Ryan Branski Grand Rounds, Part 1

Dr. Ryan Branski is an Associate Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and Pathology in the School of Medicine at NYU. He also has an affiliate appointment in Communicative Sciences and Disorders in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is a licensed speech pathologist and serves as the Associate Director of the Voice Center at NYU Langone Health. In addition to maintaining a clinical practice, Dr. Branski runs a productive research enterprise encompassing both clinical and laboratory initiatives. His NIH-funded laboratory primarily focuses on wound healing and regenerative approaches to optimized healing in the upper aerodigestive track. Dr. Branski is one of only a few investigators to be named a Fellow of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, the American Speech Language Hearing Association, and the American Laryngological Association. This is the first of a two-part interview with Dr Ryan Branski.  In Part One, Dr. Branski points out that voice loss is the most common communication disorder while the Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders allocates only 6% of research dollars for voice disorders and 70% for hearing loss research. The impacts of voice disorders are broad and hard to characterize. Psychosocial implications also are profound.  PART 2   Dr. Branski indicated that we do a ton of in-office procedures. We can put just about any therapeutic into a larynx. In our lab, we have spent a lot of time looking at steroids. We also do a fair amount of gene therapy. Unlike cholesterol studies, looking at vocal fold function in humans is not the same as looking at it in other animals, such as rabbits. We do a lot of tissue engineering. An area we are most interested in using a regenerative medicine approach to vocal fold injury. He indicated that in research, they are starting with new pre-clinical trials. They have new custom carriages and do not have to use connect. One problem is that pre-clinically, we did not know what to look at. So, we have become interested in biomechanical testing.