"This is one of the only training programs in the country focused solely on pediatric bioengineering," says Michael E. Davis, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory and director of the Pediatric Center for Cardiovascular Biology at Emory and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.  Nearly $500,000 in funding over five years will allow 10 talented undergraduate students each year from around the United States to work for a pediatric engineering project over the summer. The students also will shadow clinicians to better understand childhood diseases and receive training in scientific reading, writing, and scientific processes.

All interested students should apply directly to the Emory SURE Program by clicking HERE, and select the PERSE program.

A gene normally involved in the regulation of embryonic development can trigger the transition of cells into more mobile types that can spread without regard for the normal biological controls that restrict metastasis, the new study shows.

Analysis of downstream signaling pathways of this gene, called SNAIL, could be used to identify potential targets for scientists who are looking for ways to block or slow metastasis.

“This gene relates directly to the mechanism that metastatic cancer cells use to move from one location to another,” said Michelle Dawson, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If you have a cell that overexpresses SNAIL, then it can potentially be metastatic without having any environmental cues that normally trigger this response.”

The study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and was published December 9 in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB).

Previously, Dawson and Daniel McGrail, the lead author on the new study, published a study showing how ovarian cancer cells respond to the mechanics of their bodily environment. Their data showed that ovarian cancer cells are more aggressive on soft tissues – such as the fatty tissue that line the gut – due to the mechanical properties of this environment. The finding is contrary to what is seen with other malignant cancer cells that seem to prefer stiffer tissues.

In the new study, the researchers show how overexpression of the gene SNAIL in vitro allows breast cancer cells to operate independently of the mechanics of the environment inside the body. Growing evidence suggests that cancer cells metastasize by hijacking the process by which cells change their type from epithelial (cells that lack mobility) to mesenchymal (cells that can easily move). In the new study, the researchers examined the biophysical properties of breast cancer cells that had undergone this epithelial to mesenchymal transition (through overexpression of SNAIL).

The research team measured the mechanical properties within the nucleus and cytosol of breast cancer cells, and then measured the surface traction forces and the motility of the cells on different substrates. They found that cells became much softer, which could help them spread throughout the body.

Dawson’s lab collaborated with the lab of John McDonald, a professor in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech, to use microarray analysis to examine changes in genes related to the observed biophysical changes. The researchers found that regardless of the substrate that the cells were grown on, cells that overexpress SNAIL look and act like aggressive cancer cells.

“We found that when the cells express SNAIL, they have biophysical properties that are similar to what we see for an activated metastatic cancer cell,” Dawson said.

Although SNAIL triggers a transformation that helps cells move from the primary tumor to the metastatic site, once the cell arrives at the metastatic site and that tumor starts to grow, SNAIL no longer helps cancer progress. Though becoming softer may help cells spread to the secondary site, they were no longer sturdy enough to form a secondary tumor.

“The cells need to transfer back to the epithelial state so they can withstand solid stress,” Dawson said.

The researchers hopethat their unique blend of microarray analysis and characterization of physical changes in breast cancer cells undergoing metastasis could aid the search for ways to block or slow the spread of cancer.

“We think this work has great potential to lead to a new approach to cancer therapeutics,” said McDonald, who is also the director of the Integrated Cancer Research Center at Georgia Tech.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under award numbers 1032527, 1411304 and DGE-0965945. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agency.

CITATION: Daniel J. McGrail, et al., “SNAIL-induced epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition produces concerted biophysical changes from altered cytoskeletal gene expression.” (FASEB, December 2014) http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2014/12/07/fj.14-257345.abstract

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Media Relations Contacts: Brett Israel (@btiatl) (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Brett Israel 

The designation honors those who “have demonstrated a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.”

Prausnitz was chosen for the honor based on his revolutionary work in drug delivery technologies, especially microneedles, which are tiny needles (about 400 to 700 microns long) that can be designed as skin patches that provide a simple, painless and inexpensive way to administer influenza, polio, measles and other vaccines. Microneedles also can be prepared for microinjection into the eye for highly targeted therapies designed to increase drug effectiveness and safety.

“Our laboratory not only strives to advance scientific understanding and provide research training to students but also seeks to make inventions that can benefit society,” Prausnitz said.

Prausnitz will be honored at the NAI Fellows Luncheon and Induction Ceremony at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena on March 20. The event is part of the organization’s annual conference.

Prausnitz also was named to the list of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds this year.

When the disguised peptides are needed to launch biological processes, the researchers shine ultraviolet light onto the molecules through the skin, causing the “hat” structures to come off. That allows cells and other molecules to recognize and interact with the peptides on the surface of the material.

This light-activated triggering technique has been demonstrated in animal models, and if it can be made to work in humans, it could help provide more precise timing for processes essential to regenerative medicine, cancer treatment, immunology, stem cell growth, and a range of other areas. The research represents the first time biological signals presented on biomaterials have been activated by light through the skin of a living animal, and could provide a broader platform technology for launching and controlling biological processes in living animals.

“Many biological processes involve complex cascades of reactions in which the timing must be very tightly controlled,” said Andrés García, a Regents Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and principal investigator for the project. “Until now, we haven’t had control over the sequence of events in the response to implanted materials. But with this technique, we can deliver a drug or particle with its signal in the ‘off’ position, then use light to turn the signal ‘on’ precisely when needed.”

Supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the research was reported December 15, 2014, in the journal Nature Materials. It resulted from collaboration between scientists from Georgia Tech and the Max-Planck Institute in Germany through the Materials World Network Program.

When biomaterials are introduced into the body, they normally stimulate an immune system response immediately. But the researchers used molecular cages like hats to cover binding sites on the peptides that are normally recognized by cell receptors, preventing recognition by the animal’s cells. The cages were designed to detach and reveal the peptides when they encounter specific wavelengths of light.

During the five-year project, the research team – which included Ted Lee and Jose Garcia from Georgia Tech and Aranzazu del Campo from Max-Planck – modified peptides that normally trigger cell adhesion to present the molecular cage in order to disguise them. They showed that disguised peptides introduced into animal models on biomaterials could trigger cell adhesion, inflammation, fibrous encapsulation, and vascularization responses when activated by light. They also showed that the location and timing of activation could be controlled inside the animal by simply shining light through the skin.

The work involved numerous controls to ensure that the triggering observed by the researchers was actually done by exposure of the peptides – not the light, or the removal of the protective cage. The researchers also had to demonstrate that the “hats” were stable enough that they didn’t come off spontaneously, but only when the link between the molecular cage and the peptide was severed by the ultraviolet light.

Among the experiments was use of the peptide to attract cells that would attach themselves to the biomaterial. “We showed that if we left the hat on, there would be few cells attracted to the material, García said. “But when we take the hat off, we recruited a lot of cells to the material. That shows we can activate the peptide, and that the activation has a biological consequence.”

Another experiment showed that the timing of peptide activation could affect the quantity of fibrosis, an immune system response that builds a protective capsule around an implanted biomaterial. By delaying the exposure of the peptides until after the bulk of the inflammation reaction had taken place, the thickness of the fibrosis capsule was significantly reduced, allowing it to be better incorporated into the body.

In another experiment, the researchers showed that removing the hats could trigger the growth of blood vessels into the material. This vascularization is critical in regenerative medicine, but must take place at the right time to be successful.

“We showed that if you keep the hat on, you get no vessel in-growth into the material,” explained García. “But if we turn on the light, we get growth of new blood vessels into the material. We can control what happens and when it happens by when we expose the protective cages to light.”

In the future, photochemists at the Max-Planck Institute will be working on alternative cages that would be triggered by different wavelengths of light. As much as 90 percent of the ultraviolet light used in the experiments was lost in passing through the skin of the animal model, limiting the use of that wavelength to locations immediately below the skin.

Development of alternate “hats,” the molecular cages that protect the peptides, could allow sequential activation by light, and light activation of molecules at locations deeper inside the body.

Light, heat, and electricity have been used to trigger biological processes in vitro, García noted. Light is especially useful because it can be patterned to control processes spatially, which is also important because the processes must occur not only at the right time, but also the right place.

“The technique we developed is a general strategy that we can apply to other biological signals to see if they have similar spatio-temporal effects,” said García. “We see this as a beginning. From here, there are many, many applications that we can follow.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research involved Ankur Singh, Edward Phelps and Asha Shekaran from Georgia Tech, and Julieta Paez, Simone Weis and Zahid Shafiq from the Max-Planck Institute. Lee now works for Dexcom, a San Diego-based company that focuses on continuous glucose monitoring systems for use by people with diabetes, and Singh is currently an assistant professor at Cornell University.

The research was supported by the Materials World Network Program of the National Science Foundation under grants DFG AOBJ 569628 and NSF DMR-0909002, by the National Institutes of Health under grants R01-AR062368 and R01-AR062920, and by the NIH Cell and Tissue NIH Biotechnology Training Grant T32-GM008433. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health.

CITATION: Lee, Ted, et al., “Light-triggered in vivo Activation of Adhesive Peptides Regulates Cell Adhesion, Inflammation and Vascularization of Biomaterials,” Nature Materials 2014.

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Bioengineering and Bioscience

Outstanding BioE Student Paper

• All BioE students are eligible - Must be currently enrolled
• $750 cash and plaque award
• Nominated by Advisor - nominations must include a letter of support from advisor discussing impact and significance of the work
• Electronic copy of paper must accompany nomination
• Paper must be published, in press or accepted in the time frame January 1 - December 31, 2014

Outstanding BioE PhD Thesis

• All BioE students are eligible - Do not have to be currently enrolled 
• $750 cash and plaque award
• Nominated by Advisor
• Nominations must include a letter of support from advisor
• Electronic copy of Ph.D. thesis must accompany nomination
• Thesis Certificate of Completion form must be signed by ALL committee members in the time frame January 1 - December 31, 2014

Outstanding BioE Advisor

• All BioE Program Faculty are eligible
• $500 discretionary funds and plaque
• Nominated by graduate student(s) – Submit a letter explaining why you are nominating a faculty member. 

Christopher Ruffin Leadership Award

The Student Leadership Award was established to honor the memory of Christopher Ruffin and his exceptional contributions to the BioE Program. Chris began working at GT in 1994 and joined the bioengineering community in April 2001. As Academic Advisor in the BioE Program, Chris worked tirelessly to support the BioE students and faculty.  This award recognizes a current graduate student for his or her superior contributions to the BioEngineering Program. The Leadership Award will be awarded to a student whose influence, ideals and activities throughout his/her time in the BioEngineering Program has left a long lasting and positive impression on the institution and has raised the standard of excellence for future BioEngineering classes. Examples of strong leadership qualities include activities such as peer mentoring, teaching, and service.

Nominations should be submitted to Laura Paige with the BioE program. Nominations for the Outstanding Awards will be reviewed by the BioE Faculty Advisory Committee and nominations for the Ruffin Leadership Award will be reviewed by a BGA committee. Winners will be announced at the BioE Reception on March 27, 2015 (Recruitment Day).

Two of Tech’s major academic showcases take place this week. The second annual Tech4Good Poster Showcase and the twice-yearly Capstone Design Expo both help students gain real world experience and promote creativity in designing their own products for market.

Tech4Good lets students from different areas of study work on projects that benefit nonprofit organizations and local communities. It aims to build on current service learning activities on campus and promote social entrepreneurship and civic engagement in Tech's curriculum.

The Capstone Design Expo focuses on mechanical, biomedical, electrical and computer, and industrial and systems engineering projects, as well as industrial design projects. Students in these majors take the Capstone Senior Design course and develop innovative ideas that solve an industry-sponsored challenge, help researchers develop technology, or form the basis for their own startup. Both events allow students to meet professionals from their field of study who provide helpful criticism and potential job and investment offers.

From helping nonprofit companies to competing for cash prizes and job offers, each expo shows Tech’s student talent. Tech4Good will take place Wednesday, Dec. 3, from 4 – 6 p.m. on the first floor of Clough Commons. The Capstone Design Expo will be held Thursday, Dec. 4, from 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. at McCamish Pavilion. Both events are free and open to the public.

Now, more than ever, those opportunities are plentiful in biosciences at Georgia Tech, where researchers are creating medical devices for children, understanding how diseases occur, improving vaccines, and building better biomaterials for drug delivery. Georgia Tech’s unique blend of engineering, biology, chemistry, and computing — along with partnerships with world-class medical facilities in Atlanta, such as Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta — has transformed the Institute’s campus into a magnet for bio-minded scientists.

“What we bring to the table is a new perspective in the biological sciences that is data driven, that is quantitative, that focuses on devices and techniques and on being unafraid to ask fundamental questions,” said Ravi Bellamkonda, the chair and professor of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “It’s a different approach to biology as an engineer.”

The rise of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech has created a ripple effect across the biosciences on campus. Biologists studying genetics, ecology, and personalized medicine are collaborating with engineers to solve challenging medical problems. The bio quad, home to the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB); the U.A. Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Building; the Ford Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T) Building; and the Molecular Science and Engineering (M) Building, already forms a hub of interdisciplinary research. Soon, other collaboration-oriented buildings will be added, solidifying the Institute’s commitment to developing its bioscience portfolio, which touches everything from mechanical engineering, to electrical engineering, to materials science and engineering.

Bioscience the Georgia Tech way has attracted high-profile faculty, such as M.G. Finn, pioneer of click chemistry and rumored Nobel Prize candidate. Also flocking to campus are fresh young minds, such as Susan N. Thomas, an assistant professor in the new field of immunoengineering. These researchers and others, who might not have come to Georgia Tech even 10 years ago, say that the Institute is already making a dent in some of the world’s biggest medical challenges, and is poised to do more. Nascent fields of research, such as immunoengineering, systems biology, pediatric bioengineering, chemical biology, and biomanufacturing, are emerging strengths on campus, positioning Georgia Tech to help define what these fields become. Georgia Tech is already recognized as a leader in regenerative medicine, cardiovascular engineering, neuroengineering, and mechanobiology.

“Considering what had been done in the past 10 years, I thought the next 10 years at Georgia Tech would be pretty exciting,” said Finn, the interim chair and professor of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “Very few places in the world — if anywhere — will embed fundamental science in with applications science and technology better than we do here.”

Read more of this article from Georgia Tech's Research Horizons magazine.

The microneedles, ranging in length from 400 to 700 microns, could provide a new way to deliver drugs to specific areas within the eye relevant to these diseases. By targeting the drugs only to specific parts of the eye instead of the entire eye, researchers hope to increase effectiveness, limit side effects and reduce the amount of drug needed.

For glaucoma, which affects about 2.2 million people in the United States and is the second-leading cause of blindness worldwide, the goal is to develop time-release drugs that could replace daily administration of eye drops. A painless microneedle injection made once every three to six months – potentially during regular office visits – could improve treatment outcomes by providing consistent dosages and overcoming patient compliance issues.

In the second disease, corneal neovascularization, corneal injury results in the growth of unwanted blood vessels that impair vision. To treat it, the researchers developed solid microneedles for delivering a dry drug compound that stops the vessel growth.

“The power of microneedles for treating eye conditions is the ability to target delivery of the drug within the eye,” said Mark Prausnitz, a Regents’ professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We are developing different microneedle-based systems that can put the drug precisely into the part of the eye where it’s needed. In many cases, we hope to couple that delivery with a controlled-release formulation that would allow one application to treat a condition for weeks or months.”

To read more, follow this link.

Ten years ago, Evans suffered a stroke that left him with limited mobility. Over the past two years, he’s been working with Kemp, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, to develop and test robots that help him shave, adjust a blanket when he’s cold, and even scratch an annoying itch.

“We did things with the robots that I never could have imagined,” said Evans, who contacted Kemp after seeing him on a CNN broadcast about health care robots.

