In 2018, Mitul Patel and his wife, Aditi Patel, got married and were looking to start a family when they first experienced issues with infertility. Over the course of two years and various doctor’s appointments, Patel says they were surprised by the lack of research and options addressing infertility. The couple was overjoyed when Aditi finally became pregnant, and they began preparing for life with their new son, until tragedy struck at 37 weeks, when Patel says a true umbilical knot took his son’s life. Currently, there is no medical technology that allows umbilical knots to be detected early enough. “In a moment we went from excitement to devastation,” said Patel. “In hindsight, I think we were naively going through that process as if nothing could go wrong, because it doesn't go wrong for too many people, and when it does, you often don't hear about it.”
Afterwards he says many people started opening up to them about their own infertility journeys, pregnancy complications, and issues in women’s health that they had experienced. After multiple conversations with friends, universities, and hospitals, Patel realized there was a critical lack of research and innovation in the area of women’s health. “When you peel back every women's health disease or concern or issue, it's the same thing no matter where you look, whether it's pharmaceuticals, clinical trials, or tracking the health of women and pregnancies. It really is just abysmal, the lack of research compared to other areas.” It was then that Patel decided to start the Aarush M. Patel Foundation, named after their late son, in order to fund more research on maternal-fetal medicine and fertility, and change the landscape of women’s healthcare. Patel’s entrepreneurial background allowed him to assemble a team and create the foundation within just 3 months. The goal of the foundation is to inspire new technologies and techniques that can improve women’s health and bolster pregnancy outcomes, and ultimately prevent other families from suffering the same loss that they did. The foundation just donated a $100,000 award to Patel’s alma matter, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, towards research on fertility and miscarriages. Specifically, the fellowship will support one Master’s or Ph.D. student in their studies on the effects of different external factors on implantation failure. Patel hopes the research will provide new insights as to why some people have more difficulty becoming pregnant compared to others, and can be used to improve fertility treatments in the future. The research will be conducted at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology as part of the Environmental Impact on Reproductive Health theme. “This is just obviously just one topic amongst a million in women’s health that need to be researched,” said Patel. “But we're just getting started, and we hope to be able to double, triple, quadruple that gift year over year as we continue growing our foundation, increasing our fundraising, and getting more people to join in.” The foundation has also recently pledged $50,000 to Northwestern Feinburg School towards research on improving fertility outcomes and providing emotional support to parents. Patel says they also started distributing care packages to hospitals in Illinois to give to post-partum families after fetal loss, as a way to support them during times of uncertainty and grief. The foundation ultimately hopes to inspire research into less-explored areas of women’s health, and spark more conversations surrounding the current state of women’s health and medicine. Patel says the foundation is also a way to make a legacy for his son, Aarush. “Our son’s name, Aarush, means the first light at dawn,” Patel explained. “Our foundation’s website, sunshineson.com, reflects this, as it could be read as Sun Shines On and Sunshine Son depending on how you want to interpret it. It’s meant to be inspirational, and a way to make a name for my son who can’t make a name for himself. By naming the foundation after him, it’s my hope that over the course of my life his name reaches further than mine, and leaves that legacy.” The foundation holds many events to raise money for research, including golf outings which draw in many participants. The foundation’s 2nd annual golf outing in Lemont, Illinois is coming up on June 30th, and everyone is invited to attend. The golfing event will be held at the Cog Hill Golf and Country Club, followed by a reception and raffle drawing. More information about the Aarush M. Patel Foundation’s initiatives and upcoming events, as well as how to donate, can be found on their website: https://sunshineson.com/.
