Science in Georgia: Revolutionary Research

Real World Solutions: Prashant Doshi, InverseAI founder and president, is working with the Georgia Research Alliance to use robotic automation to sort onions. Photo credit: Daemon Baizan

For Georgia’s Vidalia onion growers, sorting and packing enough quality onions to meet the demand for an entire continent – they are not grown anywhere else – can be a challenge, particularly for smaller farms without the volume for extremely expensive automation.

But thanks to tech start-up InversAI and support from the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) – a public-private partnership between Georgia universities, businesses and government – help may be on the way in the form of affordable robotic automation. The robot can be used on the farms’ existing conveyor line, safely alongside human workers, to fill gaps during times of increased demand or when farms are short on labor, says InversAI founder and President Prashant Doshi.

InversAI, which is housed the in University of Georgia’s (UGA) Innovation District incubation offices, is among many research and commercialization initiatives supported by the GRA since its establishment in 1990 to “to leverage the power of Georgia’s universities and the discoveries that were taking place and help them move and accelerate forward toward real-world solutions for our state,” says Tim Denning, GRA president and CEO.

InversAI uses high-resolution cameras to identify blemished onions as they pass on a conveyor belt and a robotic arm to retrieve them, where they can be examined more carefully. Good onions continue down the line and are packed for shipping, while those with defects are diverted to a different conveyor belt where they may go to facilities that convert them into frozen onions or other uses.

“U.S. Grade 1 quality control only allows for a small fraction of defective onions, so being able to sort the onions for defective and non-defective is an important task, post-harvest,” says Doshi, who is a professor of computer science at UGA.

As part of GRA’s Greater Yield Initiative – an accelerator to support agriculture technology in Georgia, a crucial but underserved industry segment – InversAI has received not only funding but training, mentorship and connections to bring its invention to fruition.

Right now, the technology is being assessed in onsite R&D trials. While the technology currently detects only visible blemishes, potentially it could be expanded using special cameras to detect interior blemishes, Doshi says. It could eventually be used to sort other vegetables as well.

Leveraging the Power of Georgia Universities: Tim Denning, Georgia Research Alliance president and CEO. Photo credit: Ben Rollins

GRA invests in research that leads to these kinds of advances through the recruitment of world-class scientists, known as GRA Eminent Scholars, and by providing funding and infrastructure for advanced research centers, Denning says. It also established the GRA Core Exchange, a program enabling university scientists to share research equipment and facilities. From there, GRA facilitates the commercialization of these discoveries to stimulate new business growth. In addition to working in ag tech, GRA does work in everything from manufacturing to healthcare. Many of its invested companies are also members of Georgia Bio, a leading advocate for life science companies on public policy matters, says President and CEO Maria Thacker Goethe. “Georgia Bio helps support their business growth as they emerge outside of the academic environment,” she says.

No matter the area of research, the work GRA does ultimately helps the economy. “Discoveries in the universities spin out into start-up companies which become rooted here in Georgia, ideally, and begin to hire individuals in the state,” Denning says. “That builds the workforce, too, and they take on investments and grow financially and that supports economic development in our state.”

Addressing Human Needs

Products that have risen out of GRA-supported businesses are providing new answers to basic human needs.

Diagnosis and Assessment: Warren Jones, a scientific founder of EarliTec and director of research at the Marcus Autism Center, presents a poster showcasing how visual engagement-based biomarkers are used in autism research. Photo credit: contributed

EarliTec, for example, developed technology that measures a child’s visual field to diagnose autism. The eye-tracking device, based on years of research by GRA Eminent Scholar Ami Klin and EarliTec’s scientific founder Warren Jones, enables doctors to diagnose autism in very young children. The Marcus Autism Center, Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta worked with GRA to bring Klin and Jones to Atlanta. Klin now serves as the director of the Marcus Autism Center, one of five NIH-designated Autism Centers of Excellence, and Jones is director of research at the center.

Last year, EarliTec’s diagnostic and assessment tool was cleared by the FDA for the diagnosis and assessment of children 16 to 30 months old, says CEO Thomas Ressemann. The device, named EarliPoint, tracks the eye movements of children as they look at images and videos and detects their level of attention to social information – for example, whether they focus more on objects than faces.

“The technology can be used by anyone that is trained in diagnosing children with autism. [That] would include developmental pediatricians, clinical psychologists and the like,” Ressemann says.

Focus on Agriculture: C. Robin Buell, GRA Eminent Scholar Chair in Crop Genomics at the University of Georgia’s College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, works to genetically modify poplar trees with the hope of producing jet fuel from their leaves. Photo credit: Daemon Baizan

Early diagnosis can make a significant difference in a child’s life. Ressemann cites research from Georgia Tech showing that a child diagnosed with and treated for autism at age 3 versus age 5 is likely to have a 40% higher intellectual function, 43% higher probability of being in standard classroom and will have $1.2 million less in healthcare-related costs related to their autism.

