Our primary areas of research include, but are not limited to:

• Brain tumors
• Stroke
• Spinal cord injury
• Precision movement/Brain-machine interface
• Epilepsy
• Traumatic brain injury (TBI)

• Tumor microenvironment

Basic science vs. clinical research

What is the difference between basic and clinical research?

Basic science research, often called fundamental or bench research, provides the foundation of knowledge for the applied science that follows. This type of research encompasses familiar scientific disciplines such as biochemistry, microbiology, physiology and pharmacology, and their interplay, and involves laboratory studies with cell cultures, animal studies or physiological experiments.

Meanwhile, in clinical research, data or samples of tissue from people are studied to understand health and disease. Clinical research helps find new and better ways to detect, diagnose, treat and prevent disease. Types of clinical research include clinical trials, which test new treatments for a disease, and natural history studies, which collect health information to understand how a disease develops and progresses over time.

Join us

Our clinical research trials would not be possible without volunteers willing to join us in the journey to new discoveries that save and changes lives. The Frontiers/Pioneers Research Recruitment Registries provide our researchers with contact information for people who have enrolled in these registries and appear to meet study criteria according to electronic health records (EHR) and medical history information. Currently, more than 60,000 people from The University of Kansas Health System and the community have agreed to be contacted for approved research studies.

ResearchMatch.org is a national resource to support participant engagement for Frontiers investigators.

To search for clinical trials you may be eligible for, visit the Frontiers/Pioneers Research Recruitment Registeries and ResearchMatch websites. 

Our current and completed projects

Current Clinical Trials

• MR-Guided Focused Ultrasound in the Treatment of Focal Epilepsy (EP001)
  The purpose of this study is to evaluate the feasibility, safety, and initial effectiveness of Exablate thermal ablation of a focal epileptic target area in the brain of patients suffering from medication-refractory epilepsy, using the Exablate transcranial system to produce multiple sonications targeted in the focus of interest. The investigators will establish the feasibility and collect data to establish the basic safety of this type of treatment as the basis for later studies that will evaluate its full clinical efficacy.
  
  
• Evaluation of Safety and Effectiveness of Stryker Surpass Evolve™ Flow Diverter System (EVOLVE)
  The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of the Surpass™ Evolve Flow Diverter System in the treatment of unruptured, wide-neck intracranial aneurysms measuring ≤ 12 mm and located on the ICA or its branches.

For more information about clinical trials in our department, contact Jason Gorup, Research Administrator, at jgorup@kumc.edu.

Current Basic Science Research Studies

• Neural encoding of precision movements
• Neural mapping of hand function
• Signal processing for epilepsy
• Medical imagine algorithms

For more information about our basic science research studies, visit the Precision Neural Dynamics Lab website.