Robots working directly with people – even helping them shave – is both challenging and unusual. Most robots today work in manufacturing facilities where, for safety reasons, they stay far away from humans. But Georgia Tech robotics researchers believe people and robots can accomplish much more by working together – as long as the robots have common sense to know, for instance, how much force humans apply when shaving.

“A major challenge for health care robots is that they lack so much of the knowledge and experience that people take for granted,” said Kemp. “To us, it’s just common sense that everybody has; for robots, it’s a serious impediment.”

Giving robots common sense is just one milestone on the path to the kinds of collaboration that will be required to meet the needs of a growing population of older persons. Beyond personal care, the benefits of co-robotics are many. To produce better products more efficiently, manufacturing robots will need to team up with humans, each contributing unique abilities. And in defense and homeland security, robots will increasingly have to take on the dangerous jobs, leveraging people’s skills while protecting them from harm.

Read more of this article from Georgia Tech's Research Horizons magazine.

“Since our nation’s founding, the engineering enterprise has been the wellspring of our security and prosperity,” said Jeff Wilcox, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of engineering and founder of NEF. “The NEF movement is dedicated to bringing together stakeholders from across the engineering community and developing an actionable roadmap to ensure the sustainability of that enterprise.”

NEF’s regional dialogue series has been to 14 American engineering hubs, including New York, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Chicago. Still ahead are dialogues in Phoenix and several more locations in the planning stages.

“NEF is a center of gravity pulling everyone together to face engineering’s challenges of capacity, capability and competitiveness. We call those challenges the 3C’s,” Wilcox said.

Atlanta was chosen as a regional dialogue city because of its significant role in technology, biomedical engineering, manufacturing, and education. Georgia Tech and the Georgia Research Alliance are ideal NEF hosts. Georgia Tech is a renowned science and technology-focused research institution, serving more than 13,000 students in the College of Engineering. The university is acclaimed for its achievements in clean, sustainable energy research, discoveries in diseases and treatment, and advancements in national defense and security, while the Georgia Research Alliance is aligned with

Georgia’s universities, and brings focus to science and industry in the region, launching new companies and creating high-value jobs.

“At Georgia Tech, we’ve learned that innovation solutions are many times interdisciplinary and the result of collaboration between education, business, industry, and government,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson.

“Regional dialogues like this one, initiated by the National Engineering Forum, are helping to stimulate the conversation between thought leaders from all of these groups, and helping to build a community of action with tremendous potential in order to advance U.S. leadership in engineering.”

“Engineering talent is critical to the future of American innovation and competitiveness,” said C. Michael Cassidy, President and CEO of the Georgia Research Alliance.  “We were proud to cohost the NEF Regional dialogue and look forward to collaborating with our partners from the universities, business and government on how to address the needs of the U.S engineering enterprise.”

“It is critical that we bring together all those who have a stake in preserving and growing the American engineering enterprise,” said Chad Evans, executive vice president of the Council on Competitiveness. “We need engineers themselves,along with the business community, government leaders, educators and the media collaborating to enlighten our collective national consciousness about the power of engineering and its vital role in our nation’s competitiveness in the global economy.”

 About the National Engineering Forum:

The National Engineering Forum (NEF) brings together leaders concerned about the sustainability of the United States engineering field and the impact on the nation’s security and prosperity. NEF involves industry executives, academics, policymakers, media, engineering societies, and nonprofits to develop solutions to the challenges facing the U.S. engineering enterprise. For more on NEF, visit: www.nationalengineeringforum.com or follow us on Twitter @NatlEngForum.

The Atlanta-based team was awarded for development of iDETECT (integrated Display Enhanced TEsting for Cognitive Impairment and mTBI), a rapidly deployable, easily administered, comprehensive system designed to improve neurologic assessment following mild traumatic brain injury, such as concussion sustained in athletic events and military conflict.

A total of seven winners of Head Health Challenge II were announced November 13, 2014. The winning teams, selected from more than 500 submissions, will receive $500,000 each for development of new innovations and technologies intended to identify, measure and mitigate brain injury. The first round of winners will be eligible for an additional $1 million after a second phase of judging.

iDETECT addresses feasibility and reliability drawbacks associated with current concussion screening tools. It is an easy-to-administer, portable, and immersive system that integrates multiple concussion tests within one platform. The next generation iDETECT system will be further tested in a clinical study comparing iDETECT outcomes against other traditional separate mTBI screening tools.

“Our team is excited and honored to be selected as a winner in the NFL-GE-UA Head Health Challenge II competition,” says Tamara Espinoza, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and principal investigator of the Head Health Challenge award. “A tremendous amount of research and effort has gone into the development of iDETECT, and we believe it may become an essential tool in assessing sports-related concussion.”

Of the 1.7 million traumatic brain injuries in the United States each year, more than 750,000 are considered “mild,” and over 173,000 are related to recreational and sports activity. In the last decade, emergency department visits for mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) among highly vulnerable populations, such as children and developing youth, have increased by more than 60 percent.

“Adequately assessing mTBI using individual, single-pathway screening methods is extremely difficult, given the complexities of neurologic injury,” says Shean Phelps, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). “With this additional funding from the Head Health Challenge II, our team can more fully pursue the long-term vision of iDETECT as a multi-modal device that addresses sports-related, mild traumatic brain injury.”

The DETECT project was the brainchild of David Wright, director of Emergency Neurosciences at Emory University School of Medicine and Michelle LaPlaca, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. In 2011, the project evolved from a single neurocognitive approach for detection of concussions to an extended, multi-modal platform when the partnership broadened to include the Georgia Tech Research Institute. GTRI added critical systems engineering, human factors and military medical operational expertise.

“Mild traumatic brain injuries in youth, college and professional sports have the potential for life-changing, long-term consequences,” says Wright. “The iDETECT system integrates multiple concussion testing capabilities within one platform and allows rapid and reliable assessment at the location where the injury occurred.” This comprehensive approach enhances the ability to validate the on-field assessment platform and more accurately screen for traumatic injury.

Phelps, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel adds, “mTBI assessments in the military is an area that needs new approaches such as those provided by iDETECT.”

Partner institutions forming the iDETECT team include Georgia Tech, Emory and the University of Rochester. The Department of Defense and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation provided financial support for development of iDETECT.

In addition to Espinoza, Wright, LaPlaca and Phelps, team members include Brian Liu, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) research engineer; Stephen Smith, research engineer, Russell Gore, sports neurologist; John Brumfield, biomedical engineer; Jeff Bazarian, associate professor of emergency medicine, University of Rochester; and Courtney Crooks, GTRI senior research scientist.
Written by Emory University

The APDC is an FDA funded consortium based out of Georgia Tech (PI: David Ku), Emory University (co-PIs: Wilbur Lam, Kevin Maher), Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Virginia Commonwealth University (co-PI: Barbara Boyan) that provides a national platform to translate medical device ideas from concept to commercialization.  APDC’S mission is to enhance the lives of children through the development of novel pediatric medical devices, which are both save and effective.  The consortium provides an environment of creativity, where ideas are reviewed, tested, and developed.  

The application for seed grant funding begins with a written proposal, submitted to the APDC Innovation Competition Review Committee. Proposals are due on January 5, 2015, and selected investigators will be notified by January 30, 2015, of their selection for participation in the next round of the competition.

The second round is an opportunity for selected investigators to make a 5 minute oral presentation of their proposed idea/concept, to the review committee, an audience of peers, and the engineering and medical community in attendance. The investigators will be given advice on market size, product development, and regulatory submissions.  Proposal presentations will be held on the Georgia Tech campus on February 21, 2015.

Click here for more information and to Apply

Now they’re scaling up, making bricks that are 1000 times larger and getting close to a size that could be barely visible to the naked eye.

The advances were reported in Nature Chemistry.

Who: A team of researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard led by Peng Yin, and including Yonggang Ke, PhD, now an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

At Emory, Ke and his team are continuing to design 3D DNA machines, with potential functions such as fluorescent nanoantennae, drug delivery vehicles and synthetic membrane channels.

How: The DNA brick method uses short, synthetic strands of DNA that work like interlocking Lego® bricks to build complex structures. Structures are first designed using a computer model of a molecular cube, which becomes a master canvas. Each brick is added or removed independently from the 3D master canvas to arrive at the desired shape. The DNA strands that would match up to achieve the desired structure are mixed together and self assemble — with the help of magnesium salts — to achieve the designed crystal structures.

“Therein lies the key distinguishing feature of our design strategy–its modularity,” Ke says. “The ability to simply add or remove pieces from the master canvas makes it easy to create virtually any design.”

What for: As part of this study the team demonstrated the ability to position gold nanoparticles less than two nanometers apart from each other along the crystal structure — a critical feature for future quantum computational devices and a significant technical advance for their scalable production.

Quinn Eastman

Science Writer

Research Communications for Emory University's Woodruff Health Sciences Center

“My mom has a Ph.D. in neuropsychology and works at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, where I’m from,” Evans said. “I learned from her early on that medicine comes with long hours and high stress levels, but it pays you back tenfold because it’s so intensely rewarding.”

Evans’ mother works with patients who have experienced a traumatic brain injury, helping evaluate the condition of their brains and determining which skills they’ll likely be able to recover. Evans, on the other hand, wants more of a hands-on role.

“I want to be the doctor that sees the patient as soon as he’s wheeled into the E.R.,” Evans said. “Those high-pressure, life-or-death situations are what drive me, because your actions lead to instant results.”

That craving for immediate, tangible results has lead Evans to shy away from the research side of the field pursued by many of her peers. Scientists might spend years in the lab working on a single study, she says, only to make a small advancement.

After her freshman year at Tech, Evans completed a research internship at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. She analyzed cross-sections of brain tissue, working to understand the relationship between circadian rhythms and drug dependency. The technical skills she learned are useful, Evans says, but the experience helped her decide that long-term research isn’t for her.

Instead of spending time in the lab, Evans has devoted the past year to volunteering in the emergency room at Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta. She transports patients, changes sheets, and lends a hand wherever possible.

“The doctors and nurses in a trauma setting can always use more help,” Evans explains. “If I can take some of the workload off of them, it means they’re able to see more patients and maybe even save another life. That’s rewarding, and it makes a difference.”

For Evans, serving others is a passion. She says it’s sometimes difficult to find a balance, because preparing for the possibility of medical school requires investing the majority of her time in her own education.

It’s why, after graduation, she plans to take a hiatus from her studies.

“I plan to serve in the Peace Corps for two years, hopefully working in some sort of medical setting in a developing country. Medical school will always be waiting for me when I get back.”

That is, if she ultimately sticks to her pursuit of a medical degree. Evans also enjoys the research & development aspect of biomedical engineering, which she’s been exposed to through her courses at Georgia Tech.

In 2015, she’ll pursue an internship with a biomedical engineering company to test the waters.

“I would love to intern with a company that produces medical devices, communicating with doctors to see what works and what could be improved,” Evans said. “It’s a job that melds two of my passions–engineering and medicine–so I’m interested to see if it’s something I enjoy.”

Evans says finding what you love is all about trying new things.

No stranger to adventure, she spent a semester studying abroad at Georgia Tech-Lorraine in France. The experience expanded her worldview, she says, and pushed her toward a vocation that will allow her to work globally.

With so many different career options, Evans says the advisors and faculty within the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering have been an enormous resource.

“Sally Gerrish is amazing,” Evans said of the college’s manager of student, alumni and industrial relations. “She’s always there to share personal advice and connect you to helpful people. If she doesn’t have an answer for your question, she’ll find someone who does. She has an incredible network of contacts.”

Between networking, volunteering and–oh yes–studying, Evans feels confident she’ll wind up in the right place.

“Whether it’s in the E.R. of a local hospital or working on the ground in a third-world country, I know my career will be built on the foundation I’ve received at Georgia Tech,” she said. “I’m ready to contribute something big to the world.”

Connect with Emily Evans on LinkedIn

Written by Chris Calleri

Written by Chris Calleri

Written by Chris Calleri

In the procedure, surgeons typically bypass one of heart’s right ventricle, the lower chamber that pumps blood out to the lungs to be re-oxygenated. This is called a total cavopulmonary connection (TCPC), or Fontan procedure. The research shows improving the design of that connection has real benefits for patients.

“This has been previously hypothesized with computer simulations, but until now had never been demonstrated with solid research,” said Dr. Ajit Yoganathan, one of the paper’s authors. “The results have real-world implications for patients who have had this heart procedure in the past. The more we can reduce their complications, the better off they’ll be.”

The study focused on 30 patients with only one functioning ventricle in their heart. The patients exercised by riding a bike for several minutes while their blood flow was measured with MRI. Researchers observed that patients with a more energy-efficient TCPC had a higher tolerance for exercise.

The findings were recently published in Heart, an international peer-reviewed journal for health professionals and researchers in all areas of cardiology. Yoganathan and eight other researchers from Georgia Tech’s Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering contributed to the study.

“These findings are important for patients who have had a Fontan procedure because the TCPC design can be surgically modified,” said Maria Restrepo, a Ph.D. candidate who co-authored the study. “This means we can take a proactive approach to reducing their complications, lessening the burden on the nation’s healthcare system and improving their quality of life.”

The research was a collaboration between Georgia Tech and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia with support from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

To read the full findings in Heart, click here.

To view a related video, click here.

Written by Chris Calleri

“I guess the Learning Commons idea is taking off,” says Le Doux, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), where he is executive director for learning and student experience, a new position that places him in the role of chief facilitator for the recently opened, student-directed BME Learning Commons. “This is exactly what we want to see. It’s a start.”

A work in progress, the BME Learning Commons isn’t just a physical space – the ongoing renovation of what was a fourth-floor faculty/staff lounge into a social learning environment for BME students (an ongoing process. “It’s actually more of a movement,” Le Doux says. “And the goal is for students to take ownership of their BME experience.”

Le Doux defines his role as, “a representative of the department there to empower the students. That’s the objective. It’s very important that this is student owned and student led.”

To help that happen, Le Doux organized a brainstorming session last November. Fourteen people (including eight undergraduate students) participated in the ‘fast and furious charrette,’ to conceptualize the BME Learning Commons. From that meeting, five undergrads (Candice Cheung, Abhinav Mehra, Yuna Oh, Malvika Sanghvi and Yitian Xiao) volunteered to work with Le Doux on designing the program, along with faculty and staff advisors (Raja Schaar, Barbara Fasse, Kim Paige, Chris Calleri and Alisha Waller). The student leadership team has grown to include Veena Ganapathy, Grace Ha, Lizzie Marr, Bharat Sanders, Durazi Savasir, Dhara Patel, Alexa Siu, Abhinaya Uthayakumar and Catherine Wallace. During the spring, students interviewed classmates about the idea, and some of the early feedback wasn’t very encouraging according to Cheung, a third-year student.

“Some of the BMEs I talked to were really skeptical and actually a little condescending about what the department is trying to do with this program. Others were hesitant,” says Cheung. “And then some were excited. I would say that the general attitude towards the Learning Commons has taken a 180. I think part of it is because now we have a running program.

She’s talking about the mentorship program, a popular response to what was identified as one of the highest priorities in those early days of planning last winter and spring.

“The goal was to have every single freshman who comes to BME have an upperclassman mentor, and for every upperclassman mentor to have an alumni mentor,” Le Doux explains. “We get roughly 400 freshmen a year, and I figured that if we could have one upperclassman per five freshman, we would need to recruit 80 upperclassman mentors, which I thought would be difficult to achieve.  Instead, more than 130 upperclassmen volunteered to serve as mentors, which is amazing.”

All told, there are about 540 participants throughout the BME Learning Commons Mentorship Program now, and Le Doux expects that figure to reach 650, once the upperclassmen are matched with their alumni mentors

“The mentorship program was the first thing to grow out of the Learning Commons, but the space itself is evolving,” says Le Doux, looking at some of the comments and ideas, which are written in marker ink on walls that are actually huge white boards.

