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INQUIRING MINDS
Center Creates New Lyme Disease Test
Aurine-based Lyme disease test created by a team of George Mason University researchers could soon become available statewide after a recent clinical validation study confirmed that it meets sensitivity and absolute molecular specificity standards.
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The research project, which was led by Alessandra Luchini, has been formally approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Institutional Review Board after demonstrating its effectiveness among a cohort of 408 patients. The project was supported by the Commonwealth of Virginia and the National Institutes of Health.
Luchini says that Mason is uniquely qualified to offer the test, citing the novel technology she and her team have developed and the high-tech laboratory certified for its reliability, accuracy, and timeliness that is being used by Mason’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM). The College of Science provided two new mass spectrometry instruments that significantly increased patient testing capacity in the CAPMM laboratory.
Luchini and her team have developed a method that detects molecules derived from tick-borne pathogens in the urine of patients. Molecules shed by pathogens are eliminated from the body through urine after circulating in the blood.
“Using mass spectrometry, we can see hundreds of thousands of protein fragments in the urine,” says CAPMM research associate Ruben Magni. “We developed a new software to sieve through the data and to identify protein fragments derived from tick-borne pathogens with high-stringency criteria.”
Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is largely caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi and is transmitted to humans through the bite of infected blacklegged ticks, also known as deer ticks. If left untreated, the infection can spread to joints, the heart, and the nervous system.
The idea of a urine-based Lyme disease test originated a few years ago when a high school student participating in Mason’s Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program, Temple Douglas, asked Luchini and Liotta to work on a test for Lyme disease. Now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Douglas used a nanotechnology invented by the Mason scientists to develop a test that detected one protein derived from Borrelia burgdorferi. The nanotechnology used in the test has been licensed to the Virginia-based company Ceres Nanosciences.
The early stage of the project was supported by the state through a Virginia Biosciences Health Research Corporation grant that began in 2017, with trials beginning the following year. Since then, the Mason scientists decided to use mass spectrometry to expand the capability of the test to simultaneously measure thousands of proteins derived from all tick-borne pathogens, including Borrelia, Babesia, Rickettsia, and Anaplasma.
“Our goal is to expand the study to a statewide testing service, a clinical survey trial for which any doctor and any patient in Virginia can volunteer,” Luchini says.
—John Hollis
RESEARCH
Supporting Research in the Humanities
The new university-wide Center for Humanities Research was established to support and showcase humanities research, foster interdisciplinary research partnerships, enhance intellectual life on campus, and engage the public in dialogue over the importance of the humanities in the contemporary landscape.
“The humanities are more important now than ever as they provide a navigational tool for us to make sense of what’s going on in the world and imagine a better future,” says President Gregory Washington. “This center makes humanities research visible and accessible to the campus and the broader community.”
The College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), home to many of the humanities fields, is partnering with the Provost’s Office in supporting the new center, which takes its place alongside Mason’s other transdisciplinary research centers.
“Humanities research is also critical to the mission of the university and helped Mason attain its Carnegie R1 status,” says Alison Landsberg, the inaugural director of the center.
Planning for the center has been in the works for two years. Landsberg says each time committee members met with the university administration they were encouraged to “think bigger.”
The center’s agenda is a big one. Not only will it serve as a research incubator, providing scholarly support and funding for faculty and graduate students, the center will also serve as an intellectual hub, encouraging research partnerships and collaborations and hosting conferences, lectures, workshops, and working groups.
“This type of research is normally solitary work,” says Landsberg, who teaches in the Department of History and Art History and the Cultural Studies PhD Program. “And yet there is so much to be gained when we engage in intellectual exchange.”
The center’s conferences and lectures will be organized around annual themes, and the center’s leaders hope to encourage participation not only from across the university but also among scholars at the regional and national levels. The theme for 2020–21 is “dissent.” Learn more at chr.gmu.edu.
PHOTOS BY LATHAN GOUMAS, GETTY IMAGES, AND EVAN CANTWELL
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Protecting America’s Supply Chains
George Mason University is a managing member in the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII), a $111 million publicprivate partnership led by the University of Texas at San Antonio. CyManII will have a five-year cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy to lead a consortium of 59 proposed member institutions in introducing a cybersecure energy return on investment that drives American manufacturers and supply chains.
Mason anticipates operating CyManII’s East Coast headquarters on the Arlington Campus, which will contain lab space and equipment to demonstrate, test, and validate CyManII’s emerging cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing technologies and products.
Mason researchers from the Volgenau School of Engineering will play key roles in CyManII’s first-year projects, including finding ways to protect manufacturing supply chains from cyber threats and designing better security for advanced manufacturing plants.
INQUIRING MINDS
PHOTO COURTESY OF BRIGHTLINE INTERACTIVE
Using Virtual Reality to Support Addiction Recovery
Can virtual reality help people with substance abuse issues avoid a relapse? A team of Mason researchers thinks it just might.
