The University of Minnesota Undergraduate Mock Trial Association placed 15th out of more than 600 teams at a national competition earlier this month.

Mock trial is a student group that teaches legal and public speaking skills through practice cases and court proceedings. The team travels the country competing against other colleges at tournaments.

“We have a very straightforward, Midwesterner style, and I think that’s something a lot of judges like. We have very believable, very credible witnesses,” Harshita Kalidindi, a fourth-year University student and mock trial member, said.

At the national competition earlier this month, each of the 48 qualifying teams argued both sides of a specific case. The University’s team received the case three weeks before nationals and immediately began preparing arguments for both the defense and prosecution.

“Nationals is kind of a rat race to see who can come up with the best theory the fastest. You need to get an understanding of the case very quickly. It was intense,” Kendall Nowlan, a third-year University student and mock trial member, said.

This year, the case at the national tournament involved a dispute between a landlord and tenant over a bedbug infestation.

“I really enjoyed the national case. It related a lot more with everyone — it seems everyone has some sort of a bad experience with bed bugs,” Grace Hertzog, a first-year University student and mock trial member, said.

Colin Abress, the mock trial association president and third-year University student, won an All-American Award, a prize given to both the top ten witnesses and attorneys at nationals, for his work as an expert witness as an insect expert.

Beginning in the fall semester, the mock trial team competed at invitationals, regionals and opening round championships tournaments before attending nationals.

The University’s mock trial team qualified for nationals last year as well. However, the team could not compete when the season was canceled last March because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year’s mock trial team also lost members as a result of the pandemic. The team that competed at the national tournament consisted of nine students.

Abress said he attributes the team’s success to the coaches, talented students and lots of preparation. The team’s practices leading up to nationals consisted of hours on Zoom almost every day, whether deciding how to play a witness or creating a defense.

While competing via Zoom allowed the team to attend more invitational tournaments without added costs, Abress said the experience lacked the same sense of community.

“I think the social element was really different this year. We didn’t get to be in person with our team and travel and stay at hotels together, which is a lot of the bonding of mock trial,” Kalidindi said. “But there’s still some of that bonding that came through with being on a phone call with them for like, ten hours a week.”

Hertzog said being a first-year student during the pandemic has made it more difficult to compete and connect with her team. She said it was hard to seem engaged while sitting in a chair on Zoom because she typically speaks with her body during mock trials.

Nowlan said he feels bad for the students who joined during the pandemic and have not gotten the chance to experience the bonding and relationship-building that comes with traveling across the country to compete. “I’m really looking forward to being in person,” he said.

Most of those on the mock trial team came to college with some prior experience from high school or with law school in mind. Kalidindi said she joined mock trial thinking it would just be an extracurricular activity, but the experience has convinced her she wants to attend law school.

Students planning a career in the legal field are not the only ones on the mock trial team. Nowlan joined last year after he had the opportunity to travel with and watch his brother compete as a part of the University’s mock trial team.

“I don’t plan on going to law school. I don’t really need an understanding of the rules of evidence,” Nowlan said. “But I use [mock trial] as a creative outlet where I can go up and improve my public speaking skills by critical thinking, and I get to act and pretend I’m some character.”

By following sets of twins from age 11 to adulthood, University of Minnesota researchers have found that cannabis use has few impacts on long-term cognitive abilities.

Out of 2,410 sets of identical twins from Minnesota, only 364 had differing cannabis use between siblings, making them eligible for the study. Following twins has allowed the researchers to observe differences in cannabis usage with fewer variables at play.

“The sample of twins is representative of the population of the whole state of Minnesota,” said Dr. Steve Malone, the study co-author and Institute for Child Development (ICD) researcher. “But I think it’s a really important feature of the design, that these samples are representative of the population of us as a whole.”

Dr. Jonathan Schaefer, an ICD postdoctoral researcher at the University, joined the study two years ago. University researchers Dr. William Iacono and Dr. Matt McGue started the study in the 1990s.

The ongoing study observes cognitive, mental health and socioeconomic outcomes of cannabis use. The twins have been given a baseline assessment every two years that includes an electroencephalogram (EEG). The researchers also ask the sets of twins to self-report on topics such as the frequency of their cannabis use and the physical effects.

