Medical University Of South Carolina

Before new treatments can reach the clinic, they must be tested in clinical trials to see if they are safe and effective. Trials that do not enroll enough participants present roadblocks for advancing care to the clinic because they offer no scientific insight, waste money and time and inflate the costs of new treatments. Improving clinical trial efficiency – ensuring robust patient enrollment

Each year, the South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research (SCTR) Institute offers “Month in the Research Nexus,” a required course for biomedical science graduate students in the SCTR TL1 Predoctoral Research Training Program and M.D./Ph.D. students in the Medical Science Training Program (MSTP) at the Medical University of South Carolina. In the month-long class led by Carol Wagner, M.D

Distrust can lead people to put up walls. For communities of color, past abuses, such as the Tuskegee Experiment, left them wary of scientific research. That distrust has been further fueled by the on-again, off-again relationship some researchers have offered these communities. Keen at first to engage them to gain data for their studies, some researchers disappeared once funding ran out, often

SCTR’s Translational Research Day was held on March 25, with a keynote address that demonstrated how keeping the patient at the center of research can improve the translation of scientific discovery to clinical interventions to positively impact patient outcomes. This year’s keynote speakers, Russell “Chip” Norris, Ph.D., and Sunil Patel, M.D., presented “The power of listening: How a journey

Alzheimer’s disease is an enormous problem that, with an aging population, will only become bigger. More than 6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, and 1 in 3 seniors will die of it, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. By 2050, the cost of Alzheimer’s disease, currently estimated at $355 billion, will rise to $1.1 trillion. Could one of the causes of such a huge and costly

A new article by researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and Clemson University in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) Research Protocols provides a roadmap for implementing an exposure notification mobile app among students, faculty and staff at Clemson, a large public university in South Carolina. The roadmap also provides a theory-based framework for

Medical University of South Carolina researchers describe the development of a school-based wellness initiative for combating childhood obesity by the MUSC Boeing Center for Children’s Wellness (BCCW) in the November issue of the Journal of School Health. Launched in 2007, the program is now available in 200 schools in 20 school districts across South Carolina, thanks to its flexible

In a recent article in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science (JCTS), a Medical University of South Carolina team describes an internship in the College of Graduate Studies (CGS) that aims to build lay communication skills in scientists in training. The internship is a collaboration between the CGS, the Office of Communications and Marketing, and the South Carolina Clinical and

A team of MUSC researchers report in Frontiers in Immunology that they have identified a type of fat known as a sphingolipid that could predict the severity of heart disease in African American patients with lupus. The team was led by Samar M. Hammad, Ph.D., associate professor in the MUSC College of Medicine, and the study was funded in part by a pilot project grant from the South Carolina

For Argentino Calvo, a retired firefighter and paramedic from Bluffton, South Carolina, joining a COVID-19 vaccine trial was not just a personal choice but an investment in the health of his community. Calvo participated in the Novavax vaccine trial at MUSC, which was part of a large-scale study that recruited over 30,000 patients across 119 study sites in the United States and Mexico. SCTR co

When Miss America 2020, Camille Schrier, walked into the Norris Lab on the campus of the Medical University of South Carolina, she was among peers. Not other contestants but other people who love science and are affected by an uncommon connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, or EDS. Schrier is perhaps not a typical Miss America. Her winning talent was a chemistry experiment, and

People who successfully fight off COVID-19 without showing symptoms have much higher levels of IgG antibodies against the virus’s spike protein than do patients who were hospitalized with COVID-19, reports a research team led by Shikhar Mehrotra, Ph.D., of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in a recent issue of iScience. The researchers screened for the IgG antibody to the viral spike

Researchers at the South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research (SCTR) Institute have developed a novel bioinformatic tool called RINS, the Research Integrated Network of Systems, that can be used to evaluate whether improvements to the clinical trial process are making a difference. Their results, published online on March 17 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

When the pandemic hit, clinical researchers jumped into action, starting up trials of COVID vaccines and treatments in record time. Without experienced and knowledgeable clinical research coordinators to run those trials, South Carolinians would not have had early access to these cutting-edge tools for fighting the virus. Those research professionals were at the ready, thanks to an initiative

When his doctor told him that he had acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and less than a 1 in 5 chance of survival, David Zaas, M.D., thought first of his wife and how badly he wanted to see his two teenage children grow up. He wanted every opportunity to win his battle, and the opportunity to enroll in a phase 1 trial ensured that he was doing everything possible. Clinical trials are the only way to

Back in March, when Lucy Krasker was finishing up her final year at the University of Virginia, she began experiencing what she thought were allergy symptoms as she does each year. But when she lost her sense of smell, she decided to be tested for COVID-19. When her test came back positive, her family also went in for testing, and her mother, Amy Krasker, also tested positive. “It's an indelible

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., with over 1.4 million suicide attempts recorded in 2018. Although effective treatments are available for those at risk, clinicians do not have a reliable way of predicting which patients are likely to make a suicide attempt. Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina

Translational research aims to speed research breakthroughs into the clinic. And yet, training for basic scientists and clinicians too often remains siloed, leading to divergent cultures and a loss of opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration. The South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research (SCTR) Institute’s TL1 program, a translational research training program for doctoral students

Hailed for its ability to erase distance between health care providers in cities and patients in rural areas, telehealth has ironically enabled medical care to continue in a time when we all must keep our distance. Across the country, telehealth use has spiked as providers offer virtual patient visits to ensure medical needs are met while minimizing COVID-19 exposure. Regulatory agencies have