There are plenty of benefits that come with major academic health systems like UNC Health. Doctors and nurses get to work alongside researchers studying new advances in medical science, researchers get a first-hand look at the fundamentals of medical practice, and patients get access to a wealth of resources and specialists. And as the science of medicine expands, researchers and clinicians can even forge new connections to help the healthcare system evolve.
Tessa Andermann, an infectious disease researcher with the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases at UNC School of Medicine, is now working on forging one of those connections. Andermann studies interactions between the gut microbiome and infections in people with immune system deficiencies—and to do some of her research, she needs bacterial samples isolated from immunocompromised patients. So now, Andermann and her colleagues, David van Duin and Kevin Alby, are creating a process to acquire those samples directly from the UNC hospital system through a Clinical and Translational Science (CTS) Pilot Program grant from the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute and help from two different units of the TraCS Informatics and Data Sciences group.