The twins are also tested on their cognitive abilities through vocabulary, memory and perception tests. The long-term cognitive differences have been small.

Dr. Monica Luciana, a psychology professor and research collaborator, said the idea that adolescent cannabis use exacerbates mental health issues and cognitive impairment is a common notion.

“We concluded that there’s very little evidence that cannabis has dramatic effects on cognitive ability, at least from adolescence into adulthood,” Schaefer said.

While the twins using more cannabis are meeting the criteria for more mental health problems, are doing worse in terms of socioeconomic status and scoring slightly lower on vocabulary tests, this is not directly linked to cannabis use, Malone said.

Instead, the researchers’ findings suggest that adolescent cannabis use may cause academic or motivational difficulties that may affect a person’s educational and occupational status later in their life, he said.

Seventy-six percent of the heavier cannabis-using twins continued education beyond high school, compared to 82% of the lighter-use or sober twins. The grade point average differs by an average of approximately 0.2 points between the two siblings.

When the study began, researchers focused on identifying factors that led to cannabis use. As the twins got older, the researchers pivoted to observing the long-term effects of cannabis use. The immediate focus of the study changes to reflect concerns or issues that are relevant to the stage of life the participants are in, Malone said.

“If you follow folks long enough you can really start to look at the difference between early substance use and physical health outcomes,” Schaefer said. “Or even between substance use and signs of early cognitive decline.”

The researchers have also been collaborating with a complementary twin study at the University of Colorado Boulder, using the same twin group they have been following since the 90s. The two studies are as symmetrical as possible to compare Minnesota to Colorado, a state that legalized recreational cannabis use, to observe legalization’s impacts on substance use.

“There’s a lot of interest nowadays, especially in light of efforts toward cannabis legalization, how cannabis affects behavior, how it affects the brain and particularly whether its effects are more pronounced in some age groups relative to others,” Luciana said.

Schaefer said he would like to replicate the University of Minnesota’s twin study using more recent data with a new group to see if the changes to cannabis use since the 90s, such as increased potency, dosage and a variety of new forms have made an impact.

Third-year University of Minnesota student Priscilla Hagerman has been advocating for cities to create gender equality resolutions during her time at World Without Genocide (WWG), an organization working to prevent genocide.

Hagerman said her role as advocacy coordinator for the University’s Model United Nations prompted her to pursue human rights advocacy work. She has been working on WWG’s Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) efforts during this semester.

This convention addresses issues of gender discrimination such as pay inequality and violence against women. All but six countries have ratified CEDAW: Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Palau, Tonga and the United States.

“I was really excited to have the opportunity to work with an organization that promotes human rights outside of just studying it and learning about different issues, actually being able to take more of a hands-on approach,” Hagerman said.

Since the United States as a nation has not ratified the convention, the 100 Cities for CEDAW campaign aims to bring ordinances to prevent gendered violence in 100 cities. The aim, advocates say, is to show there is enough countrywide support for CEDAW. The convention has not been passed at the U.S. Senate level, despite bipartisan support in the past.

While interning for WWG, Hagerman has helped the national campaign bring the convention to a vote in Appleton, Wisconsin.

“Once it’s passed nationally there is actual accountability for the U.S. to the international community to uphold certain standards and women’s rights,” Hagerman said.

Dr. Ellen Kennedy, WWG executive director, said violence against women is a public health emergency.

“Even though we say [CEDAW] is a human rights bill for women, it really raises the issue of human rights broadly across race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender identity and sexual orientation,” she said.

In order to propose the convention to Appleton, WWG collaborated with the Mid-Day Women’s Alliance (MDWA), a nonprofit organization that works to educate and gain support from Appleton’s communities in an effort to provide resources to women. Hagerman compiled research and spoke about violence against women earlier this month at the webinar “Ending Discrimination against Women Locally and Globally,” a collaboration between WWG and MDWA to educate other organizations and individuals.

The Appleton Human Resources Committee will discuss CEDAW at their next meeting in April. Appleton Mayor Jake Woodford has voiced his support for their efforts.

“There was a big belief that we would need to ratify the equal rights amendment before we would be able to ratify CEDAW. That has been disproven, and that is why the effort to get these cities for CEDAW has really taken a push,” Sandi Rohde, the legislative co-chair of MDWA, said.

