Shane Wells Receives O’Brien Center Pilot Grant

Posted on August 2021

Shane Wells, MD will serve as the Principal Investigator on a pilot grant from the O’Brien Urology Research Center for his work Development of a Prostatic Elastogram. The team working on the grant includes Christopher Brace, PhD; Jim White, BS; Diego Hernando, PhD; Alejandro Roldán-Alzate, PhD; and Matt Grimes, MD (Urology).  

Previously, this team developed a novel, prostate-specific passive driver for interrogation of prostate stiffness with MRI. The goal with this grant is to optimize the passive driver and MRI protocols in phantoms for immediate translation into human subjects. They believe that prostate elastography will be a clinically useful biomarker in the comprehensive assessment of the lower urinary tract with MRI. 

“We are very thankful to Will Ricke and the George M. O’Brien Center for Benign Urologic Research at the University of Wisconsin for their support. We anticipate using the preliminary data obtained from this award for an upcoming R01 submission,” says Dr. Wells.