Transforming Plastic Waste

Catalina Island, located 22 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, once collected Hollywood royalty, smugglers and silver miners. Now, it is a collection point of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous spread of microplastics with accumulated larger debris that stretches more than 1.6 million square kilometers.

Up to 10 million metric tons of plastic end up in our oceans each year and, since the substance does not naturally degrade on a reasonable timescale, its accumulation may outweigh all the fish in the sea by 2050. Current methods to recycle or remanufacture polyethylene are also not cost-effective, something chemical recycling might alleviate.

To address this urgent challenge, Clay C. C. Wang, chair of the USC Mann Department of Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and collaborators at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences have devised an innovative method for transforming plastic trash into a variety of useful products—including pharmaceuticals—with unprecedented efficiency.

“If you look at the biological cycle, that efficiency is very exciting because the process will be cost-sensitive,” Wang says. “We’re going to make the products in bulk quantities.”

So far, the team has successfully used their new method on two major types of plastics with extremely poor recycling rates—polyethylene and polystyrene.

To test the process, Wang’s team recruited student and community groups to collect samples of plastic waste from Catalina Island. The researchers converted these samples into diacids and benzoic acid, which they then fed to strains of Aspergillus nidulans, an easy-to-engineer fungus often employed in drug discovery. The fungus responded by producing high quantities of compounds with antimicrobial, anticancer, antioxidant and neuroprotective properties— all within a week. Furthermore, they converted these plastic breakdown products into a biocontrol agent, which is used agriculturally to naturally counteract the accumulation of highly carcinogenic compounds in crops.

Overall, this method may enable such compounds with therapeutic potential to be produced in bulk while also removing harmful plastic waste from the environment. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, only about 30% of polyethylene is currently recoverable, with less than 6% of polyethylene being recycled. Meanwhile, less than 4% of the hundreds of thousands of polystyrene packages generated each year is recycled. The newly developed process would turn that waste into a vast inventory of potential therapies.

To expand the scope of this research, the team is now working on creating many more products, such as dyes, proteins and other valuable products from even more types of plastics.

“The ultimate goal is developing a method that could be used on a mixture of plastics,” Wang says. “Right now, if you go to recycle your plastic waste, there’s only one bin, but there are actually several different classes of plastics. There are systems that sort them but, ideally, we’d like to be able to tackle mixtures of plastics using a similar approach.”

Heightening Awareness Of Opioid Abuse

Jackie’s Pain, the USC Mann School’s latest health literacy publication, explains the risks of prescription opioid addiction.

The comic-book-style graphic novel is the 11th publication in the school’s popular series created by longtime faculty member Mel Baron, PharmD ’57, and producer Gregory B. Molina, that combines health information with dramatic storytelling and photography. Published in both Spanish and English, the booklets are distributed at safety-net clinics, health fairs, pharmacies and other locations.

The graphic novel tells the story of Jackie, whose adult son Luis becomes addicted to opioids after finding old prescription painkillers that Jackie had not discarded after recovering from knee surgery.

Jackie begins going to a support group for parents of addicted children as well as meditating to manage stress. She learns how to use naloxone in case her son has an overdose, and encourages him to try a support group.

Written and directed by Gabriela López de Dennis, illustrated by Los Angeles graphic design firm TinyTeam LLC and designed by Soap Studio Inc., the graphic novel covers facts about fentanyl, sharing opioids prescribed by a doctor, and how to safely dispose of unused or expired opioids. It also addresses what naloxone is and how to use it, getting help for opioid use disorder and safer ways to get relief from pain.

The number of drug overdose deaths has quintupled since 1999, and increased by nearly 30% from 2019 to 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 75% of the 91,799 drug overdose deaths in 2020 involved an opioid.

“We hear a lot of questions from parents about what to look for as far as opioid addiction, and the booklets are extremely well made,” says Elaine Di Simone, outpatient/substance use disorder program director at Clínica Romero, a federally qualified health center where trained community leaders called promotoras are distributing the publication to local, at-risk populations. “These are very helpful for parents in our youth program.”

Numerous experts on pain management and addiction, preventive medicine and health literacy—including Baron, Jennifer B. Unger, Siddarth Puri, Aurora Geysimonyan, Edward Padilla, Melissa Durham and Gene Lang—served as script consultants.

