Health In Action
Health In Action is a podcast from the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences. In each episode, Dean Marjorie Jenkins chats with UND faculty and staff about the latest developments in healthcare education, our changing healthcare landscape, and the latest news from North Dakota’s only interprofessional school of medicine and health sciences.
Health In Action
Dr. Colin Combs: Leading A New Era of Research at SMHS
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Dr. Colin Combs is senior associate dean for research at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences. After a decade of leading the university’s Department of Biomedical Sciences, Combs is now Chair of the new SMHS Office of Research Affairs & Compliance. He joined Dean Marjorie Jenkins to discuss how the new office is helping with current and future research at the School, including his own studies into Alzheimer’s disease.
Welcome to Health in Action, a podcast from the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences. In each episode, Dean Marjorie Jenkins chats with UND faculty and staff about the latest developments in healthcare education, our changing healthcare landscape, and the latest news from North Dakota's only interprofessional school of medicine and health sciences. Dr. Colin Combs is Senior Associate Dean for Research at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences. After a decade of leading the University's Department of Biomedical Sciences, Dr. Combs is now chair of the new SMHS Office of Research Affairs and Compliance. He joined Dean Marjorie Jenkins to discuss how the new office is helping with current and future research at the school, including his own studies into Alzheimer's disease.
SPEAKER_00Well, hello, Dr. Combs. And thank you for joining us for the next episode of Health in Action. I'm really excited to talk to you today about our research and the vision and your new office. But before we dig into research, I would love to just hear your journey here at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences. I understand that you've really grown up here in the School of Medicine, your career. And so would you mind sharing a little bit with the audience about that?
SPEAKER_02Sure, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Dean Jenkins. I came to UND. At that time, I joined the Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Therapeutics in the summer of 2000. I was assistant professor, tenure track higher then. And that department went through a few changes. It merged ultimately into the Department of Biomedical Sciences. And I took over as chair of that department and spent about 10 years in that role. And then I was fortunate enough to now serve as a senior associate dean for research in the School of Medicine.
SPEAKER_00Wonderful. We'll start with just a few thoughts from you about your the new Office of Research Affairs and Compliance that launched last fall.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for uh for helping uh support the formation of that office. And it came at a timely spot in the development of our research enterprise at the SMHS. The research has become so complex and so important to our mission that it was not feasible to keep management of our research enterprise fragmented. And so centralizing it is hopefully going to give us an opportunity for a single source of truth so that we can see what we're good at, we can understand our research portfolio and be able to provide increased support for improving our submissions and the quality of the numbers of submissions and the quality of submissions to our extramural sources, and then also to reduce some of the administrative burden for our faculty and departments so that our office can provide some of that additional support to increase our submission success rate.
SPEAKER_00Well, I know that you have been working with faculty on a strategic plan. And we have a number of large projects already. The School of Medicine and Health Sciences has been really successful as a community-based medical school. And I'd be remiss if I didn't tell the audience that you were our biomedical sciences chair, our department of biomedical sciences chair for 10 years and really were a leader in the growth of our research. So in addition to the big projects that we have going on, we have a few areas that you have worked with our faculty to focus on and would love to hear a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_02Sure. So what we did is we first analyzed what are the proposals that we submit, what are the topics of research that we're trying to get funded, and then we looked to see what are the topics that are actually getting funded, and then we analyzed the topics of publication that we produce in the SMHS, and then whether those publications are actually being noticed and cited by our peers. So from that, we were able to assemble what we now consider to be some of our strength areas, areas that we're good at and areas that we're also growing in, some of our emerging strengths. And then we took that and we aligned it with what's being funded at the national level from institutes like the NIH and then what's being published, trending in publications at the international level, really from sources like PubMed. So by combining what we're good at with what the rest of the world cares about, we came up with some strength areas for us that also fortuitously align exactly with some of the concerns of our state. So things like obesity and diabetes, cardiovascular disease and stroke, maternal and infant health, rural health, indigenous health, Native American health, dementia and Alzheimer's disease, cancer, lots of things are true strength areas for the SMHS based upon those KPIs. But they also are areas, like I said, that align with what the rest of the world cares about. And some of those areas we're we're keeping pace. Some of them we're even sort of above the curve, in front of the curve.
