Federally funded university research has helped create the technologies that enable multiple life-saving modern diagnostic techniques that we take for granted today, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which can detect a host of internal conditions that, before MRI came into use, often weren’t detected until it was too late.
And right now, just for example, America’s leading research universities are currently utilizing new federal funding to pioneer new and innovative ways for surgeons to more quickly and accurately determine – through innovations like advanced optics and artificial intelligence – whether they’ve completely removed all cancerous tissue before the patient even leaves the operating table.
Here are a few other recent examples of America's leading research universities creating new medical diagnostics to give doctors an edge in detecting diseases so they can treat patients more quickly and effectively:
How can we know whether the next unknown viral outbreak is coming? Typical clinical tests can only detect a specific known pathogen, and Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) tests, while better able to detect a broader range of viruses, just aren't as sensitive. So Columbia University researchers have been developing a new NGS surveillance and screening tool that can detect any virus that could potentially infect humans, known or unknown, faster and with greater sensitivity than existing tests. This could both transform precision medicine by giving caregivers the ability to quickly pinpoint the cause of an infection while also providing an enormous potential benefit to public health by providing information on viruses circulating in the community.
University of Michigan researchers have invented a chip to analyze blood samples to determine the effectiveness of a particular cancer treatment for a patient far more quickly than by traditional methods. Typically doctors have to wait weeks or even months before they can fully assess the effectiveness of a particular cancer treatment for a patient – and in the meantime patients can be receiving ineffective treatments and suffering needless side effects. This new innovation uses nanofabricated chips to capture cells in a patient's blood that have cancer-specific protein markers, allowing physicians to quickly and continuously monitor the effectiveness of a patient's treatment and pivot away from ineffective therapies to alternatives that might stand a better chance of saving their life.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis pioneered a diagnostic test to solve one of the biggest problems facing doctors who fight infectious disease every day: quickly determining if a patient's infection is viral or bacterial and thus what the best course of treatment would be. The nanoparticle labels used by the team made their new test 1,000 times more sensitive than previous ones as well as much faster, returning results to physicians in 20 minutes instead of several hours.
This essential work would not be possible without federal support for groundbreaking research at America's leading research universities. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) invests most of its nearly $48 billion budget in life-saving medical research for the American people – and it conducts much of that research through America's leading research universities nationwide. Nearly 66% of all federally funded medical research for NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services is performed by America's leading research universities across the nation through competitive grants.
And each year NIH awards almost 50,000 such grants overall to keep 300,000 medical researchers at more than 2,500 research universities, medical schools, and research institutions in every state hard at work on the next discoveries that can save lives and improve Americans' health.
That investment in research has paid off in the form of transformational medical diagnostic tools that we now take for granted, such as the previously mentioned MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), which was made possible thanks to extensive NIH and NSF-supported research at universities.
Banner Image Credit: Graduate student Elizabeth Cummins uses an acoustic tweezing device in Professor Damir Khismatullin’s lab at Tulane University as part of a grant to develop technology for the assessment of severe cases of infectious diseases, September 1, 2022.
