EnMed

Texas A&M University to establish Intercollegiate School of Engineering Medicine

August 24, 2021 By EnMed

EnMed leads the world in training “physicianeers” as medical inventors by offering medical doctorates and master’s degrees in engineering simultaneously

EnMed students in Maker's Space — The Intercollegiate School of Engineering Medicine is the only school in the world to offer students a fully blended curriculum resulting in a simultaneous doctorate of medicine and master’s degree in engineering in four years. Credit: Texas A&M Engineering

Texas A&M University President M. Katherine Banks has announced approval to establish the Intercollegiate School of Engineering Medicine effective Sept. 1, 2021. The new school will be the organizational home of the EnMed initiative, which launched in 2018 as a partnership between the College of Engineering and College of Medicine in collaboration with the state’s top-ranked Houston Methodist Hospital.

Established in the globally recognized Texas Medical Center, through the integration of engineering and medicine, EnMed aims to transform health care for all by training invention-minded, problem-solving doctors known as physicianeers. Faculty and students will also conduct broad translational medicine, interdisciplinary translational research and develop medical technologies. In the school, EnMed will continue to be led by its executive dean, world-renowned physician-scientist, Dr. Roderic I. Pettigrew.

“We are excited to provide a home for our faculty, staff and physicianeers-in-training through this new school that allows us to intensively focus and collaborate with others in developing the future of health care — 22nd century medicine,” Pettigrew said. “Our faculty and students will work to address some of the greatest challenges in medicine through convergence-born innovations that have the potential to extend the human health span globally.”

With more than 100 students already enrolled, EnMed is the only school in the world to offer its students a curriculum resulting in a simultaneous doctorate of medicine and master’s degree in engineering focused on the design and implementation of medical technologies in four years. In addition, as part of their training, EnMed students are uniquely required to invent a solution to an identified health care problem. While just beginning its third year, multiple invention disclosures have already been filed by students in EnMed.

“Having a school dedicated to discipline blending to create effective scientific bilinguals, is critical to our success in expeditiously stimulating health care breakthroughs and accelerating their practical translation to use,” Pettigrew said while addressing the core concept that underpins the creation of the new school.

The EnMed Building, a recently renovated 17-story facility at 1020 Holcombe Boulevard, features a design and prototyping center that offers its students access to tools, equipment and expertise needed to bring their ideas from concept to reality. This includes machine and electronics shops, a cell culture and bioprinting lab and a virtual reality robotics room that is currently in development.

EnMed is the first actualization of Texas A&M’s broader EnHealth concept that serves as the nation’s first comprehensive educational program to fully integrate engineering into all health-related disciplines.

Media contact:

Diamond Marie Dixon

Communications Specialist – EnMed

Texas A&M University | College of Engineering and College of Medicine

diamond@tamu.edu

Houston ISD town hall generates early interest in EnMed

June 28, 2021 By EnMed

Engineering Medicine’s (EnMed) leadership and two current first-year students, Ramya Varadarajan and Robby Loving, recently met with more than 100 high-achieving students from Houston Independent School District (HISD) in an exclusive informational town hall to learn more about EnMed and potential scholarship opportunities through the Craig and Galen Brown Foundation.

“EnMed represents one of the most amazing opportunities in the country for high-performing students interested in medicine, entrepreneurship and engineering,” said Dr. Rick Cruz, HISD chief strategy and innovation officer. “Students selected to participate in this town hall represent the brightest and hardest working students in the city.”

The HISD students selected for the town hall were in grades eight through 11 and were chosen based on their exceptional PSAT scores. Dr. Roderic Pettigrew, executive dean for EnMed, and Dr. Michael Moreno, director of innovation for EnMed, provided an overview to students on how they could best prepare to pursue degrees at EnMed before inviting Varadarajan and Loving to share more on their experiences.

“I love the opportunities that we’re given outside of the classroom,” Varadarajan told the student audience. “EnMed has a wonderful relationship with Houston Methodist Hospital, and we often have guest lectures from physicians and surgeons who are willing to chat with us or even let us shadow or work in their research labs.”

