Molly Mollica receives NIH Trailblazer Award for research to improve diagnosis of bleeding disorders
Molly Mollica, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Trailblazer Award of more than $550,000 to take important steps toward the development of new medical tests that could identify the cause of bleeding disorders that standard tests often miss.
Bleeding disorders, which impair blood clotting and lead to excessive bleeding, affect 3 million people in the U.S. Sometimes patients bleed excessively, but standard laboratory tests cannot identify a cause, leading to a diagnosis of “bleeding disorder of unknown cause,” or BDUC.
Mollica is working to develop new tests that might yield insights into what is going on in the blood of people with BDUC. She studies the mechanical forces generated by platelets—blood cells that help stop bleeding by gathering at the site of an injury and contracting. Initial studies indicate that the platelets in patients with BDUC are not able to contract as much as platelets in people without that diagnosis.
As part of the new NIH-funded project, Mollica and her students will work with co-investigator Matthew Merguerian, a hematologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, to develop tests of platelets’ mechanical function that meet the requirements for practical clinical tests—including the ability to manufacture the testing devices at large scale and minimize the amount of computational resources needed to analyze the results.
Image: Researchers in Mollica’s lab measure how much single platelets deform microscopic dot patterns, indicating platelet strength. The forces of the platelet are shown with the blue arrows on the right. (Image courtesy of Mollica)
A single platelet has a volume 6 million times smaller than a grain of sand, meaning Mollica and her students must measure single-platelet strength with advanced microfabrication and microscopy techniques.
The NIH Trailblazer Award supports early-stage investigators pursuing innovative research that integrates engineering and the physical sciences with biomedical science.