If CEDAW is ratified on a federal level, which is the campaign’s goal, the U.S. would be required to participate in accountability measures such as submitting reports on human rights issues every few years. So far, six cities in Minnesota, including the Twin Cities, and two in Wisconsin have passed CEDAW resolutions.

“Depending on how things go with Appleton, there are people kind of already watching to see, potentially the Green Bay area, to be the next [city,]” Rohde said.

Through educating others about human rights, advocates can better hold their legislatures accountable, she said. The goal is that by the time CEDAW reaches a vote at the federal level, senators are ready to sign it.

“I think [CEDAW not yet being ratified in the U.S.] definitely sends a message that women’s rights aren’t one of the most important things. It sends a message that it’s not something that [the U.S. is] fully committed to,” Hagerman said.

University of Minnesota researchers are conducting animal trials for a newly developed synthetic heart valve, which can grow with its recipient.

These valves can be used for those with congenital heart defects (CHDs), the most common type of birth defect, affecting about 40,000 babies in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These heart defects are present at birth and can affect the function of a baby’s heart.

Currently, the only options for children with CHDs are valves that can defect or require numerous open-heart surgeries as the child outgrows the valve. Pediatric patients are lucky to get five years of use out of current devices, University biomedical engineering researcher Zeeshan Syedain said.

“The problem right now is that none of the materials grow,” said Dr. Robert Tranquillo, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Researchers from the University’s Medical School and College of Science and Engineering developed this new valve and recently concluded a yearlong study on its efficacy. The study was published earlier this month in Science Translational Medicine, a medical journal by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The valve has shown its ability to grow with lamb recipients, giving the implanted tissue the same living capabilities as real tissue, Syedain said.

“We’re going to use this to develop valves that are more durable, that can last longer and that can be part of your own body rather than a foreign material, which is what they are now,” Richard Bianco, a professor of surgery at the Medical School, said.

Syedain said the researchers’ hope is to replace tissue that has stopped functioning or never properly functioned with their synthetic tissue that will work for the rest of the patient’s life.

Since implanting their first sheep in 2017, University researchers have made substantial improvements in both material and design, Tranquillo said.

This valve-making technology has been patented and licensed to Vascudyne, a University start-up company for which Tranquillo is a consultant.

The researchers chose lambs for testing because of their size and quick transition to adulthood. These factors allowed researchers to use clinical-sized devices and measure synthetic valve growth over a short time.

“We need to mimic the clinical intent as close as possible,” Bianco said.

To create the synthetic valve, researchers used a single donor lamb’s cells. They removed the donor cells from the tissue and created a material that any recipient sheep can use. When the new material was implanted in the recipient sheep, it did not induce a negative immune response, Syedain said.

“This has been the holy grail,” Bianco said.

After they implanted the new valve, the recipient lamb’s cells started to populate the valve, allowing it to grow with them.

“You have a material that is essentially a cell product but is something that is cellular and can be stored and implanted into any patient,” Tranquillo said.

This material can be preprepared and stored for at least six months. The technology also has the potential to be used for vascular grafts for people with dialysis, kidney disease or peripheral artery disease or for those in need of a bypass graft, Syedain said.

In this most recent study, three of the seven sheep’s valve implants were deemed successful after a year, meaning the valves did not leak or experience blockages.

The researchers are conducting another yearlong sheep study, which will resemble a clinical trial as closely as possible. Bianco said the team hopes to get the Food and Drug Administration’s approval to begin human trials.

“I want the device that would go into a human, and I want to test that device. So a lot more regulations but essentially the same study with more animals,” Bianco said.

With the FDA’s approval, proper funding and a team including pediatric surgeons to implement the valve, researchers could start human trials within a year or two, Tranquillo said. The researchers could conduct a clinical trial observing the synthetic valve’s use in three to four years.

“But there’s a lot of milestones to be achieved before that,” Tranquillo said.

On Monday, March 1, fourth-year University of Minnesota student Musab Hussein and his brother Lukman Hussein went to the Hanson Hall computer lab to rent a computer and print notes for his midterm that night. Instead, they were yelled at by a Carlson School of Management staff member, and Musab Hussein was denied the resource he needed.

A staff member working at the computer lab that night immediately seemed apprehensive, Musab Hussein said. Musab Hussein previously had a job in that computer lab and recognized the employee, but said the worker disputed recognizing him.

