Top OU Research Achievements from 2016

Cancer treatments can have life-threatening side effects and take months to administer. Dr. Roger Harrison and Dr. Daniel Resasco worked to create a treatment with no side effects. He and other professors developed a new treatment that is non-invasive and takes only three minutes. It uses nanotubes small enough to reach inside a tumor, allowing them to target cancer cells instead of the entire body. The treatment is patented and will be available for bladder cancer patients soon!

Before the study, little was known about prehistoric peoples in the Himalayas. OU researches focused their study on the peoples of the high valleys of the Himalayan arc, which was one of the last habitable places colonized by prehistoric humans. The first DNA study of the prehistoric peoples of the Himalayas revealed that the genetic makeup of high-altitude Himalayan populations were uniquely adapted to live at high elevations.

MRSA is difficult to treat because it is resistant to many of the antibiotics used to fight ordinary staph infections. Diagnosis comes with many health complications and the treatments that exist now have harsh side effects. Dr. Charles Rice and his team are developing a new treatment to effectively kill the virus without detrimental side effects.

OU received a $166 million grant from NASA for new Earth science research. The study will advance our understanding of the carbon cycle and vegetation health on earth. The mission will launch a satellite to monitor the Americas, extending our nation's lead in measuring key greenhouse gasses and Earth's natural exchanges of carbon.

Thubi Kolobe, a physical therapist and researcher at the University of Oklahoma, and her colleagues developed a contraption to help promote crawling for infants with Cerebral Palsy. In the preliminary trial, infants who received therapy with the Self-Initiated Prone Progression Crawler (SIPPC) were able to move around the room a month earlier than those who did not receive therapy.

The responsibility of publishing professional manuscripts on new species is not usually entrusted to undergraduates. But with a semester of researching, attending labs and lectures, studying and naming their new species, undergraduate students in a museum-led biology course submitted manuscripts and were published in the scientific journal, Zootaxa.

So far, researchers have yet to catalog Environmental DNA as a means to protect living creatures in different habitats. A team of researchers at OU, including undergraduate and graduate students, is on the cutting edge of collecting Environmental DNA over time. This record will enhance our ability to create predictive models, reveal invasive species, detect diseases, examine biodiversity, and monitor endangered species.

Dr. Michael Markham's team of researchers are leading the way in our understanding of two species of fish that harness self-generated electric fields. Research on the unique species could lead to biomedical advances and protection of endangered species.