There are several different requests for coffee makers and refrigerators, one for hammocks outside on the patio, one for Legos, one for a telescope and one that says, “Two words … wet bar.” Le Doux and Cheung chuckle at one particularly vivid suggestion for heating control, accompanied by two cartoons. One depicts a wilting man on all fours saying, “Its too hot.” The other depicts a shivering man saying, “Its too cold.”

“We’re encouraging students to think of this as an experimental space right now,” says Le Doux. “We haven’t plunked down a lot of money on renovating the space yet, so student feedback and comments will generate what ultimately happens to the space.”

According to Le Doux, this sense of student empowerment is key to the success so far, and the promise, of the BME Learning Commons. “Out of all this, a new student organization has emerged to harness all of this energy,” he says, referring to the ‘product owners’ who have taken on leadership roles in ‘scrum teams,’ part of the ‘agile management’ methodology (prevalent in the software industry, adapted by the Learning Commons folks), a management style that fits well with rapidly changing needs.

“So, we have about a dozen product owners so far who are in the process of forming teams, and we have literally just started having weekly Learning Commons leadership team meetings,” Le Doux says.

Cheung is the product owner for what may be the Learning Commons’ next up-and-running program, the podcast studio. “I’m thinking that the first podcast will be an introduction to the Learning Commons as a whole,” she says, adding, “Now that people are seeing that we are very serious about creating a change in BME, they’re more willing to use the services that we offer and will be offering.”

With 1,400 students in BME, that leaves plenty of opportunities for a wide variety of podcasts, which means lots of stories and human experiences, which Le Doux believes will only enhance the learning experience in the Coulter Department. “Storytelling is a fundamental human trait,” he says. “We all create narratives to explain how things work. Sharing stories is a natural, effective way to learn. Research shows that when experts solve problems, the first thing they do is talk to somebody else who solved a problem similar to theirs. It’s essentially story collection, and we see that as one way to provide more interaction with alumni or faculty or experts in the field.”

There is a definitive StoryCorps vibe to the podcast idea, and that isn’t an accident. StoryCorps is a nonprofit organization that is producing one of the largest oral history projects ever conceived. Since 2003, the organization has collected and archived more than 50,000 interviews, including weekly broadcasts on National Public Radio.

“StoryCorps certainly has influenced our thinking,” says Le Doux, who employed a similar program in a course he taught, BMED 1000, as a way of connecting students with alumni, with experts in biomedical engineering, and essentially, with their potential futures.

“It was a way of building community, because our students don’t necessarily know what everybody with a BME degree is up to.” Le Doux says. “In fact, there is some angst and uncertainty about what to do with a BME degree. So our students worked in teams, went out and interviewed biomedical engineers, and asked them deep, open-ended questions.”

They gathered more than 80 stories, which Le Doux, with the help of Alexa Siu and her BME Stories scrum team, plans to post online soon. Cheung is looking forward to assembling a team of students to gather even more stories, with the help of the podcast studio. The idea is to build a catalog of stories from experts, alumni, faculty, and students. “I imagine it as something students can open up and find what they need in the experiences of others, find something that resonates with them, something they can learn from,” Le Doux says. “Kind of like a box of wisdom.”

Written by Jerry Grillo

“This year’s fair was the largest we’ve had since we began offering it a decade ago,” said event organizer Sally Gerrish, who manages student, alumni and industrial relations at Georgia Tech. “It’s a much-needed opportunity for both our undergrad and graduate students to get valuable face time with some of the top players in the field. We’re very pleased with the success of this year’s event.”

The event was open to all students, regardless of major, who have an interest in the field of biomedical engineering. Many of the companies with representatives at the fair were there to meet with potential interns, full-time job candidates, or both.

“I was incredibly impressed with the students I met at the career fair, not only because of their intelligence but because of how dedicated they were to investing in their futures,” said Ken Zielmanski, Director of Quality Assurance for T3, a pre-clinical testing and training provider. “I met with about 50 students and my colleague met with another 50, and we wished we had positions to offer all of them.”

Zielmanski explains that with so many capable candidates, his company believes it’s important that applicants are able to excel not only as an individual, but as part of a team.

“Knowledge and intelligence are important, of course, but candidates for jobs and internships with our company have to be able to work successfully with an entire group of people,” Zielmanski said. “A ‘team-player’ mentality is key to succeeding in any career in biotechnology.”

For participating students, the career fair was a chance to make connections, ask questions, and personally deliver their resumes to some of the most knowledgeable professionals in the biotechnology industry.

“I’m in my fifth year at Georgia Tech, and I’ve come to realize that networking is one of the most important skills you can develop, regardless of your area of study,” said undergraduate BME student Allison Kramer. “I try to attend as many events like the career fair as possible, and make notes about who I met and what we talked about. That personal connection may one day be what sets your resume apart from all of the other applications in the pile.”

Kramer hopes to secure a full-time job after graduation and study for her graduate degree while working.

“Advancing in my career is my number one priority,” said Kramer. “My dream would be to get a job at one of the amazing companies that took part in the career fair, and pursue a higher degree while also building up my work experience.”

For the university, events like the career fair play a pivotal role in strengthening relationships with industry powerhouses. They’re relationships that prove beneficial to all parties—the company, the university and the students.

“By working directly with top companies in the biotech industry, we’re able to give our students advance notice of job openings and offer important connections that aid them during their job search,” said Gerrish. “The companies benefit from accessing our talented pool of candidates for internships and full-time jobs, and many times those students go on to climb the ranks to upper-level positions. That means our alumni base grows even stronger.”

In the weeks leading up to the career fair, the college hosted panel discussions with Georgia Tech alumni, corporate information sessions, and professional development seminars for both undergraduate and graduate students. Students who attended were able to submit their resume to a Student Resume Database, which was accessible exclusively to the companies that registered for the fair.

Gerrish hopes to continue to grow the size and scale of the career fair in years to come.

Written by Chris Calleri

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 Written by Chris Calleri

Don’t have an idea or a team? No problem. Competition organizers at Georgia Tech’s VentureLab say a passion for entrepreneurship is all that is required to succeed in the competition, which is open to all current Georgia Tech graduate students and 2014 master’s/doctoral graduates.

You can learn more and find potential teammates through workshops/mixers being held in Room 300 of Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business on September 29 and October 6 from 7:45 p.m.-9 p.m. The September 29 workshop is on “Customer Segments and Value Propositions,” while the October 6 event covers “Customer Discovery” and provides an overview of the competition.

The team application deadline is October 13. Mentoring is available to teams throughout the academic year in preparation for the semifinals on March 2 and finals on March 9 at Scheller College of Business, the competition’s sponsor.

Cash Prizes

Teams, which can include 2 to 6 people, are competing for $40,000 in prizes: $15,000 for first prize, $5,000 for second, and $3,000 for third (plus two additional $1,000 prizes). Starting with the 2015 competition, the first prize team will also win the prestigious Edison Prize (a $15,000 convertible note).

Known as the Business Plan Competition from 2001 to 2013, the Startup Competition now focuses on discovering a market opportunity and creating an innovative business model to address it. No written business plan, financial projections, or investor pitch is required. Instead, teams work together to define a compelling startup.

Startup Approach

Most technology startups fail because they start executing before they have a proven business model, note the competition organizers. The Startup Competition helps positions teams for success by requiring them to talk regularly to potential customers to ensure that they’re developing a product or service that people want.

Sixteen teams will be selected by VentureLab to present at the semifinals, and then judges will decide which eight teams advance to the final round

Teams may not enter with an existing business, because the goal of the Startup Competition is to discover new business opportunities. The only exception to the requirement of being a Georgia Tech graduate student/2014 graduate is for Emory law students who are teamed with Tech students through the Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results (TI:GER) Program.

For more information, visit startup.gatech.edu/startup_competition.

Platelets respond to surfaces with greater stiffness by increasing their stickiness, the degree to which they “turn on” other platelets and other components of the clotting system, the researchers found.

“Platelets are smarter than we give them credit for, in that they are able to sense the physical characteristics of their environment and respond in a graduated way,” said Wilbur Lam, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The first author of the paper is research associate Yongzhi Qiu. Lam is also a physician in the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

The researchers’ findings could influence the design of medical devices, because when platelets grab onto the surfaces of catheters and medical implants, they tend to form clots, a major problem for patient care.

Modifying the stiffness of materials used in these devices could reduce clot formation, the authors suggest. The results could also guide the refinement of blood thinning drugs, which are prescribed to millions to reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke.

The team was able to separate physical and biochemical effects on platelet behavior by forming polymer gels with different degrees of stiffness, and then overlaying them each with the same coating of fibrinogen, a sticky protein critical for blood clotting. Fibrinogen is the precursor for fibrin, which forms a mesh of insoluble strands in a blood clot.

With stiffer gels, platelets spread out more and become more activated. This behavior is most pronounced when the concentration of fibrinogen is relatively low, the researchers found.

“This variability helps to explain platelet behavior in the 3D context of a clot in the body, which can be quite heterogenous in makeup,” Lam said.

Qiu and colleagues were also able to dissect platelet biochemistry by allowing the platelets to adhere and then spread on the various gels under the influence of drugs that interfere with different biochemical steps.

Proteins called integrins, which engage the fibrinogen, and the protein Rac1 are involved in the initial mechanical sensing during adhesion, while myosin and actin, components of the cytoskeleton, are responsible for platelet spreading.

“We found that the initial adhesion and later spreading are separable, because different biochemical pathways are involved in each step,” Lam said. “Our data show that mechanosensing can occur and plays important roles even when the cellular structural building blocks are fairly basic, even when the nucleus is absent.”

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Heart Association, the National Heart Lung & Blood Institute (U54HL112309, R01HL121264) and the National Eye Institute (PN2EY018244).

Media Relations Contacts: Emory University: Quinn Eastman (qeastma@emory.edu) (404-727-7829) or Georgia Tech: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986).

Writer: Quinn Eastman

“One of the biggest challenges with surgeries to remove tumors is that there are residual cancer cells left behind. They account for about 40 percent of cancer recurrence,” said Shuming Nie, Ph.D., a Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair and director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Cancer Nanotechnology Center. “Our technology uses tiny luminescent particles that bond to these cancerous cells to show doctors where the malignant cells remain so they can be removed.”

Nie hopes to commercialize the technology by early 2015, likely starting in Europe where the regulatory process moves faster. Nie will work in tandem with the biomedical technology company Spectropath, a spinoff founded by one of his former students.

Spectropath was started in 2009 to further develop and commercializing image-guided cancer surgery.

The venture recently received a boost from the National Institutes of Health, which awarded Nie and his team a five-year, $6.9 million transformative research award.

“This award supports projects that are high-risk, high-payoff,” Nie said. “In other words, we may face major challenges, but we also have the potential to make an enormous impact on the field of medicine. This technology will literally save lives.”

The technology has a host of practical applications where it may prove useful. It could allow for minimally invasive pathology via fiber optics, as opposed to the generally random sampling currently used in biopsies. Scientists are already researching how it might help combat cardiovascular disease, using the same ultra-small glowing particles to target plaque in the arteries. It may have implications for cell-based therapy and regenerative medicine as well.

“Biomedical engineering is a field that allows you to turn your personal interests and curiosities into practical applications for human health,” Nie said. "It’s a most satisfying field.”

Clinical trials on the new technology are expected to begin in Europe early next year.

 Related Links:

Shuming Nie’s Profile

Google Scholar

Emory Press Release

UPenn News Release

Atlanta Magazine Article

Written by Chris Calleri

A former member of the Puerto Rican national gymnastics team, it was an easy transition to “cheerleader” at Georgia Tech for Díaz Ortiz, who works football and basketball home games and engages in cheerleading team competition, which involves a lot of tumbling, flipping and throwing people in the air.

“I like to stay grounded, so fortunately, I’m not one of the people who gets thrown into the air,” says Diaz Ortiz, a 2014 Petit Scholar, who has found that her athletic endeavors help fuel the rest of her busy life at Tech. “Oh, it definitely keeps me in shape, keeps me healthy, which is pretty important with my high-pace schedule. But I like keeping a busy schedule. It helps make me more structured. And I love cheerleading because there is a real sense of community and bonding. I’ve got great teammates.”

Díaz Ortiz, a senior in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, sees a clear correlation between cheerleading and her work with mentor Chris Johnson in Andrés García’s lab at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Her independent research project is entitled, "A Critical Bone Defect Infection Model Utilizing an Engineered Bioluminescent Clinical Strain of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa."

“I definitely do see a parallel between cheerleading and my courses in biomedical engineering and work in the lab at the Petit Institute. You get to collaborate with people with diverse backgrounds and ideas,” she says. “Just within the lab, for example, are people who have biotech backgrounds working with mechanical engineers. You’ve got people with different strengths, working together on the same project. Same thing in cheerleading. You’ve got people who are stronger at tumbling, people who are stronger at putting other people up in the air. It’s interesting to see how people from so many different backgrounds can work so well together.”

When Díaz Ortiz arrived at Tech, she brought an interest in science, and liked the idea of doing research, but didn’t know if she wanted to be a research scientist or not. Then she interviewed with García for an opening in his lab for an undergraduate research assistant, and really dug it, and became interested in applying to the Petit Scholarship program – and the program wanted her. She was first invited to become a Petit Scholar for 2013, but at the same time, she was offered an internship with Abbott Laboratories and decided to defer her acceptance into the Petit Scholars program for a year.

“I really wanted to get a feeling for what industry was like,” she says. “I’d gotten the research experience, but didn’t have a feel for industry. It turned out to be a good learning experience for me, because it wasn’t quite what I expected, and honestly, it helped me cross out that idea.”

Planning to graduate in the spring, Díaz Ortiz is in the process of applying to M.D.-Ph.D. programs – ultimately, she wants to do clinical research.

“I haven’t decided where I want to go yet, but I’d prefer to stay near a city that is a hub of biomedical research,” she says. Her top three choices would be somewhere in Boston, California, or right here at the Tech/Emory joint biomedical engineering program. “Where ever I wind up, I feel like the Petit Scholarship experience has been good preparation for grad school. It’s definitely given me a feeling for what independent research is like."

The disposable self-testing device analyzes a single droplet of blood using a chemical reagent that produces visible color changes corresponding to different levels of anemia. The basic test produces results in about 60 seconds and requires no electrical power. A companion smartphone application can automatically correlate the visual results to specific blood hemoglobin levels.

By allowing rapid diagnosis and more convenient monitoring of patients with chronic anemia, the device could help patients receive treatment before the disease becomes severe, potentially heading off emergency room visits and hospitalizations. Anemia, which affects two billion people worldwide, is now diagnosed and monitored using blood tests done with costly test equipment maintained in hospitals, clinics or commercial laboratories.

Because of its simplicity and ability to deliver results without electricity, the device could also be used in resource-poor nations.

A paper describing the device and comparing its sensitivity to gold-standard anemia testing was published August 30, 2014, in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Development of the test has been supported by the FDA-funded Atlantic Pediatric Device Consortium, the Georgia Research Alliance, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Georgia Center of Innovation for Manufacturing and the Global Center for Medical Innovation.

“Our goal is to get this device into patients’ hands so they can diagnose and monitor anemia themselves,” said Dr. Wilbur Lam, senior author of the paper and a physician in the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Department of Pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine. “Patients could use this device in a way that’s very similar to how diabetics use glucose-monitoring devices, but this will be even simpler because this is a visual-based test that doesn’t require an additional electrical device to analyze the results.”

The test device was developed in a collaboration of Emory University, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Georgia Institute of Technology – all based in Atlanta. It grew out of a 2011 undergraduate senior design project in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. In 2013, it was among the winners of Georgia Tech’s InVenture Prize, an innovation competition for undergraduate students, and won first place in the Ideas to SERVE Competition in Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business.