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As we age, our bodies change and degenerate over time in a process called senescence. Stem cells, which have the unique ability to change into other cell types, also experience senescence, which presents an issue when trying to maintain cell cultures for therapeutic use. The biomolecules produced by these cell cultures are important for various medicines and treatments, but once the cells enter a senescent state they stop producing them, and worse, they instead produce biomolecules antagonistic to these therapeutics. While there are methods to remove older cells in a culture, the capture rate is low. Instead of removing older cells, preventing the cells from entering senescence in the first place is a better strategy, according to Ryan Miller, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Hyunjoon Kong (M-CELS leader/EIRH/RBTE), a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
“We work with mesenchymal stem cells, that are derived from fat tissue, and produce biomolecules that are essential for therapeutics, so we want to keep the cell cultures healthy. In a clinical setting, the ideal way to prevent senescence would be to condition the environment that these stem cells are in, to control the oxidative state,” said Miller. “With antioxidants, you can pull them the cells out of this senescent state and make them behave like a healthy stem cell.” While treating the cells with antioxidants can delay senescence, current methods of antioxidant delivery have many shortcomings, including large variation in amount of drug release over time and between cells. However, a recently published study by the labs of Kong and Hee-Sun Han (GNDP/IGOH), an assistant professor of chemistry, with Miller as first author, describes a new method of delivering antioxidants to stem cells that is reliable, long-lasting, and minimizes variation. The new method utilizes antioxidants in the form of polymer-stabilized crystals. Traditional methods grow crystals within reactors, but using microfluidics, a technology that allows researchers to work with incredibly small amounts of fluid, the researchers can create crystals that are all the same size and dosage, minimizing variation in drug release between cells. “With microfluidics, each drop functions as a small reactor, such that we can get small, similar-sized, individual crystals, which minimizes variation in drug release rate.” said Miller. Furthermore, the crystals dissolve at a slower rate than traditional methods, making the release of the drug uniform over time, and increasing the duration of the drug’s effectiveness. “We learned that the narrow variation in the drug’s release profile is really important,” explained Han. “When you add drugs that dissolve in water, there is this bursting period where a lot of is dissolves in the liquid at once, and not much later. But the crystal allows this uniform, extended release, which helps maintain the tight range of optimal concentrations that are needed.” “When typical antioxidants are put into water or biological fluid, they lose their vital activity within six hours,” described Kong. “But the new antioxidant crystal remains bioactive for at least two days, so we can actually extend the duration of the drug, and also reduce the frequency with which we have to add antioxidants to the cell culture media. This minimizes the variation in the type of the biomolecules the stem cells are generating and improves the reproducibility of the product, which is one of the biggest challenges in biomanufacturing at the moment.” Increased duration of the drug’s efficacy means that stem cell cultures can be kept out of the senescence state for longer, which leads to a larger harvest of the needed biomolecules for therapeutics. Miller also says this method could be used for patient-derived stem cell treatments, where the biomolecules from a patient’s own body are used to help with various tissue ailments, such as injuries or disease. “When we use biomolecules from donors instead of the patient, that can have a host effect,” explained Miller. “Ideally, we would harvest stem cells from the patient that we're treating, grow them in a bioreactor, and harvest those biomolecules for that therapeutic. This works well for someone who is 20, but if we envision an elderly patient, they’re going to have a high population of these senescence cells, that are not going to be secreting the therapeutically relevant biomolecules. If we can pull those cells out of that state, and make them behave like a healthy cell, we can get a much larger load of therapeutically relevant biomolecules for the patient.” The team says that while they want to continue to improve the biomanufacturing process, there are already many potential uses for this methodology besides just controlled delivery of antioxidants to stem cell cultures. Most cells experience senescence, so this technique could be applied to other cell cultures important in medicine and therapeutics. Furthermore, the crystals could be used to deliver sustained and controlled levels of antioxidants, or potentially other drugs, directly into the target tissue of a patient. “I think the beauty here is that this is a technology development paper, so this can be applied to various hydrophilic drugs, disease models, and methods applications,” said Han. “We’re showing that we can maintain a sustained release of this drug at a relatively constant rate for an extended period of time. There are a lot of exciting studies and directions that we can go with this technology.” The study is published in Advanced Functional Materials and can be found at https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202302232 Investigating mechanisms behind variation in color of killifish Growing up in South India, Ratna Karatgi found herself moving between cities as her dad relocated for work. Though living in the city meant she was not exposed much to wildlife early on, she quickly became interested in zoology after working as a volunteer at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust, an educational outreach-focused reptile zoo. There, she says that presentations and experiments by visiting researchers lit the spark for her. “I didn’t have a distinct goal in mind at the time,” Karatgi said. “I knew I really liked animals, but I wasn't thinking about being a veterinarian or anything. So, I thought I would work at this zoo and see what happens. But then researchers from everywhere would visit the zoo and talk about their work, and I thought it was fascinating that people could actually do research and study animal behavior for a living.”
