Winners of annual Clinical Research Achievement Awards announced

By Erin O'Byrne, MBA

Winners of the Buffalo Translational Consortium (BTC) 2019 Clinical Research Achievement Awards performed research studies on aerobic exercise recovery in sport-related concussion, mechanistic insights on prostate cancer health disparities in American men, and hospital naloxone treatment for suspected opioid overdose.

This is the fourth year of honoring outstanding accomplishments in clinical research performed at a BTC institution with investigators from the University at Buffalo or Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center serving as lead authors. The awards sought out research findings that were published or in press in the past 12 months.

The award winner, John J. Leddy, MD, clinical professor in the Department of Orthopaedics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, was selected for the study, “Early Subthreshold Aerobic Exercise for Sport-Related Concussion: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” The article was published in the April 2019 issue of JAMA Pediatrics.

Recognized as an award finalist is Dhyan Chandra, PhD, associate professor of oncology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. He was selected for the study, “Cytochrome c Deficiency Confers Apoptosome and Mitochondrial Dysfunction in African-American Men with Prostate Cancer” which was published in the American Association for Cancer Research April 2019 issue.

Also recognized as an award finalist is Brian Clemency, DO, associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine in the Jacobs School, who was selected for the study titled, “Hospital Observation Upon Reversal (HOUR) With Naloxone: A Prospective Clinical Prediction Rule Validation Study.” The article was published in the January 2019 issue of Continuing Medical Education in Academic Emergency Medicine.

“Our Clinical Research Achievement Awards are designed to highlight the most novel and impactful clinical research being performed by clinical researchers throughout the Buffalo Translational Consortium,” stated Anne B. Curtis, MD, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Charles and Mary Bauer Professor and chair, Department of Medicine, Jacobs School. “These research studies have directly led to improvements in the health and wellbeing of patients in our community and have changed practice well beyond Western New York.”

The BTC awards competition seeks to identify major advances resulting from the region’s investment in clinical research to benefit the health and welfare of the Western New York community. To be eligible for an award, the research should contribute to the understanding of human disease and physiology and demonstrate an impact on the understanding, prevention and diagnosis or treatment of disease.

“These innovative studies epitomize the clinical research by research teams in the BTC. They encompass a broad range of disorders and they advance the diagnosis and treatment of important clinical questions that are prevalent in our community and beyond,” stated Timothy F. Murphy, MD, SUNY Distinguished Professor and director of the CTSI. “They were chosen from an impressive group of submissions from BTC investigators. Congratulations to all three winners.”

The award winner and finalists have been invited to present their research at the Clinical and Translational Science Institute Annual Forum on March 18, 2020. They will also receive a travel stipend from the CTSI to attend Translational Science 2020, a national conference of key thought leaders, future collaborators and funding agencies, to be held in Washington, D.C., April 14-17, 2020.