Using a two-piece prototype device, the test works this way: A patient sticks a finger with a lance similar to those used by diabetics to produce a droplet of blood. The device’s cap, a small vial, is then touched to the droplet, drawing in a precise amount of blood using capillary action. The cap containing the blood sample is then placed onto the body of the clear plastic test kit, which contains the chemical reagent. After the cap is closed, the device is briefly shaken to mix the blood and reagent.

“When the capillary is filled, we have a very precise volume of blood, about five microliters, which is less than a droplet – much less than what is required by other anemia tests,” explained Erika Tyburski, the paper’s first author and leader of the undergraduate team that developed the device.

Blood hemoglobin then serves as a catalyst for a reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction that takes place in the device. After about 45 seconds, the reaction is complete and the patient sees a color ranging from green-blue to red, indicating the degree of anemia.

The colors are produced by a redox-sensitive dye that complements the color arising from the hemoglobin, explained L. Andrew Lyon, who supported the work while he was chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry & Biochemistry. “It is the breadth of color space covered by the reaction that really enables the assay to be so reliable when read out by the naked eye,” said Lyon, who is now dean of the Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University in California.

A label on the device helps with interpretation of the color, or the device could be photographed with a smartphone running an application written by Georgia Tech undergraduate student Alex Weiss and graduate student William Stoy. The app automatically correlates the color to a specific hemoglobin level, and could one day be used to report the data to a physician.

To evaluate sensitivity and specificity of the device, Tyburski studied blood taken from 238 patients, some of them children at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the others adults at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute. Each blood sample was tested four times using the device, and the results were compared to reports provided by conventional hematology analyzers.

The work showed that the results of the one-minute test were consistent with those of the conventional analysis. The smartphone app produced the best results for measuring severe anemia.

“The test doesn’t require a skilled technician or a draw of venous blood and you see the results immediately,” said Lam, who is also an assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “We think this is an empowering system, both for the general public and for our patients.”

Tyburski and Lam have teamed up with two other partners and worked with Emory’s Office of Technology Transfer to launch a startup company, Sanguina, to commercialize the test, which will be known as AnemoCheck™. The test ultimately will require approval from the FDA. The team also plans to study how the test may be applied to specific diseases, such as sickle cell anemia – which is common in Georgia.

The device could be on pharmacy shelves sometime in 2016, where it might help people like Tyburski, who has suffered mild anemia most of her life. “If I’d had this when I was kid, I could have avoided some trips to the emergency room when I passed out in gym class,” she said.

About a third of the population is at risk for anemia, which can cause neurocognitive deficits in children, organ failure and less serious effects such as chronic fatigue. Women, children, the elderly and those with chronic conditions such as kidney disease are more likely to suffer from anemia.

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Media Relations Assistance: Georgia Tech -- John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986) or Brett Israel (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) (404-385-1933) or Emory University -- Holly Korschun (hkorsch@emory.edu) (404-727-3990).

Writer: John Toon
 

The clotting particles, which are based on soft and deformable hydrogel materials, are triggered by the same factor that initiates the body’s own clotting processes. Testing done in animal models and in a simulated circulatory system suggest that the particles are effective at slowing bleeding and can safely circulate in the bloodstream. The particles have been tested with human blood, but have not undergone clinical trials in humans.

Supported by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the American Heart Association, the research was reported September 7, 2014, in the journal Nature Materials. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Arizona State University collaborated on the research.

“When used by emergency medical technicians in the civilian world or by medics in the military, we expect this technology could reduce the number of deaths from excessive bleeding,” said Ashley Brown, a research scientist in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and first author of the paper. “If EMTs and medics had particles like these that could be injected and then go specifically to the site of a serious injury, they could help decrease the number of deaths associated with serious injuries.”

The bloodstream contains proteins known as fibrinogen that are the precursors for fibrin, the polymer that provides the basic structure for natural blood clots. When they receive the right signals from a protein known as thrombin, these precursors polymerize at the site of the bleeding. The synthetic platelet-like particles use the same trigger, and so are activated only when the body’s natural clotting process is initiated.

To create that trigger, the researchers followed a process known as molecular evolution to develop an antibody that could be attached to the hydrogel particles to change their form when they encounter thrombin-activated fibrin. The resulting antibody has a high affinity for the polymerized form of fibrin and a low affinity for the precursor material.

“Fibrin production is on the back end of the clotting process, so we feel that it is a safer place to try to interact with it,” said Tom Barker, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and one of the paper’s co-corresponding authors. “The specificity of this material provides a very important advantage in triggering clotting at just the right time.”

The effectiveness of the platelet-like particles has been tested in an animal model and in a microfluidic chamber designed to simulate conditions within the body’s circulatory system. In the chamber, tubes about the thickness of a human hair were lined with endothelial cells as in natural blood vessels.

The chamber was used to study normal human blood, as well as human blood that had been depleted of its natural platelets. In platelet-rich blood, clots formed as expected, and blood without platelets did not form clots. When the platelet-like particles were added to the platelet-depleted blood, it was able to clot.

The researchers also tested blood from infants that had undergone open heart surgery, which requires that their blood be diluted, reducing its clotting ability. When platelet-like particles were added to the dilute neonate blood, it was able to form clots.

Finally, safety testing was done on blood from hemophiliac patients. Because that blood lacks the triggers needed to cause fibrin formation, the particles had no effect.

Before they can be used in humans, the particles will have to undergo human trials and receive clearance from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

About one micron in diameter, the particles were originally developed to be used on the battlefield by wounded soldiers, who might self-administer them using a device about the size of a smartphone. But the researchers believe the particles could also reduce the need for platelet transfusions in patients undergoing chemotherapy or bypass surgery, and in those with certain blood disorders.

“For a patient with insufficient platelets due to bleeding or an inherited disorder, physicians often have to resort to platelet transfusions, which can be difficult to obtain,” said Dr. Wilbur Lam, another of the paper’s co-authors and a physician in the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Department of Pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine. “These particles could potentially be a way to obviate the need for a transfusion. Though they don’t have all the assets of natural platelets, a number of intriguing experiments have shown that the particles help augment the clotting process.”

In addition to providing new treatment options, the particles could also cut costs by reducing costly natural transfusions, said Lam, who is also an assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

What ultimately happens to the hydrogel particles circulating in the bloodstream will be the topic of future research, noted Brown. Particles of similar size and composition are normally eliminated from the body.

While the platelet-like particles lack many features of natural platelets, the researchers were surprised to find one property in common. Clots formed by natural platelets begin to contract over a period of hours, starting the body’s repair process. Clots formed from the synthetic particles also contract, but over a longer period of time, Brown noted.

In addition to those already mentioned, co-authors of the paper included Andrew Lyon, co-corresponding author and dean of the College of Science and Technology at Chapman University; Sarah Stabenfeldt, co-first author and now an assistant professor at Arizona State University; Byungwook Ahn, Riley Hannan and Victoria Stefanelli, from the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; Kabir Dhada and Emily Herman from the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Dr. Nina Guzzetta from the Division of Pediatric Cardiology at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University School of Medicine; and Alexander Alexeev from the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.

CITATION: Ashley Brown, et al., “Ultrasoft microgels displaying emergent platelet-like behaviours,” Nature Materials, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat4066

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health under awards HHSN268201000043C, R21EB013743 and R01EB011566; the John and Mary Brock Discovery Research Fund; the Department of Defense under award W81XWH1110306, and an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship. The opinions expressed in this news release are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the sponsoring agencies.

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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

She began to study vascular aging, and found a passion that would chart the course for her entire academic career. Dunn obtained her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and today is a 5th year Ph.D. student at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. She’s working to better understand cardiovascular disease–the same condition that affects her grandmother.

“Cardiovascular disease continues to be the number one cause of death in the developed world, despite major advancements in medicine,” said Dunn. “I study how blood flow affects gene expression, which will either prevent or accelerate harmful plaque buildup that leads to heart disease.”

Dunn’s know-how in the lab is rivaled only by her exceptional skills as a multi-tasker. She spent time this past summer interning at the CDC through the strategy and technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, and now continues working as a graduate research fellow in the Jo Lab of Vascular Mechanobiology and Disease. It’s here that her abilities as a researcher shine. Dunn’s thesis centers around a genome-wide analysis of gene expression and DNA methylation in cardiovascular disease.

“Put simply,” Dunn explained, “the genome is like a puzzle where the pieces are constantly changing. When one piece changes, the surrounding pieces must alter their behavior in response. I find it fascinating to learn why and how this happens.”

Her fascination is what drives her, and gets results. Dunn’s thesis culminated in a May 2014 publication in the Journal of Clinical Investigation–one of five published studies Dunn has under her belt.

But Dunn’s success hasn’t come without its fair share of challenges. Early on, she faced gender bias in a field that’s still predominantly ruled by men. She found solace in supportive groups like MIT’s Women’s Technology Program and the Society of Women Engineers.

“These groups taught me about reducing gender discrimination that still persists in the field, and how to be a role model for young women in science,” Dunn said.

It’s a role Dunn doesn’t take lightly. While on the BBUGS Education and Outreach Committee, she helped organize a program to introduce biomedical engineering to 8th grade girls from the Bronx Preparatory Middle School in New York. The girls took basic biology lessons learned in the classroom and applied them to form hypotheses about sets of research. Dunn hopes programs like this will inspire and encourage young girls to pursue STEM fields–science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“These young women truly represent the next generation of researchers in biomedical engineering,” Dunn said. “In several years, one of these girls could be working right here in this lab–with even more advanced technology and equipment.”

Dunn credits Georgia Tech’s Biomedical Engineering Department with helping her achieve her research goals, providing the computational infrastructure to perform large-scale analyses of data sets. Down the road, she hopes to pursue a career converting and translating biomedical “big data” into real and impactful conclusions.

“Georgia Tech has introduced me to a wide variety of research fields that I otherwise would have known nothing about,” Dunn said. “The faculty have helped me take the interest that I had when I was younger and turn it into a real, concrete career path doing something that I believe in.”

Listening to Dunn describe her ambitious goals in the biomedical engineering arena, you might not guess that she pursues another passion: ballet dancing. Not only does she find the time to practice ballet regularly, but she also founded the Johns Hopkins University Ballet Company during her time as an undergrad there. The Company holds free classes and performances for the Baltimore community and teaches ballet at public elementary schools.

It’s all part of Dunn’s larger mission to instill young girls with a clear and strong message: you can succeed at whatever you put your mind to, and you can excel at many different things if you simply take the chance to try.

“In biomedical engineering, in dance and in life, your strongest proponent is yourself,” Dunn said. “It can be difficult to challenge longstanding beliefs or do something that has never been done before, but it’s only through doing this that you achieve enormous success.”

Of that, Dunn is living proof.

Connect with Jessilyn Dunn on LinkedIn

Follow Jessilyn Dunn on Google Scholar

Written by Chris Calleri

“The traditional idea of a ‘commons’ is a place where people go to meet their neighbors and hold gatherings, and we plan to apply this concept to the BME student experience,” said Joe Le Doux Ph.D., The Executive Director of Learning and Student Experience, who is spearheading the program. “This will be a place where BMEs of all ages, levels, skills, and interests can meet, talk, share ideas, and work together on common projects.”

The $750,000 renovation will completely transform the space based on the day-to-day needs of BME students. The walls will be painted with “IDEA paint”, turning them into giant whiteboards, while rolling whiteboards will enable quick partitioning of the space to support team work. Multiple terminals will be available that connect to high speed campus servers, and collaborative spaces will provide abundant opportunities for students to engage and share their digital information with each other quickly and seamlessly. 

“The design of physical spaces for learning is critical because, if done well, they can motivate students to be agents for change, to overcome challenges, and to create innovative solutions. The Learning Commons space will be supportive, creative, bold and inspiring, which are all characteristics of a great engineer, by the way.”  The first phase of minor modifications is currently underway and is expected to be completed by mid-September, at which time the commons will open for student use. The full renovation, which will include a student meeting room, a problem-based learning room, and a recording studio, is projected to be completed before the beginning of the fall semester next year.

“The space itself will be truly remarkable, but the Learning Commons Initiative is about much more than just bricks, mortar, electronics, and white boards,” said Le Doux.  Several new student-led programs will be created to accompany the renovation, including programs that will help students connect with each other and with faculty and alumni, such as the all-new BME Mentorship Program, which already boasts more than 500 participants; programs that will help students learn, including a range peer tutoring services and the creation of a library of student-created peer-instructional videos; and programs that will help students reach their maximum potential, including the creation of, and participation in, activities that stimulate their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit, such as case competitions and healthcare hackathons, as well as a student-led initiatives to capture and catalog the stories of working BME professionals.

For more information on the Learning Commons Initiative and how to become involved, please email learningcommons@bme.gatech.edu

Written by Chris Calleri

“I’m honored and humbled to receive a committee position within this globally-recognized organization,” Wang said.  “Health Informatics is identified as one of the 14 Grand Challenges in the 21st Century by the National Academy of Engineering. I have been devoted to biomedical and health informatics (BHI) research for personalized and predictive medicine since I joined Georgia Tech-Emory BME as a faculty member. This new recognition will allow me to help grow BHI within the IEEE and BME communities to tackle this Grand Challenge.”

In addition to her new position, Wang has been serving as the Biomedical and Health Informatics Technical Committee Chair and will present at the EMBC 2014 Frontiers in Biomedical Engineering Symposium.

Wang’s research centers around translating huge amounts of multi-modality and multi-scale biomedical data acquired by –omic technologies, tissue and histopathological imaging, bedside monitors, and wearable sensors into knowledge that helps physicians make health decisions for each individual, including:

1. Identifying biomarkers from tera-bytes (TBs) of next generation sequencing data for personalized diagnosis and treatment of cancer and cardiac patients.
2. Identifying cellular and tissue imaging markers from TBs of pathological H&E, multiplex Quantum-Dots IHC imaging, or imaging mass spectrometry data for clinical decision support.
3. Analyzing bedside continuous monitoring data and point-of-care data for real-time critical care in ERs and ICUs
4. Developing mobile health and educational intervention solutions for Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) kids to report pain and medication adherence. A small clinical trial for SCD kids has been finished in Children’s Health of Atlanta, and the approach will be extended to other chronic conditions, such as asthma, diabetes, and pain management.

“Through my new position with EMBS, I will have the opportunity to work with biomedical engineers around the world to continually innovate in the field of BHI research for discovery, development, and delivery. The ultimate goal is to use novel technologies to improve human health outcomes and reduce costs at every level.”

IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society is the world's largest international society of biomedical engineers. The organization is made up of 9,100 members in some 97 countries. EMBS provides its members with access to the people, practices, information, ideas and opinions that are shaping one of the fastest growing fields in science.

Related Links: Wang’s Profile , Wang's Lab

Written by Chris Calleri

What makes Ford’s accomplishment so remarkable is that 79 student teams applied to be part of the final eight that qualified for the Startup Summer program. So, the odds weren’t in her favor.

“I was just thrilled that I managed to get into the program, but to have both of my teams get in is an amazing accomplishment. But it’s a testament to the teams, not one person,” says Ford, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering with a minor in finance. “I was blessed to have two good teams to be part of. It was luck and serendipity, and a lot of hard work.”

The graduation (August 15 at the Technology Square Research Building, or TSRB) showcased the results of all that hard work, the culmination of a 12-week summer program. Eight companies with working prototypes, gave startup presentations in the TSRB auditorium, real-world training that may net real-world results for these teams, all of them made up of undergraduate students – recently graduated seniors, mostly. It was a day of celebration for a new program that might be heralding a change in the undergraduate educational experience at Georgia Tech.

