From advancements in the treatment of acute pancreatitis to innovative research designs to better understand addiction across the lifespan, researchers from USC and Ohio State University have been collaborating for years on medical and scientific breakthroughs.
"Competitors on the field can make excellent partners in the lab when it comes to medical innovation and discovery, such as our work in chronic disease and neurological disorders," said Steven D. Shapiro, executive vice president of health affairs for USC and president and CEO of Keck Medicine of USC. "USC and Ohio State University are combining their talents and resources to fight a common foe - human illness."
As fans prepare to watch the two Big Ten institutions battle on the football field Saturday, here are some research projects that prove that the two schools can be partners rather than opponents - at least in the laboratory.
Better understanding addiction across the lifespan
Several major research collaborations between the two schools involve addiction science and tobacco control, especially in at-risk youth populations.
Adam Leventhal, a professor of population and public health sciences and psychology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and director of the USC Institute for Addiction Science, served as co-principal investigator on a research collaboration with Alayna Tackett, a pediatric psychologist and associate professor in division of medical oncology at Ohio State, on ice flavors and non-menthol synthetic cooling agents in e-cigarettes.
Within the project, researchers explored how e-cigarettes with cooling flavors have diversified in ways that challenge tobacco control through the emergence of ice-hybrid flavors and products containing non-menthol synthetic cooling agents.
The pair are also collaborating on a project to use an experimental design to better understand the appeal and abuse of gum and oral nicotine pouches among young-adult e-cigarette users.
Overall, the collaborations aim to further the National Institute on Drug Abuse's mission of identifying the neural circuits underlying drug addiction and the causes and consequences of addiction across the lifespan to guide treatment strategies.
Elsewhere, Jessica Barrington-Trimis, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of population and public health sciences at Keck School of Medicine, is collaborating with Megan Roberts, an associate professor of health behavior and health promotion at Ohio State, to study age restriction policies for youth tobacco use.
With funding from the National Institutes of Health, Barrington-Trimis - along with a team of USC colleagues - leads the Southern California components of the project, obtaining California tobacco retailer names and addresses, recruiting youth participants from different at-risk populations and enrolling participants in online focus groups.
Addressing critical gaps in neuroscience, brain health and behavioral research
Co-principal investigators Jose-Luis Ambite, associate research professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and Lei Wang, a professor in Ohio State's department of psychiatry and behavioral health and neuroscience, worked together on a project connecting big data for reproducible clinical neuroscience.
Researchers proposed the "NeuroBridge," which the researchers describe as a "data sharing infrastructure that combines innovative techniques and established technologies in a platform that will greatly enhance the reuse of critical neuroscience data sets."
The goal is to develop technologies that address critical gaps in big-data clinical neuroscience research. The proposed research also included collaborations with addiction projects to improve the quality of research on drug use and addiction.
Meanwhile, Arthur Stone, a University Professor of Psychology and Economics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and Joshua Smyth, a professor of clinical psychology at Ohio State, collaborated on a project titled "Advancing the Science and Practice of Ecological Momentary Assessment." Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) refers to a family of techniques designed to capture self-reported accounts of people going about their daily lives. The goal of the project is to achieve an accurate measurement of symptoms, well-being, beliefs and the social and physical environment over time in natural contexts. The researchers argue that although EMA methods are commonly used in behavioral, social and medical research, critical gaps in our understanding must be resolved for these methods to be best understood and used.
Co-principal investigator Paul Aisen, USC professor of neurology at Keck School of Medicine and director of the USC Epstein Family Alzheimer's Therapeutic Research Institute, and Professor Douglas Scharre, director of the division of cognitive neurology at Ohio State, are collaborating on a series of Alzheimer's disease-related projects. In one project, their team is tracking how Alzheimer's disease-related blood biomarkers, brain amyloid and cognitive function change over time and evaluating how those changes vary by race, ethnicity, sex and apolipoprotein E (APOE) status. Another includes determining whether BAN2401, the FDA-approved Alzheimer's drug Leqembi, is superior to a placebo in reducing brain amyloid accumulation. Aisen has worked with various principal investigators across the country on both projects.
Advancing treatment for acute pancreatitis
James Buxbaum, professor of medicine and executive director of the Digestive Health Institute at Keck School of Medicine, and Professor of Medicine Georgios Papachristou at Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center are collaborating on a project focused on pancreatitis. The SUSTAIN project proposes a multi-center randomized controlled trial to address a knowledge gap in the critical need for therapeutic interventions for acute pancreatitis, a leading cause of gastrointestinal hospitalization in the United States that has both substantial mortality and a rising incidence. A major goal of the project is to provide a reproducible, objective pathway for clinicians to use in acute pancreatitis treatment.
