How NYU Langone Residents Used DataBiologics to Turn Clinical Questions into a National Poster Presentation

A New Model for Resident-Led Research

In the rapidly evolving field of musculoskeletal medicine, resident physicians are often faced with clinical questions that go unanswered in traditional academic literature. At NYU Langone Health’s Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, one group of residents decided to take a different approach — leveraging real-world outcomes data from the DataBiologics registry to investigate their hypothesis and present it on a national stage.

What began as a curiosity about platelet-rich plasma (PRP) treatment timing led to a research project, culminating in a poster presentation at the 2025 American Osteopathic Academy of Sports Medicine (AOASM) Annual Meeting.

Turning a Clinical Question Into a Research Project

Like many physicians-in-training, the NYU Langone Rusk Rehabilitation residents — Drs. Brandon Burg, Andres Gronda, Chun Maung — were seeing firsthand the increasing use of orthobiologic treatments like PRP in clinical practice. They asked a fundamental but understudied question: Does timing of PRP administration affect outcomes for patients with knee osteoarthritis?

To find some early answers they turned to the DataBiologics registry.

Leveraging the Registry: Access, Speed, and Scale

With the support of DataBiologics, the residents gained access to a large, de-identified dataset of patients who had undergone PRP therapy for knee osteoarthritis. This access allowed them to:

• Segment patient populations based on symptom duration at the time of treatment
• Run analyses quickly using existing outcome measures like KOOS JR
• Bypass typical research bottlenecks, such as long IRB approval or manual chart review

Within a few weeks, the team had built a retrospective cohort study from the real-world data.