From AI to wearables: VCU’s Wright Center awards four NIH-funded grants to accelerate medical research

By Christopher Richmond

Four interdisciplinary research projects earned a total of $100,000 in translational science grants from the C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research at Virginia Commonwealth University.

These $25,000 pilot awards are funded through the Wright Center's $27 million Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health, supporting the center's mission to identify and solve systemic hurdles in medical research.

Unlike traditional medical research, which focuses on specific diseases, these translational science grants fund the development of new methods, technologies, and research practices that are "disease agnostic." The goal is to create generalizable solutions that can be applied across many different fields of medicine to make the journey from laboratory discovery to patient care faster and more efficient.

"The purpose of these awards is to improve the translational process," said F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., director of the Wright Center. "By identifying and overcoming the scientific and operational hurdles - or bottlenecks - that slow down research, we aren't just supporting four studies; we are developing a more effective framework for all future medical research at VCU and beyond."

The 2026 awardees and their projects:

Juan Pablo Arab, M.D., School of Medicine, and Ekaterina Smirnova, Ph.D., School of Public Health

"Wearable Biosensors for Accurate Detection of Alcohol Use in Patients with Alcohol-associated Liver Disease"

Juan Pablo Arab, M.D., School of Medicine, and Ekaterina Smirnova, Ph.D., School of Public Health

Ekaterina Smirnova, Ph.D., an associate professor in the School of Public Health, and Juan Pablo Arab, M.D., an associate professor in the School of Medicine and the inaugural director of alcohol sciences at the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health, aim to leverage emerging wearable technology to provide objective, real-world monitoring of alcohol use in patients with liver disease.

This project seeks to overcome the unreliability of patient self-reporting, creating a new validated standard for detecting heavy drinking episodes that can be translated to treating many other alcohol-related conditions.

"This project addresses a major translational bottleneck in alcohol-associated liver disease: our inability to accurately measure alcohol use in patients' real-world environments," said Arab. "A major strength of this work is its multidisciplinary nature, bringing together clinical hepatology and quantitative expertise in collaboration with Dr. Ekaterina Smirnova, whose leadership in statistics and wearable health technology is helping move this field forward."

Arab said the pilot award supports the integration of wearable biosensors with established biomarkers, such as phosphatidylethanol (PEth), which is a direct metabolite of ethanol measurable in the blood. This approach allows for the collection of data required to transition from subjective self-reports to more precise and scalable monitoring solutions.

"This support from the Wright Center is an important step toward improving risk stratification, strengthening clinical research and ultimately developing better interventions for our patients," he said.

Na Bo, Ph.D., School of Public Health

"Advancing Precision Medicine: Novel Statistical and AI Methods to Characterize Treatment Heterogeneity in Survival Data"

Na Bo, Ph.D., School of Public Health

Na Bo, Ph.D., an assistant professor in VCU's School of Public Health, is seeking to address a critical barrier in precision medicine: while randomized clinical trials provide valuable insights by estimating the overall treatment effect in the study population, what works well for the average patient may not work for everyone. By developing novel AI-powered prediction models, her team aims to help doctors accurately predict how individual patients - not just the "average" patient - will respond to specific treatments based on their unique medical profiles.

"This research project focuses on developing novel statistical methods and clinician-facing computational tools to characterize heterogeneous treatment effects in survival data," Bo said.

Bo explained that the project answers a crucial translational science question: "Will a patient survive longer or have a delayed disease progression if taking a treatment versus an alternative?"

Bo said the work is generalizable to many translational science areas such as cardiology, pulmonary, psychiatry, hepatology, etc. for targeted therapy development and optimal treatment decision-making at the point of care. The grant helps to access data, develop the software and disseminate the work to broader clinician-scientists and statistics communities."

Erin Britton, Ph.D., School of Public Health

"Building a Virginia APCD Training Platform for a Data-Proficient Research Workforce"

Erin Britton, Ph.D., School of Public Health

Erin L. Britton, Ph.D., an assistant professor in VCU's School of Public Health, is targeting the technical bottleneck that prevents researchers from effectively using the Virginia All-Payer Claims Database. Designed to support healthcare research and decision-making, the database is a powerful health data resource enabling researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to better understand healthcare utilization, costs and outcomes across Virginia. However, this data is complex and protected for patient privacy, making it difficult for researchers to use. This creates a major bottleneck, where too few people with the right skills can use it to answer critical health questions.

Britton's project aims to create a "high-fidelity synthetic dataset" - a safe practice environment that mimics real healthcare data without compromising patient privacy - to train a new generation of data-proficient researchers.

"To accelerate translational research and support evidence-based healthcare policy around things like tobacco use and insurance coverage for doula care, we need to combine rigorous study designs with real-world data; and building that expertise requires practice," Britton said. "My pilot addresses the growing demand for research using real-world data that was not collected for research by building a hands-on learning opportunity. The Wright Center's support is an investment in expanding research capacity at our university and will help me efficiently train data-proficient collaborators to advance research on reducing care fragmentation."

Karen Chartier, Ph.D., School of Social Work, and Ananda Amstadter, Ph.D., School of Medicine

"Advancing Translational Science through Genome-Exome Data Integration across Ancestral Populations"

Karen Chartier, Ph.D., School of Social Work, and Ananda Amstadter, Ph.D., School of Medicine

Karen G. Chartier, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Social Work, and Ananda B. Amstadter, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Medicine, are working to modernize the long-standing Spit for Science registry, a unique resource with over 15,000 participants. Chartier and Amstadter will implement advanced genotyping technology to better capture rare genetic variants across the ancestry continuum, ensuring that the next generation of personalized medicine tools works for everyone, not just those of European descent.

"Genetic research holds great promise for improving health outcomes, but many studies have historically focused on individuals of European ancestry, which limits our understanding of how genetic factors influence health across different populations and can lead to medical tools and treatments that don't work equally well for everyone," according to the researchers.

By modernizing genotyping methods and refining analytical tools, the researchers hope this project will support the downstream discovery of genetic factors linked to hundreds of behavioral and emotional health outcomes measured across time. The researchers said the Wright Center funding will help their project produce a generalizable solution for this common bottleneck in genetics-informed translational research.

For more information about the Wright Center's pilot grant programs and other funding opportunities, visit cctr.vcu.edu.