12 Mar Announcing the 2025 ITHS Pilot Awardees
The Institute of Translational Health Sciences is pleased to announce the Pilot Award recipients for 2025. The Pilot program is designed to inspire innovative and collaborative research aimed at improving overall human health. This year’s awardees were selected from a diverse group of applicants whose research spans the translational science spectrum, including basic research, clinical implementation, public health, and clinical and pre-clinical research.
Pilot funding offers investigators the opportunity to obtain preliminary data in order to establish a proof of concept and seek larger funding amounts. Investigators supported by the Pilot Program are expanding knowledge in perinatal care, neurodegenerative disease, biologics, infectious disease, community health and cancer research.
You can learn more about all of the awards ITHS offers and past recipients on our Pilots Program page.
This Year’s Awardees
ITHS offered pilot funding in three categories for 2025: Early-Stage Product Development, and Translation Research Partnership Awards for Academic Community Partnerships and for New Interdisciplinary Academic Partnerships.
Early-Stage Product Development Award
This award is designed to help translate clinically relevant research discoveries toward development of commercial products that improve human health. Projects should be designed to demonstrate or strengthen critical evidence that the envisioned product accomplishes its health-related purpose with respect to safety, efficacy, scalability, feasibility or clinical utility (i.e., proof of concept).
This year, we awarded two projects the Early-Stage Product Development Award.
- Dr. Ayọ̀kúnlé Ọlánrewájú of the University of Washington (UW) College of Engineering and School of Medicine received the award for a project called “CandyCollect Open to Closed (O2C) Microfluidic system for Rapid and User-Centric Detection of Group A Streptococcus.”
- Dr. Konrad Meister from the Boise State University Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry and Dr. Sophia Theodossiou from the Boise State University College of Engineering will collaborate on their project “Silk Microneedle Patches for Novel Biologics Delivery.”
Academic Community Partnership Award
This awards supports collaborations between academic and community investigators in projects that investigate a community-based health problem, disseminate evidence-based health innovations into practice, target health promotion or prevention, or examine ways to enhance or implement sustainable health programs in community settings. Applications that propose research to plan or implement a new intervention or innovation in clinical settings are especially encouraged for this award.
This year there are two projects that will recieve the Academic Community Partnerships award.
- Dr. Taylor Neher and Dr. Megan L. Smith from the Boise State University School of Public and Population Health will partner with St. Luke’s Health System on their project, “Improving Idaho Youth Well-Being Outcomes Through Community Capacity Building.”
- Dr. Marcy Hanson from the Montana State University Mark and Robyn Jones School of Nursing and Dr. Sarah Reese from the University of Montana School of Social Work will partner with the Missoula County Perinatal Substance Use Network. Their project is called “Safe Pathways to Perinatal Care for People Using Substances: An Academic Community Partnership.”
New Interdisciplinary Academic Partnership Awards
This award is designed to encourage and support the formation and development of partnerships in projects that address critical transitions in translational research in innovative ways, with the potential to become long-term collaborations showing a deep commitment to a common goal.
ITHS is giving these awards to two new teams this year.
- Dr. Gabriel Cler of the UW Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences will collaborate with Dr. Jeanne Gallée of the UW School of Medicine on a project called, “Acoustic Characteristics of Prosody in Stroke and Neurodegenerative Disease.”
- Dr. Danny Miller of Seattle Children’s and the UW Departments of Pediatrics and Laboratory Medicine & Pathology and Dr. Cecilia CS Yeung of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Division of Translational Science & Therapeutics will partner on their project “Comprehensive and rapid cancer diagnostic testing using methylation-based classification of long-read sequencing data.”
The next round of applications for the awards above opens in May 2025 but our Catalyst and Voucher awards are offered quarterly and they might be just what you need to get your translational science project finished. Check out all our awards now!
