical-studies/#active-studies

Pelotonia will transform into a more personal experience, asking participants “What will your Pelotonia 2020 be?” and encouraging them to set individual fundraising and activity goals. While cycling is still encouraged, this year the experience is about more than just riding. By asking the community to define their own Pelotonia, the doors are open for anyone to participate and become a legend. Participants can set their own one-time or cumulative activity goal with My Pelotonia to ride, walk, run, volunteer or even create their own activity – whatever feels right to honor and support cancer research. In doing so, participants will embody Pelotonia’s 2020 Be Legendary campaign, uniting with the Pelotonia community in spirit and purpose.

“The Pelotonia community has come together in profound ways over the past 12 years, and this year will be no different. Our legendary community is unwavering in Pelotonia’s goal to fund accelerated cancer research, united in a shared sense of duty to those diagnosed with this disease,” said Doug Ulman, Pelotonia President and CEO. “While so much has recently changed, the need for critical research funding and the goal of Pelotonia has not. My Pelotonia will be an experience that is more inclusive and personal with more ways to engage and participate than ever before.”

The My Pelotonia platform will provide an online community for people to share their training and fundraising ideas, or simply cheer one another on along with the inspirational stories of everyday legends pushing forward despite challenges. Pelotonia will celebrate all efforts the weekend of August 7 with an entertaining and motivating live broadcast that mirrors the Pelotonia Opening Ceremony program the community has come to love.

To allow for even greater participation, the 2020 registration fee has been waived along with required fundraising commitments historically tied to Ride distances. In addition, Pelotonia will not have a minimum age requirement this year and the fundraising deadline has been extended to October 31, 2020. The My Pelotonia platform will share goal suggestions, and Pelotonia community leaders are already setting examples: Doug Ulman will ride from Columbus to Cincinnati as his 100+ mile goal and Cindy Hilsheimer, Pelotonia Board Member and Managing Principal, BeecherHill, will walk 200 miles and send an equal number of thank you notes to generous supporters; and Dr. Bill Farrar, CEO of the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute, will ride 43 miles, with his wife, to recognize the number of years that he has treated patients at The James.

“As the global scientific community shifts its focus to the important work of navigating through and overcoming COVID-19, it is paramount that we ensure that scientific discovery continues in cancer. We must maintain momentum in basic, translational, clinical and population research studies so that we continue to improve our cancer prevention and bring new clinical therapies to our patients, which will ultimately lead to better outcomes for our community,” says Raphael E. Pollock, MD, PhD, director of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center and surgical oncologist with the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James). “We are grateful for the steadfast support and efforts of the Pelotonia community of riders, corporate partners, and volunteers.”

All Riders, Virtual Riders and Volunteers already signed up for Pelotonia will be able to update fundraising and activity goals for My Pelotonia starting June 2. Participants who have already paid a registration fee will have the option to direct the fee toward cancer research or defer it to 2021 registration. Incentives will be provided to My Pelotonia participants when they reach various designated fundraising levels.

“The Huntington peloton and all our colleagues take great pride in partnering and volunteering to make a difference as part of the legendary efforts of Pelotonia, and we are especially inspired to create our Pelotonia journey during this challenging time,” said Steve Steinour, Chairman, President and CEO of Huntington and Pelotonia Board Member.

With 100 percent of every dollar raised, Pelotonia will continue to provide critical funds for innovative cancer research at the OSUCCC-James, a portion of these funds supports the Pelotonia Institute for Immuno-Oncology. Additionally, Pelotonia has collaborated with the OSUCCC-James to create a research fund, with an initial pledge of $1 million, to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the cancer community.

For more information on Pelotonia, please visit https://pelotonia.org/rise/. To read more about the impact of Pelotonia dollars, please visit pelotonia.org/impact and pelotonia.org/institute.

The National Institutes of Health today announced when interventions will begin in the communities in Ohio and three other states that are participating in the HEALing Communities Study, which aims to reduce overdose deaths by 40% over three years.

In April, the NIH awarded a $65.9 million grant to The Ohio State University to lead a consortium of academic, state and community partners on the Ohio portion of the study. The study involves 19 counties across Ohio and the state’s RecoveryOhio initiative.

The HEALing Communities Study will determine how best to address the opioid epidemic through prevention, treatment and recovery. To assess the effectiveness of different interventions, the study will compare results between communities. To make these comparisons, participating communities were randomly assigned using a scientific algorithm to start these interventions either in December 2019 (Wave 1) or December 2021 (Wave 2).

Ohio’s HEALing Communities Study team will move forward quickly to help these counties battle the opioid crisis,” said lead investigator Dr. Rebecca Jackson, director of Ohio State’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science and associate dean for clinical research in the College of Medicine. “Communities in both waves will benefit. The first wave will benefit from immediate intervention, and we will apply the lessons learned to deliver the most effective, targeted assistance to the communities in the second wave.”

