With over 90% of cosmetic surgeries requiring the use of plastic-based meshes for soft tissue support and securing implants, the risk of introducing microplastics and their subsequent adverse health effects runs high. It is clear that there is a need for a bio-based alternative. We propose a silk-based mesh, dubbed Caddisgraft, to solve this issue. Caddisfly silk is a wet adhesive secreted by aquatic caddisfly larvae to protect against the elements, and thus boasts a high tensile strength, biodegradability and non-cytotoxic properties. Our team hopes to develop a yeast strain capable of expressing caddisfly silk for purification and mass production into Caddisgraft surgical meshes. This yeast strain would be created through a novel synthesis method that stitches together highly repetitive silk protein motifs until the desired number of repeats is reached. Ultimately, Caddisgraft hopes to reduce post-operative pain and encourage better tissue regrowth in cosmetic surgery patients.

In this project, we further developed our robust leader-follower protocol which autonomously coordinates a group, or swarm, of devices. The system is designed to seamlessly adapt to devices dropping out of the swarm unexpectedly and to any new devices joining the network. We focused on two main tasks this year: formal verification of the protocol and developing a demonstration with mobile robots. The formal verification proved that our protocol satisfies both safety and adaptability requirements.

At Design Day, we will have an interactive simulation, which shows how our protocol can coordinate up to 50 robots. We will also present a video of our robot demonstration, which uses five TurboPi robots as devices which autonomously work to each perform a task within different quadrants of a large grid.

SurgMap is developing an innovative suite of devices with a novel annotation software for 3D scans of a tumor specimen/bed as well as a physical tumor/bed marker, both of which enhance intraoperative communication between surgeons and pathologists during curative intent surgical resections of oral cavity squamous cell carcinomas. Currently, intraoperative positive margin localization relies on imprecise verbal descriptions and rudimentary markers, leading to high rates of inadequate resections, and therefore increased cancer recurrence in the long term. Often, surgeons try to ensure adequate cancer resection by overestimating the extent of surgical resection to be safe. However, in the head and neck anatomical region, these overestimations may impact critical structures and significantly impair speech or swallowing after the surgery.

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic autoimmune condition characterized by inflammation in the colon and rectum. Though specific etiological factors underlying UC are unclear, T cells play a critical role in the immune response against gut microbial antigens. Therefore, prior cross-sectional studies have investigated T cell receptor (TCR) repertoires in UC patients. However, patients fluctuate between flare (inflamed) and remission (uninflamed) states, and dynamic changes in TCR repertoires are poorly understood. We leverage TCR repertoires collected from sigmoid colon biopsies to investigate TCR characteristics across disease states and over time in our cohort of 21 patients. Although the vast diversity of TCRs limits the shared number of sequences between patients, we find differential gene usage patterns and shared elevated K-mers in TCR sequences across flare and remission states. Individual patients’ repertoires also change dramatically over time, further highlighting the need for longitudinal TCR repertoire analysis in chronic conditions like UC.