“I think we are at a point in time where this eventually will become the norm in all universities, and I’m thrilled that Georgia Tech is taking a bold step in terms of leading this kind of movement,” says program coordinator Raghupathy ‘Siva’ Sivakumar, a successful entrepreneur who has started two venture-backed companies, and is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), which supported the pilot Startup Summer effort, along with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME).

The Startup program is, “part of a larger initiative to have 'entrepreneurial confidence' be a signature feature of a large number of Georgia Tech undergraduate students of all majors,” explains Ravi Bellamkonda, the professor who chairs the Coulter Department. “The idea started with the realization that students increasingly want to work for their own startups and businesses.  Also, larger companies value employees who are creative and entrepreneurial and take initiative.  These two aspects combined to create a burning question in my mind. What if Georgia Tech designed a set of experiences where students create their own jobs as a part of their experience at Georgia Tech?’’

The answer to that question led to a fruitful collaboration and partnership across many university departments, spearheaded by the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Executive Vice President for Research’s office. They needed someone with entrepreneurial experience to help lead the program, and Sivakumar was glad to step in.

“As an entrepreneur myself, I’m passionate about this program, which provides a platform for students that are interested in entrepreneurship,” Sivakumar says. “Our broader vision, going forward, is to create a bouquet of programs for undergraduate entrepreneurs, from the first day a student lands at Georgia Tech until they leave, giving them the knowledge, skills and experiences to pursue their own opportunities when they go out into the world. Startup Summer is one key aspect of that, and only the beginning.”

Sivakumar offered a class for sophomores and juniors, ‘Startup Lab,’ in the spring that he’ll bring back next spring. His co-leader in Startup Summer, Ray Vito (professor emeritus in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering) offers a freshman/sophomore level class, ‘Your Idea, Your Invention.’ “These are just examples,” Sivakumar says. “Our vision is really to have 20 such programs, all through the education process of an undergraduate student.”

Sivakumar, having already created venture-capital supported companies (including, most recently, StarMobile and Asankya) was a logical choice to lead the program, with an instructional team that included Vito, Keith McGreggor (director of VentureLab at Georgia Tech), and Tech alum and entrepreneur Sanjay Parekh. These guys were tasked with choosing from among the 79 applicant teams.

“The biggest challenge going forward will be keeping up with the demand,” Vito says. “There is a lot of student interest. We looked at 79 teams, interviewed about 30 of them, and there were at least five or 10 teams in addition to the final eight that could easily have benefited from this experience. It took a fair amount of work on the part of the teams. A lot of it was in developing the technologies, and taking what they learned and essentially putting it to good use. The presentations went great today, and they seemed to all come together at the last minute. But then, the Tech culture is a last-minute culture.”

Sivakumar envisions a time in the not too distant future when the Startup suite of programs is helping to create up to 100 student-led companies a year, with a longer-range goal of 300. But creating little enterprises is not the only aim of the program. It’s more like a targeted bonus.

“Its not just about starting companies, which only a small percentage of our students might do,” says ECE professor and chair Steve McLaughlin, who partnered with Bellamkonda in helping to launch the program (and provide a major chunk of support). “Its about creating leaders and equipping our students with a life skill over and above the superior education they get as engineers, scientists, and business graduates.”

In the summer program, eight teams went through 12 weeks of entrepreneurial training, most of that time spent on identifying potential customers and market needs. It took a lot of intent. One team (Filitic, an apparel analytics company) flew across country to meet with different clothing companies. Another team, Unmanned United, a drone technology company that spent a lot of time working outdoors.

“They practically went and lived with farmers in South Georgia,” Sivakumar says. “It’s one thing to hypothesize the problem, but another thing to actually be embedded with the customer and understand what their problems are.”

The other teams were Sucette (which makes a pacifier that changes colors when the baby is running a temperature, or it gets too hot outside for safety); Narvaro (which offers revolutionary, 3D telepresence for hyper-real virtual experiences); Gimme (which makes software that vastly increases efficiency for small to medium vending machine owners); Cloudpin (which offers an easier way to wirelessly share content with people nearby, opening up new avenues for location-based digital marketing); SonoFAST (which incorporates an innovative polymer pad for medical ultrasound procedures, replacing the need for messy liquid ultrasound); and FIXD (which has developed a plug-in sensor and an app that helps you understand your vehicle by translating your check engine light).

“What does this light really mean? In reality, this light can mean over 7,000 things,” says John Gattuso, FIXD co-founder, who gave his company’s presentation. “So a few months ago I get a call from my mom. She says, ‘John, I’m driving home from work and my ‘check engine’ light came on. What does it mean? Can you help me?’ Me being 500 miles away, I wasn’t much use. I told her to go home, go to a mechanic and they’d be able to figure out. It turns out the problem was a malfunction in the airbag system. My mother’s life was in danger, but because this light is so vague, she was none the wiser. Her car was talking to her but she was not able to listen.”

Each of the companies set up a table with information and demonstrations, and all were busy fielding questions, showing off their product or service, or explaining the technology behind it. The multi-talented Ford spread her time out among the two companies she helped start– Sucette (where she has utilized her biomedical engineering education and product development skills developed at DuPont, where she worked under a co-op arrangement), and FIXD (where she is putting her finance education to work in more of a business development capacity).

“I’m trying to bridge the gap between science and business,” says Ford, who dreams of being a CEO and a soccer mom – she wants to have it all. “When I worked in industry, at DuPont, I found that you really need backgrounds in both.”

The Startup Summer teams were generally comprised of two to five students. Each team had a mentor that worked with them along the early stage startup path. For Chris Klaus, the former Georgia Tech student who launched the multi-million dollar ISS (Internet Security Systems), then founded (and still leads) Kaneva (a 3D virtual world that supports 2D web browsing, social networking and shared media), this meant answering a lot of one on one business questions.

“What’s a startup? How do we reach customers? How do we set up a set up a web site? That kind of stuff,” Klaus says. “I acted as a sort of advisor, or coach, for Narvaro. It’s a 3D telepresence concept that has never really been explored before. It’s been done in science fiction, but now we have the technology, and it’s about to explode, within the next 12 months. So I saw this as a unique opportunity to jump in and provide some guidance, offer any lessons that I stubbed my toes on along the way.”

The difference between the Startup program philosophy and a typical business school approach, Klaus says, “is like the difference between researching how to drive a car and actually driving the car. You’re going to make mistakes, everyone does, but you’re going to learn much quicker if you get in the car and drive.”

And the program is exactly what it implies it is – a start, not the end all, but a first step toward starting a viable business.

“It sort of accelerates the learning curve for student entrepreneurs,” observes Lee Herron, vice president of commercialization for the Georgia Research Alliance, who has spent most of his career starting bioscience companies and helping others do the same. “I’m not saying it makes them entrepreneurs, but it accelerates the learning curve. These were some very polished, well-coached, well rehearsed pitches, and some unique ideas.”

Herron wonders if this does mark the beginning of a change in undergraduate education, a new element to the experience. Bellamkonda and McLaughlin both believe it very well could be that, and more.

“We believe that Startup Lab and Startup Summer are just the beginning of something big, not only for engineering students, but all Georgia Tech students,” McLaughlin says. “The idea that we are giving students the exposure, experience, and confidence to create their own jobs is exciting to students and increasingly important for their careers and lives in general.”

Bellamkonda also sees the potential for economic benefits rippling throughout the Atlanta region.

“One very likely outcome of this initiative is going to be a large number of student led startups that can vitalize the Atlanta economy further,” he says. Still, he maintains that the primary aim goes beyond the rapid creation and rise of fledgling companies. He wants to help create a new entrepreneurial mindset. “I honestly believe that this entrepreneurial confidence in Georgia Tech undergrads is going to be transformative in terms of their ability to be successful leaders, no matter what they pursue after they graduate.”

 Written by Jerry Grillo

“Before now, there was no international program specifically for Biomedical Engineering students,” says Dr. Paul Bankeser, Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. “If they wanted to study abroad, they would only be able to complete one or two courses. That’s not a great payoff for such a substantial investment. This program allowed them to take a full BME course load abroad for the first time.”

Forty-nine BME students took part in the ten-week program, which wrapped up on August 2nd 2014. They were able to choose from more than a dozen core BME and AE courses, each of which were taught by Georgia Tech faculty. To complement their studies in the beautiful international setting, the participants also had an invaluable opportunity to connect with industry powerhouses in the Limerick area.

“Ireland is a hotbed for global leaders in the biomedical device industry,” said Sally Gerrish, Manager of Student, Alumni and Industrial Relations. “Medtronics, Boston Scientific, Abbott Laboratories, Cook Medical, the list goes on. All of these were a short walk or bus ride away, and the students were able to tour these facilities, meet with the staff, and gain valuable insight into the real-world applications of their degree.”

Cy Wilcox and Laticia Khalif took on large responsibilities for making industry connections and played an instrumental role in setting up these industry visits. BME undergraduate student Sara Khalek participated in the program as a teacher assistant and helped arrange tours. “Organizing the tours helped me understand how to communicate and work with personnel in the BME field,” Khalek said. “It was an excellent networking opportunity for me, and provided me with great experience executing a plan within a real-world setting.”

In addition to their coursework and industry visits, the students received an introduction and tour of the National University of Ireland, Galway, which will be useful in opening doors for future research opportunities or graduate school. Aside from the educational and practical applications of the program, perhaps the greatest takeaway for participants was the chance to broaden their horizons on a personal level.

“The AE/BME Limerick Study Abroad program offered me an opportunity to live in a foreign country, to travel all over the EU, to study and teach within my major, to strengthen my friendships, and finally, to develop who I am and who I want to be,” Khalek said. “There are few opportunities that offer all these riches in one experience.” The Universities are already working on plans to continue the partnership again next year.

Related Links: Summer Program Information , University of Limerick

Written by Chris Calleri

This Atlanta professor uses tiny glow-in-the-dark particles to root out cancer

The only sure way to beat cancer is to remove it completely, with surgery. But the tumor margin—where cancerous cells merge into healthy tissue—is notoriously difficult to clear. Thanks to some Atlanta researchers, those gray areas are now a little less murky.  

Shuming Nie, a biomedical engineering professor at Emory University and Georgia Tech and director of the Nanotechnology Center for Personalized and Predictive Oncology, is heading up a clinical trial for breast and pancreatic cancer, testing a new method of ensuring that every last tumor cell gets detected. Nie’s team injects patients with luminescent nanoparticles, which spread to the site of the tumor and bind with cancerous cells. When surgeons shine a specialized light on the area, tumor cells glow like stars in the night sky while healthy tissue remains dark. During one surgery for pancreatic cancer last year, this process revealed otherwise undetected malignant cells, which the doctors were then able to remove. “We believe we’ve already saved a few lives,” Nie says.

Nie’s background is in chemistry, but he found the dry academic output of that field unsatisfying. “I wanted to tackle big problems,” he says. Cancer was that big problem. Nie has focused on nanoscale engineering since coming to Atlanta from Indiana University in 2002. Here he joined an extensive community of nanomedicine researchers, including Georgia Tech professor Gang Bao, who leads two national centers. Nie’s team works at the state-of-the-art “clean room” lab at Marcus Nanotechnology Building on Tech’s campus.

Over the past decade, Nie has published almost 100 papers, filed twenty patents, and received too many awards to list. But for all his accomplishments, he is understated, working out of a small, neat office in the new Health Sciences Research Building on the east side of Emory’s campus.

“He’s definitely a relaxed person. He puts a lot of trust in the people who work with him and allows them the freedom to explore novel concepts or designs,” says Nie’s colleague Brad Kairdolf, an assistant professor and researcher. The team is also developing cancer-fighting drugs that could be sent straight to a tumor, though that technology is likely a decade away. Similar research could be used to fight cardiovascular disease, using nanoparticles to target plaque inside arteries.

In 2011 Atlanta-based Spectropath spun out of Nie’s research to commercialize the detection tool; it’s planned for an early 2015 launch in Europe, where the regulatory process takes less time. Spectropath CEO Ralph Gaskins, whose father died of colon cancer after an initial surgery failed to completely remove the tumor, became interested in the work after hearing a presentation by Nie in 2009. “My first thought was that this technology would have saved [my father’s] life,” says Gaskins.

Read Original Article

Originally posted by Christine Van Dusen, Mary Jo DiLonardo, Van Jensen, and Carolyn Crist.

Engineers are critical to our world… and, we need more engineers, and more kinds of engineers – young minds just like you – who will take on the challenges facing the 21^st century and create the next amazing innovations.

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Click http://reasons.beanengineer.com/students/ for more on why we want to hear from you. Share with us why engineering is such a cool career path – send your stories, ideas, quotes, pictures, videos and personal anecdotes to Reasons@BeAnEngineer.com.

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The school, which this year began the process of transitioning from Centennial Place Elementary to a K-8 charter school, is leaving behind some of the restrictions of public school operation and hoping to incorporate elements of problem-based learning into its pedagogy in all grade levels.

“We wanted to see what we could learn from the kids and bring to the teachers,” said Roberts, a fourth-year student from Tifton. “It also helped the students learn about PBL and how it works. They’ll be kind of like ambassadors to the other students this year.”

The three enthusiastic women — all former Tech cheerleaders — were considered action researchers by Centennial, giving them both internship and research experience as part of their undergraduate curriculum. They spent the first half of the summer teaching the subject of earth science and used the remaining weeks to gather and analyze data, then put together presentations and recommendations for Centennial’s faculty.

They also were able to compare what they learned as teachers and researchers to their own experience as students.

“You have to do a little more traditional teaching with PBL with younger students, as opposed to how you would in a college class,” Roberts said, pointing out that critical thinking skills aren’t fully developed until around sixth grade. “The kids adapted much easier than we anticipated, though. Their progress in only 12 days of instruction was astounding.”

Before their experience at Centennial Academy, all three women had some prior interest or experience in working with children, but they hadn’t necessarily considered education as a career. Now, they’re considering how they can use their engineering background and skills to improve the education system. 

“When you think about it from an engineering standpoint, education is a process that needs to be optimized,” Loupee said. After working at Centennial and teaching test prep classes for Princeton Review, she knows what it’s like to be in the classroom but also knows there are areas beyond the classroom that need an engineer’s mind.

“It’s possible there are other places we could be more beneficial to the system,” she said.

Jeffares is now planning to work pre-teaching classes into her coursework at Tech. Loupee is taking two pre-teaching classes this fall and has already completed Tech’s contemporary education course.

“The education classes at Tech are great,” she said. “They’re not just about grades K-12 — you get an inside view of your own education.”

Loupee graduates in December, but Jeffares and Roberts have more time to figure out their path. Jeffares could see herself working in a school’s math, science or engineering lab, all of which exist at Centennial Academy. Roberts hopes to use her background to recruit more women into STEM, and perhaps education, by showing you can find balance as a female in these fields — particularly at Tech.

“We can be girly girls but still love engineering,” she said. “You get that at Tech, but I don’t know that it’s something you get nationwide.”

All three encourage other Tech students of any major to venture across the street to gain work experience at Centennial Academy. Past pre-teaching interns have also come from the College of Sciences and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

“It’s a huge benefit to have both schools right here,” Loupee said. “You can get experience while also fulfilling the needs of Centennial. There are so many opportunities here for Tech students.”

The pre-teaching program also offers internships at Grady High School. More information on pre-teaching opportunities is available at preteaching.gatech.edu.

This could be the one, the project that Philip Santangelo will be talking about when he’s 80 and retired and rocking on the front porch, in some distant future – a promising future for mankind because, well, this could be the one.

Santangelo, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is helping lead a research team that was recently awarded a $5.5 million grant from the NIH/NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) for their role in a national, multi-pronged effort to once and for all cure HIV/AIDS.

