Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Karin Wang, PhD, was recently awarded one of the inaugural Blue Sky Initiative grants from Temple’s Office of the Vice President for Research.
The Blue Sky Initiative is Temple’s “commitment to bold, transformative research that challenges the status quo and sparks paradigm-shifting discoveries.”
The award provides $75,000 for Wang's collaboration with Jeffrey H. Anderson, MD from the Lewis Katz School of Medicine for the research project: Ancestry-Dependent Fibroblast Migration and Matrix Assembly During Wound Repair.
There is evidence to suggest that fibroblasts, cells critical in wound repair, have significant differences in their behaviors and execution of wound repair function, which may be tied to ancestry.
Wang and Anderson plan to develop a comprehensive fibroblast repository organized by ancestral characteristics. They will then study cell behaviors during wound repair to understand how ancestry influences fibroblast migration and matrix organization during wound closure, exploring how a patient's ancestral background can cause differences in cell behaviors during wound repair.
This project lays the groundwork for what has the potential to be a groundbreaking discovery in the approach to wound repair. Wang and Anderson’s research spans widely and acknowledges characteristics that influence healing outcomes across diverse populations. Identifying ancestry-specific wound repair signatures will position researchers to develop personalized and effective strategies for wound repair. This will validate their experimental platform as a predictive tool for identifying patients at high risk of adverse scarring with the potential for early preventive interventions.
“It is exciting that we have support from Temple to further develop our collaborative vision and generate sufficient preliminary data for external grants in this area,” shares Wang.