ECE faculty Mehdi Javanmard received a New Jersey Commission for Spinal Cord Injury grant

ECE  Professor Mehdi Javanmard and BME Professor Francois Berthiaume together received a New Jersey Commission for Spinal Cord Injury grant for the project "Dynamic Sensing of Pressure Wounds in Spinal Cord Injury". This is a three-year $600,000 research project from December 2024 to November 2027.

Current treatment strategies for pressure wounds require numerous medical visits, are inherently slow and inefficient, and which can be challenging to attend for spinal cord injury (SCI) patients who have limited mobility. Furthermore, wound diagnosis and care are largely based on subjective and qualitative criteria. Finally, there is much trial and error in the use of therapies, and valuable time may be lost before an effective therapeutic regimen is found. The main goals of this project are twofold: (1) to develop and use nanobioelectronic sensors that report, within minutes, the levels of specific biomarkers in wound fluid; and (2) to use this information to better time treatment of the wound with topical therapeutics. Nanobioelectronic sensors will be based on a recently developed technology that enables measuring virtually any antigen for which an antibody is available, in complex wound fluids. The technology will be further developed to simultaneously measure multiple biomarkers in wounds in situ. We will use this information to stage experimentally induced pressure skin wounds in both healthy and SCI mice (the latter of which exhibit delayed healing), in order to optimize the timing of growth factor therapies.

Congratulations to Mehdi and Francois!