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Today, the AB Nexus program announced its 2024 seed grant awards to interdisciplinary research teams from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the University of Colorado Boulder. Collectively, the seven winning teams will receive $713,000 in funding to advance cutting-edge research that improves human health and well-being.

Jay Lemery, M.D. and Katherine James, Ph.D.—based at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus—together with Jose-Luis Jimenez, Ph.D. at CU Boulder, epitomize the collaborative spirit of AB Nexus. While Lemery, James and Jimenez focus on distinct areas—such as climate medicine, water contamination and airborne transmission—all add to the collective efforts of climate adaptation and mitigation for Colorado and global communities.

The Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis (NITRO) program, the first created under ARPA-H, is enabling a dream team of engineers, medical scientists and veterinarians from CU Boulder, the CU Anschutz Medical Campus and Colorado State University to make an aggressive final push toward a goal many have spent their entire careers pursuing.

“To truly address osteoarthritis, you have to get at both the biology and the structural problem,” said co-Principal Investigator Michael Zuscik (Department of Orthopedics, CU Anschutz). “This unique Colorado dream team we have put together has the multidisciplinary expertise, and now the resources, to tackle both at once. We can approach curing the disease like never before.”

The collaborative seed grant program will continue full steam ahead in Spring 2024, including the introduction of award tracks to seed research in two new, key areas of opportunity: Climate Change and Health; and Artificial Intelligence/Advanced Computing and Health.

From advancing new Alzheimer’s treatments to developing predictive computer models to help youth in crisis, newly awarded teams of researchers from the CU Anschutz Medical Campus and CU Boulder are advancing a wide range of collaborative research projects aimed at improving human health and well-being.

With vaginal birth a top cause of pelvic floor disorders, the conditions are common among women. But because the causes are multifactorial, complex and not completely understood, treatment lags. Two women scientists recently received an AB Nexus grant to help change that.

A team of CU researchers funded by AB Nexus has developed a new strategy for transforming medical images, such as CT or MRI scans, into incredibly detailed 3D models on the computer. The advance marks an important step toward printing lifelike representations of human anatomy that medical professionals can squish, poke and prod in the real world.

The intercampus program stimulates innovative research collaborations and progress toward solving some of our world’s most pressing health problems. After receiving funding from the AB Nexus grant program, awarded teams have attracted $13 million in outside funding and published more than 20 peer-reviewed research studies.

With funding from AB Nexus, researchers from CU Anschutz and CU Boulder are developing an artificial intelligence tool with a goal of diagnosing dementia at earlier stages, so patients and providers can plan more effective treatment options.