The multidisciplinary team, which includes faculty members Holly Matto, Padmanabhan Seshaiyer, Stephanie Carmack, and Nathalia Peixoto and graduate student Matthew Scherbel, is working with Brightline Interactive and using virtual reality (VR) simulations to examine the effect of recovery cues on preventing drug relapse.
This work is supported by a Small Business Technology Transfer Grant from the National Institutes of Health. Brightline Interactive is a team of creative technologists that design and build immersive virtual reality experiences for simulation and training purposes.
Prior to becoming a professor, Matto was a social worker who worked with individuals in recovery from substance use. In her work, she found that the first weeks in recovery are a tricky time with a critical need for support to maintain a person’s sobriety goals. “It takes more than a strong commitment to be sober,” Matto says. “You may not be able to think your way through [when triggered].”
She says research shows that the intensity of the craving experience can still be quite high even after two months of abstinence. This led Matto to think about the importance of real-time interventions to support recovery when these individuals leave treatment.
“We are interested in understanding how we can disrupt the drug trigger-craving-relapse chain by using customized recovery cue substitutions,” she says.
The intervention the team is working on with Brightline involves having the person wearing the VR goggles interact with triggering objects related to their addiction while their physiological response is assessed. The results may lead to the development of a mobile nonpharmacological support system to help individuals manage cravings and avoid relapse.
—Colleen Kearney Rich, MFA ’95
Research Shows Disparities in Care of Newborns
In the United States, Black newborn babies are three times more likely to die than white newborn babies during their initial hospital stays, according to a peer-reviewed study co-written by Brad Greenwood, an associate professor in Mason’s School of Business.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that when Black doctors cared for Black babies, their mortality rate was cut in half.
“Babies are dying,” Greenwood says. “That’s not a political statement. That’s what’s happening, and it’s unacceptable.”
Greenwood and his co-authors examined 1.8 million hospital birth records in Florida from between 1992 and 2015, identifying the race of the doctor in each birth. The study found that the race of the doctor caring for white babies did not appear to make a difference in the likelihood of survival.
“Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases, and when hospitals deliver more Black newborns,” Greenwood and his co-authors wrote. “The findings suggest that Black physicians outperform their white colleagues when caring for Black newborns.”
“So the next question is why,” Greenwood says. “There’s a million possible explanations, so the next step is to, through observations, find out the reasons for such a difference.”
Greenwood has previously been a coauthor for studies on medical disparities based on race and gender. In a study published last fall, he and his co-authors found that physicians should use digitized protocol when making decisions on patient care as a way of overcoming potential racial bias.
“It’s important to focus on the issues of disparities in health care to understand what’s going on and try to figure out how to change things for the better,” Greenwood says.
—Anna Stolley Persky
Expanding Forensic Science Training in Rural Areas
A$2 million grant from the National Institute of Justice will enable Mason to create a National Center on Forensics to provide forensic science training that expands services in rural areas nationally.
Former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole, director of Mason’s Forensic Science Program, says the grant will allow Mason to collaborate with partners to ensure that all victims and their families receive justice.
“Too often victims and their families and the professionals investigating the crimes who reside in rural areas don’t have access to the same resources as those from metropolitan areas,” says O’Toole. “This gap can be significant and stand between case resolution and years of never knowing what happened. This grant will allow us and our partners to work to increase the number of much-needed forensic experts like medical examiners and coroners and to provide state-of-the-art training for them and other professionals.”
Mason professors Joseph DiZinno, a former FBI forensics expert, and Anthony Falsetti, a forensic anthropologist, will serve as co-principal investigators.
Mason will partner with the National Institute of Justice, the American Society for Clinical Pathology, the National Association of Attorneys General, the University of Washington Schools of Medicine and Law, and the Montana Forensic Science Division to raise awareness about and address the shortage of medical examiners and coroners, particularly in rural areas.
The center will provide learning opportunities for medical students training as deputy medical examiners and coroners in rural areas while also offering forensic science and legal training to district attorneys, judges, and law enforcement officials.
“By increasing the number of forensic pathologists and by training the medical examiners, coroners, and legal communities, the center will directly impact the criminal justice system’s ability to determine if crimes have been committed and ensure that the guilty are held accountable and the innocent are not unfairly charged or convicted,” DiZinno says.
—John Hollis
RESEARCH
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George Mason University has signed a collaboration agreement to give Sykesville, Maryland-based Noble Life Sciences access to the National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) facility at the Science and Technology Campus.
The agreement enables Noble Life Sciences to carry out federally and nonfederally funded BSL-3 animal model projects to support the development of new antiviral and antibacterial agents against infectious and resistant pathogens. Mason and Noble Life Sciences have also agreed to explore collaborative research opportunities.
“The collaboration opens doors to new opportunities for the development of novel therapeutics and diagnostics by Mason scientists and enables us to partner with an entity that has extensive experience bringing such new discoveries to the marketplace,” says Ali Andalibi, the lab’s chief scientific officer and senior associate dean in the College of Science.