The worker denied Musab Hussein a laptop rental, even though Musab Hussein is a student and used his U Card to prove authentication.

“‘How can I trust you? You’re not a Carlson student’,” Musab Hussein said the worker responded to him.

When two started arguing, Lukman Hussein said he began filming to have proof. He recorded the employee calling for security, giving the brothers the middle finger and locking them out of the computer lab with Musab Hussein’s midterm notes still inside.

This was when I become uncomfortable and started recording to assure to everyone how I was being treated. I left Hanson Hall and went to my car thinking that everything will be resolved but nah. pic.twitter.com/cQryXU28ZF

— M (@Nomorewlh) March 2, 2021

“I’m hyperventilating, I’m pissed off. So, me and my brother went to our car,” Musab Hussein said. “Then in two minutes, we see two cop cars.”

Musab Hussein added he was upset that the Carlson employee called the cops. He said he had to control his anxiety to have a calm conversation with them.

“They confirmed that I was a student and stuff, and then the cop became comfortable with us,” he said.

Despite a non-confrontational ending with the police, Musab Hussein said he felt anxious about the interaction and made sure to record the police interaction.

Lukman Hussein said he was shocked by the discrimination they both faced.

“My brother tells me about a lot of racism that he experiences, but it’s different actually experiencing it,” he said.

Carlson’s computer lab resources are crucial to his academic success, Musab Hussein said. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, he would do school work in the labs until they closed. He told his adviser about the incident, who then rented him a laptop so he could take his midterm that was due the same night.

Without his notes and his anxiety starting to return, Musab Hussein said he took the midterm and then sat on his bed hoping the situation would not affect his ability to pass the class.

“This situation is messed up. The fact that low-income students basically have to fight for resources,” he said.

Musab Hussein said he experiences imposter syndrome in Carlson, which can cause a person — usually high achievers — to doubt their own abilities or feel like a fraud.

“I’m a senior and I’ve never really felt like I belong, except when I go to the student groups,” he said.

These experiences of discrimination are not new to Carlson, according to Jael Kerandi, the former Minnesota Student Association President and Carlson Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee member.

“If you’re asking for the interaction that students have had, I think that culture is sometimes indescribable because it’s a feeling,” she said. “There’s a certain culture that has been perpetuated, there’s a certain way in which people operate, there’s a certain space in which you don’t feel welcome. This is constant at the Carlson School.”

About 18.2% of Carlson students are people of color. Black students make up even less of the Carlson student body, about 3%.

Carlson Dean Sri Zaheer sent an email to Carlson students two days after Musab Hussein interacted with Norman, saying the matter was “being investigated.” There have been no updates on the investigation since the email was sent out, and Musab Hussein said he has not had any direct conversations with the school.

Kerandi said Black students at Carlson have to support one another, as opposed to relying on the administration to provide help.

“Sometimes what gets lost is how much the Black community at Carlson supports the Black community at Carlson,” she said. “I think that there’s been more damage caused to this community than there has been healing. Specifically with our Black students.”

Student groups, such as the Carlson Business Board, and individual students have reached out to Musab Hussein to show support and allyship. The Business Board expressed their disapproval of the incident to Carlson via email asking that the administration investigate “thoroughly without bias from an external review.” If Norman does not receive consequences for the incident, the board stated that “this directly communicates the lack of care and appreciation” for Black students.

“As fellow Black peers within the Carlson community, we are appalled. We are disheartened, disappointed, dispirited, yet not surprised,” the letter stated. “Black and African-American students in Carlson routinely face racism and discrimination in various forms.”

Zaheer’s email states that the Dean’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee (DEIC) is “working to enhance our efforts and make meaningful progress.”

“It was such a troubling and upsetting event,” co-chair of the DEIC Pervin Shroff said. “We need to show the students that we are behind them, and we have committed to do better for them.”

DEIC co-chair Nora Anderson said the committee developed five pillars last summer to advise the dean on creating a more inclusive culture at Carlson; student experience, faculty and staff cultural competency, admissions and student recruitment, hiring practices and business community partnerships.

“In the aftermath of the incident on March 1, we’re continuing that work around all five pillars because it’s immensely important and these efforts have to be ongoing,” Anderson said. “That being said, what we heard loud and clear from the students and from members of our committee was that piece around Carlson culture and we need to do better.”

