The University of Texas at San Antonio Office for Research and Innovation announced 14 interdisciplinary teams will receive a total of $543,274 through the university’s Health Research Challenge. Launched in November 2025, the new internal funding program aims to foster interdisciplinary health research collaboration by requiring that winning teams include researchers from both the academic and health campuses of the newly integrated university.
“The UT San Antonio Health Research Challenge teams embody the potential of our combined faculty of researchers to solve the most complex health challenges of our time,” said Jennifer Sharpe Potter, PhD, MPH, senior executive vice president for research and innovation. “The funding was intended to catalyze research collaboration across the recently integrated university and provide a foundation for future external funding.”
The Health Research Challenge began with input from the internal Faculty Experience Working Group, created as part of the university’s integration process. A kickoff event was attended by more than 200 UT San Antonio researchers representing all colleges and schools at UT San Antonio.
“We were looking for projects with a high potential for advancing future collaborative research and funding,” said Siobhan Fleming, PhD, assistant vice president for strategic research initiatives.
Of the 72 proposals, 14 were ultimately selected that addressed highly pressing health challenges.
“These 14 projects exemplify our commitment to bringing together our expertise and resources for the greatest possible public impact, ensuring that the work done by our research teams truly leads to improved lives,” Fleming added. “Their visionary projects reflect the combined strength and ambition of UT San Antonio.”
The teams, ranging in size from two to eight members, are comprised of a combined total of nearly 50 researchers from across the university. Each project was designed to advance the program’s mission of fostering interdisciplinary and cross-campus collaboration.
“The funding is intended to build our combined community of scholars. To that end, each awarded team will host an event that highlights its research,” Potter explained. “This event will build our newly integrated research community beyond these specific projects.”
The winning teams are leveraging their expertise — in areas such as AI and engineering — to address a wide array of health challenges, including cancer, chronic pain, obesity, diabetes, PTSD, traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s disease.
One winning team comprised of Francisca Acosta, PhD (Long School of Medicine), Eric Brey, PhD (Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design), Carolina Solis-Herrera, MD (Long School of Medicine) and Christopher Rathbone, PhD (Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design) aims to create a first-of-its-kind solution by growing a patient’s own tissue in a lab to test drugs before they ever enter the body.
Using small biopsies from individuals in South Texas, the team will engineer functional, vascularized “units” of human fat and muscle tissue. These lab-grown tissues will be analyzed using cutting-edge tools such as the Seahorse flux analysis to see exactly how they respond to therapies like GLP-1 agonists.
According to the CDC, obesity affects over 41% of adults in the U.S., yet no two patients respond to treatments in the same way, so this “clinical-to-bench” pipeline could remove the guesswork from treatment plans and prescriptions while also reducing the need for animal testing.
Another funded team of Matt Wanat, PhD (Brain Health Consortium), Flavia Carreno, PhD (Long School of Medicine), Daniel Lodge, PhD (Long School of Medicine) and David Morilak, PhD (Long School of Medicine) is looking to provide relief to the 30% of military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for whom standard therapies and drugs simply do not work.
The team is establishing a preclinical pipeline to evaluate two groundbreaking treatments: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and MDMA, while using sophisticated lab equipment to track brain activity. This research is the first step toward a Conte P50 Center Grant, which would unite researchers across San Antonio to develop a new gold standard of care for trauma survivors. The goal is to move beyond symptom management toward rewiring the brain for full recovery.
The Health Research Challenge lasts until July 31, 2027, and interdisciplinary teams must pursue at least one external grant submission within 18 months of the award end date.
More program information will be shared throughout the challenge as teams host events before spring 2027 to highlight their research progress, promote external visibility and attract interest from stakeholders. Teams are also encouraged to share their efforts through participation in conferences, symposiums, workshops, networking events and events aimed at translating research into actionable health policy.
