Four faculty members selected to receive the 2020 FAME Grant

The Department of Medicine has selected faculty members Pooja Amarapurkar, MD, Emily Cartwright, MD, Merin Kuruvilla, MD, and Athan Tiliakos, DO as the 2020 Fostering the Academic Mission in the Emory Department of Medicine (FAME) Grant recipients. For more than a decade, the FAME Grant has enabled Department of Medicine clinician faculty to dedicate up to 20 percent of their professional time to scholarly activities, including research, education, quality improvement projects, and mentoring.

Please join us in congratulating the below four awardees:

Pooja Amarapurkar, MD, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Rheumatology

Amarapurkar’s FAME grant project, “Improving Access to Nephrology Care Using Epic-Based E-Consult Service at the Grady Health System,” seeks to expedite access to Neohrology care and prevent delays in evaluation of high-risk patients using E-consults. It will serve as a platform for better communication between primary care physicians and nephrologists in co-managing patients at Grady Health System.

“It is an honor to receive this FAME grant. This project will be the stepping stone to building a Nephrolohy telemedicine program at Grady Health System. I am particularly excited about our patients having prompt care delivered without having to make multiple hospital/clinic visits, especially for simple questions. We will be one of the very few hospitals systems in the country to have such a unique service.”

Emily Cartwright, MD, associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases

Through her FAME grant project,”Improving the Hepatitis C Care Cascade within the Emory Healthcare Network,” Cartwright aims to identify and reduce barriers to curative hepatitis C therapy.

“Receiving this FAME grant is truly an honor. Curing hepatitis C with direct-acting antiviral therapy is known to significantly reduce the risk of liver-specific complications like hepatocellular carcinoma and cirrhosis, as well as reduce all-cause mortality. Identifying ways to improve the number of patients in the Emory Healthcare Network who receive life-saving hepatitis C therapy is an important endeavor and hopefully will allow Emory to emerge as a leader in hepatitis C elimination efforts.”

Merin Kuruvilla, MD, assistant professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine

Kuruvilla’s FAME Grant project, “A streamlined approach to iodinated contrast allergy labels for use in interventional pain procedures,” seeks to develop and validate an algorithm for skin-test-based management of interventional pain patients with a history of immediate reactions to iodinated contrast media, and thereby optimize the use of iodinated contrast for interventional pain procedures.

“This grant will address the critical gap in studies evaluating iodinated contrast media allergy labels among centers in the United States. We chose to pilot our approach to ICM allergy in the interventional pain population since these labels have unique clinical relevance and implications for this specialty. In the long term, this project will provide pilot data for a larger-scale study in the setting of other imaging procedures that require extravascular and intravenous ICM administration.”

Athan Tiliakos, DO, assistant professor in the Division of Rheumatology

Through his FAME Grant project “B-cell Signatures in ANCA-Associated Vasculits”, Tiliakos seeks to monitor B-cell abnormalities in patients with ANCA-Associated Vasculitis and examine whether/how these B-cell signatures correlate with disease phenotype and response to rituximab therapy.

“It has been well-documented that B-cells play an important role in the pathogenesis of the ANCA-Associated Vasculitides, and that rituximab, a B-cell depleting agent, is an important therapeutic option. That being said, not everyone responds to Rituximab therapy, and some patients experience profound side effects. Our goal is to better understand ANCA-disease phenotypes and be able to predict who will respond to rituximab therapy based off of a patient’s B-cell signature. I am honored to be a recipient of the Department of Medicine FAME grant and appreciate the opportunity that this will provide me. I want to also thank Dr. Ignacio Sanz for his continued support.”

Click here to learn more about the FAME Grant.