Following this path, she obtained a bachelor’s degree in Zoology from Stella Maris College before attending Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research to complete her masters in evolutionary biology. Karatgi described the transition as a dramatic shift from classwork-heavy undergraduate school to her intense, research-focused master’s program. She completed multiple lab rotations to learn new skills before settling into her master’s research on circadian rhythms of fruit flies. By this point, she was hooked on research, but was unsure about the next step. “I knew I was interested in studying larger scale patterns in bigger animals (than a fly), preferably out in the wild, and I wanted to explore options outside of India,” she said. “The States or Canada were the places I was considering for doing a PhD. So, I decided to work as a research assistant in a lab at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore to really see if a career in research on behavior and evolution in wild animals was a good fit before making the move.” While working as a research assistant, Karatgi studied intrasexual competition in regards to the color displays of peninsular rock agamas lizards during the breeding season. Males have bright colors in the breeding season, and this dynamic color change is used in signals for both fighting and mating. Karatgi says this got her thinking about how variation in color is developed and maintained in other animal populations. After cold-emailing faculty in the US about taking her on as a PhD student, she says Rebecca Fuller (GNDP), a professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was eager to have her join the team. Currently, Karatgi is a 5th year PhD student in the program in ecology, evolution and conservation biology. For her doctoral work, she explores how variation in killifish coloration is maintained across populations. Killifish are small fish that can come in different patterns of red, yellow, and blue, and these colors are used for signaling aggression and attracting mates. While red and yellow coloration are genetically based, the presence of blue is related to the environment, namely the light levels and amount of tannin (brown organic substance) in the water, that these fish reside in. Blue males are more abundant in murky, tannin-stained swamps, compared to springs which are much clearer. She wanted to test if blue males were more abundant in swampy water because they have a competitive advantage in this environment, since this could lead to better access to territories in swampy water. So, for one of her studies Karatgi placed a blue male with a non-blue male and a female, and then measured the male’s aggressive behaviors such as attacks and fin flaring. She found that blue males are more likely to win competitive interactions in murky swamp water than in clear spring water, replicating the findings of a previous study on bluefin killifish from a different set of populations. Because tannins affect how deeply light can pierce the water, Karatgi is also interested in how the lighting of the environment that the fish develop in affects their plasticity to become blue. “We see so much variation in the extent of blue plasticity in killifish, and I’m trying to figure out what is preventing everyone from being equally plastic,” Karatgi explained. “There may be a critical period during development where fish need a specific lighting cue to turn blue. I’m interested in figuring out the precise stage during development when this cue is used to trigger the plastic blue coloration. So now all my experiments involve breeding and raising the fish to try to figure this out.” In addition to being a student, Karatgi also served as the Outreach Coordinator for the Graduates in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology organization for two years, where she helped organize outreach events and connected researchers with the community. “I like engaging in outreach,” Karatgi said. “I was not aware of opportunities for outreach when I was in India. But here in a university town, as a researcher, you can go talk to the librarian and be like, ‘Hey, can we come put up a showing or do a demonstration here?’ and they're totally up for it. My favorite event is the farmer’s market ‘Science at the Market’ stall.” When asked about hobbies, she jokingly responded that, with how busy she is, “Hanging out with people, cooking and eating…that's pretty much most of what I do now during graduate school.” She then continued “I do like to read historical fiction, and when I need to de-stress I like to do nail art. I sort of picked that up after coming to graduate school, I find it very meditative and a nice way to calm down.” Karatgi also enjoys traveling to see her boyfriend at UC Santa Barbara, and her family in