SPEAKER_00I love that. And I hear from folks all the time that you are becoming quite masterful at using AI and creating AI agents to help with the work of the Office of Research Affairs. Can you tell us a little bit about how you've leveraged AI? We had Dr. Van Eck on uh earlier to talk about the AI Hub, and I think folks would really want to hear about how you can really leverage AI in all areas of our critical mission areas.
SPEAKER_02Sure. Yeah, we've we've been building a number of different tools leveraging AI to help with our research mission. Some of the instances are that we now have a tool that we can help identify collaborators. Everybody within the SMHS, which includes our entire SMHS, including our clinical partners, or everybody within UND. So we can identify folks based upon things, areas they've been funded in, areas that they've been publishing in, and citations they receive for those publications to try to partner together folks that should be working together and aren't, or to assemble teams when we have new grant initiatives. We also have a tool that we use to do a sort of a pre-review of research proposals before they're submitted. And we're comparing that actively in a little internal study at the moment with paid external review that we get from an external vendor like Hanover to see if the quality of our internally developed research tool is comparable to the input that we get from external vendors. We also have a tool to try to help identify the best study section. If you're particularly interested in NIH, there as folks probably know, there's an ability to suggest a study section when you submit an NIH grant. So we have a tool that tries to look at publishing or funding trends rather from NIH with respect to the topics that that study section typically evaluates, and then try to determine whether the proposal that you prepared aligns best with that study section and what it's funding, and whether some of the keywords and areas that have been funded in that study section align with some of the keywords in your proposal. So just some things to try to help assemble the best team and then try to make sure that the proposal you submit is the most competitive proposal. We we would like to increase our success rate for first submissions. It's not terrible, but we'd like to make it higher.
SPEAKER_00It sounds like all the things that your office is bringing to the table, having that central infrastructure, leveraging our data, really looking at our portfolio and our our, we have really talented scientists here at the School of Medicine. So it's great to know that we're on the cutting edge of using AI to help forward our research platform and our success. So I'd like to pivot a little bit, Dr. Combs, to your personal research. I understand that you you do study Alzheimer's disease. I'm sure our listeners would like to hear what you see as the current state of Alzheimer's research and maybe some future emerging research or treatments that are coming out of research for Alzheimer's.
SPEAKER_02Most folks have heard of some of the drugs that were approved in the last few years that are essentially passive vaccines. They're antibodies that patients receive via injection, IV injection, and they recognize a protein called beta-amyloid that aggregates in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients to form these things called plaques. Those antibodies are designed to get into the brain and help effectively dissolve those plaques, get rid of them. So there's a lot of excitement in some folks' minds about the promise of this sort of drug approach. Not everybody is excited. Some folks are fairly skeptical, and there are a lot of different reasons for why they don't think that these uh vaccine therapies, these monocholar antibody drugs will be the cure that folks hope for. But even if they're not as effective as as planned, at least they will let the field test the idea that removing plaques from the brain is going to be beneficial. And that's been one of the long-standing debates in the Alzheimer's disease community, research community, that whether or not plaque accumulation truly is bad for sort of dementia progression. Another thing that's emerging is that there's a lot of excitement at the moment in a blood-based biomarker that's uh another protein that aggregates in the brain called Tau. There's a particularly modified form of the protein that blood levels appear to indicate when a disease is progressing from, for instance, mild cognitive impairment to dementia. So there's quite a bit of excitement over this blood-based cognitive decline biomarker.
SPEAKER_00You know, my background and interest is biological uh sex differences. Is there a lot of work going on in Alzheimer's in that space? Or has your lab looked at data by sex?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. Almost unfortunately, almost every study that compares sex, whether it's rodents or humans, they're different in almost any parameter you want to look at in Alzheimer's disease. So it's pretty critical, and in fact, is required by any NIH anyway, that if you're doing studies in not just Alzheimer's disease, but but any disease, that you're appropriately considering sex as a biologic variable. It it it truly is different. Even things like the immune response is completely different.
