Environmental Factor – July 2022: NIEHS-led collaboration awarded for Innovation Award in the Director’s Challenge

A research collaboration led by the NIEHS won the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Challenge Award for Creativity.

Coppel runs the NIEHS vivarium, where he helps ensure researchers working with research animals receive the support they need and that the facility provides outstanding animal care and scientific support. (Image credits to Steve McCaw / NIEHS)

Led by Dondrae Coble, DVM, chair of the Comparative Medicine Branch, the grant will fund the construction of multiple animal enclosures designed to help researchers monitor the effects of 115 environmental chemicals on behavior. The enclosures help ensure the observations have less impact on research animals, which include fruit flies and mice. In addition, the researchers will use the grant to build a system for collecting, analyzing, storing, and sharing data collected during the piloting process.

The ultimate goal is to narrow down the range of 115 to 10 environmental chemicals most likely to cause potential neurodevelopmental disorders in fruit flies and mice, which could then be translated into the potential for those chemicals to cause neurodevelopmental disorders in human children.

This effort brings together collaborators from the NIEHS Division of Internal Research (DIR) and the Division of the National Toxicology Program (DNTP), as well as in National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the National Institute of Medical Imaging and Bioengineering.

“The proposed project led by Dr. Koppel, a recent NIEHS employee from Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Ohio State University, is highly appreciated and is specifically the type of innovative high-risk/high-reward research that the NIH’s in-house program is designed to support,” said Daryl Zelden, MD, Scientific Director of DIR. “I am pleased that he and his distinguished research team have been awarded this very competitive award.”

The award comes on the heels of previous NIEHS research also using Holistic Systems Physiology initiated by Brian Berridge, DVM, Ph.D. DNTP Scientific Director – A method for doing animal modeling that measures the effects of environmental factors for multiple systems simultaneously. The method reduces the number of research animals while increasing the amount of information collected.

“As an in vitro animal medicine veterinarian, I want to use animals in the most responsible and appropriate way,” Coble said. “If there are opportunities to improve our technologies or reduce animal use, that’s something I’m interested in pursuing.”

Applying autonomous car research to health

The development of 24-hour monitoring tools for animal enclosures stems from an unexpected resource: the machine vision capabilities pioneered by autonomous vehicle research. Machine vision is when artificial intelligence (AI) is applied to real-time image and video processing using deep neural networks, which are used to train the AI ​​to pick features and learn as they go.

Cushman said the project’s approach could be used not only as a model for extrapolating effects on humans, but also on other species, such as bees or aquatic invertebrates. (Image credits to Steve McCaw / NIEHS)

said Jesse Cushman, Ph.D., director of the Neurobehavioral Core Lab.

Just as a self-driving car can distinguish between a person and a stop sign, the machine vision used in enclosures will be trained to distinguish behaviors that are beyond species, such as grooming, eating, sleeping and interacting with each other, as well as tell the difference between species-specific behaviors such as wing expansion in fruit flies and searching for food in mice.

By observing how environmental chemicals affect the behavior of fruit flies and mice, researchers can extrapolate these effects to how they affect human development.

“In general, extrapolation across species is fundamental to what we do in science,” Cushman said. The organizers put a lot of weight on this in vivo studies, but they are expensive and time-consuming – which we are trying to address using this approach. It is important that you have in vivo Data on the whole organism to understand the full effect of the compounds. Our goal is to create a high-throughput and scalable automated method for better animal behavioral research. We view this as an essential technology for building in holistic perspectives.”

(Kelly Christensen is a contract writer for the NIEHS Office of Communications and Public Communications.)

from San Jose News Bulletin https://sjnewsbulletin.com/environmental-factor-july-2022-niehs-led-collaboration-awarded-for-innovation-award-in-the-directors-challenge/