(Press-News.org) ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic has been selected to lead a groundbreaking research project focused on improving indoor air quality and safety in healthcare settings by the Advanced Research Project Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The project, part of the ARPA-H BREATHE program, aims to develop new ways to monitor and improve air in real time, helping protect public health in buildings nationwide.
Mayo Clinic will lead the Hospital Air QUality (HAIQU): Breathing Life into Patient Care project, focusing on improving indoor air quality in hospitals to enhance health. "Maintaining high indoor air quality is essential to supporting respiratory health and preventing the spread of airborne illnesses — just one of the many ways we prioritize staff, patient and visitor well-being," says Connie Chang, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at Mayo Clinic and the project's principal investigator. "This initiative will push innovation in public health as we study and design systems that can continuously monitor air quality in real time and establish cost-effective interventions."
Through the HAIQU project, Mayo Clinic will introduce cutting-edge biosensors, artificial intelligence and smart air filtration systems in emergency departments across Mayo Clinic's campuses in Florida, Arizona and Minnesota. These innovative technologies work together to enhance air quality by proactively monitoring the environment, assessing potential risks and automatically improving air safety when needed — creating healthier spaces for patients and care teams alike.
The work is directly aligned with the design priorities of Bold. Forward. Unbound., which emphasizes clean, flexible and intelligent environments to support optimal healing.
"This award reinforces Mayo Clinic's commitment to harnessing the power of technology and data to prevent illness before it starts," says Vijay Shah, M.D., Kinney Executive Dean of Research at Mayo Clinic. "Our research will help create resilient clinical systems capable of sensing, interpreting and responding to data in real time, making the hospital of the future even more sophisticated for our patients."
The project will unfold in three phases over five years, beginning with the development of a biosensor to monitor emergency room air for aerosols such as viruses, bacteria, mold and allergens. Once validated, the system will undergo real-world testing and could lay the foundation for future indoor air quality standards and public health policies.
The Mayo Clinic-led effort includes a multidisciplinary team of collaborators from Siemens Corporation, Metalmark Innovations, Princeton University, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and The University of Chicago. The coalition brings together expertise from the healthcare, biotechnology and academic sectors. Mayo team members also include Jim Wilking, Ph.D. (biomedical engineering), who will lead the engineering effort to design the biosensor; Chung Wi, M.D. (Precision Population Science Laboratory), who will lead a clinical study to validate the research; Alexander Revzin, Ph.D. (biomedical engineering); Clifton Haider, Ph.D. (biomedical engineering); Priya Sampathkumar, M.D. (infectious diseases); Casey Clements, M.D., Ph.D. (emergency medicine, Minnesota); Andrej Urumov, M.D. (emergency medicine, Arizona); and Jesse St Clair IV, M.D. (emergency medicine, Florida).
###
About Mayo Clinic
Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization committed to innovation in clinical practice, education and research, and providing compassion, expertise and answers to everyone who needs healing. Visit the Mayo Clinic News Network for additional Mayo Clinic news.
END
Mayo Clinic awarded up to $40 million by ARPA-H for pioneering air safety research
2025-10-02
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
People with Down syndrome have early neuroinflammation
2025-10-02
Down syndrome is associated with accelerated aging. It is estimated that up to 90% of individuals with the condition develop Alzheimer’s disease before the age of 70. A study by researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil identified high levels of neuroinflammation in young individuals with Down syndrome, an additional factor explaining the high prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in older people with the condition. The discovery paves the way for strategies to prevent and monitor the disease.
The study, which was published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia and ...
CNIO researchers create the “human repairome”, a catalogue of DNA “scars” that will help define personalized cancer treatments
2025-10-02
The human repairome, REPAIRome, will allow researchers around the world to rapidly check out how each of the 20,000 human genes affects DNA repair.
Created by researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), it is published today in the journal Science.
The human repairome is ‘a powerful resource for the scientific community’, the authors write in Science. It has ‘implications for human health, including cancer treatment’.
It also allows progress ‘towards full control of CRISPR-Cas gene-editing technologies’, they add.
The repairome ...