India. When graduate school becomes too stressful, Karatgi says she thinks of an Urdu/Hindi saying by Faiz Ahmed Faiz that helps keep her optimistic: Dil na-umid to nahin, nakaam hee to hai, Lambee hai gam ki shaam, magar shaam hee to hai Which translates to: The heart has not lost all hope, but just a fight that is all, The dusk of sadness is long, but it is just a dusk after all An engineered bazooka designed to launch candy, a 3D-printed novel board game, an ecological experiment with fish, and a magnetically powered trebuchet. You may guess that these are all projects designed by undergraduate or even graduate level students for a class. However, these projects are the curiosity-driven creations of middle schoolers as part of the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) TRAIN (Transdisciplinary Research Across Institutional Near-peers) program, which just completed its third successful year. STEAM TRAIN, which partners the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with the Champaign Franklin STEAM Academy, is organized by the IGB’s Senior Outreach Activities Coordinator Daniel Urban, Franklin’s Magnet Site Coordinator Zanne Newman, and University Laboratory High School’s teacher Melinda Tidrick, and is funded by the University of Illinois’ Community Research Partnership Program. The program encourages independent, student-inspired research by allowing middle school students to dream up any kind of science or engineering project they want. Mentors in the program then help guide the design of the project and provide the necessary tools to make the idea feasible and achievable.
This year, four groups of students met weekly after school to work on their research projects from September 2022 till May 2023. During these meetings, they received mentoring from researchers at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, along with high school students from Uni High. At the end of the semester, the teams gathered to show off their final creations or research findings, complete with impressive slideshow presentations with data and graphs to match. Some projects even rivaled the caliber and level of design that might be expected of college students. The teams not only presented their findings, but also discussed potential real work applications of their work, the limitations, and the insights they gained. “Working with the kids for STEAM TRAIN is always a blast,” said Danny Ryerson, IGB’s Outreach Activities Coordinator. “They are great students, and I am always excited to see what research questions they decide to pursue. For many of the kids, this is their first opportunity to take charge of a science project and decide what they want to research. This can lead to really driven researchers and some amazing results.” One team found clear differences in fish survival based on temperature that they related to the impacts of global warming. Another team found that they could consistently get their bazooka to shoot tiny projectiles over 45 feet after tinkering with the stability of the design. During the trebuchet team’s demonstration, the students explained how magnetic attraction creates force energy that quickly rotates the trebuchet's arm, clarifying that this was different from the kinetic energy that standard trebuchets use. While watching students present their data, it was clear that through running these projects, students were also inadvertently learning advanced concepts in scientific testing, such as the need for larger sample sizes and consistent methodology. These concepts were echoed during a conversation with one student on the trebuchet team, named Anna, about her experience: “My favorite part was recording our data, because sometimes it failed, and sometimes it worked really well. And it would be funny because when it failed, it would usually be a dumb mistake, like we forgot a step. But it taught us to be very accurate with what we were doing, because a slight difference can have a huge impact on your results.” Another team designed a robot-themed board game, called “BOT 1 2 3!”, the goal of which was to enter the other player’s base and take their pawns, similar to chess. However, the game has an added layer of walls, which break up the board and add complexity to how pawns reach the other side. When Natan, one of the students on the team, was asked about the inspiration for the project, he said it had started as a video game design inspired by the popular video game Five Nights at Freddy's. “But when that didn't work, we switched to doing a board game, and then the game took on a different path entirely,” Natan said. “I still want to learn more code in the future though so I can make the video game version!” When asked if he had any other thoughts about his experience making the game, he said “I’ll summarize it in one