“This is like the Holy Grail for a molecular imaging person who’s interested in infectious disease. From my point of view, this is it, this is huge,” says Santangelo, who is partnering with Emory’s Francois Villinger as principal investigators on the research, supported by the aforementioned R01 (which is the original and historically oldest grant mechanism used by the National Institutes of Health, or NIH).

The prospect of eliminating HIV from infected patients may be achievable with novel anti-retroviral therapies, but it would require new tools with greater sensitivity than what is now available. So the research aims to create and improve imaging technology, to better monitor HIV reservoirs.

“This was an RFA [Request for Application]. It was a response to an RFA regarding delivering therapeutics to active viral reservoirs,” Santangelo explains. “At NIH right now, especially at NIAID, they have a huge emphasis on trying to cure HIV.”

But here’s the dilemma Santangelo, et al, are looking at: A person who’s infected with the HIV virus is treated with anti-retroviral therapies. It appears to work. Within a month, the virus is undetectable in the blood stream. It’s been suppressed. But if you take the patient off the therapy, the virus comes back. It rebounds. “The drugs work but they are not sufficient to clear the virus. And really, we don’t know why that is yet,” Santangelo says. “Where is the virus? Where are the active reservoirs during suppression?”

The prospect of eliminating HIV from infected patients may be close at hand, but such a lofty goal will require new tools with greater sensitivity than currently available to monitor the progress of novel anti-retroviral therapies – not only in blood but also in organs that harbor such reservoirs and sites of residual viral replication in vivo.

“We’re not necessarily in this project, quote, 'creating the cure.' But we’re creating a tool that’s going to give us a lot more information about how you might go about doing that,” Santangelo says. “Otherwise, it’s a shot in the dark, you’re just trying different approaches. It’s trial and error. In the drug development world, trial and error is useful, but not ideal, and certainly not efficient.”

This research and resulting improvements in imaging technology, he says, will eventually give drug developers more information than they’ve had before, about how drugs are affecting very specific parts of the body.

“It’s about giving them much more powerful information about what’s happening, as opposed to downstream information,” says Santangelo, whose research areas include molecular imaging, nano-biophotonics, and optical microscopy. The long-term aim is to cure HIV, he adds, “and we’re working on a tool to help facilitate that.”

And that, he adds, is the reason the research got its funding – the NIH wants this tool in its toolbox. The grant covers five years, but it’s been a seven-year journey to this point. It began with a discussion between Santangelo and Emory professor Eric Hunter, whose research is focused on the molecular biology of HIV and other retroviruses.

“We were sitting around a table and Eric basically said, ‘one thing we’d like to know is, where is the virus? Is there a way to image this?’ I said, ‘I have no idea, but let’s see if we can figure that out.’ So I went back to the drawing board and thought about ways to approach the problem,” Santangelo says. “But that’s how it started – a group of people sitting around the table, asking, ‘how do we address this?’ and me being crazy enough to say, ‘I’ll try this,’ because I don’t say no to anything.”

Hunter introduced Santangelo to researcher/pathologist Villinger. They went after and received a $30,000 boost from the Woodruff Foundation, then got $100,000 from the Georgia Research Alliance, “and these were so important in pushing the momentum forward,” Santangelo says.

Then they received $450,000 from the NIH in the form of an Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award (R21) and now, $5.5 million, to support the work of an all-star team of researchers, including (among others) principal investigators Santangelo and Villinger, as well as Ray Schinazi, who directs the Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology at Emory, and is a co-investigator.

The overall goal, according to Santangelo, is to create or improve an imaging tool that will determine how the virus is being affected by a new drug strategy, and also to help promote new drugs that Schinazi is working on – “to clear HIV, and also to make current drugs more effective,” says Santangelo, who believes that by enhancing current imaging technology, particularly CT (computed tomography, or CAT scanning) and PET (positron emission tomography), he can track the reservoirs, including active viral reservoirs.

“If you can figure out where the reservoirs are, if you can figure out how long they are being affected by the drugs, and how the drugs are actually changing the reservoirs, we might be able to clear them,” says Santangelo, whose eyes light up at the prospect, giving him the look of a kid contemplating a super toy that hasn’t been invented yet. “And if you can clear these reservoirs, you could cure AIDS, and if you can cure AIDS, well, that would be pretty awesome.”

This study was supported in part by NIH Grants 1R01DE019935-01, 1R01AR056445-01A2 and R01GM067958, and 1DP2OD007433-01 and NSF Grant NSF#0933643.

BME was nosed out last week in the annual College of Engineering competition for the Buzz Award for Staff Appreciation. So, BME had to hand the trophy off to this year’s champion, the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautical Engineering (AE).

Every year, the staffs of Tech’s various schools and departments compete for recognition, but the means of competition changes each time. Last year, BME took home the trophy in a t-shirt contest, with a winning design from student Marisa Casola, a Petit Scholar in Melissa Kemp’s lab (and a layout editor for the Pioneer). Her artistic rendering of a profiled head with a multitude of diverse ideas popping out of it, surrounded the winning message, “Great Minds Don’t Think Alike,” reflecting the interdisciplinary approach that has become inextricably linked with Tech’s bio community philosophy.

But this year, the competition was in poster design, and AE won the trophy with a design that featured a bunch of staff photos overlaid with a shot of the AE building, and the message: “They are our bricks. They are our mortar. They are the key to our success.”

“The decision was based on a vote of the associate deans and myself,” explains Gary May, dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering. “AE stood out because of the collage of all the staff images integrated with the image of the AE building. It was very impressive and must have taken quite a bit of time to complete.”

Just like Lord Stanley’s Cup, which goes to the National Hockey League champion, or the World Series Trophy in baseball, the glass Buzz Trophy exchanges hands when a new champion is crowned. BME’s victory last year ended a two-year run by the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

“No one should be disappointed – there can only be one winner,” May assures. “All of the posters were good, and I am grateful to all who participated. We look forward to another spirited competition next year.”

“My two favorite demos were the cardiovascular demo, in which we had dissections of pig and chicken hearts prepared for the kids to learn about how blood is pumped through our bodies, and the edible cell demo, in which kids made their own large-scale cells out of candy that resembled different cellular organelles, and learned about what each of them does along the way,” Blum says.

“For the Ting Lab tour, we had demonstrations set up for the kids with their parents and grandparents to teach them how we study sensorimotor control of posture and balance,” he adds. “We were able to demonstrate how we elicit reactive postural responses experimentally by having volunteers stand on our motorized platform and moving it to throw them off balance. In addition to the platform, we showed them how we can record their motions and use electromyography to measure the neural response to the movement of the platform. It was great to see both the kids and their parents asking questions about what our lab does, and hopefully learning about neuroscience from the experience.”

Bounce houses in the bio-complex, a hands-on experiments table, the lab tours filled with kids wearing lab coats, balloons and ice cream – all in all, not your typical day at the office. Donna Sibble, business administrator in the Coulter Department, brought her grandson Julian, who enjoyed the magic show (Professor Garrett Stanley, complete with cape) and the experiments, but was especially thrilled to visit Ross Ethier’s lab, where they were dissecting a pig’s eyeball.

“On our way home,” Donna says, “he pleaded with me to stop by the store to buy Borax and Elmer’s Glue so that he could replicate the ‘silly putty’ he made at the experiment table. I truly look forward to bringing him again next year.”

A new technique for studying the structure of the RSV virion and the activity of RSV in living cells could help researchers unlock the secrets of the virus, including how it enters cells, how it replicates, how many genomes it inserts into its hosts – and perhaps why certain lung cells escape the infection relatively unscathed. That could provide scientists information they need to develop new antiviral drugs and perhaps even a vaccine to prevent severe RSV infections.

“We want to develop tools that would allow us to get at how the virus really works,” said Philip Santangelo, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We really need to be able to follow the infection in a single living cell without affecting how the virus infects its hosts, and this technology should allow us to do that.”

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences and published online ahead of print in the journal ACS Nano on December 30, 2013. While RSV will be the first target for the work, the researchers believe the imaging technique they developed could be used to study other RNA viruses, including influenza and Ebola.

“We’ve shown that we can tag the genome using our probes,” explained Santangelo. “What we’ve learned from this is that the genome does get incorporated into the virion, and that the virus particles created are infectious. We were able to characterize some aspects of the virus particle itself at super-resolution, down to 20 nanometers, using direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM) imaging.”

RSV can be difficult to study. For one thing, the infectious particle can take different forms, ranging from 10-micron filaments to ordinary spheres. The virus can insert more than one genome into the host cells and the RNA orientation and structure are disordered, which makes it difficult to characterize.

The research team, which included scientists from Vanderbilt University and Emory University, used a probe technology that quickly attaches to RNA within cells. The probe uses multiple fluorophores to indicate the presence of the viral RNA, allowing the researchers to see where it goes in host cells – and to watch as infectious particles leave the cells to spread the infection.

“Being able to see the genome and the progeny RNA that comes from the genome with the probes we use really give us much more insight into the replication cycle,” Santangelo said. “This gives us much more information about what the virus is really doing. If we can visualize the entry, assembly and replication of the virus, that would allow us to decide what to go after to fight the virus.”

The research depended on a new method for labelling RNA viruses using multiply-labeled tetravalent RNA imaging probes (MTRIPS). The probes consist of a chimeric combination of DNA and RNA oligonucleotide labeled internally with fluorophores tetravelently complexed to neutravidin. The chimeric combination was used to help the probes evade cellular defenses.

“There are lots of sensors in the cell that look for foreign RNA and foreign DNA, but to the cell, this probe doesn’t look like anything,” Santangelo explained. “The cell doesn’t see the nucleic acid as foreign.”

Introduced into cells, the probes quickly diffuse through a cell infected with RSV and bind to the virus’s RNA. Though binding tightly, the probe doesn’t affect the normal activities of the virus and allows researchers to follow the activity for days using standard microscopy techniques. The MTRIPS can be used to complement other probe technology, such as GFP and gold nanoparticles.

Work done by graduate student Eric Alonas to concentrate the virus was essential to the project, Santangelo said. The concentration had to be done without adversely affecting the infectivity of the virus, which would have impacted its ability to enter host cells.

“It took quite a bit of work to get the right techniques to concentrate the RSV,” he said. “Now we can make lots of infectious virus that’s labelled and can be stored so we can use it when we want to.”

To study the infection’s progress in individual cells, the researchers faced another challenge: living cells move around, and following them complicates the research. To address that movement, the laboratory of Thomas Barker – also in the Coulter Department – used micro-patterned fibronectin on glass to create 50-micron “islands” that contained the cells during the study.

Among the mysteries that the researchers would like to tackle is why certain lung cells are severely infected – while others appear to escape ill effects.

“If you look at a field of cells, you see huge differences from cell to cell, and that is something that’s not understood at all,” Santangelo said. “If we can figure out why some cells are exploding with virus while others are not, perhaps we can figure out a way to help the bad ones look more like the good ones.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included James Crowe, professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University; Elizabeth Wright, assistant professor in the School of Medicine at Emory University; Daryll Vanover, Jeenah Jung, Chiara Zurla, Jonathan Kirschman, Vincent Fiore, and Alison Douglas from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; Aaron Lifland and Manasa Gudheti from Vutara Inc. in Salt Lake City, and Hong Yi from the Emory University School of Medicine.

One of the challenges of studying RSV is maintaining its activity in the laboratory setting – a problem parents of young children don’t share.

“When you handle this virus in the lab, you have to always be careful about it losing infectivity,” Santangelo noted. “But if you take a room full of children who have not been infected and let one infected child into the room, 15 minutes later all of the children will be infected.”

The research described here was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under contract R01 GM094198-01. Any conclusions or opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

CITATION: Eric Alonas, et al., “Combining Single RNA Sensitive Probes with Subdiffraction-Limited and Live-Cell Imaging Enables the Characterization of Virus Dynamics in Cells,” (ACS Nano, December 2013). (http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nn405998v).

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Writer: John Toon

Today, genetic information is stored in DNA. RNA is created from DNA to put that information into action. RNA can direct the creation of proteins and perform other essential functions of life that DNA can’t do. RNA’s versatility is one reason that scientists think this polymer came first, with DNA evolving later as a better way to store genetic information for the long haul. But like DNA, RNA also could be a product of evolution, scientists theorize.

Chemists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown how molecules that may have been present on early Earth can self-assemble into structures that could represent a starting point of RNA. The spontaneous formation of RNA building blocks is seen as a crucial step in the origin of life, but one that scientists have struggled with for decades.

“In our study, we demonstrate a reaction that we see as important for the formation of the earliest RNA-like molecules,” said Nicholas Hud, professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech, where he’s also the director of the Center for Chemical Evolution.

The study was published Dec. 14 online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

RNA is perfect for the roles it plays in life today, Hud said, but chemically it’s extraordinarily difficult to make. This suggests that RNA evolved from simpler chemical couplings. As life became more chemically complex and enzymes were born, evolutionary pressures would have driven pre-RNA into the more refined modern RNA.

RNA is made of three chemical components: the sugar ribose, the bases and phosphate. A ribose-base-phosphate unit links together with other ribose-base-phosphate units to form an RNA polymer. Figuring out how the bond between the bases and ribose first formed has been a difficult problem to address in the origins of life field, Hud said.

In the study, Hud’s team investigated bases that are chemically related to the bases of modern RNA, but that might be able to spontaneously bond with ribose and assemble with other bases through the same interactions that enable DNA and RNA to store information. They homed in on a molecule called triaminopyrimidine (TAP).

The researchers mixed TAP with ribose under conditions meant to mimic a drying pond on early Earth. TAP and ribose reacted together in high yield, with up to 80 percent of TAP being converted into nucleosides, which is the name for the ribose-base unit of RNA. Previous attempts to form a ribose-base bond with the current RNA bases in similar reactions had either failed or produced nucleosides in very low yields.

“This study is important in showing a feasible step for how we get the start of an RNA-like molecule, but also how the building blocks of the first RNA-like polymers could have found each other and self-assembled in what would have been a very complex mixture of chemicals,” Hud said.

The researchers demonstrated this property of the TAP nucleosides by adding another molecule to their reaction mixture, called cyanuric acid, which is known to interact with TAP. Even in the unpurified reaction mixture, noncovalent polymers formed with thousands of paired nucleosides.

“It is amazing that these nucleosides and bases actually assemble on their own, as life today requires complex enzymes to bring together RNA building blocks and to spatially order them prior to polymerization,”said Brian Cafferty, a graduate student at Georgia Tech and co-author of the study

The study demonstrated one possible way that the building blocks for an ancestor of RNA could have come together on early Earth. TAP is an intriguing candidate for one of the first bases that eventually led to modern RNA molecules, but there are certainly others, Hud said.
Future work, in Hud’s lab and by other laboratories in the Center for Chemical Evolution, will investigate the origins of RNA’s phosphate backbone, as well as other pathways toward modern RNA.

“We’re looking for a simple, robust chemistry that can explain the earliest origin of RNA or its ancestor,” Hud said.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Chemical Evolution under award number CHE-1004570, and the NASA Exobiology Program under award number NNX13AIO2G. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

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Writer: Brett Israel

Election as a fellow of AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society, is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers. Fellows are recognized for meritorious efforts to advance science or its applications.

New fellows include:

• School of Interactive Computing Professor Henrik Christensen, cited “for contributions to applied estimation methods in mapping, robot localization, visual tracking and recognition, as well as national-level leadership of the robotics community.”
• School of Biology Professor Mark Hay, cited “for distinguished contributions in ecology, particularly for developing marine chemical ecology and for elucidating how chemical cues and signals structure populations, communities, and ecosystems.”
• School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Hang Lu, cited “for distinguished contributions to the field of engineering systems for high-throughput quantitative and systems biology, particularly for microfluidics, automation, image-based science, and phenomics.”
• School of Aerospace Engineering Professor Suresh Menon, cited “for distinguished and innovative contributions to the field of multi-scale computational simulation and modeling of turbulent combustion in power and propulsion systems.”

