How much would you be impacted by a shoulder injury? According to Peter Chalmers, a University of Utah orthopaedic surgeon, pain in your shoulder can be more impactful on your quality of life than heart failure.
“Patients come in and tell me that their shoulder hurts, and they can't sleep, and they can't do the things they want to do,” Chalmers said. “If you can't use your arm, it's incredibly debilitating.”
Treating these patients in the clinic inspires Chalmers to research and create solutions that improve his patients’ lives. “It's only by seeing the people suffering with the problem and then trying to help them that I think you can truly motivate yourself to fix this for these people,” he said. “I think that helps us understand the importance of the work and the ways in which it can help people or improve the human experience.”
A common problem Chalmers sees in the clinic is a rotator cuff tear. These tears usually occur after years of the rotator cuff weakening before it finally tears, and even when a doctor repairs the torn rotator cuff, it is still not as good as it was before it weakened.
One of Chalmers’s colleagues Robert Tashjian, a fellow U orthopaedic clinician and researcher, found a tie between an estrogen receptor and rotator cuff tears after looking at data from the Utah Population Databank and his own patients. Once they were aware of the connection, they just needed to figure out how they could use it to improve outcomes for patients with rotator cuff tears.
Chalmers kept this information in the back of his mind while he went about his research and surgeries for the following years. It wasn’t until a casual conversation with another colleague—Jim Hotaling, a U urologist and associate vice president of research for commercialization—that ideas and plans started to fall into place.
It's all about your team. It's all about finding the right collaborators, the right partners, and then building those relationships with them so you can succeed together.
The two surgeons went for a run after their day in the operating room, and along the way they discussed the research they were working on. Chalmers mentioned Tashjian’s discovery and how they weren’t sure what to do with it, and Hotaling brought up the association between low hormone levels and loss of strength. From there, Chalmers conducted a database study looking at that connection.
“We looked at our own patients, and I started measuring hormone levels. I found that about 70% of my patients with rotator cuff tears also have low hormone levels,” Chalmers said. He then started studying the connection in animals and found that supplementing the animals with hormones clearly improved the animals’ recoveries.
While the hormones improved outcomes in the animals, studies have shown that supplementing hormones in humans can have systemic side effects like heart attacks, so the team of clinician-researchers needed a way to deliver hormones directly to the affected area. Chalmers reached out to the Louis S. Peery, MD Orthopaedic Innovation Center at the U to tap into their medical device and polymer expertise and the Technology Licensing Office to protect the resulting technology.
In order to continue developing the technology, the team would need more funding to support additional dosing and validation studies, so they applied for and received an Ascender Grant. Ascender Grants help U inventors bridge the funding gap between research and commercialization by providing support for technology development, proof of concept and more.
With the funding from the Ascender Grant and a team of researchers with different expertise, development on the technology is moving forward.
“It's all about your team,” Chalmers said. “It's all about finding the right collaborators, the right partners, and then building those relationships with them so you can succeed together.”