“I think now the biggest thing is that this technology is enabling access for everybody, for all autistic children to be diagnosed to get the treatment they need at an earlier age,” he says.

Working to Produce New Biofuels

When C. Robin Buell and her colleagues at UGA look at trees, they see a potential alternative to fossil fuels.

Tracking Equipment: Jim Stratigos, chief technology officer at Cognosos, far right, with fellow employees whose work helps hospitals and auto manufacturers keep tabs on medical supplies and cars, respectively. Photo credit: contributed

Buell was working on bioenergy crops at Michigan State University when she was recruited to become the GRA Eminent Scholar Chair in Crop Genomics. Buell says it was the infrastructure, plant community and focus on agriculture that attracted her to UGA – “in addition to the warmer weather!”

In Athens, Buell was introduced to the potential of poplar trees by preeminent poplar expert CJ Tsai, a GRA Eminent Scholar and professor in plant biology and genetics. Today the two are collaborating with researchers across UGA to genetically modify poplar trees, which grow quickly and whose genetics have been well studied.

Genetic modification involves changing the DNA of specific regions in the trees’ genome in tiny pieces of plant or tissue cultures in the lab, she says. “We can clonally generate these plants, so we are doing that in laboratory and then we take them to the greenhouse and grow them there.”

Such modifications can change whether a tree grows tall and makes more wood or becomes a shrub with lots of leaves. “We’re able to make it smaller and have lots of leaves and lots of branches. What we’re working on now is to produce a jet fuel in its leaves so we could just take the leaves and extract this jet fuel. And then we’re trying to make the wood so [that] it is multipurpose,” Buell says.

If that happens – and it’s more than a decade away – it will have been possible in large part due to the funding the two received from GRA and a program that promoted their collaboration. “If I wasn’t a Georgia Research Alliance Scholar,” Buell says, “I would have not been interacting with CJ Tsai.”

Protecting Company Assets

Jim Stratigos was an entrepreneur in residence at ATDC – the Advanced Technology Development Center at Georgia Tech – when he met Mary Ann Weitnauer, an engineering professor working in wireless communications. “I had a vision for how low-cost radio technology could be used in agriculture initially, and she had some technology concepts that seemed applicable,” Stratigos says. “I helped her write some GRA grants and that led us to hire some graduate students to write some software, and that was the beginning of the technology that ultimately became Cognosos.”

Today that technology has moved out of agriculture and into the healthcare and automotive industries, where it is helping hospitals and auto manufacturers keep track of their assets – namely, equipment and cars.

Breaking Barriers: Melissa B. Davis, director of Morehouse School of Medicine’s Institute of Translational Genomic Medicine, led a team that received a $25 million grant – the first to be given by Cancer Grand Challenges in health disparities research and the first awarded to a researcher at a historically Black medical school. Photo credit: Ben Rollins

“We manage the new cars that come off the assembly line before they are shipped to the dealers,” says Stratigos, who now serves as chief technology officer for the company. “It is a complicated process involving thousands of cars on a big parking lot and they are always in motion.” Cognosos provides a technology platform using widely available tech – GPS and Bluetooth – and applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to locate and keep track of vehicles.

In the hospital, tracking expensive equipment has become increasingly important, as technology has become smaller and portable with many tests taking place at the patient’s bedside, Stratigos says.

With Cognosos technology, hospital personnel can simply track and locate equipment through an app. “We make sure that when nurses and doctors go to where they expect the equipment to be, it is there,” he says.

Stratigos says Cognosos currently employs 75 people in its Midtown Atlanta offices. “I’d say that the GRA program was an essential element in getting Cognosos started,” Stratigos says. “I’m not sure we [would] have ever founded the company as rapidly as we did, or even at all, if there weren’t grants available to commercialize our research.”

Tackling Disparities in Cancer

Earlier this year, the Morehouse School of Medicine announced that a global team of researchers led by Melissa B. Davis, director of Morehouse’s Institute of Translational Genomic Medicine, was awarded a $25 million grant by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute, through Cancer Grand Challenges – to address cancer disparities in populations of African ancestry.

Unique Insights: Vince Calhoun, founding director of Georgia State’s Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging Data Science, is a leading expert in brain imaging and analysis. Photo Ben Rollins

Cancer Grand Challenges is a global research initiative that identifies the toughest challenges in cancer research and, with monetary awards, empowers interdisciplinary teams to take them on. The grant awarded to Team SAMBAI (Societal, Ancestry, Molecular and Biological Analyses of Inequalities) not only is the first one to focus on health disparities and to be led by an African American woman, but it is also the first one awarded to a researcher at a historically Black medical school and is the first one given to a host institution in Georgia.