Throughout the project, all participating communities will continue to get all the other treatment and prevention resources and services that they would otherwise receive. All participating communities are at the leading edge of an unprecedented, life-saving national initiative.

• The 10 counties in the first wave are: Ashtabula, Athens, Cuyahoga, Darke, Greene, Guernsey, Hamilton, Lucas, Morrow and Scioto.
• The nine counties in the second wave are: Allen, Brown, Franklin, Huron, Jefferson, Ross, Stark, Williams and Wyandot.

The Ohio consortium brings together experts from six universities — Ohio State, University of Cincinnati, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio University, University of Toledo and Wright State University — and leaders from state agencies and community organizations.

Along with Dr. Jackson, the Ohio portion of the study is led by Theresa Winhusen, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati, director of the Addiction Sciences Division and principal investigator of the Ohio Valley Node in the NIDA Clinical Trials Network.

“The HEALing Communities Study is critically important for its potential to address the opioid epidemic, including reducing opioid overdose deaths, through the wide-spread implementation of evidence-based practices,” said Winhusen.

“Only by partnering with communities can we facilitate the processes of getting what works into the hands of those doing the work and supporting those already using these practices to improve the lives of those touched by the opioid epidemic, achieving a long-term solution to addiction,” she said. “If found to be successful, this study could serve as a model for addressing emerging public health crises.”

At Ohio State, more than three dozen faculty members are participating in the initiative. They represent the colleges of Medicine, Pharmacy, Public Health, Public Affairs, Social Work, Nursing, Education and Human Ecology, Engineering, Arts and Sciences, and Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. The Wexner Medical Center, the Center for Clinical and Translational Science, the Translational Data Analytics Institute and Ohio State Extension are also involved in the initiative.

The HEALing Communities Study is funded and supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, in partnership with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

For more information on the study, see https://heal.nih.gov/research/research-to-practice/healing-communities.

The teams successfully completed the 2019 I-Corps@Ohio program. The eight-week program aims to help selected faculty and student teams to determine if their intellectual property – such as a new technology – could be the basis of a startup company.

The Ohio State teams are developing technology ranging from a nasal aid that will help some people with breathing problems to software that will optimize maintenance schedules for industrial equipment.

In all, 13 teams from Ohio research universities and organizations participated in this year’s program, after being selected earlier this year in a competitive process. They shared their final business concept videos and presentations at an event July 11 at the Blackwell Inn.

I-Corps@Ohio, an initiative of the Ohio Department of Higher Education, is a statewide program that helps faculty and graduate students from Ohio universities and colleges determine the market potential of their technologies and assists with the launch of startup companies.

“Our goal is to change the mindset of university researchers and students so that they begin to see the value of their research in terms of commercial opportunities,” said Norman Chagnon, program director of I-Corps@Ohio.

“For the people of Ohio, this can translate into growth and economic development all across the state.”

Participants from Ohio State agreed that the program did indeed change their mindset.

“Going through the I-Corps process forced us to think about a lot of issues that we don’t normally think about as researchers,” said Kai Zhao, associate professor of otolaryngology and principal investigator for the “Breathe Better” team working on the nasal aid.

The aid helps redirect airflow in the nose, which improves breathing sensation for some people with nasal airway problems.

As part of the I-Corps@Ohio process, each team is required to interview potential customers, business partners, funders and others who can help them evaluate and refine their business plan.

“It gave us a lot of perspective on what we should focus on,” said Kanghyun Kim, a graduate student at Ohio State and member of the Breathe Better team.

“One thing we learned is that we need to collect more data about the effectiveness of our product.”

The I-Corps@Ohio process helps researchers get out of their “academic bubble,” said Mrinal Kumar, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and principal investigator for the “Point Prognostics” team. Their group is the one trying to commercialize software to help companies maintain their equipment.

The software is designed to optimize maintenance schedules for equipment, which is intended to reduce costs by preventing unexpected shutdowns and premature repair.

“As researchers, we are often too focused on solving problems at the ‘fundamental level’ and do not necessarily look at the other side - whether this might actually be something that people or companies can use,” Kumar said.

Most of the teams that finished I-Corps@Ohio will continue the process they began in the program before deciding whether to create a startup company or otherwise license their products.

The other three Ohio State teams in the 2019 program were:

“AAV Tx,” with principal investigator Lei Cao, associate professor of cancer biology and genetics. This team has developed a gene therapy technique that shows promise in helping treat people with Prader-Willi Syndrome.

“Microorganisms and Natural Products at OSU,” with principal investigator Christopher Taylor, associate professor of plant pathology. The team is developing an entity that can act as a matchmaker for academic-industry collaborations involving the use of microorganisms and other natural products.

“Neovascular Therapeutics,” with principal investigator Zhiwei Hu, associate professor of surgical oncology. The team has developed an immunotherapy treatment that uses a patient’s own immune cells to create a high-efficacy, targeted therapy for advanced stage triple-negative breast cancer.