Collaboration doesn’t just come easy for him. It is at the very foundation of his research approach when it comes to understanding cancer. McDonald, then, was a natural choice among faculty members who will relocate to the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB) when it opens in 2015. Campaign Georgia Tech has been instrumental in raising money for the building.

“I’m convinced that the effective treatment of complex diseases like cancer will require an understanding of the interactive relationships that underlie cell function,” McDonald said. “I am excited about the prospect of working with other researchers committed to a ‘systems’ approach to better understand the basis of cancer onset and progression.”

The EBB was conceptualized and designed, and will be constructed, according to one fundamental tenet — that understanding and fighting multifaceted disease requires a new way of doing things; that new insights emerge not from the solitary confines of one laboratory or one discipline but from shared resources, spaces, and expertise.

The collaborative spaces within the facility are decidedly intentional and planned. The five-story, 200,000-square-foot building will house faculty members and other researchers in three research neighborhoods: chemical biology, cell and developmental bioengineering, and systems biology. Within each neighborhood, scientists and engineers from many different disciplines will share lab, office, and communal spaces, making it possible for them to share ideas, perspectives, and resources in an entirely new way.

For many years, McDonald has taken a collaborative approach to cancer research, working with faculty in chemistry and computer science to develop new, highly accurate diagnostic tests for ovarian and prostate cancer, and partnering with biomedical engineers, chemists, and biologists in cell therapies and personalized cancer medicine. Once the EBB is operational, collaboration will drive its every function and use, which will help accelerate the pace of discovery.

“We are not striving to compete with cancer centers like MD Anderson,” explained McDonald. “We are complementing their efforts by developing these unique integrative approaches, and this building will greatly enhance our ability to do that.”

For more about Campaign Georgia Tech, click here.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a monthly series that focuses on Campaign Georgia Tech.

Among his many titles, Nerem is the founding director of Georgia Tech’s Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. He has been a bioengineer for more than 35 years. Nerem knew how important Coulter was to the field, but the man he met in Miami gave no hint of scientific or business celebrity.

“He was a fascinating individual, very humble in nature,” Nerem said. “As the CEO of an important company, he did not believe in an executive dining room. So he hosted me for lunch in the cafeteria where all the other employees were. That was just his style.”

The connection made then and maintained through the years was instrumental in the formation of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

"Walter H. Coulter's life and approach to work are an inspiration to us all and we try to honor his memory every day in the way we approach our educational and research activities," said Steve Cross, Georgia Tech’s Executive Vice President for Research.

This year, Wallace Coulter would have turned 100, and to celebrate the life and scientific legacy of Coulter, his namesake department is hosting a celebration on Dec. 5-6 at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“I have heard many wonderful stories about Wallace’s deep commitment to his team and his people and employees,” said Ravi Bellamkonda, who holds a Wallace H. Coulter Chair in the department. “I’d like to think that the Coulter Department has a similar environment of a team and a family.”

Coulter studied electronics as a student at Georgia Tech in the early 1930s. The Coulter Foundation, through its philanthropy, helped establish the innovative academic department operated jointly by Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“There’s no question that the major gift by the Coulter Foundation was extremely important in building the biomedical engineering department to propel itself in a very short time to being a leading department in the country,” said Don Giddens, the founding chair of the Coulter Department and former dean of the College of Engineering.

The biomedical research conducted today might not be possible without the invention of the Coulter Counter. The Coulter Counter transformed diagnostics in hospitals by allowing rapid counting of blood cells. As cells of different sizes go through the counter, the cells change the current that flows through the device. That change in current is used to very rapidly count blood cells, providing information that helps spot illnesses in patients.

The invention of the Coulter Counter was the foundation for the successful, multi-national Coulter Corporation. Wallace Counter also held 85 patents and positioned the Coulter Corporation as a leader in the diagnostics technology industry. In October 1997, the Coulter Corporation was acquired by Beckman Instruments, Inc. and the company is now known as Beckman Coulter, Inc.

“I will always remember the Coulter Counter as the best way to count cells without having to do it by eye and on a microscope that can be prone with many different errors,” said Manu Platt, an assistant professor and GRA Distinguished Cancer Scientist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, who also earned his PhD in the Coulter Department. “For it now to be so routinely done in hospitals has allowed for greater processing of a large number of patient blood draws.”

Analysis of blood work revolutionized the detection of cancer and many kinds of blood-related diseases. Tests that once took several days took just minutes with the Coulter Counter.

“Wallace Coulter firmly believed that technology and engineering can change medicine for the better,” Bellamkonda said. “That is entirely our focus here in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.”

Outside of biology, the Coulter Counter has had commercial impacts in other fields such as manufacturing. For example, the Coulter Counter is used in paint manufacturing to quickly measure particle size and number.

The Coulter Counter was based on the Coulter Principle, which says that when cells are passed through microchannels separating electrolyte solutions, a transient current drop is proportional to the particle volume.

The Coulter Principle is one of the precursors to microfluidic studies that are commonly used today, Platt said.These studies are now at the forefront of how to miniaturize or “nano-ize” diagnostic detection devices for cheaper, faster and better assays, which are directly applicable to  environments like those in developing countries, such as in rural Africa where Platt does fieldwork studying HIV/AIDS.

Microfluidic studies, such as Assistant Professor Todd Sulchek’s work sorting cells by stiffness to spot disease, are a modern legacy of the Coulter Counter.

“That principle — the idea of making a very small aperture or very small hole — is a foundation for microfluidics,” said Sulchek, who works in both the Coulter Department and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “People realized that if you make very small dimensions, on the scale of individual cells, you can utilize new mechanisms for detection. That idea underpins almost all of microfluidics.”

Coulter was driven to innovate, something that the Coulter Department also strives for. Many of the Coulter Department’s faculty members have created startups and are interested in taking their ideas further. They are not satisfied with just publishing a study, Bellamkonda said. Embedded in the DNA of the Coulter Department is a drive to move technologies to patients as fast as possible, he said.

Just one example of this drive is found in the Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics lab of Ajit Yoganathan, the Associate Chair for Translational Research, Regents Professor and the Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair in Biomedical Engineering. His lab has a rich history of translational research over the past 34 years, working closely with cardiologists and cardiac surgeons, both adult and pediatric, to identify the important questions and challenges that the clinicians face and how the lab’s research could help clinical care.

Yoganathan’s lab has developed a repair technology for the mitral valve that is currently licensed for commercialization to a major heart valve company, and the lab has also developed a minimal blood loss access port into the left ventricle, which is in clinical trials in partnership with his startup company Apica Cardiovascular.

“The ideas came from basic research that was going on in the lab and having the Coulter funding allowed us to take it to the next level,” Yoganathan said.

Helping improve the lives of patients through commercializing biomedical research is a modern-day Coulter principle.

“The old Coulter principle is how to count particles. The new Coulter principle, pioneered with single-minded focus by the Coulter Foundation, is helping us take engineering innovations from the lab and successfully commercialize them,” Bellamkonda said. “Wallace’s legacy vibrantly lives on through the work of his foundation.”

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Writer: Brett Israel

The K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award is an award given by NIH to postdoctoral scientists to support their transition into an independent faculty appointment. This award provides support for a one- to two-year postdoctoral mentored phase and a successive three-year independent phase as a principal investigator. The main objective of this grant is to support promising scientists in the early stages of their career and accelerate their transition to an independent research position.

This competitive award is one of the few available for non-U.S. citizens and is a great complement for prospective faculty candidates. Current faculty members of the Georgia Tech community who have won this award include Dr. Brandon Dixon (Mechanical Engineering) and Dr. Matthew Torres (Biology).

After completing undergraduate studies in chemical engineering at Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM) and working in industry for a couple of years, Adriana moved to the United States from her native Mexico to pursue a graduate degree at Georgia Tech. She completed her Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering under the supervision of Dr. Sven Behrens, working on stimulus-responsive microcapsules and emulsions. She is now a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Hang Lu’s lab, where she and others work on integrated engineering systems to perform high-throughput experiments with the nematode C. elegans to answer biological questions that cannot be addressed with conventional methods. Tools developed in the Lu lab, including microfluidics, machine learning and hardware automation, allow unbiased quantitative multidimensional characterization of micron-sized synaptic sites in large animal populations.

In the study, individuals with paralysis were able to use a tongue-controlled technology to access computers and execute commands for their wheelchairs at speeds that were significantly faster than those recorded in sip-and-puff wheelchairs, but with equal accuracy. This study is the first to show that the wireless and wearable Tongue Drive System outperforms sip-and-puff in controlling wheelchairs. Sip-and-puff is the most popular assistive technology for controlling a wheelchair.

The Tongue Drive System is controlled by the position of the user’s tongue. A magnetic tongue stud lets them use their tongue as a joystick to drive the wheelchair. Sensors in the tongue stud relay the tongue’s position to a headset, which then executes up to six commands based on the tongue position.

The Tongue Drive System holds promise for patients who have lost the use of their arms and legs, a condition known as tetraplegia or quadriplegia.

“It’s really easy to understand what the Tongue Drive System can do and what it is good for,” said Maysam Ghovanloo, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a study co-author and principal investigator. “Now, we have solid proof that people with disabilities can potentially benefit from it.”

The study was published on Nov. 27 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and the National Science Foundation funded the research. Scientists from Shepherd Center in Atlanta, and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago were also involved in the study. Jeonghee Kim and Hangue Park, who are working on the Tongue Drive System as graduate students at Georgia Tech, are co-authors of the study.

“The Tongue Drive System is a novel technology that empowers people with disability to achieve maximum independence at home and in the community by enabling them to drive a power wheelchair and control their environment in a smoother and more intuitive way,” said

Northwestern co-lead investigator Elliot Roth, M.D, chair of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Feinberg and the medical director of the patient recovery unit at Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. “The opportunity to use this high-tech innovation to improve the quality of life among people with mobility limitations is very exciting.”

The research team had subjects complete a set of tasks commonly used in similar clinical trials. Subjects in the trials were either able-bodied or people with tetraplegia.

“By the end of the trials, everybody preferred the Tongue Drive System over their current assistive technology,” said Joy Bruce, manager of Shepherd Center’s Spinal Cord Injury Lab and co-author of the study. “It allows them to engage their environment in a way that is otherwise not possible for them.”

Researchers compared how able-bodied subjects were able to execute commands either with the Tongue Drive System or with a keypad and mouse. For example, targets randomly appeared on a computer screen and the subjects had to move the cursor to click on the target. Scientists are able to calculate how much information is transferred from a person’s brain to the computer as they perform a point-and-click task. The performance gap narrowed throughout the trial between the keypad and mouse and the Tongue Drive System.

For the first time, the research team showed that people with tetraplegia can maneuver a wheelchair better with the Tongue Drive System than with the sip-and-puff system. On average, the performance of 11 subjects with tetraplegia using the Tongue Drive System was three times faster than their performance with the sip-and-puff system, but with the same level of accuracy, even though more than half of the patients had years of daily experience with sip-and-puff technology.

“That was a very exciting finding,” Ghovanloo said. “It attests to how quickly and accurately you can move your tongue.”

The idea for piercing the tongue with the magnet was the inspiration of Anne Laumann, M.D., professor of dermatology at Feinberg and a lead investigator of the Northwestern trial. She had read about an early stage of Tongue Drive System using a glued-on tongue magnet. The problem was the magnet fell off after a few hours and aspiration of the loose magnet was a real danger to these users.

“Tongue piercing put to medical use — who would have thought it? It is needed and it works!” Laumann said.

The experiments were repeated over five weeks for the able-bodied test group, and over six weeks for the tetraplegic group. All of the subjects with tetraplegia were able to complete the trial, which Ghovanloo called an “exciting” and “major finding.”

The tetraplegic group was using the Tongue Drive System just one day each week, but their improvement in performance was dramatic.

“We saw a huge, very significant improvement in their performance from session one to session two,” Ghovanloo said. “That’s an indicator of how quickly people learn this.”

Experiments on the Tongue Drive System to date have been done in the lab or hospital. In future studies, scientists will test how the Tongue Drive System performs outside of the controlled clinical environment. The research team hopes to test how patients maneuver with the Tongue Drive System in their homes and other environments.

The Tongue Drive System isn’t quite ready for commercialization, but Ghovanloo’s startup company, Bionic Sciences, is working with Georgia Tech to move the technology forward.
Ghovanloo is the foundering director of the GT-Bionics Laboratory, where his team is experimenting with other devices to improve the quality of life for individuals with disability.

“All of my projects are related to helping people with disabilities using the latest and greatest technologies,” Ghovanloo said. “That’s my goal in my professional life.”

DiSanto hopes that the one day he’ll be able to use a tongue-powered wheelchair outside of the hospital, which would help him gain some independence he lost after his diving accident.

"The Tongue Drive System will greatly increase my quality of life when I can start using it everywhere I go,” DiSanto said. “With the sip-and-puff system, there is always a straw in front of my face. With the Tongue Drive, people can see you, not just your adaptive equipment."

This research is supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering under award number 1RC1EB010915, and by the National Science Foundation under awards CBET-0828882 and IIS-0803184. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

Dr. Ghovanloo's company, Bionic Sciences, is negotiating with the Georgia Tech Research Corporation for a license to the technologies discussed in this article. If the license is executed, the results of his research on the Tongue Drive System could affect his personal financial status. Dr. Ghovanloo's Conflict of Interest has been reviewed and approved by Georgia Tech in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.

CITATION: J Kim, et al “The Tongue Enables Computer and Wheelchair Control for People with Spinal Cord Injury,” (Science Translational Medicine, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1126/scitranslmed.3006296

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Writer: Brett Israel

 A research team is attempting to engineer an injectable therapy for the shoulder’s supraspinatus tendon, a rotator cuff tendon that is commonly torn in sports. When the tendon is damaged, the body makes things worse by activating enzymes that further break down the tendon. The scientists hope to develop an injectable compound that would deliver an inhibitor capable of blocking these enzymes, thereby reducing the severity of the injury or even healing the tissue.

“Normally people focus on treating tendon injuries after the tear has occurred, but we’re focusing on a much earlier stage in the disease,” said Johnna Temenoff, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “This is the first time that an injectable therapy specifically designed to interact with tissue at an early disease state has been attempted for this particular tendon injury.”

Temenoff’s work is supported by a $1 million grant from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) for five years of research, which began in September 2013. Collaborating on the research is Manu Platt, an assistant professor in the same department. Temenoff’s previous work on tendon injuries, which focused on quarterbacks in football, was sponsored by the NFL Charities.

Shoulder tendon injuries are common overuse injuries for athletes and also for industrial workers whose repetitive overhead motion put them at risk. The rotator cuff is a collation of four tendons, and the tendons are made of collagen. Overuse of the tendons damages the collagen, and people feel stiff and sore in their shoulders as the area becomes weaker.

Once a tendon is damaged, the body accelerates the damage by activating enzymes that eat at the tendon, worsening the condition over time.

“The interesting thing about this disease is that we don’t know exactly what causes it,” Temenoff said. “We’re studying enzymes that are known to chew up the collagen, and we’re looking at then delivering inhibitors to those enzymes in a local injection in the tendon to try to stop the degradation.”

In their research, the team will use an animal model to characterize when these collagen-destroying enzymes are the most active. This will give researchers a good idea of when to inject inhibitors.

So that patients won’t need multiple shots, the scientists are working on a drug delivery material that will release the inhibitors over time once inside the body. One idea is to control the interactions between the inhibitors and small amounts of the blood thinner heparin. The team will also study the histology and mechanics of the tendons after healing.

Temenoff said that the injectable therapy could, in theory, work on other kinds of tendon injuries, not just in the shoulder.

