Ashutosh Chilkoti Receives Award from the Duke Translational Research Institute
Ashutosh Chilkoti, the Theo Pilkington Professor of Biomedical Engineering, is one of five investigators at Duke who received $100,000 in May from the Duke Translational Research Institute (DTRI) to accelerate projects from preclinical to Phase I clinical trials. DTRI awards these collaborative pilot funds to projects that link basic lab and clinical science investigators.
The primary source of funding for the DTRI Collaborative Awards is from Duke's Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA), funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). DTRI is a component of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute.
Chilkoti's project is a collaboration with Kristin Newby, MD, MHS, to improve the lives of chronic heart failure patients. They are making it easier to track the levels of a biomarker hormone that the FDA has approved as a diagnostic tool for this condition. The team is building an assay tool on a small chip that patients can use to test a finger-prick of blood. Patients will be able to upload an image of the assay result to their electronic health record via a smart phone app.
Chilkoti appreciates that the pilot funding includes research study support from DTRI, including regulatory support for working with the FDA and also "providing technical support as we try to integrate this data into the electronic health record," he said.