National Institute on Deafness & Other Communication Disorder

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), a member of the U.S. NIH to provide Remmie Health with nearly $3 million in support, subject to the availability of funds SEATTLE, June 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Remmie Health has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 grant to develop and commercialize Remmie.ai, an AI-based diagnostic assistance engine for supporting clinicians to accurately identify ENT diseases. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), a member of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), plans to provide nearly $3 million in support, subject to the availability of funds. Continue Reading According to Jane Zhang, PhD/MBA, Remmie's CEO and President, "This NIH SBIR Phase 2 grant is a milestone in AI healthcare, enabling more accurate and efficient diagnostic assistance tools for ENT conditions, addressing the $40 billion global market for accurate ENT diagnosis. This will ultimately help increase access, reduce costs, and enhance confidence in diagnosis and referral care for patients worldwide." ENT diagnosis depends upon in-person clinic visits and visual examination by medical providers, at great inconvenience to patients and caregivers and a significant cost to the healthcare system, estimated at $4 billion per year. "This grant is a milestone in AI healthcare, enabling more accurate and efficient diagnostic assistance tools for ENT conditions, addressing the $40 billion global market for accurate ENT diagnosis," said Jane Zhang, PhD/MBA, Remmie's CEO and President. "This will ultimately help increase access, reduce costs, and enhance confidence in diagnosis and referral care for patients worldwide." The grant encompasses clinical research with Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, one of the top children's hospitals in the nation. Led by Dr. Juan Espinoza, the study team will include key members of the Medical Device Clinical Trials Unit for The Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP), an FDA-funded pediatric device accelerator centered at Lurie Children's, the Division of Otorhinolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, and the Smith Child Health Catalyst, a research service core at the intersection of pediatric research and child health. "Remmie.ai's preliminary data are compelling, and we are confident in our ability to explore its clinical applications and develop this innovative technology for pediatric care," says Juan Espinoza, MD, Chief Research Informatics Officer of Stanley Manne Children's Research Institute at Lurie Children's, and CTIP Director. This award builds on last year's SBIR Phase 1 success, where Remmie.ai achieved high accuracy in recognizing both binary and multi-class ear conditions and deployed for usability feedback. The two-year Phase 2 will advance Remmie.ai's development and integration into clinical practice. The outcomes will deliver accurate ENT diagnosis assistance through real-world testing and lead towards FDA designation as a Software as Medical Device (SaMD). For more information about Remmie, visit . For investment and healthcare partnerships, click here to contact Remmie Health CEO, Jane Zhang. About Remmie: Remmie helps families play a more active role in their health from the convenience of home by bringing connected ENT examinations into their hands to share with a doctor online. Remmie uses technology to target the most common reason Americans go to the doctor's office, ear, nose, throat, and common upper respiratory conditions. The Remmie solution suite includes a digital otoscope kit, APIs to link with telehealth and e-health provider platforms, and a pipeline ML/AI diagnosis assistance engine, Remmie.ai. The research reported in this press release is supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under Award Number 1R43DC020868 and 2R44DC020868-02. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. Media Contact: Jane Zhang 612-699-1617 [email protected] SOURCE Remmie Health

Our ability to think, decide, remember recent events and more, comes from our brain's neocortex. Now neuroscientists have discovered key aspects of the mechanisms behind these functions. Their findings could ultimately help improve treatments for certain neuropsychiatric disorders and brain injuries. Our ability to think, decide, remember recent events and more, comes from our brain's neocortex. Now University of California, Irvine neuroscientists have discovered key aspects of the mechanisms behind these functions. Their findings could ultimately help improve treatments for certain neuropsychiatric disorders and brain injuries. Their study appears in Neuron. Scientists have long known that the neocortex integrates what are called feedforward and feedback information streams. Feedforward data is relayed by the brain's sensory systems from the periphery (our senses) to the neocortex's higher order areas. These high-level brain regions then send feedback information to refine and adjust sensory processing. This back-and-forth communication allows the brain to pay attention, retain short-term memories, and make decisions. "A simple example is when you want to cross a busy road," said corresponding author Gyorgy Lur, Ph.D., an assistant professor of neurobiology & behavior in the School of Biological Sciences. "There are trees, people, moving vehicles, traffic signals, signs and more. Your higher-level neocortex tells your sensory system which merit attention for deciding when to go across." The interaction between higher- and lower-level systems also allows us to remember what you saw when you glanced both ways to gather the information. "If you didn't have that short-term memory, you would just keep looking back and forth and never move," he said. "In fact, if our feedforward and feedback streams weren't constantly working together, we would do very little except respond by reflexes." Until now, scientists have not been sure how neurons in the brain participate in these complex processes. Lur and his colleagues discovered that feedforward and feedback signals converge onto single neurons in the parietal regions of the neocortex. The researchers also found that distinct types of cortical neurons merge the two information streams on markedly different time scales and identified the cellular and circuit architecture underpinning these differences. "Scientists already knew that integrating multiple senses enhances neuronal responses," Lur said. "If you only see something or just hear it, your reaction time is slower than when experiencing them with both senses simultaneously. We've identified the underlying mechanisms making this possible." He noted that the study data suggests the same principles apply if one information stream is sensory and the other is cognitive. Understanding these processes is critical for developing future treatments for neuropsychiatric ailments like sensory-processing disorders, schizophrenia and ADHD, as well as for strokes and other injuries to the neocortex. Lur is a fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping and the Center for Hearing Research at UC Irvine. Ph.D. candidate Daniel Rindner, who performed all neuronal recordings and biological tissue work, served as the paper's first author. Archana Proddutur, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar in the lab and second author on the paper, conducted computational modelling that led to the mechanistic understanding of the processes integrating sensory and cognitive information streams. Their research was supported by the Whitehall Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders.

