Carly S. Filgueira, PhD, assistant professor of nanomedicine and cardiovascular surgery at Houston Methodist, was recently awarded two grants exceeding $600,000 total from the U.S. Department of Defense to support two projects; the first takes a spectroscopic approach to overcome the barriers of diagnosing early familial hypercholesterolemia, and the second evaluates the effects of thyroid hormone metabolite treatment for postmenopausal heart repair. These grants supplement an original seed grant of $50,000 ($25,000 from Houston Methodist, $25,000 from Rice University) that was awarded to support her project, “A Field-Deployable, Small Molecule Nanosensor with Specificity Based on Lipophilicity.” Filgueira is currently investigating nanotechnological approaches to find alternative treatment strategies for physiological disorders.

In addition, Bruna Corradetti, PhD, assistant professor of nanomedicine at Houston Methodist, was recently awarded a grant of $323,003 from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs. This grant was awarded to support her research on local immunoactive patches for the treatment of chronic wounds. Corradetti’s research interests include natural and bio-inspired artificial platforms for the delivery of RNA therapeutics, biomimetic strategies to improve tissue regeneration and modulate the immune response, synthetic biomimetic extracellular matrices for the healing of chronic wounds and cell transplantation, and the development of exosome-based vaccines to induce anti-cancer immune responses.