UB researcher awarded $2.1 million NIH grant to study growth, breakup of tissues

UB researcher Ashlee Ford Versypt has received a $2.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how diseases interfere with the complex balance between the growth and break up of tissues occurring in normal healthy conditions.

The project is a continuation of a $1.8 million grant that Ford Versypt, professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, received from NIH in 2019 while at Oklahoma State University.

The previous work investigated what causes a person’s body to over-produce or under-produce fibrous structures. Conditions where these processes are unbalanced include cancers, osteoporosis and fibrosis of various organs, such as the lungs and kidneys. Ford Versypt used her lab’s computational models to study diabetic kidney disease, lung infection and fibrosis, cancer and immune cell migration, bone remodeling and polymer implants for drug delivery.

The new grant — through the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) R35 funding mechanism within the National Institute of General Medicine Sciences (NIGMS) — will enable Ford Versypt to continue her research team’s work. The team will:

• Develop additional computational tools for investigating how different diseases affect the body’s balance between the construction and decomposition of fibrous structures.
• Investigate processes that are present across a multitude of conditions, approaching them from cellular and tissue levels up to the scale of the whole body.

Ford Versypt hopes the research will allow clinical medical professionals to better predict how to promote regeneration across different tissue systems in the body. This would enable better treatment and reduce the impact of those conditions on patients. The research will primarily focus on fibrotic diseases.

It’s challenging to visualize damage deep within living tissues in real time, Ford Versypt says, and to mentally predict how many processes interact and compete during diseases. The project will tackle these challenges to increase understanding of human tissues and lay the foundation for advancement in disease treatment and prevention. The team will study tissue remodeling and damage in various human, animal and engineered tissue microenvironments.

Ford Versypt identifies two key challenges in the next research phase of the grant renewal. The first is relating molecular and cellular level information to macroscopic tissue and organ systems level clinically relevant phenotypes. The second is cell migration through 3D tissue microenvironments.

“With this NIH support, my lab will continue to produce high quality scientific research results and to develop interdisciplinary computational biomedical research scholars,” says Ford Versypt. “Trainees at UB from the first grant period have gone on to careers in the pharmaceutical industry to design and predict medication effects and to careers in education, training the next generation of scientists and engineers. Working with trainee scholars is a joyful and rewarding part of academic scientific research at UB.”