word – BOT.” Scientific and technological advancements, particularly in the area of genomics research, continue to penetrate nearly all areas of society. Yet most of the public do not have access to the knowledge or tools necessary to understand how this new research may affect them, both in their lives and in their careers. As such, Genomics for Professionals, otherwise known as Genomics forTM, was developed as a series of educational programs designed to teach basic concepts in biology and genomics to professionals within different public sectors. These seminars also provide a space for questions and discussions with scientists regarding the impact genomics may have in their particular sector. The program has already successfully collaborated with many sectors over the years, including judges, lawyers, clinicians, journalists, police officers, and more. IGB Director Gene Robinson introduces the Genomics for Faith panel, which included Christina Laukaitis, clinical associate professor of medical genetics and medical doctor at Carle Illinois College of Medicine, Michael Aref, Assistant Medical Director of Palliative Medicine at Carle Hospital, and Melanie Sheckels, threshold doula and hospice nurse. A new program within the series debuted on May 17th at the Channing-Murray Foundation, where a crowd of scientists, faith leaders, and faith-holding members of the community gathered for a fruitful discussion regarding ‘what is life?’, ‘what does it mean to be alive?’, and ultimately, ‘what is death?’. Participants were able to ask questions to a panel of three community members with diverse experiences: Christina Laukaitis, a clinical associate professor of medical genetics and medical doctor at Carle Illinois College of Medicine, Michael Aref, the Assistant Medical Director of Palliative Medicine at Carle Hospital, and Melanie Sheckels, a threshold doula and hospice nurse.
Gene Robinson, IGB Director, gave opening remarks at the start of the session, explaining the inspiration behind Genomics for Faith: “When you step back, there are two groups of people in our society that the public turns to for trusted information, and that is scientists, and faith leaders,” said Robinson. “As the situation exists now, those two groups don't talk to each other very much. We would like with your partnership to change that, and today we enter with a spirit of humility. We're here to explore with you our shared passion for the search for the truth.” Daniel Urban, the IGB’s Senior Outreach Activities Coordinator, gave a short presentation to introduce the topic of discussion for the day, jokingly stating “We thought we’d start off with something small and simple to ease ourselves in this, so we settled on the topic: ‘What is life?’ “A lot of people have this impression that scientists have the answers to everything,” Urban continued. “I'm sure many of you will be shocked to find out that we don't have it all quite nailed down just yet, especially with today’s question.” After a short presentation on the science, the floor was opened for discussion on the meaning of life and death. The panel and audience members shared unique perspectives on the topic, which stemmed from various experiences, faiths, and backgrounds in science. Some of the questions asked included how to talk about death, what counts as someone being alive versus dead, and does life go beyond death. Conversations also arose regarding how one’s view of what life means to them shapes where they draw the line of when life ends. The event’s organizers say the goal of Genomics for Faith is to provide a safe space to have discussions where personal beliefs and scientific information intersect. “As a society we face many daunting challenges,” said Claudia Lutz, the IGB’s Outreach Manager and one of the lead organizers of the event. “The recent pandemic was a reminder of what a powerful and positive impact institutions of faith can have on communities by providing information and guidance. We hope to find areas of common ground and collaboration with faith communities so that both science and faith practitioners are even better positioned to help our society face current and future challenges.” Currently, the IGB is planning future Genomics for Faith sessions to branch into other topics of interest that lean more heavily into genomics research, such as the role of stem cells in health, and genome editing techniques. Organizers of the forum are also considering new methods of engagement and interactions within Genomics for Faith that will allow participants to have a more open-ended and free-form experience. Members of all faith communities are welcome to attend in the future, and sessions are free. If anyone has feedback regarding the last session, or has ideas for future sessions, they can email Lutz at [email protected]. |