Loving shared that his favorite part of EnMed was seeing the integration of medicine and engineering come together in class, where students are tasked with looking for innovation opportunities while learning how to conduct patient exams.

“I can’t imagine a better way of directly integrating these concepts,” Loving said. “We learn how to conduct different patient exams and immediately after get to come up with innovations to improve them.”

Varadarajan also shared with the students how she saw her experience at EnMed contributing to her overall life goals.

“I am going to approach my future career with the mindset of appreciating everything that already exists in the health care infrastructure, but also understanding that I can identify things that can be improved,” she said. “An EnMed education provides me with the knowledge and power to improve those things myself.”

The event concluded with scholarship information from Sue Smith, executive vice president and head of the EnMed Program for the Craig and Galen Brown Foundation. The Brown Foundation has a 30-year history of providing undergraduate scholarships to National Merit students attending Texas A&M University and recently added EnMed-specific scholarships. According to Smith, the Brown Foundation will proffer between 15 to 25 high school students as candidates for conditional admission to the EnMed Program each year utilizing the E2EnMed Early Assurance Program.

The Brown Foundation has an ongoing relationship with EMERGE, a nationally recognized free program started in Houston ISD that empowers and prepares high-performing youth from underserved communities to attend and graduate from the nation’s top colleges and universities. The program has helped hundreds of students to receive full ride scholarships to top colleges. While nationally only about 1 of 10 low-income students graduate from college, more than 95 percent of all EMERGE-affiliated students have either graduated from college in four years or are on track to do so.

EnMed faculty, Caira Surgical awarded NSF Small Business Technology Transfer grant

May 24, 2021 By EnMed

Two members of the Engineering Medicine (EnMed) faculty recently collaborated with a medical technology startup, Caira Surgical, to gain a $256,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer grant.

Andrew-Robbins-Michael-Moreno — Dr. Michael Moreno and Dr. Andrew Robbins were awarded a National Science Foundation Small Business Technology Transfer grant with the surgical startup Caira.

Dr. Andrew Robbins, research assistant professor for EnMed, and Dr. Michael Moreno, associate professor in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University and director of innovation for EnMed, partnered with New York-based startup Caira Surgical on a project aimed at developing a novel radar-guided, computer-assisted surgical system for total joint replacement surgery.

“Caira is developing new technologies that simplify workflows and enable better patient outcomes in joint replacements,” said Robbins, who is the principal investigator for the Texas A&M component of the project. “We are excited to work with them on the development of a navigation system for knee replacements that will shorten procedure time, reduce invasive surgical instruments, and significantly reduce the cost and complexity of utilizing advanced technology in joint replacement surgery.”

According to Robbins, the grant from the NSF validates the need to effectively leverage science and engineering to address unmet needs in health care, the ultimate goal of EnMed.

“Support like this will help us translate basic science into meaningful solutions that address tremendous health care needs,” he said.

Having received the initial $256,000 Phase I grant, the researchers will be eligible to apply for a Phase II grant of up to $1 million to continue their research upon successful completion of the Phase I project.

Pettigrew joins group of world-renowned scientists on Excellence in Science and Technology Panel

May 20, 2021 By EnMed

Regeneron ISEF 2021 – Excellence in Science and Technology Panel

Dr. Roderic Pettigrew recently joined Nobel laureates Dr. Frances Arnold and Dr. H. Robert Horvitz, and MacArthur “genius grant” Fellow Dr. Monika Schleier-Smith, on the Excellence in Science and Technology Panel for the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. Together the group answered questions from student finalists across the globe who were selected to compete in the international science fair.

Engineering Medicine’s (EnMed) Executive Dean, Dr. Roderic I. Pettigrew, joined a panel of distinguished educators and scientists at the Excellence in Science and Technology Panel for the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) sponsored by the Society for Science on May 17.

