Advancing one health
By Grant Guggisberg
Research continues to be a priority for the faculty of the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering, with the goal of solving problems and creating new knowledge for the betterment of society. The college has four areas of emphasis when it comes to research: sustainable infrastructure, computing technologies, secure platforms and one health.
The idea of one health encapsulates more than just preventing or treating disease. Instead, this concept focuses on the interconnection among people, animals, plants and their shared environment with the goal of achieving optimal health on a local, regional, national and global scale.
This could mean using data to model the potential spread of a pathogen, or perhaps embedded medical sensors and devices that provide real-time data and treatment options. The possibilities are endless, which makes the research being done in the college all the more important.
What follows are two examples of the one health concept in action, one focused on ecosystem balance in bodies of water, and another on an innovative procedure to treat cancer in a minimally invasive manner.
Managing harmful algae blooms
Trisha Moore, Peggy and Gary Edwards Cornerstone Teaching Scholar and associate professor in the Carl and Melinda Helwig Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, is leading a team that is developing a novel mobile monitoring platform to better understand and predict the emergence of harmful cyanobacteria blooms, also known as cyanoHABs or blue-green algae, in freshwater systems.
Left unchecked, these blooms cause serious ecological, economic and human health issues each summer and turn lakes and ponds into dangerous breeding grounds for cyanotoxins. Exposure in humans can result in mild rashes and skin irritation to much more severe liver or neurologic injury and even death.
“We still don't fully understand the set of conditions that trigger cyanoHABs and what causes them to persist,” Moore said. “We hope that the data we collect through this project, and, importantly, the methods for analyzing and utilizing those data in predictive models, will help fill some of these gaps in understanding.”
Moore is leading a team that is developing a novel mobile monitoring platform to better understand and predict the emergence of harmful cyanobacteria blooms.
Funded through a 2021 grant from the U.S. Geological Survey, the project is now in its third year as testing of the prototype platform has ramped up. But the project isn’t without its hurdles. Supply chain issues early on made assembling the initial prototype difficult, while human interference with the deployed prototype caused a disruption in data collection.
“Our mobile monitoring platform presents other deployment challenges, too,” Moore said. “For example, right now it is limited to going out on calm days or in areas that are protected from the wind as it is difficult to maneuver in rough waters.”
In the two years since starting the project, Moore said the group has added some components to help paint the full picture of how and why cyanoHABs occur.
“One of the conditions we suspect triggers and sustains bloom formation is when the reservoir gets a fresh flush of nutrients from the landscape upstream of it,” she said. “We are in the process of adding data collection points in the streams that feed Marion Reservoir and are also developing a watershed model to get a better sense of the nutrient load that is delivered to our reservoir during storms.”
Treating cancer from the inside out
Punit Prakash, recipient of the Paul L. Spainhour professorship in electrical engineering and Steve Hsu keystone research scholar in the Mike Wiegers Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is working on a project aimed at improving and expanding the use of thermal ablation procedures to destroy cancerous tumors without the need for surgery.
The idea of thermal ablation, essentially burning away cancerous tissue, has been around for 30 years, but Prakash’s group is developing and refining devices that can improve the procedure and allow it to treat additional types of cancer, such as lung cancer. Current thermal ablation methods use tiny needles to access the tumor from outside the body.
“One of the challenges with lung cancer is you’re poking a needle through the lung, which is essentially a bag of air, and it might collapse,” Prakash said. “There are ways to manage that and doctors doing the procedure watch out for that, but it’s a complication they’d rather not deal with if possible.”
Prakash’s group is developing and refining devices that can improve the procedure and allow it to treat additional types of cancer, such as lung cancer.
Prakash, also a Steve Hsu keystone research scholar, and his group are working on a device that could be inserted through the mouth and into the trachea, reaching the lungs to perform the thermal ablation with less complication risk. Additionally, the recovery process from a procedure like this has the potential to be dramatically shorter than surgery and could be offered to patients in declining health that aren’t good surgery candidates.
“Currently, these are done as outpatient procedures,” Prakash said. “They come in, and assuming there are no complications, they could go home the same day, which is a big deal, especially in areas where folks have to drive two hours to go the hospital.”
Prakash and his team are also working on microwave devices that specialize in directionally heating, as opposed to heating in all directions, like a flashlight as opposed to a lightbulb. This would give doctors much more control in treating smaller areas and without damaging healthy tissue.
“That’s important if the doctor is treating some tissue and there is something nearby that they want to protect,” he said.
In a similar vein, Prakash and his team are also developing a pair of microwave devices, positioned on either side of the cancerous tissue, that can communicate with each other.
“The idea is that as the tissue gets destroyed, its physical properties change,” he said. “There will be less and less signal reaching from one device to the other one, and we think we can use that as a signature to know we’ve adequately treated the tissue.”