“Especially today with so much misinformation, we want the appropriate information to reach the public,” Baron says. “Packing expert advice in an entertaining format helps ensure the public health message gets through. Our graphic novels fulfill a vital need by reaching underserved communities and educating patients about drug-related dangers. It’s part of what pharmacy is all about.”

The project was supported by the USC Mann School, UniHealth Foundation, USC Good Neighbors Campaign, L.A. Care Health Plan, Keck Medicine of USC and Beit T’Shuvah, a residential addiction recovery center whose leadership, staff and clients provided insights and contributed to the development of the publication.

Preventing Hospital Complications

Hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) such as adverse drug effects, infections and pressure injuries cost the U.S. nearly $48 billion annually. Avoidable complications afflict more than 3.7 million patients every year. HACs are also the third-leading cause of death nationwide.

William Padula is a nationally recognized expert leading the charge to design policies that prevent these conditions from occurring in the first place, saving both lives and money.

Although hospitals and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have made $ 48 billion spent annually on hospitalacquired conditions progress in recent years toward reducing HACs, Padula says they are missing a chance for even greater impact. This is because hospital systems, in response to the threat of payment reductions from CMS, tend to create initiatives that treat issues as different and distinct. This leads to nurses and practitioners dividing the issue into too many parts rather than addressing it holistically.

As Padula, Dana Goldman and colleagues argued in an editorial for Mayo Clinic Proceedings, many HACs have overlapping risk factors. So a better way to prevent them is to focus on factors that overlap between outcomes—such as nutrition or mobility.

To reduce complexity bias—the tendency to choose the most complex of two competing approaches—they write that CMS should consider rewarding health systems for good performance, rather than enforcing only punitive measures. They believe that hospitals that become designated as Centers of Excellence—that is, go beyond providing a baseline standard of care—would meet eligibility criteria for these reward-based payments.

PADULA’S CHECKLIST FOR PRESSURE INJURY PREVENTION WAS WRITTEN INTO LAW AS THE STANDARD OF CARE FOR VETERANS AFFAIRS FACILITIES NATIONWIDE IN 2022.

Pressure injuries, a common but preventable HAC, affect approximately 2.5 million patients in the U.S., cost the healthcare system $26.8 billion and result in 60,000 deaths annually.

Padula’s findings have gained attention from federal policymakers and health system administrators. His checklist for pressure injury prevention was written into law as the standard of care for Veterans Affairs facilities nationwide in 2022.

CDC’S WRIGHT TO SPEAK AT COMMENCEMENT

USC Mann’s 2023 commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 13, will feature keynote speaker Janet S. Wright, MD, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention. Wright was appointed director of the division in July 2021 after returning to the CDC following a two-year detail in the Office of the Surgeon General as acting director of science and policy.

From 2011 to 2019, Wright served as executive director of Million Hearts, a national initiative co-led by the CDC and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to prevent 1 million heart attacks and strokes in the U.S. In the first five-year phase, an estimated 500,000 cardiovascular events were prevented through efforts in all 50 states and the District of Columbia involving more than 125 public and private partners.

Prior to federal service, Wright served as senior vice president for science and quality at the American College of Cardiology from 2008 to 2011 and practiced cardiology for many years in Chico, Calif. She received the Surgeon General’s Award for Exemplary Service in 2020.

Connect With Usc Mann

In keeping with the name change, the school’s website and social media accounts have changed. Reset your bookmarks!

mann.usc.edu

@usc_mann

@USCMann linkedin.com/school/uscmann facebook.com/uscmannschool youtube.com/@USCMann

Lee Joins Board of Councilors

Ann Young Lee has joined the Mann School’s Board of Councilors. She has 20 years of experience managing large-scale humanitarian response and sustainable development programming across a variety of sectors.

Alongside Sean Penn in 2019, Lee co-founded Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE), an evolution of Penn’s J/P Haitian Relief Organization, for which Lee has served as CEO since 2016. During her time with CORE, she has overseen the organization’s successful transition into an international response and resiliencebuilding nongovernmental organization, responding to crises in Puerto Rico, across the Caribbean, Latin America and the continental United States. CORE was a key partner in the USC Mann School’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts.

Prior to joining CORE, Lee worked as the lead on urban humanitarian response for the UN’s Organization for Coordination and Humanitarian Affairs and a privatesector liaison for the Secretary General’s World Humanitarian Summit. She holds a master’s in urban planning from NYU and a master’s in economics and conflict management from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Lee received the Society for International Development’s prestigious Truman Award in May 2009.