Three Studies Receive NUCATS Pilot Funding
For many Americans, milk, eggs, and peanut butter are grocery staples. But for millions of children, they are the most likely source of a foodborne allergic reaction.
“Peanuts are one of the most prevalent food allergies among children — affecting an estimated 2 million — and among the least likely to be outgrown,” says Lucy Bilaver, PhD, associate professor of Pediatrics. “Although treatments are on the horizon, primary prevention is still the best option and evidence suggests that introducing peanut protein to an infant’s diet early in life is an effective way to prevent the condition.”
This means that pediatricians are needed to get this message out to caregivers of infants. How to ensure that messaging is received is the focus of Bilaver’s newly awarded Translational Science Pilot grant.
“This represents my first project to use implementation science and the pilot is an incredible opportunity to build preliminary data for a large implementation trial,” she says. “The Intervention to Reduce Early (Peanut) Allergy in Children (iREACH) study has allowed us to collaborate with 30 pediatric practices, but we know that we can generate knowledge to successfully implement the successful intervention outside of our randomized controlled trial.”
Bilaver’s grant was one of three recently awarded as part of the 2023 Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute Translational Science Pilot Award program. Other Pilot awardees include Katherine Collison, PHD, a clinical psychologist and research faculty member at The Family Institute at Northwestern University, and Faraz Ahmad, MD, MS, assistant professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and Preventive Medicine (Health and Biomedical Informatics).
Collison and Erika Lawrence, PhD, LCP, director of Translational Science at the Family Institute, will be evaluating the implementation and sustainability of a group-based intimate partner violence intervention in corrections and community agencies.
“We are incredibly honored to receive this support from NUCATS — we will use this funding to better understand how we can work with community agencies to implement an intimate partner violence intervention, known as ACTV, that has been shown to be effective at reducing based intimate partner violence and criminal recidivism,” says Collison. “Importantly, the grant will allow us to conduct this work in close collaboration with our community partners, who are deeply invested in promoting rehabilitation and reducing violence in their communities.”
Intimate partner violence is a serious public health concern that is highly prevalent in U.S. families and the most widely used treatments have been found to be ineffective at reducing violent behavior. Lawrence and colleagues developed and tested the effectiveness of ACTV, a new intervention that has been shown to be highly effective, reducing rates of criminal recidivism by one-third to one-half compared to the current “gold standard” treatment. Despite evidence that ACTV is effective at reducing violence, significant barriers exist within agencies that make it challenging to implement ACTV on a larger scale.
“For this project, we plan to speak with people in different roles within two organizations (one community counseling agency and one community corrections agency) to learn about how these decisions are made and what makes implementing a new intervention easier or more challenging,” says Collison. “The ultimate goal of these conversations is for us to collaborate and find ways to make it easier for community and corrections agencies to implement ACTV.”
Ahmad will use his Pilot Award to increase the use of life-saving heart failure medications within community health center settings. The study team will also test ways to better identify patients with heart failure in a large network of community health centers, working in partnership with people who seek care in community health centers, as well as people who work there.
"This grant is really important for me to continue to partner with AllianceChicago and test ways to improve the uptake of evidence-based therapies for people with heart failure cared for in community health centers," says Ahmad. "This pilot award will provide important preliminary data for a larger grant that will hopefully fund a pragmatic clinical trial to test multiple implementation strategies to improve the prescription of evidence-based therapies for patients with heart failure."
More than 6.5 million adults in the U.S. live with heart failure. Half of these individuals have heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), a condition with high mortality and poor quality of life. However, several large trials have demonstrated the effectiveness of a combination of medications delivered at target doses in improving quality of life and extending the lifespan of individuals with HFrEF. This quadruple therapy is known as guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT). Despite strong evidence of benefit, GDMT is underutilized. Community health center patients disproportionately bear the burden of poor heart failure outcomes and face greater challenges to receiving GDMT
The long-term goals of Ahmad’s study are to develop scalable, multi-level strategies to improve evidence-based care and outcomes for patients with HFrEF and advance health equity by reducing the burden in populations experiencing disadvantage.
NUCATS is expected to post the 2024 NUCATS Pilot Award request for applications in Spring. The RFA will be disseminated via the NUCATS Minute email and posted on the NUCATS website. Additional pilot award opportunities are available on Feinberg’s “Find Pilot Funding” webpage.
Research reported in this publication was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Grant Number UL1TR001422. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Written by Roger Anderson
