Congratulations to Dr. Gallippi on receiving two NIH R01 grants for her research projects! The first grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) will go to monitoring renal transplant health. The other grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) will go to improve the discrimination of malignant from benign breast masses. In addition to these two R01s, Gallippi was awarded a Unified Medical Ultrasound Technology Development (UnMUTeD) T32 grant to train predoctoral students in medical ultrasound technology development.
For the NIDDK award, Dr. Gallippi’s lab is developing novel ultrasound elasticity imaging methods to enable earlier detection of antibody-mediated rejection (AMR) in kidney transplant patients. They hope that by doing so, interventions can be delivered earlier and more effectively to extend transplant life. Their collaborators are Melissa Caughey in JBME, Randy Detwiler and Emily Chang in Nephrology, Tim Nichols in Cardiology and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and Elizabeth Merricks and Rani Sellers in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.
The NCI award will go to the development of novel ultrasound elasticity imaging methods to enable noninvasive differentiation of malignant from benign breast masses in patients with suspicious lesions to reduce the burden of an invasive biopsy. They will also apply their imaging methods to monitor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with breast cancer, with the goal of expediting differentiation of response versus non-response to treatment. Their collaborators are Melissa Caughey in JBME, Cherie Kuzmiak in Radiology, Emily Ray in Oncology, Ben Calhoun in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and Melissa Troester in the Gillings School of Public Health.
For the UnMUTeD T32 award, they will prepare predoctoral students with the collaborative, technical and commercialization skills necessary to transition their work from advanced research and development of medical ultrasound technologies to commercially available ultrasound products that meaningfully impact patient care. Gallippi is the program director, and Xiaoning Jiang in MAE at NC State and Omer Oralkan in ECE at NC State are associate directors.