My name is Dee Luo, and I am a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania working towards a degree in the Biological Basis of Behavior from the College of Arts and Sciences and a minor in Healthcare Management from the Wharton School of Business. This summer, I am working with Dr. David Brindley, Dr. David DiGiusto, Anthony Davies, and Kirk Trisler to investigate regulation strategies in regenerative medicine.

My past research encompasses both clinical and benchwork experience. As an independent student researcher under Dr. David Asch and Dr. Ben Roman at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics under Dr. David Asch and Dr. Ben Roman, I was able to conduct an investigation on the effective use of Positron Emission Tomography combined with Computed Tomography (PET/CT) scans to detect reoccurring tumors as a patient management tool. In today’s medical climate, advancements in medical imaging technologies show great therapeutic promise, but the accompanying price tags pose an increasingly more difficult obstacle in the effort to reduce healthcare expenditures in the United States. One such costly new imaging modality, PET/CT scans, showed promise in detecting reoccurring tumors. However, at the time of discovery, there wasn’t enough data to either prove or disprove the efficacy of the scans. The Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) therefore conditionally covered the usage of such scans in an effort to accumulate data. However, when a formal evaluation two years later showed there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of PET/CT to detect reoccurring tumors, the technology was already widely incorporated into clinical practice and attempts to withdraw coverage for the procedure was met with so much physician backlash that CMS revised their decision to allow three PET/CT scans per cancer patient.¹

We sought to determine whether physician rationaleeasons for supporting low value care could be explained by sufficient perceived benefit of PET/CT and/or loss aversion. Content analysis proceeded through several stages, resulting in the identification ofa 7 main reasons. The results are currently being analyzed, with prominent trends such as loss aversion promising some surprising results that could tie health economics more closely with business models.

The research I conducted on the inefficiencies in healthcare policy made me realize the crucial importance regulation has on the ability of medicine to help patients. If guiding policy is outdated or misinformed, a therapy might never pass regulations, and the patient population will continue to suffer. On the other hand, if a promising technology is released into market that doesn’t measure up, the entire healthcare economy has to shoulder that expense. This interest in regulation drew me to SENS Research Foundation, because the cutting edge research being conducted in regenerative medicine at SRF is exactly where regulatory science research is needed.

My benchwork stems from an acknowledgement that all policy suggestions should come from a background based in science. As a current assistant researcher under Dr. Gordon Barr at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Management, I study acute and chronic pain management from a developmental perspective. When infants are admitted into intensive care, they undergo painful tests and procedures that utilize anesthetic opiates such as morphine.² Infant models for morphine withdrawal are currently unstudied. I am investigatinge the novel mechanisms for infant pain management through formalin-induced c-fos expression in areas associated with pain perception, namely the periaqueductal gray of the midbrain, of model rats.³ I have high hopes that this research will break grounds in the standard of care in the neonatal intensive care unit.