28 Feb Fixing the future
UW researchers offer reasons for hope.
UW–Madison professors aren’t merely dreaming of a better world — they’re actively building it. We asked faculty members across campus to describe breakthroughs in their fields that will improve life for all of us. In an era not known for optimism, here are many good reasons to be hopeful about the future.
A Solution for Infant Health Disparities
Racial disparities in infant health are a long-standing challenge that has proven incredibly difficult to solve. Wisconsin, for example, has the highest Black infant mortality rates in the United States. While many prior interventions have focused on health care, the evidence suggests that the social determinants of health, such as poverty, may be far more important factors in driving these inequalities.
The Expecting Justice collaborative has taken a novel approach to this problem: a guaranteed-income pilot study giving 150 pregnant Black and Pacific Islander people living in San Francisco $1,000 monthly stipends during and after pregnancy. The hope is that the no-strings-attached funds will reduce financial stressors and in turn reduce poor infant health outcomes such as preterm birth.
Researchers from the University of California–Berkeley/San Francisco are collaborating with Expecting Justice to evaluate the program’s effects on health and well-being. If unconditional cash transfer programs like this can move the needle on infant health disparities, it will help make the case for replicating them elsewhere — perhaps even here in Wisconsin.
— Tiffany Green, Departments of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology
Smarter Therapeutics to Fight Disease
A new era of “programmable” therapies is starting to have a real-world impact in medicine. Traditional drugs and recombinant proteins (like aspirin and monoclonal antibodies) are static entities that bind to protein targets within cells. In contrast, engineered therapeutic cells can dynamically sense and respond to changing pathological conditions in the body.
Informed by sequencing and molecular diagnostics advances, newer biotechnologies over the last decade have leveraged the information content of DNA and RNA to generate a new class of programmable cell/gene therapeutics. These therapeutics can be more precise, to match the needs of individual patients, and smarter, to evolve with the body as the disease progresses.
For example, gene therapies can encode correct copies of pathogenic genes, and cell therapies can harbor genetic circuits that sense and destroy cancer. Similar advances have produced flexible mRNA COVID-19 vaccines that encode evolving antigenic variants.
At UW–Madison, biomedical engineers are coming together with clinicians, computer scientists, and biologists to apply these programmable cell/gene therapy techniques toward the treatment of many diseases, including in the brain (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease), blood (e.g., cancer), and eye (e.g., retinal disorders). They are exploiting new CRISPR tools that incorporate synthetic, programmable RNA to enable targeted editing of the genome within many cells of the body.
— Krishanu Saha, College of Engineering