SC governor honors MUSC researcher for her work to make behavioral health care more accessible

As Jennifer Dahne, Ph.D., was growing up, her father frequently repeated a Talmudic teaching: Whoever saves a life, it is as though he saved the world entire.

That precept stuck with her.

“Throughout my career, starting from undergrad when I first got involved with research, I've always been motivated to save lives,” she said. “I was a psychology major, and I thought, ‘OK, within psychology, how do we do this? How do we save a lot of lives?’ And that was where I first got interested in smoking cessation research.”

Her interests then expanded to depression treatment and finding ways to provide both types of treatments to people remotely so that anyone, anywhere, could get help to quit smoking or to treat depression without needing to travel to see a provider in person.

“If you can do something to move the needle with either – or both – within someone's life, you can reduce their suffering, improve their quality of life, and hopefully save their life,” she said.

Now, her work is being acknowledged with the Governor’s Young Scientist Award for Excellence in Scientific Research.

This award, jointly awarded by the governor’s office and the South Carolina Academy of Science, honors a “gifted young researcher” who has the “potential for major contributions to his or her discipline.”

Thomas Uhde, Ph.D., chairman of the MUSC Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, where Dahne is a professor, and Raymond N. DuBois, M.D., Ph.D., director of MUSC Hollings Cancer Center, of which Dahne is a member, both wrote glowing letters nominating Dahne for the award. Colleagues at institutions in New York and Alabama also wrote enthusiastic letters of support.

“One of the things that is most compelling about Dr. Dahne’s research is how pragmatic it is – she develops clinical innovations that can be directly and efficiently deployed within ‘real world’ clinical practice settings to readily transform health care delivery and improve quality of life,” wrote Carl W. Lejuez, Ph.D., executive vice president and provost at Stony Brook University.

Dahne became interested in practical applications of her work early on. In graduate school, she wanted to find a way to use technology to deliver depression treatment.

“I went to my graduate school mentor, and I said, ‘I want to build these things,’ and he said, ‘That's a great idea, but you have to find money for it.’ I always joke that I think he thought that would scare me away. But I said, ‘All right, I'll just write a grant.’”

As a graduate student, though, she couldn’t be the principal investigator on a grant. So she applied for – and received – two Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants under her mentor’s name. STTR grants provide seed funding to start to bring new products, drugs or medical devices to the market.

That interest eventually led to the development of two apps focused on depression treatment.

Upon moving to South Carolina for her internship year, Dahne quickly realized that her ideas could really be useful in reaching people in rural areas where there are fewer health care providers.

As MUSC Health has grown, she’s started to work with the Regional Health Network – for example, partnering with the most rural of the MUSC Health primary care clinics in the Marion, Florence and Lancaster areas to run a clinical trial testing proactive e-visits for smoking cessation.

Of course, when the COVID pandemic erupted, everyone became interested in telehealth and remote clinical trials. As the co-director for remote and clinical trials at the South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research Institute, based at MUSC, Dahne works both to help others to conduct remote trials but also to evaluate whether this type of trial is fulfilling its promise.

That promise is that remote trials could provide options to people who live far from the academic medical centers where most trials take place, and that they could make trials more accessible to a broad swath of the population.

There are challenges, though.

“We're hopefully making our trials more accessible. But for most of our studies, we need to capture some type of biomarker – like in a smoking cessation trial, we need to biochemically verify that someone has actually quit. So how do we remotely capture those biomarkers?” she said.

Whether it’s having trial participants breathe into a carbon monoxide monitor, take a temperature, measure blood pressure or even get their own blood sample – something that Dahne plans to do in an upcoming trial with a specialized device – researchers need to know that it is, indeed, the participant’s sample. They need to know it was collected properly. Dahne is working now on solving these logistical questions.

“I've had this program of research that has taken various Bluetooth-enabled remote patient monitoring devices. It started with a carbon monoxide monitor for smoking cessation, then we further built onto the platform a COPD screening with a remote home spirometry device that they breathe into. And then with the STTR from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, the goal was to build a system where we could keep pulling in new remote patient monitoring devices over time, as other investigators need them,” she explained. With that platform now built, she is looking ahead to continue building it out, enabling more researchers to offer remote trials.

Dahne especially loves working at MUSC because she gets to collaborate with people from many different fields. For example, she’s working with Evan Graboyes, M.D., a head and neck cancer surgeon, to test a new model of mental health care delivery for people living with likely incurable cancer and dealing with depression. Their trial uses one of the apps that she began developing back when she was a graduate student.

She’s also grateful for her team in her Behavioral Health Innovations Lab.

“The staff on my team are amazing, and working with all of them makes work fun every day,” she said.

Her genuine collaborative spirit is felt and appreciated by those she works with. Larry Hawk, Ph.D., of the University at Buffalo touched on what a difference it makes in his letter supporting her award nomination.

“Dr. Dahne is one of my most valued colleagues, both for her scientific ideas and ideals and because of how collegial, understanding and efficient she is. If she says she is going to do something, she does it, and at the highest level,” he wrote. “During our lengthy slog to get our grant funded, Dr. Dahne was always a voice of reason and encouragement, focused and fun to work with.”

Dahne, for her part, is energized by the people around her.

“The thing that I love the most is the people I get to work with and the people I hopefully get to help,” Dahne said. “So I just keep having fun at work. When things get tough – and I tell this to my team all the time – you have to remember the impact of our work.”

About MUSC Hollings Cancer Center

MUSC Hollings Cancer Center is South Carolina’s only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center with the largest academic-based cancer research program in the state. With more than 150 faculty cancer scientists and 20 academic departments, it has an annual research funding portfolio of more than $50 million and sponsors more than 200 clinical trials across the state. Hollings offers state-of-the-art cancer screenings, diagnostic capabilities, therapies and surgical techniques within its multidisciplinary clinics to provide the full range of cancer care. Dedicated to preventing and reducing the cancer burden statewide, the Hollings Office of Community Outreach and Engagement works with community organizations to bring cancer education and prevention information to affected populations. For more information, visit hollingscancercenter.musc.edu