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Three projects.
One winner.
$100,000.
Since 2012, we have awarded over a dozen research projects with $100,000 BRIght Futures Prizes, supported by the philanthropic contributions to the BRIght Futures Fund. These are just some of the exciting ideas and projects that have been transformed in large part due to donor support.
For most of the virtual event where we will announce the winner, voting will be still be open, so you will have a last-minute chance to ask your own questions as well as to vote for the winning project which will get a $100,000 award!
Join us virtually on Thursday, September 12th from 5-6PM ET for the Bright Futures Prize Showcase.
Step 1 Read about each project to learn more about their incredible research, then decide which project gets your vote.
Step 2 Cast Your Vote! Your votes will decide which of the projects receives the $100,000 Bright Futures Prize.
Step 3 Register to attend the Virtual Bright Futures Prize Showcase on September 12th at 5PM ET where we will announce the winner live.
Step 4 Share the Bright Futures Prize competition so that others can vote for the projects that spark their curiosity, too!
Adverse drug reactions are a major yet underrecognized public health problem. Roughly 23 million people nationwide and an astounding 10 to 20 percent of all hospitalized patients will experience an adverse drug reaction. Drug hypersensitivity reactions (DHRs) are a common type of adverse reaction. Individuals of any age, sex, race/ethnicity, and from across the globe can be affected by DHRs, and any drug (prescription, over-the-counter medication, herbal supplement, etc.) can cause a reaction. Reactions are unpredictable, and they can be severe or even deadly. Despite the magnitude of this issue, we currently lack a reliable test to predict and prevent these types of reactions.
Importantly, we also lack a reliable test to identify the drug that caused a reaction. Because of this, if a patient develops a DHR, they may have to stop multiple or even all their medications. This includes life-saving medications, for example their cancer therapy, treatment for infections, and the like.
We are committed to solving this problem by developing a test to prevent DHRs and to identify the causative drug when reactions occur. Our efforts have the potential to transform clinical care for patients across all fields of medicine and around the world.
We will develop a test that does two things. First, it will screen patients to identify those at risk of developing a DHR before starting high-risk medications. Second, it will identify which medication is causing a DHR when a patient with a reaction is on multiple treatments simultaneously.
Our novel approach uses easily obtainable skin and blood samples, which can be collected at the hospital or clinic in under 10 minutes. Samples are processed in the laboratory to study a specific type of immune cell, a T cell, that causes DHRs. Each T cell in a patient has a unique signature, like a fingerprint. By studying these ‘fingerprints’ using our approach, we can determine whether a patient is at risk for/reacting to a specific drug. We can then tell patients and their doctors which drug(s) should be stopped or avoided, and which are safe to take.
Our proposed work builds directly on our extensive preliminary data from real patients. My team and I have significant experience with the methodologies we plan to use, and we have access to a high volume of patients with active or recent DHR for our study. Furthermore, we have expert collaborators, all of whom are committed to ensuring the success of this project.
Developing a simple laboratory test that can screen individuals to prevent DHRs and identify the drug causing a reaction could be life-changing and even lifesaving. Such a test would inform treatment decisions and improve clinical outcomes by allowing patients to continue receiving essential medications while preventing DHRs.
Developing and evaluating the efficacy of this test requires funding and resources. With support from BRIght Futures, we can optimize this test in our laboratory, evaluate its efficacy across a breadth of patients and clinical settings, and ultimately scale the test to be used in laboratories across the nation and globe.
Kimberly Blumenthal, MD, MSC
Director of Research in the Center for Drug and Vaccine Allergy, Co-Director of Rheumatology and Allergy Clinical Epidemiology Research Center, Department of Allergy & Immunology, Massachusetts General Hospital
Manuel Garber, PhD
Professor, Department of Genomics and Computational Biology, University of Massachusetts T.H. Chan School of Medicine
Megan Noe, MD, MPH
Director, Clinical Research, Department of Dermatology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Our BRIght Futures project aims to create a detailed map of the genes responsible for the development of neurodegenerative diseases and identify how cells respond to different treatment types. To do this, we will develop new gene editing techniques to advance research and drug development for neurodegenerative diseases like dementia and Parkinson’s disease—both debilitating conditions without adequate treatments or cures.
These conditions have strong genetic origins. When certain genes don’t work as they should it can cause brain cells, or neurons, to malfunction. Most research on neuron function uses animal models, like mice. However, human neurons provide the best platform to understand how our genome can influence brain diseases.
Typically, human neurons need to be obtain from brain samples collected after death, which only show the disease’s end stages. Instead, we’re using a method to grow neurons in a petri dish from stem cells, allowing us to directly apply our gene editing techniques to these lab-grown human cells.
Using CRISPR technology—a way of editing the genome—to selectively deactivate specific genes in neurons, we hope to understand what causes these neurons to malfunction and die.
We will engineer stem cells from healthy living adults to include two additional genes: Cas9, the protein necessary for gene editing, and α-Synuclein, the protein that cause diseases in the brains of patients with Dementia with Lewy Bodies and Parkinson’s disease. After transforming these stem cells into neurons in the lab, we will use CRISPR gene editing to alter the activity of around 200 genes linked to this protein clumping. We will then analyze each neuron separately to assess how these different genes affect disease development. More specifically, we will perform single-cell transcriptomics profiling, a technology that allows us to identify active or “turned on” genes in brain cells and how this gene activity affects brain health.
