Thomas Matula
University of Washington, WA·Biomedical Engineering
Skin and soft tissue infections, especially pus-filled pockets called abscesses, are among the most common infections seen in clinics and hospitals. They are also a top cause of hospital readmission.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physics
- Topics
focused ultrasound
histotripsy
cavitation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Expand an animal model of skin and soft tissue abscesses to include MRSA, a drug-resistant bacterium, for testing focused ultrasound treatment.
- Test whether histotripsy, short intense focused-ultrasound pulses that create cavitation bubbles, can disinfect abscesses and liquefy their contents for complete fine-needle aspiration.
- Perform animal studies of histotripsy abscess treatment needed to advance the approach toward first-in-human studies.
More about the research
The standard treatment is incision and drainage, which means cutting the abscess open. It is one of the most painful emergency-room procedures and can cause scarring, damage nearby tissue, and spread infection. Wound care is especially hard for people facing homelessness or injecting drugs. Bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics, but they cannot easily resist being physically torn apart.
Why it matters
Focused ultrasound could give patients with skin and soft tissue abscesses a less painful, noninvasive outpatient alternative to incision and drainage. If successful, it could reduce complications and scarring, avoid hospital stays and lower costs. It may especially help patients for whom wound care is difficult, while needing little extra training for physicians.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lilly Immergluck
Morehouse School of Medicine, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Apply association mining to antibiotic resistance phenotypes of community-onset Staphylococcus aureus from children to identify which resistance patterns co-occur and how multidrug-resistant profiles have changed over two decades.
Virginie Papadopoulou
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Biomedical Engineering
Optimize phase-change contrast agents, droplets that turn into bubbles under ultrasound, and therapeutic ultrasound settings to boost antibiotics against biofilms of Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterococcus faecalis in vitro.
Timothy Bigelow
Iowa State University, IA·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether adding lower-amplitude pulses to histotripsy, an ultrasound technique that creates bubble clouds to mechanically destroy cells, reduces cavitation memory and shortens treatment of infected hernia mesh, and measure how exposures affect mesh properties.
The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
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