Every day, people arrive at hospitals with blocked arteries caused by strokes, heart attacks or traumatic injuries. The national standard for treatment is to restore blood flow as fast as possible, measured from the time the patient arrives at the ER to the moment the balloon-tipped catheter opens their artery. Thanks to decades of scientific progress, that “door-to-balloon time” has dropped dramatically, saving lives every hour.
Paradoxically, the lifesaving procedure can also cause harm. When oxygen-starved tissue suddenly receives new blood flow, the cells can become overwhelmed and damaged. This is called ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI), a life-threatening complication faced by the nearly 600,000 Americans who are treated for blocked arteries every year.
There is no approved therapy to prevent IRI, but hope is on the horizon. University of Utah scientists within the Nora Eccles Harrison Cardiovascular Research & Training Institute (CVRTI) have built a working system that moves discoveries toward the FDA pathway faster and more cost-effectively than industry. This is the foundation of the ASAP Project (American Science Acceleration Project), a model that tests three U-originated IRI therapies side-by-side in a 12-month, translational sprint.
“What good is discovery if it can’t reach the people who need it?” said Robin M. Shaw, director of the CVRTI who has spent his career studying how heart cells behave under stress and how science can better serve patients. “My dream isn’t just to discover something, it’s to see that discovery help a patient. That’s the full journey of science.”
A Utah case study—the model in motion
The ASAP Project is a cross-unit team of researchers who have developed therapies that treat IRI using different approaches. All labs are housed within the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine and are led by Shaw, who also holds the Nora Eccles Harrison Presidential Endowed Chair in the Department of Internal Medicine; Jared Rutter, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biochemistry; and Craig Selzman, professor in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery.
The project is a one-stop-shop with in-house resources, a situation often missing in research efforts nationwide. This includes:
- Operating rooms ready for translational science
- Regulatory expertise in house
- Clinical trial design capacity
- Interdisciplinary collaboration, without the silos
By taking advantage of existing U infrastructure and collaborations, the total projected cost is under $1 million and the projected time to clinical trials is one year—a vast improvement to the $10M to $20M and multiple-years it usually takes to advance three separate preclinical candidates. That represents a new model for translational infrastructure.
“This isn’t about speed for speed’s sake. It’s about moving fast enough to matter to people whose lives are on the line,” said Erin Rothwell, Vice President for Research at the U.
The question is no longer whether universities can move science forward—
it’s whether they will provide the resources to scale what already works. If the U.S. wants to compete globally in biotech and health innovation, research universities must move beyond laboratories and become national infrastructure.
“Universities generate the ideas. The question now is: can we carry these ideas forward to the bedside? What we’re establishing is, yes, we can,” said Shaw.
A model from which other universities can build
What makes this effort different is not just the therapies, but the structure behind them. The model developed at CVRTI is not proprietary, it’s portable. It depends on aligned incentives, flexible research infrastructure and leadership willing to connect the work across disciplines.
The U is proof that a public research institution, with the right systems in place, can move science from bench to bedside faster than the traditional biotech model. The question has changed from whether universities can do this to how many will—and how many lives could be changed if they do.