SPEAKER_00I'm really excited to hear you say that because that's still near and dear to my heart. So as we are looking forward and we're we're in a growth mindset, right, around research and around focusing on the issues that are really the highest issues of concern for North Dakotans. So I know that you, I mentioned you have a new strategic plan that you've developed with getting and getting input from folks. Can you just tell us a little bit about that strategic plan and what is the goal for health research in North Dakota? And what do you see happening over the next five to seven years?
SPEAKER_02So the first thing we did was to try to make sure, after we determined what our research strengths are, was to make sure that if we were going to do research that was going to align with our mission of the SMHS, which is to serve North Dakota for the benefit of its people and to enhance the quality of their lives. So we wanted to make sure that whatever we do aligns with our stated mission. And as I said, uh thankfully a lot of our strengths do align precisely with, for instance, the leading causes of death in the state. So what we want to do is try to increase the research, particularly the clinical and translational research, focused on those strength areas which align with our health needs in the state and grow from basically double our research, uh, extramaral research support over the next five years. And what that will do is increase not just our footprint internationally in these areas, but also will improve our standing among community-based medical schools to make us, it should elevate us up into the top few community-based medical schools in the country with regard to their research output. We've implemented a number of uh changes in the sort of first few months now that, again, as I was saying, largely focused on improving the infrastructure of our SMHS to increase our research output and the quality of our research output. We have a true bridge funding program now. We have a number of different types of seed grants that we're doing. We we support publication costs for particularly for students when they have to deal with article processing uh fees. We have data management person in the office now that helps us deal with compliance, which is a huge federal consideration. We have active bibliometric analysis now that we do uh in the office. We have tried to standardize the research pathway for particularly for our medical students through a badging program that Dr. Sarah Sladin has initiated. We've hired a director or a chair of clinical and translational research, Cornelia Steik, who is not just our classic bench-to-bedside translational output, but also the reverse translation initiative that he's driving, which is to seek input, again, thinking about the needs of our state, seeking input from our health system partners across the state, and trying to determine whether things that they're struggling with or questions that have arisen during their practice can be uh turned into a research question and whether we can help provide answers that they can ultimately use back in their practices. And we've enjoyed a little bit of success with his reverse translation program. He has one project that's moved along now that is active collaboration between clinician and a preclinical scientist.
SPEAKER_00I think that's really all of that is really important work. You know, the administrative infrastructure is important with the goal of focusing on our purpose. You know, people and purpose is what we talk about. And sometimes people don't always connect the research that is being done with how it will benefit our state. But I think that you've explained how we can do bench research in the lab, but take that to the clinic. We just take clinic observations and bring it back to the lab and really just have a wonderful ecosystem in North Dakota with the fact that the School of Medicine works across all our health care partners and with their health care partners. So it's quite a robust environment. And I know you're planting seeds and kind of tilling the soil for us to plant the seeds so that we have a really good growth of our research and that we're able to share that with the public about what the outcomes of our research mean for the state. I want to thank you, Dr. Combs, for joining me today. It's been really enlightening. You and I meet frequently, but I've learned some things today, so I hope our audience does too. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_01Founded in 1905, the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences is the only MD granting institution between Minnesota and Washington State. In addition to its four-year program in medicine, the school houses degree programs in athletic training, medical laboratory science, occupational therapy, physical therapy, physician-assisted studies, and public health. It also hosts master and doctoral programs in biomedical science, clinical and translational science, and indigenous health. Since 1973, our historic Indians Into Medicine program has produced hundreds of indigenous physicians, therapists, lab scientists, and other health professionals for practice in rural and underserved areas. Learn more at med.und.edu. The opinions expressed on this podcast do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of North Dakota, the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences, or the North Dakota University system. By listening to this podcast, if you agree not to use this program as medical advice to be used in the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition for yourself or others, to consult your own health providers for any medical issues you may be experiencing.