The DEIC has organized workshops for faculty and staff at the end of March to focus on recognizing and responding to bias and combating microaggressions. In addition, the committee hosts listening sessions over Zoom, where students are encouraged to share concerns and advise the committee on what issues to prioritize, such as improving the reporting processes for students.

Going forward, Musab Hussein and Lukman Hussein said they want Carlson administrators to take responsibility and make policy adjustments to implement consequences for staff misconduct.

Musab Hussein said he wants to see Carlson make changes with the same energy and commitment to diversity that they present on their social media platforms.

“They can also take this incident as a learning experience,” Lukman Hussein said. “There’s a lot of minority students that shared my brother’s same experience that they had. I was just so shocked.”

Several researchers and health experts are taking a community-engaged research approach to assist Minnesota and Wisconsin American Indian tribes in creating smoking cessation programs tailored to their cultures.

The number of American Indian people in Minnesota that experience lung cancer is at least double the number of any other racial or ethnic group, according to the American Lung Association.

As American Indian people have not historically felt heard by researchers, community-engaged research can be done poorly, said University of Minnesota assistant professor of medicine Dr. Abbie Begnaud.

“I’ve seen presentations about things that I thought should not be public and followed up on it with the tribe ⁠— what the presenter was doing ⁠— and they were appalled,” associate professor in the School of Public Health, Dr. Linda Frizzell said. During her experience as a provider and administrator with American Indian health systems, she interacted with many researchers.

When she worked as a client director for a tribe, she would receive regular phone calls from researchers, many of whom did not attempt to build relationships with the tribe. However, things have changed in the past ten years, and tribes now have the legal ability to control their research and data, even for research conducted under a federal grant. The data-sharing agreements, now used nationally by tribes, give the tribes control of the research, Frizzell said. If a researcher wants to present data on the tribe, it must be in writing.

For researchers, or those in academia looking to collaborate with American Indian tribes and communities, it is important to remain humble and responsive to tribal members, Frizzell said. Each tribe has its own culture.

American Indian tribes have the insights and wisdom to solve health inequity, but some may require outside tools, resources or financial support to do so, said Melissa Buffalo, interim CEO of the American Indian Cancer Foundation.

Tribes lead commercial smoking cessation efforts, researchers help

Dr. Dana Carroll, assistant professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the University’s School of Public Health, has provided guidance and technical assistance to some American Indian Cancer Foundation research projects that aim to understand the usage behaviors, perceptions and attitudes around commercial and traditional tobacco.

Carroll is collaborating with Minnesota and Wisconsin tribes to create culturally tailored smoking cessation programs. The Bad River Band Tribe of Lake Superior Chippewa has been collaborating with Carroll for about two years to develop a smoking cessation program that utilizes its oral history and traditional teachings to reduce commercial smoking. Programs that are culturally tailored and seek to incorporate a tribe’s traditions as the foundation can really help the community, member of the Bad River Tribe program implementation team Dylan Jennings said.

“Forms of colonization really have done damage to us in different ways. And, commercial isn’t our traditional form of tobacco,” he said. “We want to get people back to growing their own tobacco plants and making their own ceremonial mixtures so that we’re not playing into the commercial tobacco system.”

In early February, Carroll discussed her approach at a workgroup hosted by the University. Her approach uses community-based participatory research that involves tribes in developing and conducting research.

“The overall focus [of the project] is on reducing commercial smoking, but then it’s very driven by the community in their own way,” Carroll said. “That’s an exciting part to be around — never a dull moment.”

Carroll’s main role in these collaborations is to help set up and oversee research, apply for funding as needed, help write proposals and be up to speed on tobacco and lung cancer research. She said tribe members are busy, so she helps however she can. Carroll said she is committed to ensuring individuals within the tribe are heard throughout the process.

For example, researchers are collaborating to find the most respectful and beneficial way to implement screening in American Indian communities. Screening can identify lung cancer early and give someone a much better chance of cure or more effective treatment, she said.

An estimated less than 10% of the eligible U.S. population get screened for lung cancer. Barriers to accessing screenings lead researchers to suspect American Indian people are screened for lung cancer at even less than the national rate, Begnaud said.