New research used the highly regenerative zebrafish to investigate the timing and genetic programs of macrophages, a type of white blood cell, in the repair and regeneration of a zebrafish sensory organ. Understanding how the immune system responds to injury, first by inducing inflammation immediately followed by an anti-inflammatory response, provides invaluable knowledge for designing targeted immunotherapies that may be applicable in combating human conditions like hearing loss or deafness, heart or spinal cord damage. How the immune system responds to injury in many organs and tissues allows and enables their repair and regeneration. Yet for some species like humans, damage to organs such as the brain, spinal cord, or heart is irreversible. Imagine if we were able to regenerate these. For organ transplant candidates and recipients, the nerve-wracking wait for "the call," or the lifelong need for immunosuppressing medications would no longer be necessary. New research from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research used the highly regenerative zebrafish to investigate the timing and genetic programs of macrophages, a type of white blood cell, in the repair and regeneration of a zebrafish sensory organ. Understanding how the immune system responds to injury, first by inducing inflammation immediately followed by an anti-inflammatory response, provides invaluable knowledge for designing targeted immunotherapies that may be applicable in combating human conditions like hearing loss or deafness, heart or spinal cord damage. Recently published in Nature Communications on September 20, 2022, Postdoctoral Researcher Nicolas Denans, PhD, in the lab of Stowers Investigator Tatjana Piotrowski, PhD, discovered a new macrophage anti-inflammatory paradigm. Rather than the established view that anti-inflammatory activation states for macrophages are linked to just one type of signaling pathway, Denans found that the same population can, and must, transition through each of three anti-inflammatory states for organ regeneration. "Organ regeneration offers an exciting opportunity for studying the immune system and to inquire why some species can regenerate organs like the heart or missing limbs while others like humans cannot," said Piotrowski. Zebrafish sensory organ hair cells are an ideal system to investigate the pathways and cell types involved in regeneration since they are easily destroyed with antibiotics and begin regenerating within five hours. This enabled the researchers to identify the exact timing and genetic programs for each anti-inflammatory macrophage activation state. "Our hypothesis is that human macrophages do not receive the proper chemical activation "cocktail" to instruct pro-regenerative processes," said Denans. "Identifying the molecular recipe of macrophage activation in zebrafish may one day enable us to design regenerative immunotherapies in humans." Essential for organ regeneration, macrophages, which in Latin literally translates as "big eaters," engulf foreign particles like dead cells and bacteria and use enzymes to digest them. In addition to their culinary appetite, these cells signal both pro- and anti-inflammatory pathways to secrete chemicals, or cytokines to either recruit additional types of white blood cells or trigger anti-inflammatory pathways for cellular and tissue repair. Investigating macrophages at high spatial resolution and at multiple closely spaced time points during zebrafish sensory hair cell death and regeneration was critical. For the first time, the study demonstrates that a single population of this cell type sequentially and independently transitions through three different anti-inflammatory states, each with its own unique molecular and genetic signature. "The new evidence is a valuable resource for comparative studies on the genetic programs involved in macrophage-mediated repair and regeneration," said Denans. "In other words, different types of injuries may induce different kinds of inflammatory responses. We want to decipher whether this "language" is universal or if there are a variety of dialects." While the study marks the first time that the sequential macrophage states have been resolved with extraordinary precision, preliminary comparisons with previously reported pathways in different organs and species suggest that this mechanism is likely conserved. "When you look in more detail, macrophages are not only required to initiate regeneration, but they also interact with the brain by communicating with nerve cells to reestablish and maintain synapses necessary for proper organ function after regeneration," said Piotrowski. The team hopes that additional studies based on this new finding may provide the basis for designing tailored immunotherapies to diminish disease, perhaps enabling greater regenerative abilities in regeneration-limited animals like humans. "This is just one in a series of steps to entertain the idea of developing regenerative immunotherapies in humans," said Denans. Additional authors include Nhung T. T. Tran, Madeleine Swall, Daniel C. Diaz, and Jillian Blanck. This work was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health (award 1R01DC015488-01A1) and by institutional support from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.