The panelists answered questions from high school students across the globe who were selected as finalists to compete for nearly $5 million in awards, prizes and scholarships.

Pettigrew, who competed in the ISEF in the 10th grade from Albany, Georgia, during the latter phase of the civil rights era, answered questions from the student finalists on a range of topics, including time management, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on collaborative research, the important role that art plays in STEM and choosing a career in academia over industry.

“Academia and industry careers both provide an opportunity to improve the human condition and that’s what it’s all about,” Pettigrew said. “The appeal of academia for me is that you can pursue a variety of scientific interests while also having the opportunity to interact with students, and how stimulating it is to be with students — I still consider myself to be one of you.”

Pettigrew was joined on the panel by Dr. Frances Arnold, Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and Nobel laureate in chemistry; Dr. H. Robert Horvitz, David Koch Professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Biology and Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine; and Dr. Monika Schleier-Smith, associate professor of physics at Stanford University and 2020 MacArthur Genius Awardee. The panel was moderated by Joe Palca, science correspondent for National Public Radio.

According to the Society for Science, the Excellence in Science and Technology Panel enables students to hear directly from Nobel laureates and other esteemed members of the scientific community, allowing the greatest minds in science to answer the questions of the future.

ISEF is the world’s oldest and largest science competition with nearly 2,000 high school participants this year who represent more than 60 countries and territories.

Researchers use real-world data to investigate impact of race, ethnicity in cancer treatment

May 12, 2021 By EnMed

Results highlight need for more diverse populations in clinical trials

Kamlesh Yadav, PhD, instructional associate professor for EnMed

Randomized clinical trials are used in medical research to help determine the effectiveness of new treatments. Although these trials are rigorously designed, they often include an underrepresentation of minority participants, making it difficult to assess whether trial results can be generalized for patients of diverse races and ethnicities.

Now, a Texas A&M Engineering Medicine (EnMed) researcher has found that analyzing real-world data can help identify minority patients who might have better than expected outcomes for cancer therapies. It is a finding the researcher says should prompt clinical trials to include more diverse populations for a more complete evaluation of therapeutic outcomes. The research was recently published in The Oncologist.

“It is well known that African Americans have a higher likelihood of not only developing, but also dying from certain cancers,” said Kamlesh Yadav, PhD, instructional associate professor for EnMed at Texas A&M University. “This study is one of the first to use real-world clinical data to identify that African Americans respond favorably to lung cancer immunotherapies.”

Yadav worked with a team of researchers to analyze outcomes of 249 lung cancer patients, from a dataset of more than 11,000 patients, who received immunotherapy treatments and had clinical follow-up data available to review. They found that African Americans had significantly longer time-to-treatment discontinuation, which is the date of starting a medication to the date of treatment discontinuation or death, as well as overall survival when compared to the rest of the group. Yadav says these results have clinical implications for lung cancer patients treated with immunotherapies.

“The clinical trials that led to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, approval of these immunotherapies only had 1–4% African Americans,” Yadav said. “In addition, a race-based subgroup analysis was never carried out. Thus, this kind of retrospective analysis of real-world data can help patient stratification for improved therapeutic outcomes.”

Yadav says that while this study identifies a significant association of African Americans having better treatment response to immunotherapies for lung cancer, further research with larger patient cohorts is needed to help validate the findings.

“A major limitation of our study is that the sample size is only 249 patients, 75 being African Americans,” he said. “Even after conducting a larger study, more research will be needed to understand the mechanism that helps this group of patients, and importantly, how those findings can be extrapolated to other ethnic groups.”

Yadav says that EnMed is at the cusp of pursuing similar studies and would benefit from building a digital health platform that could be accessed by the next generation of “physicianeers.”

“This platform could be used to analyze and design race-specific personalized medicine approaches,” he said. “That includes artificial intelligence-based identification of more accurate diagnoses and therapeutic procedures for improved clinical outcomes.”

The research was funded by Sema4, a patient-centered health intelligence company dedicated to advancing health care through data-driven insights.