Preserving traditional tobacco use

Many tribes are teaching awareness about the harm of commercial tobacco use, Buffalo said. She stressed the importance of commercial use education while still strengthening tribes’ relationship with traditional tobacco use.

“We really want researchers who want to have a long-term relationship beyond the project life,” Buffalo said.

Colonization restricted American Indian tribes’ access to traditional tobacco plants, leaving people to use commercial tobacco in place of traditional tobacco. This led to high rates of commercial use, especially cigarettes, according to research published in the American Journal of Public Health.

The distinction between tradition and commercial tobacco is very important, Frizzell said. Traditional tobacco is harvested from traditional plants, and unlike commercial tobacco, it does not have any smell and is generally used for ceremonies or offerings instead of smoking.

Traditional tobacco use is part of American Indian culture and has been for generations before and will be for generations to come, Buffalo said.

Working to reclaim Indigenous health

The University has a part in colonization that has been traumatic for tribes, which can cause reluctance to participate in the institution’s research, Carroll said. History also shows the maltreatment of tribes in research. It is also a common concern among other communities of color.

Buffalo said she sees the impact of cancer on her family, her communities and her staff.
“We really want to reclaim our Indigenous health,” she said. “We really do see a day where cancer is no longer the leading cause of death for our Native people.”

Collecting research and collaboration has been slowed during the pandemic, Carroll said.

“COVID-19 has been harsh on American Indians,” Frizzell said.

Despite complications of the pandemic, Carroll has been able to meet virtually with American Indian tribes. But COVID-19 has become such a prevalent issue for some tribes that they have decided to pause research.

The general population has become more stressed during the pandemic, and, anecdotally, smoking has seen an uptick, she said. Some tribes have told Carroll that they want to quit more now than ever because of health conditions due to smoking, making them more susceptible to COVID-19.

Bad River Tribe has adapted to collecting interviews from community members virtually, Jennings said. The pandemic has slowed but not stopped the collecting of information from people in the tribe: how they began smoking, when they started, what type of tobacco they use and what they know of tobacco and health information.

“Everybody knows somebody in our community that’s impacted negatively by smoking of commercial tobacco. So, everybody thought that trying to create something in this realm could be helpful to our community and hopefully in the long run improve health,” Jennings said.

University of Minnesota researchers found that iron deficiency in infants increases an individual’s chances of developing autism, depression and schizophrenia.

Dr. Michael Georgieff, executive vice chair and professor at the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, received an award for this research from the March of Dimes, a nonprofit that works to educate and advocate for healthcare for mothers and their infants. Georgieff’s research found that iron deficiency impacts the development of the hippocampus in infants.

It is not common practice to check a newborn’s iron levels. Infants’ iron levels are typically not screened until they are almost a year old. By then, the damage has been done, Georgieff said.

Screening for iron deficiency should be done earlier, assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics Dr. Phu Tran said. If the parent carrying the baby replenishes their body’s iron early enough, they can reverse deficiency in their infant. Tran discovered that external environmental factors change how genes in your brain work.

If the pregnant person has access to good maternal care, they may check their blood for iron deficiency during pregnancy, but not everyone has access to such care, Tran said.

Most iron deficiencies in infants are caused by insufficient iron intake by the parent during pregnancy. The iron demand in a pregnant person’s body increases quickly. If an individual comes into a pregnancy iron-deficient themself, it is much more difficult to supply the needed amount of iron to support their body and the baby.

The last stage of pregnancy through the first year and a half of a baby’s life is a critical time for developing their hippocampus, Georgieff said. Iron plays an important role in developing the hippocampus, which is an energy-demanding process, assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics Dr. Thomas Bastian said. While the brain is developing there are critical periods that, if interfered with, can impact the brain’s operations.

The hippocampus is responsible for a person’s learning and memory and allows them to differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar people, places and objects.

Building off of Georgieff and others’ work that shows long-term behavioral impairments due to lack of iron, Bastian said they are working to find a supplement that would allow a fuller recovery for an iron-deficient brain.

“The fetus is a very good ‘parasite.’ It’s very good at taking what it needs from the mom. But when the mom becomes iron deficient, there just isn’t enough to supply the whole system,” Georgieff said.

