The School of Podiatric Medicine has received a $125,000 Rising STARs grant to establish a new research lab on the UTRGV Harlingen campus.
UTRGV Researcher Dr. Claudia Biguetti is head of the lab, which will focus on regenerative medicine.
“The impact of my work is to try to help accelerate bone healing when a patient has a surgery for bone reconstruction, or if a patient has a fracture and needs to reconnect bones, or for patients who need … bone implants,” Biguetti said.
Asked about the future lab’s research, she replied, “We search for new methods and for new drugs that could help with the bone healing.”
Biguetti said that the research would be useful to certain populations.
“Especially for patients that have compromised healing, for example, diabetic patients,” she said. “These [patients] suffer more of these musculoskeletal problems.”
For Biguetti, being able to do this research is a wonderful opportunity.
“I can create new ways to deliver … treatments to these patients,” she said. “I enjoy doing research.”
When she interviewed for her job at UTRGV, she told School of Podiatric Medicine Dean Javier La Fontaine about her ideas of establishing a lab for regenerative medicine.
The goal has become a reality with the assistance of the Rising STARs grant, which was established by the University of Texas System and will be used to purchase equipment and renovate labs on campus.
“If the UT System sees the potential of your research, they will grant the institution,” Biguetti said.
This lab will be located on the third floor of the Clinical Education building on the Harlingen campus.
“The reason we need to have this lab here is because they are also students in the school of Podiatric Medicine,” Biguetti said.
The school is located on the Harlingen campus and was established this year. Biguetti said the creation of the school helped in the push for the lab.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to start this culture of research … to help our students, our future physicians, to have this vision of new treatments,” she said. “It’s super exciting to start my lab in a new school.”
The lab is starting with three current graduate students, but will expand soon.
“I hope to recruit two or three [undergraduates],” Biguetti said. “They can come from UTRGV or from community colleges. … Maybe it can help them make decisions for their future.”
These students will work on a variety of tasks.
“We are researching new immunological markers that can be related with … inflammatory complications … in Mexican Americans that [have advanced] diabetes,” Biguetti said. “Two of my students [are collecting] clinical data. … We want to apply new pathways to improve bone healing.”
This data would then be used in animal models for testing.
“[Mice] and rats are well-established animal models in research, and we transfer the clinical problems … problems that we have in clinic … we transfer to the animals. We try to heal the fracture in the animal or we put an implant in the animal and we try to mimic what we have in clinic,” Biguetii said.
She also spoke about the next step in the research project.
“We are trying to apply for a research grant from UTRGV to test the implants in our animal models for diabetes,” Biguetti said. “It will be rats and mice and it will be fractured models.”
She said animals are taken care of.
“The animal does not suffer, everything is regulated,” Biguetti said.
Overall, the researcher is optimistic about the future of the center and the research that will be conducted, especially for the Rio Grande Valley community.
“I think we have a highly diverse field and it is a way we can help each other,” she said. “I have always been interested in research because it is a field where you can help a lot of people at the same time.”
Biguetti said the short-term goals are to launch the lab and then bring in undergraduate students.
“For summer research, I think it will be a wonderful opportunity for medical students to engage in the lab,” she said. “We will be accepting new students for summer.”
