David Gius, MD, PhD, professor and Associate Cancer Director of Translational Research, has been awarded a $1.6 million UT System Faculty STARs award to support his research on aging and breast cancer. The award will be used to purchase equipment to conduct more in-depth experiments in his laboratory at the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies. Dr. Gius said one vital tool is a scanning electron microscope that creates a 3-D reconstruction of the mitochondria.

Shaun K. Olsen, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Structural Biology, is the recipient of the UT System Faculty STARs award. This award will allow him to obtain next-generation structural biology equipment, such as cryo-electron microscopy, enhancing the infrastructure for researchers and pre-clinical drug development. The funding further advances his goal to establish an interdisciplinary, collaborative center for cancer, metabolic and neurodegenerative disorders by next summer.  

Ramon Cestero, MD, MBA, FACS, FCCM, clinical professor in the Department of Surgery, invented the Titan CSA, a retractor, disrupting current surgical instrument technology that has remained the same for more than 100 years. His frustration led him to develop a pathway from concept to reality, with support from Office of Technology Commercialization and the President’s Translational and Entrepreneurial Research Fund. Dr. Cestero’s retractor has undergone patient testing at University Hospital, achieving efficacy — and is now being tested in Austin at the Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas.

“Funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Shared Instrumentation program and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute (CPRIT) Core Facility Support program allows state-of-the art technology to be purchased for highly used institutional core labs by UT Health San Antonio researchers, but also made available to external research partners,” said Ramiro Ramirez-Solis, PhD, director of the institutional core labs. He added, “Writing these grants is very time intensive, so I am delighted that Michael Berton, PhD; Alex Taylor, PhD, and Exing Wang, PhD, were successful in their efforts to support the research enterprise.”