VCOM 2024 Annual Report

VCOM Research Collaboration with Virginia Tech Earns $2.17 Million in NIH Funding

G unnar Brolinson, DO, VCOM’s vice president for research, is the principal investigator on a research project that has recently been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH.) The grant is $2.17 million over five years, and the project is a collaboration with Pamela VandeVord, PhD, who heads up the Traumatic Nerve Technologies (TNT) Lab and Jennifer Munson, PhD, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics (BEAM) at Virginia Tech. As a clinician, Brolinson is particularly interested in how diseases and conditions affect the human brain and how osteopathic techniques can provide treatments. Like all osteopathic physicians, Brolinson has seen firsthand the positive result of OMM to serve as a non-invasive and non-pharmaceutical treatment for a wide variety of conditions. Cranial OMM has been performed for years, but Brolinson says that the neurobiological mechanisms of why it works aren’t well understood. Studying those mechanisms could go a long way toward helping people suffering from traumatic brain injuiry (TBI) because it could lead to new treatments. Brolinson reached out to Pam VandeVord, who studies the complex mechanisms of injury to the brain. Together, they applied for and received intramural funding from VCOM and the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS), an investment institute that advances Virginia Tech research by connecting researchers with resources that will help them maximize the scope and impact of their work. The intramural funding allowed the team to develop the data that would be needed to get additional funding from other organizations—like the NIH. Their team worked on this preclinical TBI research for about five years and submitted grant proposals to the NIH and other funding agencies a handful of times before being successful.

Pam VandeVord, Virginia Tech (left), and Gunnar Brolinson, VCOM

This funding from the NIH is important—not just for VCOM, but for the osteopathic profession. “NIH is widely regarded at the top tier of funding in research, so you can’t underestimate the impact that getting NIH funding has on your research profile,” Brolinson says. He’s also grateful for the teamwork that is a key part of this kind of research. “I don’t do this by myself. We have a big team working on this project. Put together great teams of collaborators and great things happen.” VCOM President Dixie-Tooke Rawlins, DO, FACOFP, and its board chairman John Rocovich, Jr., JD, LLM, have been incredibly supportive of research at VCOM. The College provides more than $1.3 million annually to researchers, and their proposals are reviewed in a competitive process to ensure that the College is engaged in high value research. This kind of seed funding allows researchers to gather data, which is critical to successfully receiving funding from agencies like the NIH, the American Osteopathic Association, the United States Department of Defense, and the Centers for Disease Control. VCOM has several funding programs across its four campuses, many of which are collaborative with other universities and medical partners.

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