Our project combines advanced experimental and computational methods, so we will collaborate with Dr. Vikram Khurana’s group for cell engineering. Together, our team has extensive experience with stem-cell models, single-cell technologies, and gene editing. We have also conducted extensive research on how abnormal protein clumping contributes to disease using stem-cell models.
By 2030, roughly 10 million people in the United States will be living with a neurodegenerative disease. The vast majority of these conditions still lack adequate treatments or cures and significantly impact quality of life. The high cost of care for these conditions creates a substantial societal and financial burden on individual finances, the economy, and the healthcare system.
Stem cell models allow us to explore, test, and treat the affected cells in a petri dish before testing them on humans. By understanding disease mechanisms using human models in the lab, we can facilitate a more accurate and efficient drug development process, bringing new treatments to clinical trials in a faster and safer way. Our solution ultimately seeks to accelerate the delivery of new drugs to patients and better inform clinical trials.
The BRIght Futures prize will provide us with the funding and resources necessary to generate new disease models using stem cells compatible with CRISPR gene editing and single-cell transcriptomics profiling technology.
Using this technology incurs high upfront costs, and BRIght Futures will enable us to move this work forward. The data this technology generates will provide valuable insights into how specific genes contribute to the death or survival of human neurons.
Vikram Khurana, MD, PhD
Department of Neurology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Susanna Mierau, MD, DPhil
Department of Neurology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Despite the best patient safety and quality protocols, Hospital Acquired Infections (HAIs) can affect any patient, and those living with highly immunocompromising conditions like cancer are most vulnerable, as they can acquire infections from germs that naturally live in their own bodies in addition to germs from the hospital environment. Notably, these infections can make even the best cancer treatments challenging.
Contracting an infection can derail a patient’s treatment plan, putting their health and safety at further risk. These infections contribute to high rates of death and critical illness and impose tens of thousands of dollars in costs to individuals and the healthcare system.
If we can better understand how these germs spread and identify outbreaks early, we can implement timely preventative measures to control disease outbreaks in the hospital or stop them before they start. Improving our understanding of infection transmission and improving outbreak detection in hospitals will allow us to better protect our most vulnerable patients.
We will develop a robust infrastructure within the hospital to proactively sequence the genomes of all pathogens detected, not just those attributed to outbreaks, from patients in the oncology and intensive care units (ICU) at the Brigham over four months. We will use the data to map out how pathogens are related to one another and which patients are more susceptible to different forms of infections. This transmission map will help us determine which infections were acquired in-house and what led to their transmission. This will lay the groundwork for interventions to reduce infections, improve patient outcomes, and prevent the expansion of outbreaks.
While we are initially focusing our efforts on cancer and ICU wards, this is only a starting point. We ultimately strive to apply the data collected and transmission maps created in the initial phase of our project to inform care for all patients with immunocompromising conditions, including our youngest patients in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
These findings will be able to provide insights into HAIs beyond the Brigham to hospitals nationwide. Despite efforts to prevent infection, HAIs remain a persistent, national healthcare problem and there is much work to be done. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, on any given day, about one in 31 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection, with more than 680,000 infections and billions of dollars in excess health care costs related to HAIs across the United States every year. Reducing and eliminating HAIs could improve care, save lives and reduce healthcare spending.
The BRIght Futures Prize will allow us to conduct a full four-month pilot study using whole genome sequencing to analyze all bacterial isolates from patients in oncology and related ICUs at the Brigham. We will also conduct an epidemiological investigation into all patients with closely related pathogens. This will enable us to draw conclusions about hospital procedures and practices linked to infections and develop a larger proposal to use pathogen genetic analysis in routine hospital care.
With this initial funding, we will employ the most advanced genetic sequencing techniques to build scalable infection transmission maps and tools. These tools will inform patient care and infection control in real time to stop disease outbreaks.
Lynn Bry, MD, PhD
Director, Massachusetts Host-Microbiome Center + Crimson Core
Associate Medical Director, Clinical Microbiology, CAMD
Associate Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School
Dept. Pathology, Brigham & Women’s Hospital
Manfred Brigl, MD
Director, Clinical Microbiology Laboratory
Assistant Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School
Dept. Pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Chanu Rhee, MD MPH
Associate Professor of Population Medicine and Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Associate Hospital Epidemiologist, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Physician, Divisions of Infectious Diseases and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine
Michael Klompas MD, MPH
Hospital Epidemiologist, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Professor of Medicine and Population Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Sanjat Kanjilal, MD MPH
Assistant Professor | Dept of Population Medicine | Harvard Medical School & Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute
Associate Medical Director of Microbiology | Brigham & Women’s Hospital
Associate Physician | Division of Infectious Diseases | Brigham & Women’s Hospital
After you’ve learned a bit about each project, we welcome you to cast your vote for the project you think should receive the $100,000 Bright Futures Prize this year.
We will be announcing the winner at a Bright Futures Prize Showcase on September 12th from 5PM ET. This virtual event will be viewed around the world as the final votes come in, so be sure to register to attend the virtual event and see the winner announced live.
Voting opens on August 26th and will close on September 12th. Voting will close during the live event before the announcement of the winner, at approximately 5:50PM ET.
Do you work at the Brigham? Still looking for a specific resource?