Davis is a Georgia native and UGA grad who was recruited to Morehouse by the school and GRA in 2023. Throughout her career, she has been a pioneer in the field of “disparities genomics” – disparities in genomic medicine that result from inadequate representation of certain racial and ethnic groups in disease-specific databases that support genetic research. She says part of her reason for coming to Morehouse was to establish an Institute for Translational Genomic Medicine that would increase diversity in the field, “mainly because we know the clinical tools that exist currently don’t quite work as well in non-European patients.”

“Quite frankly, Georgia Research Alliance saw the value of having this type of focus in their portfolio, so they invested by providing the endowment for my faculty position, which funds part of my startup,” Davis says. GRA also provided a million dollars toward equipment for cutting-edge genetic studies that she hopes will provide insights related to minority and underserved populations – populations for which genetic studies thus far have provided few answers.

Providing Insights into the Brain

The first GRA Eminent Scholar to hold a triple appointment at Georgia State University, Georgia Tech and Emory, Vince Calhoun serves as the founding director of Georgia State’s Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging Data Science (TReNDS), a collaborative research initiative supported by all three institutions.

Calhoun, a leading expert in brain imaging and analysis, develops advanced techniques to help researchers maximize the vast amount of brain data available. Different imaging technologies each provide unique insights into brain function. Yet, because each method has limitations, integrating the data is crucial to an understanding of the brain. Calhoun has created algorithms that map dynamic brain networks, including function, structure and genetics, to explore how these networks change during different tasks or in people with mental disorders.

“Quite frankly, Georgia Research Alliance saw the value of having this type of focus in their portfolio, so they invested by providing the endowment for my faculty position, which funds part of my startup.” Melissa B. Davis,director, Morehouse School of Medicine’s Institute of Translational Genomic Medicine

“Think of it as having different windows into the brain,” he says.

Prior to coming to Georgia, Calhoun served on the faculty of the University of New Mexico and as president of the Mind Research Network, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and brain injury.

Current work being supported by GRA includes research to predict classes of medications that are more likely to help people with mood disorders, helping them to get appropriate treatment faster. Calhoun’s group also does a lot of work “looking at the typical developing brain or aging brain,” he says.

Calhoun says one of the things that brought him to Georgia was the collaborative nature of the people he has met and the willingness to try to work together. He says the mindset of his colleagues is, “Let’s not start with one of the problems of working together, but let’s see how we can make it happen,” he says. “That has been the general attitude that I have found here as I have worked across institutions.”

Genetic research is moving forward at universities throughout Georgia due in large part to the Integrated Genomics Shared Resource. Housed at Augusta University, the resource is part of the RA Core Exchange, a program that allows university scientists to share each other’s core research facilities and equipment.

“Our team provides a specialized service called next-generation sequencing, which allows researchers to examine the entire genome within their samples,” says Martina Zoccheddu, director of the Integrated Genomics Shared Resource. “These samples can come from patient or animal tissues, a tissue slide from the pathology lab, or single cells isolated from blood or other samples. This technology has broad applications, enabling discoveries across various fields – from finding cell markers that drive diseases, such as cancer and cardiovascular, neurodegenerative and infectious diseases, and more.”

The service provides access to highly specialized, high-cost genomic instruments, some valued at $1 million or more, that individual labs generally can’t afford due to the expense not only of the equipment itself, but of its specialized upkeep, says Zoccheddu. Housing the instruments in a core facility allows the university to subsidize experimental costs and offer services that are affordable for researchers, she says. “We start by meeting with investigators to discuss their projects and determine which technology will best address their research questions. Once the approach is decided, we help plan the experiment, and when the investigator provides their samples, we process them and charge a fee per sample.”

Projects for the lab include a major sequencing project for the Pediatric Immunotherapy Program at Augusta University’s Medical College of Georgia, which offers clinical trials to families seeking immunotherapy options for children with relapsed cancer, and a study of inflammatory cells that play a role in the build-up of fat cells and calcifications in the body’s arteries, with the eventual goal of developing a vaccine for atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).

In other important research, Augusta University postdoctoral fellow Natalia Jaeger is exploring the role of immune cells in the tumor environment of women with endometrial cancer. A disease that begins in the lining of the uterus, endometrial cancer disproportionately affects Black women, who experience higher rates of both incidence and mortality compared to white women.

“By comparing the immune landscapes in endometrial tumors from Black and white patients, Jaeger aims to uncover biological differences that could contribute to the observed disparities in treatment outcomes. Ultimately, her research has the potential to guide the development of targeted, personalized treatments for endometrial cancer, helping to address the survival gap and improve outcomes for all patients.” says Zoccheddu.