2019: A Reflection from Dr. Kevin Ward
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Seasons greetings and happy holidays! This time of year always gives me pause to reflect on the many things I am thankful for. Among these is the opportunity to work with some of the world’s top intellectual talent to save and improve the lives of patients and their families challenged with critical illness and injury. Anyone, at any time, can find themselves a victim. Minutes, hours, days, and weeks can make a difference between life, death, significant disability, or return to normalcy.
To make substantial strides that impact patients, integrated multidisciplinary teamwork is required. MCIRCC’s strategy to transform critical care through innovation, integration and entrepreneurship is based on making the whole greater than the sum of its parts by providing resources and people that lower the barrier to team science. The MCIRCC 2019 Year in Review illustrates some of the victories we have had using this approach.
While still young, MCIRCC, with your help and dedication, is changing the critical care landscape by helping to create opportunities for every discovery to be leveraged to its fullest across the spectrum of critical care. Here are some 2019 highlights that reflect MCIRCC’s impact:
$4M American Heart Association Strategically Focused Research Program Grant awarded to the Michigan Resuscitation Innovation and Science Enterprise (M-RISE), a program including 15 MCIRCC faculty focused on improving neurologic outcomes after cardiac arrest.
NIH Program Project Grant (P01) was submitted by a team of 21 investigators from 11 departments in 5 UM schools/colleges using a precision medicine approach to tackle the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS).
MCIRCC’s Proposal Development Unit assisted in submitting more than $59M in grants were submitted to the NIH, Department of Defense, American Heart Association, National Science Foundation, and industry on critical care science. These grants included nearly 100 members from 20 UM departments using MCIRCC resources.
A new MCIRCC startup company, FifthEye, received $10M in venture funding to bring MCIRCC’s Analytic for Hemodynamic Instability to market.
Six patents were filed and 20 new critical care-related invention disclosures were submitted by MCIRCC faculty in the Medical School, College of Engineering, College of Pharmacy and College of Literature Science and Arts.
MCIRCC’s Data Science Unit collaborated with the Michigan Medicine Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation to develop a predictive analytic which will significantly reduce unnecessary readmissions.
The fifth Massey TBI Grand Challenge awarded more than $650K among five teams and their innovations to improve outcomes in patients with severe traumatic brain injury.
MCIRCC formed its first external advisory board of professionals who are committed to work with us to develop innovative strategies to grow and sustain MCIRCC’s high-risk and high-reward model of translational science.
A new scholar, Christopher Fung, MD, was named in MCIRCC’s unique multidisciplinary NIH K-12 Career Development Program.
MCIRCC’s Re-Imagining Critical Care Seminar Series that explores critical care innovation opportunities launched.
MCIRCC re-designed its website to better communicate its mission.
2020 promises to be another exciting year full of possibilities. A peek at some of these include:
Several large team science grants to be developed on the topic of precision medicine and sepsis
Developing a new research training program in critical care engineering
Launching several spin-off companies to take MCIRCC developed technologies to market
Deploying and studying new MCIRCC-developed predictive analytics into Michigan Medicine
FDA approval of previously licensed MCIRCC technologies
New industry partnerships and the development of new Grand Challenges in other critical care areas
Developing new MCIRCC marketing tools to help communicate the challenges and needs of the critically ill and injured patients and their families
Creation of a new integrated team of clinicians and engineers to produce the ICU bed and life support platform of the future
Of course, none of this would be possible without the unique combination of basic scientists, clinicians, engineers, data scientists, our Catalyst Team, and the guidance and leadership of MCIRCC’s Associate Directors. We look forward to a new year of bringing the Michigan Difference to those who are counting on our critical care solutions!
