June 2025
TRaCES Core Team Secures Second Grant Focused on Brain-Metastatic Melanoma Research
A multidisciplinary team led by Principal Investigator Dr. Jackson has been awarded a prestigious Department of Defense (DoD) grant to advance research on brain-metastatic melanoma. The study, titled “Human Organotypic Brain Slice Cultures to Study Brain-Metastatic Melanoma and Immune Infiltration,” will utilize innovative human brain slice cultures to model the tumor microenvironment and evaluate therapeutic responses.
Key contributors to the project include several other DUCOM faculty (Drs. Hartsough, Klase, VanDuyne, Fatatis, Sarkar and Meucci), whose collective expertise spans oncology, immunology, neuroscience, and pharmacology. These investigators represent the core team of the Translational Research and Core Expert Support (TRaCES) initiative, spearheaded a few years ago by the department chair, Dr. Meucci, to elevate departmental research through collaborations with COM clinicians. This marks the second funded grant for the TRaCES Core team, building upon their previous success in neuroHIV research.
June 2024
First TRaCES Project Published
The TRaCES initiative’s first major project has been published in the open-access journal Cells. The paper reports a novel human brain slice culture system to study neuroHIV and describes how donor-matched immune cells can be used as a vector to infect human brain slice cultures with a fluorescent HIV. The system allows for controlled study of HIV infection in the brain over several weeks and is primed to overcome the limitations of animal and cellular models of HIV. This human model system was developed through a joint effort of TRaCES investigators and collaborators. Read the paper here.
April 2023
TRaCES Investigators Earn First NIH Grant Focused on NeuroHIV Research
The TRaCES research partnership successfully earned funding from the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse to move the groups’ first translational research project forward. This multi-PI R21 grant, with Drs. Meucci, Klase, and Jackson, plans to create an adult human brain slice culture model of neuroHIV in collaboration with neurosurgeon Dr. Atom Sarkar. This project will set the stage for testing new treatments for neuroHIV and better understanding the disease mechanisms specific to human brain tissue.
March 2023
New R21 Supports TRaCES Project
Congratulations to the multi-PI team of Drs. Meucci, Jackson and Klase for receiving a new R21 award from NIDA. Funding from this award will support an ongoing project in our TRaCES facility, titled “Adult human brain tissue cultures to study neuroHIV.” The project also features a collaboration with co-investigators Drs. Alessandro Fatatis and Atom Sarkar of the Global Neurosciences Institute.
February 2023
TRaCES Work Presented at Philadelphia Coalition for a Cure
Drs. Fatatis and Meucci presented TRaCES work on brain tumors at the Philadelphia Coalition for a Cure 6th Annual Meeting at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. They also explored potential collaborations with local researchers in their talk: Implementation of Scientific Collaborations on Brain Malignancies: From TRaCES to MetNet With PC4C.