Strengthening biosecurity screening for genes that encode proteins of concern
2025-10-02
Advances in artificial intelligence-assisted protein engineering are enabling breakthroughs in protein design, but they also introduce biosecurity challenges related to potential production of harmful proteins. Though screening software to detect harmful proteins exists, a new multi-month analysis of such software reports that this software has vulnerabilities; some proteins of concern could evade detection. Critically, the study also offers a way to improve detection rates of proteins of concern going forward. AI-assisted protein design (AIPD) enables powerful advances in medicine and biology, enabling researchers to modify existing proteins or design wholly new ones ...
Global wildfire disasters are growing in frequency and cost
2025-10-02
Wildfire disasters worldwide are growing notably in frequency and cost, according to a new study, with nearly half of the most damaging events over the last 44 years occurring in just the past decade, driven largely by increasingly extreme fire weather in vulnerable, densely populated regions. The findings, informed by an analysis of global reinsurance data and international disaster reports, reveal a concerning trend and highlight the need to adapt for a more fire-prone world. Humans have coexisted with wildfires for millennia, but climate change, land mismanagement, and expansion into flammable landscapes ...
Wildfire management: Reactive response and recovery, or proactive mitigation and prevention
2025-10-02
Catastrophic wildfires – those causing massive damage and soaring suppression costs – are increasing in frequency and intensity worldwide, a trend expected to worsen with climate change. In a Policy Forum, Robert Gray and colleagues use British Columbia (BC), Canada, as a case study of a government at a crossroads: continue reactive spending on suppression and recovery or invest in strategies to reduce future wildfire risk. “Although we focus on BC, this same tough question, along with lessons learned and our main recommendations, apply to regional ...
Phosphine detected in the atmosphere of a low-temperature brown dwarf
2025-10-02
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have detected the molecule phosphine beyond our Solar System, according to a new study, finding it in the atmosphere of the cold brown dwarf Wolf 1130C. The presence of the phosphorus-containing molecule phosphine (PH3) is well established in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, as well as in some giant stars. Although models predict that PH3 should be similarly common in gas giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs, searches for the molecule in the atmospheres of those objects have shown it to be in very low abundance, if not totally absent. Using the JWST NIRSpec instrument, Adam Burgasser ...
Scientists develop rapid and scalable platform for in planta directed evolution
2025-10-02
Directed evolution is a laboratory technique that mimics natural selection and allows scientists to evolve genes and the proteins they encode. Traditionally, this technique has been used in microbes, mammalian cells, or in test tubes.
Now, researchers led by Prof. GAO Caixia from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Prof. QIU Jinlong from the Institute of Microbiology of CAS have developed a new system that enables rapid and scalable directed evolution of diverse genes directly ...
New tiny prehistoric fish species unlocks origins of catfish and carp
2025-10-02
The fossil of a tiny fish found in southwestern Alberta provides new insight into the origin and evolution of otophysans, the supergroup of fish that includes catfish, carp and tetras, which today account for two-thirds of all freshwater species.
The specimen, studied by researchers at Western University, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and international collaborators, is a skeleton of a fish about 4 cm long from the Late Cretaceous period (the age of the iconic Tyrannosaurus Rex, about 100.5 million to 66 million years ago.) A new kind of fish entirely, it ...
Plant microbiota: War and peace under the surface
2025-10-02
When we talk about microbiota, we usually think of the one inhabiting our gut. But there is another, less known and equally vital: the plant microbiota. In an article featured on the cover of Science (October 2, 2025), Professor Niko Geldner and his team at the University of Lausanne (Unil) unveil the subtle alliances and rivalries that unfold between bacteria and roots, hidden beneath the soil.
Roots and microbes
The plant microbiota, or “phytobiome,” brings together communities of bacterial and fungal microorganisms that can be partners, allies—and sometimes enemies. The part most closely associated with roots is called the “rhizospheric” ...
Fossilized ear bones rewrite the history of freshwater fish
2025-10-02
When saltwater fish long ago evolved to live in fresh water, many of them also evolved a more sophisticated hearing system, including middle ear bones similar to those in humans.
Two-thirds of all freshwater fish today — including more than 10,000 species, from catfish to popular aquarium fish like tetras and zebrafish — have this middle ear system, called the Weberian apparatus, which allows them to hear sounds at much higher frequencies than most ocean fish can, with a range close to that of humans.
University of California, Berkeley paleontologist Juan Liu has now used the structure of this Weberian apparatus in a newly discovered ...