The researchers are studying iron deficiency because it is so prevalent among infants, Bastian said. Forty percent of pregnant women are anemic worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. About half of pregnancies in Minnesota are unplanned, leaving a pregnant person with little time to increase their iron intake, according to Georgieff.

Auditory recognition can help test infants’ hippocampi. By monitoring infants’ brain activity, researchers found they tune out their mothers’ voices because they sound familiar.

“If babies show the same response to the novel and familiar voice, it means that their hippocampus isn’t working that well,” Georgieff said.

The researchers’ studies with rats observed that if a rat looks at an unfamiliar object and familiar object for the same amount of time, that signals iron deficiency. In another experiment, they were able to reverse iron deficiency in rats at a later stage in life.

In addition to rat and mice models, Georgieff observed infants with iron deficiencies for the first ten years of their life and observed some remaining mental effects.

“This is a huge problem affecting global populations,” Tran said.

After years of testing on mice and dogs, a team of University of Minnesota researchers treated their first human patient for glioblastoma, an aggressive brain and spinal cancer, late last month.

There are several existing drug therapy options for cancer, such as Keytruda, Opdivo and Libtayo, that work to strengthen the immune system. However, this new treatment has a make-up and tumor suppression that is new to the medical field, in addition to activating the immune system to fight cancer cells.

Dr. Michael Olin, an associate professor in the oncology division of pediatrics at the University, has been working on this new treatment since 2012. “This is my baby,” he said.

“It’s very translatable to other diseases, to other cancers and potentially even infectious diseases,” Olin said.

Phase one of the human trial

Phase one of three of the trial will last about two years and treat up to 18 people. Three patients will be treated at a low dose before the trial is able to move onto a higher dose with three new patients. The team is taking a slower approach to testing the treatment due to guidance from the Food and Drug Administration.

“We’ve done other trials with what we call a rapid escalation design but [the FDA] thought that it was inappropriate given how new this drug is and not knowing exactly what the side effects would be,” pediatrics professor Dr. Christopher Moertel said.

Olin and Moertel have both remained at a distance from the trial so as to not to influence its outcome or analysis. Assistant professor in the Department of Neurology Dr. Elizabeth Neil, who started the previous trials in canines, is currently leading the human trial.

If the treatment is proven safe in three adults, the researchers can then expand to a pediatric trial. Despite the versatility of this new treatment, Olin said they chose to focus on brain cancer first because it is the cancer with the highest mortality rate for children.

Currently, the treatment is given in the form of an injection at the base of the neck where the lymph nodes associated with the brain are accessible. The location of the shot is specific to treating brain cancer. The treatment frequency is slowly reduced over time as the body starts to build immunity.

During phase one of the trial, the therapy will only be administered to volunteers who have already been treated for glioblastoma and are now seeing it return. Individuals in that situation are in the greatest need of help, Moertel said.

So far, the team has not seen any side effects from the animal or early human trials, Olin said.

When tested on mice in previous trials, the treatment was successful in fighting breast tumors, brain tumors and melanoma. In dogs, approximately one in five brain tumors were permanently eliminated.

Olin and Moertel started the company OX2 Therapeutics in 2016 to raise money for the trial. External investments allowed them to move forward much more quickly than if they had solely relied on grants and philanthropy to fund their technology, Moertel said.

How it works

In 2018, researchers James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on how cancer uses immune checkpoints to make the immune system less aggressive. Cancer is constantly sending out chemicals to inhibit T-cells, a type of white blood cell essential to the body’s immune system. When immune checkpoints are blocked, T-cells are able to fight cancer cells more effectively.

Building off of Allison and Honjo’s work, Olin discovered a simpler way to downgrade immune checkpoints by using a peptide chain to activate the immune system and control the inhibitors so the cancer cells are unable to fight back. This is a different method than the use of antibodies commonly used in other immune checkpoint treatments.

Olin’s revelation came from a protein shed by cancer cells called CD200. The protein inactivates T-cells and fights against immune system responses. Current cancer treatments are full of this protein, according to the OX2 Therapeutics website.

If the new treatment is shown to be safe by the FDA in phase one of the trial, the researchers will go on to test the treatment’s efficacy. During phase two, the trial can treat a larger number of patients. Moertel estimated about 60 people will be eligible when the time arrives. And finally, in phase three, the treatment will be compared to the most effective existing therapies in the field: radiation and chemotherapy.