Meet the 2025 Accelerated Translational Incubator Pilot Program (ATIP) Recipients
Funded by a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), the Accelerated Translational Incubator Pilot Program (ATIP) seeks to support projects that focus on the science of science and ultimately promote NCATS’ mission to accelerate translational research by exploring more efficient strategies for overcoming barriers to investigational studies. Each awardee receives a 12-month, $50,000 grant.
The research proposals selected for support included a project from the ICTR’s CTSA partner, the University of Maryland Baltimore ICTR.
2025 ATIP Recipients
Lili Barouch, MD
“Developing Exercise Prescription for Patients with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM) Using Wearables and Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing (CPET)”
With emerging evidence supporting the benefits and safety of exercise when guided by individualized risk assessment in HCM patients, wearable devices are being considered as a means of providing both reproducible subjective assessments of exercise intensity, as well as objective measures that can be tracked as an individual’s cardiorespiratory fitness changes. This would be achieved by first utilizing CPET to establish appropriate personalized exercise intensity zones and then using wearables to facilitate implementation of exercise prescriptions across these zones. As a requisite first step, the accuracy of commercially available wearables that are suitable for this purpose (i.e. chest strap, smartwatch and smart ring) must be assessed against the gold standard of CPET for evaluating heart rate, heart rate reserve, and maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max), amongst a diverse cohort of HCM patients as well as age, sex, fitness, and race-matched controls.
Elisa Ignatius, MD. MSc
“Home Is Where the Heart is: Use of Handheld ECG Device for Periodic QTc Monitoring among Elderly Patients with Nontuberculous Mycobacterial(NTM) Lung Disease”
Antibiotics such as azithromycin, clofazimine and bedaquiline are commonly prescribed for treating NTM, but all confer a risk of QTc prolongation on electrocardiogram (ECG), which in rare cases, can lead to the potentially fatal arrhythmia , “torsades de pointes.” Therefore, periodic but frequent ECGs for QTc monitoring are recommended for patients receiving these medications. To reduce the burden on individuals who currently need to travel to clinics to undergo QTc monitoring and are often elderly, this pilot will explore a more accessible and efficient monitoring solution through the use of the KardiaMobile 6L, an FDA approved 6-lead personal ECG device that can provide accurate QTc measurements and remote ECG monitoring. PK data will also be obtained from study participants and coupled with cardiac monitoring information for the purpose of creating personalized treatment plans that would adjust drug doses to maintain effective plasma concentrations, while attempting to minimize the risk of QTc prolongation.
Muhammad Mohiuddin, MBBS
University of Maryland
“Pilot Study for the Development of a Novel In Vivo Model of Transplantation Using Subcutaneously Transplanted Cells with the Aim of Decreasing Reliance on Animal Subjects”
This project aims to develop an in vivo model of allo- and xenoreactive immune responses that is suitable for exploring questions in transplant immunobiology and allows for rapid iteration of test conditions, including genetic modifications of porcine cells in the case of xenotransplantation. The scope of this study includes piloting the proposed model: addressing any technical hurdles and validating all observations derived from these research activities. Briefly, cell lines of baboon, murine, and porcine origin will undergo lentiviral transduction with plasmids encoding fluorescent proteins before subcutaneous injection into recipients. Methodologies will be developed for measuring transcutaneous fluorescence which is hypothesized in these experiments to correlate with surviving transplanted cell populations. Biopsies of recovered transplanted cells will be subjected to histological analysis, including staining for antibody, complement, and inflammatory cellular infiltrate as a measure of allo- and xenoreactive immune responses in the proposed model.
Robert Stevens, MD, MBA
“Clinical Validation of a Wearable Sensor for Continuous Blood Pressure (BP) Monitoring”
The Multimodal On-body Sensor Array nonInvasive data Collection (MOSAIC) device, is a miniature wearable system that collects a range of high resolution biosignal data and is designed to provide continuous cuffless BP monitoring, as well as improve on current approaches for obtaining non-invasive BP assessments. This project will evaluate the feasibility, accuracy and reliability of continuous BP monitoring using the MOSAIC device, by comparing its performance against invasive arterial BP readings obtained in an ICU clinical environment. Clinical-grade continuous BP measurements obtained via patients with arterial catheters will be leveraged to establish ground truth labels for BP estimation, which will then be used in conjunction with MOSAIC outputs to train supervised machine learning algorithms.
Nitish Thakor, PhD, MS
“Re-Kinesis Twin: Democratizing Gait Analysis in Rehabilitation with e-Dermis and AI-Powered Digital Twin”
This project aims to improve gait analysis by combining e-Dermis, an electronic skin technology, with the Re-Kinesis Twin learning model. By integrating these 2 systems AI-driven biomechanical modeling will be used to reconstruct lower limb kinematics, a critical marker of gait disturbances, and ultimately enable real-time assessment of joint mechanics, balance control, as well as force transmission throughout the gait cycle. The Re-Kinesis Twin learning model will be developed and validated using gait data collected from 20 able -bodied adults wearing footwear embedded with e-Dermis sensors and ground-truth kinematic data obtained from a gold-standard motion capture system. The goal is for the model to predict key gait parameters with an estimation accuracy of > 95% when compared to motion capture data. Re-Kinesis Twin will also be studied in a small group of stroke patients by performing gait analysis under a variety of real-world stroke rehabilitation conditions.