“We’re studying the disease in the shoulder, but it’s the same disease that causes tennis elbow, Achilles injuries, and jumper’s knee,” Temenoff said. “It’s the same process, just in different tendons in the body.”

This research is supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) under award1R01AR063692-01A1. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NIAMS.

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McDevitt is an associate professor in the Coulter Department, a Petit Faculty Fellow in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and director of the Stem Cell Engineering Center at Georgia Tech. The objective of McDevitt’s research program is to develop enabling technologies for the directed differentiation of stem cells for regenerative medicine, disease models, and diagnostic applications. Much of his research focuses on the application of technologies to engineer stem cell fate, on stem cell bioprocessing and on engineering regenerative therapies from stem cells. McDevitt has garnered more than $9 million in funding, including a Transformative R01 award from the NIH and an NSF IGERT on Stem Cell Biomanufacturing. He received the 2010 Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator Award, a New Investigator Award from the American Heart Association and was recognized as one of the “40 Under 40” by Georgia Trend magazine. McDevitt graduated cum laude from Duke University, with a B.S.E. and a double major in Biomedical and Electrical Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in 2001 in Bioengineering from the University of Washington, where he worked for Patrick S. Stayton, and where he conducted post-doctoral research in the pathology laboratory of Charles E. Murry. 

Roy joined the Coulter Department this summer as professor and is currently the director of the Center for Immunoengineering.  He is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). He received his B.S. from the Indian Institute of Technology, M.S. from Boston University and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Following his Ph.D., he joined a start-up biotechnology company, Zycos Inc., where he served as a senior scientist in drug delivery research.  He joined The University of Texas at Austin in 2002, where most recently he was professor of Biomedical Engineering. He also served as the director of the graduate program and as associate chair for education and outreach. His research interests are in the areas of immunoengineering with particular focus on material-directed cells signaling and immune cell generation and controlled drug and vaccine delivery technologies with applications in cancer and immunotherapies.  Roy has received the Young Investigator Awards from The Society for Biomaterials (SFB) and the Controlled Release Society (CRS). He has been extensively funded by NIH, NSF, the Coulter Foundation, the Whitaker Foundation and the Cancer Prevention And Research Institute of Texas, among others. He serves as a member of the editorial boards for the Journal of Controlled Release and the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics.

Georgia Tech and Emory created the joint department of biomedical engineering in the fall of 1997. The collaborative relationship blends the expertise of medical researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine with that of the engineering faculty at Georgia Tech, and is the first of its kind between a public and private institution. The collaboration has resulted in a biomedical engineering program that consistently ranks among the top five in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.

“The Coulter Department is an excellent example of an academic unit designing its curriculum and instructional approach to truly focus on student learning and achievement,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “It’s no surprise that the department and one of its own, Steve Potter, would be selected to receive these awards.”

The University System of Georgia (USG) Teaching Excellence Awards recognize both individual faculty and staff, and departments and programs for a strong commitment to teaching and student success.  

The Coulter Department was recognized for its design and implementation of a problem-focused curriculum.

“Problem-driven learning aims to develop empowered, self-directed inquirers who fearlessly seek and tackle local and global problems,” said Wendy Newstetter, who helped develop the award-winning BME curriculum and is now director of educational research and innovation for the College of Engineering.

A team of BME faculty, including Newstetter, BME Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies Joe Le Doux and Director of Learning Sciences Innovation and Research Barbara Fasse, are scheduled to share their curriculum design approach in March 2013 during a workshop for faculty from across the state.

Potter, director of the Laboratory for NeuroEngineering, was recognized for his self-defined “real world” approach to teaching neuroscience courses. For example, students interview experts in the field and use what they learn from experts and readings to create new neuroscience articles for Wikipedia.

“Nothing is more rewarding for me than to get an email from one of my former students telling me about where they are now and how much they still appreciate and use what they learned in a class of mine,” Potter said. “To get recognition from the USG for leaving a lasting influence on my students is icing on the cake.”

In addition, Dr. Phelps provides clinical input into safety and regulatory interactions and assists with the development of global collaborations that integrate broad medical, scientific, and commercial concepts into the program. These efforts are designed to shepherd the transition of viable ideas into useable products across and between the fields of medicine, technology and science.

“We are excited to have someone of Dr. Phelps’ broad clinical expertise as part of our leadership team” said Barbara Boyan, Executive Director of TRIBES and the Price Gilbert, Jr. Chair in Tissue Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation for Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering.

In addition to his role as TRIBES Medical Director, Dr. Phelps serves as the Director of Health Systems Technology Research and Development at the Georgia Tech Research Institute where he manages and facilitates health-related technological synergies internally and externally.

Dr. Phelps retired in March 2011 from the U. S. Army with over 30 years of total active federal service. He started in the military as a Special Forces Senior Non-Commissioned Officer.  Following his commission, he completed medical school and residency and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Medical Corps.  His duties included planning, supporting, and/or directing numerous Department of Defense research and development projects totaling over $150 million. 

Widely regarded as an expert on a variety of special operations/operational medicine, injury biomechanics and wilderness medicine topics, he currently focuses on research into the cause, prevention, and development of applied solutions to human injury. He is certified as both a Senior U.S. Army and U.S. Navy Flight Surgeon/Aerospace Medicine physician, and is a distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

The Translational Research Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Science (TRIBES) links biomedical research and educational activities at Georgia Tech with key medical institutions and organizations for the benefit of diagnosis and treatment of patients in the healthcare system. TRIBES provides critical capabilities to pre-commercial engineering development activities for the license and transition of technology into industry.

TRIBES is part of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and includes three centers directed by Boyan – the Center for Advanced Bioengineering for Soldier Survivability, the Center for Pediatric Healthcare Technology Innovation and the Atlanta Pediatric Device Consortium.

“What we found was that how people perceived the intent of therobot was really important to how they responded. So, even though the robottouched people in the same way, if people thought the robot was doing that toclean them, versus doing that to comfort them, it made a significant differencein the way they responded and whether they found that contact favorable ornot,” said Charlie Kemp, assistant professor in the Wallace H. CoulterDepartment of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

In the study, researchers looked at how people responded whena robotic nurse, known as Cody, touched and wiped a person’s forearm. AlthoughCody touched the  subjectsin exactly the same way, they reacted more positively when they believed Codyintended to clean their arm versus when they believed Cody intended to comfortthem.

These results echo similar studies done with nurses.

“There have been studies of nurses and they’ve looked at howpeople respond to physical contact with nurses,” said Kemp, who is also anadjunct professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “And they found that,in general, if people interpreted the touch of the nurse as being instrumental,as being important to the task, then people were OK with it. But if peopleinterpreted the touch as being to provide comfort … people were not socomfortable with that.”

In addition, Kemp and his research team tested whether peopleresponded more favorably when the robot verbally indicated that it was about totouch them versus touching them without saying anything beforehand.

“The results suggest that people preferred when the robot didnot actually give them the warning,” said Tiffany Chen, doctoral student atGeorgia Tech. “We think this might be because they were startled when the robotstarted speaking, but the results are generally inconclusive.

Since many useful tasks require that a robot touch a person,the team believes that future research should investigate ways to make robottouch more acceptable to people, especially in healthcare. Many importanthealthcare tasks, such as wound dressing and assisting with hygiene, wouldrequire a robotic nurse to touch the patient's body,

“If we want robots to be successful in healthcare, we’re goingto need to think about how do we make those robots communicate their intentionand how do people interpret the intentions of the robot,” added Kemp. “And Ithink people haven’t been as focused on that until now. Primarily people havebeen focused on how can we make the robot safe, how can we make it do its taskeffectively. But that’s not going to be enough if we actually want these robotsout there helping people in the real world.”

In addition to Kemp and Chen, the research group consists ofAndrea Thomaz, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, andpostdoctoral fellow Chih-Hung Aaron King.

“There’s a misconception that sickle cell disease solely affectsAfrican Americans and that it does not represent a health disparity.  Allraces can be affected and the disease is most prevalent in those with ancestryfrom sub-Saharan Africa, Saudi Arabia, India, the Mediterranean and Latin andSouth America,” said conference organizer Gilda Barabino, professor andassociate chair for graduate studies in the Wallace H. CoulterDepartment of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Sickle celldisease is prevalent in populations that face social, economic, cultural,structural, geographical and other barriers to comprehensive and quality careand, as such is among the diseases that involve healthdisparities.”

Sickle cell disease is a blood disorder thatresults in patients having mostly hemoglobin S in their blood streams. Patientswith this disorder often have red blood cells that take on a sickle shape,rather than the typical disc shape. The sickle-shaped blood cells are lesspliable than normal red blood cells, making it difficult for blood to passthrough small blood vessels. When sickle cells clog up small blood vessels,less fresh blood can flow to that tissue, causing damage and the eventualcomplications that accompany sickle cell disease.

“There is no cure for sickle celldisease, and existing therapies are limited in their benefit to patients. This blood disorder involves virtually every organ system, and each must beaddressed in the context of the other systems,” said Barabino. “Whileunderstandably, since Sickle cell disease is a blood disorder, hematologicalperspectives have dominated, there is much to learn from other areas to includeperspectives on public health, nutrition, health outcomes and surveillance.Future translational advances in the next century will only occur through integratedapproaches that view the patient in total and draw on the tools andtechnologies of a variety of disciplines.”

The symposium will gather experts from the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta,the University of Southern California, the University of California – SanFrancisco, the University of Minnesota, the University of Virginia, theUniversity of the West Indies and Medical College of Georgia as well as theGeorgia Institute of Technology and Emory University.

By bringing together scientists, policy expertsand consumers, the organizers hope to build a true community amongstresearchers aiming to develop treatments and possible cures for this disease.They also aim to strengthen existing partnerships and develop a blueprint forresearch that establishes the state of Georgia as an unrivaled leader in thisfield.

“Sickle cell disease is a very complicated anddebilitating genetic blood disorder for which a cure and effective treatmentstrategies remain elusive, even 100 years after the initial discovery of thedisease. By bringing together these groups, we seek to work across boundariesand deliver a blueprint for an integrated sickle cell research strategy,” saidBarabino.

While stem cell research is on the verge of broadly impacting many elements of the medical field - regenerative medicine, drug discovery and development, cell-based diagnostics and cancer - the bio-process engineering that will be required to manufacture sufficient quantities of functional stem cells for these diagnostic and therapeutic purposes has not been rigorously explored.

"Successfully integrating knowledge of stem cell biology with bioprocess engineering and process development into single individuals is the challenging goal of this program," said Todd McDevitt, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and a Petit Faculty Fellow in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences at Georgia Tech.

McDevitt is leading the IGERT with Robert M. Nerem, professor emeritus of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Nerem is also director of the Georgia Tech/Emory Center (GTEC) for Regenerative Medicine, which will administer this award.

Ph.D. students funded by Georgia Tech's stem cell bio-manufacturing IGERT will receive interdisciplinary educational training in the biology, engineering, enabling technologies, commercialization and public policy related to stem cells. Their research efforts will focus on developing innovative engineering approaches to bridge the gap between basic discoveries made in stem cell biology and therapeutic stem cell-based technologies.

"This program provides a unique opportunity for engineers to generate standardized and quantitative methods for stem cell isolation, characterization, propagation and differentiation," said Nerem. "These techniques must be developed in a scalable manner to efficiently produce sufficient numbers of stem cells and derivatives in accessible formats in order to yield a spectrum of novel therapeutic and diagnostic applications of stem cells."

The Georgia Tech program is centered around three main research thrusts, which focus on several critical technologies that must be developed to enable the application and use of stem cell-based products:

* Creating reproducible, controlled and scalable methods to expand and differentiate stem cells with defined phenotypes and epigenetic states.
* Developing reliable, rapid and quantifiable methods to characterize the composition and function of stem cells to be generated.
* Designing low-cost systems capable of producing large populations of defined stem cells and derivatives.

Students in the program will be able to take advantage of the core facilities provided by the new Stem Cell Engineering Center at Georgia Tech, which is directed by McDevitt. Technologies developed by the students supported through this IGERT will be rapidly integrated into academic and industrial stem cell practices and cell-based products.

The award will support 30 new Ph.D. students over the next five years and brings together more than two dozen faculty members from Georgia Tech, Emory University, the University of Georgia and the Morehouse School of Medicine. In addition, plans are being made for students to participate in international research collaborations with the National University of Ireland at Galway, Imperial College London, the University of Cambridge and the University of Toronto.

"We anticipate this program will produce the future leaders and innovators in the field of stem cell bio-manufacturing who will contribute significantly at the interface of stem cell engineering, biology and therapy," added McDevitt.

Implants coated with "flower bouquet" clusters of an engineered protein that mimics the body's own cell-adhesion material fibronectin made 50 percent more contact with the surrounding bone than implants coated with protein pairs or individual strands. The cluster-coated implants were fixed in place more than twice as securely as plugs made from bare titanium - which is how joints are currently attached.

Researchers believe the biologically-inspired material improves bone growth around the implant and strengthens the attachment and integration of the implant to the bone. This work also shows for the first time that biomaterials presenting biological sequences clustered together at the nanoscale enhance cell adhesion signals. These enhanced signals result in higher levels of bone cell differentiation in human stem cells and promote better integration of biomaterial implants into bone.

"By clustering the engineered fibronectin pieces together, we were able to create an amplified signal for attracting integrins, receptors that attached to the fibronectin and directed and enhanced bone formation around the implant," said Andres Garcia, professor in Georgia Tech's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

Details of the new coating were reported in the August 18 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Arthritis Foundation, and the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute through the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues.

Total knee and hip replacements typically last about 15 years until the components wear down or loosen. For many younger patients, this means a second surgery to replace the first artificial joint. With approximately 40 percent of the 712,000 total hip and knee replacements in the United States in 2004 performed on younger patients 45-64 years old, improving the lifetime of the titanium joints and creating a better connection with the bone becomes extremely important.

In this study, Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry professor David Collard and his students coated clinical-grade titanium with a high density of polymer strands - akin to the bristles on a toothbrush. Then, Garcia and Tim Petrie - formerly a graduate student at Georgia Tech and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington - modified the polymer to create three or five self-assembled tethered clusters of the engineered fibronectin, which contained the arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD)sequence to which integrins binds.

To evaluate the in vivo performance of the coated titanium in bone healing, the researchers drilled two-millimeter circular holes into a rat's tibia bone and pressed tiny clinical-grade titanium cylinders into the holes. The research team tested coatings that included individual strands, pairs, three-strand clusters and five-strand clusters of the engineered fibronectin protein.

"To investigate the function of these surfaces in promoting bone growth, we quantified osseointegration, or the growth of bone around the implant and strength of the attachment of the implant to the bone," explained Garcia, who is also a Woodruff Faculty Fellow at Georgia Tech.

Analysis of the bone-implant interface four weeks later revealed a 50 percent enhancement in the amount of contact between the bone and implants coated with three- or five-strand tethered clusters compared to implants coated with single strands. The experiments also revealed a 75 percent increase in the contact of the three- and five-strand clusters compared to the current clinical standard for replacement-joint implants, which is uncoated titanium.

The researchers also tested the fixation of the implants by measuring the amount of force required to pull the implants out of the bone. Implants coated with three- and five-strand tethered clusters of the engineered fibronectin fragment displayed 250 percent higher mechanical fixation over the individual strand and pairs coatings and a 400 percent improvement compared to the unmodified polymer coating. The three- and five-cluster coatings also exhibited a twofold enhancement in pullout strength compared to uncoated titanium.

Georgia Tech bioengineering graduate students Ted Lee and David Dumbauld, chemistry graduate students Subodh Jagtap and Jenny Raynor, and research technician Kellie Templeman also contributed to this study.

This work was partly funded by Grant No. R01 EB004496-01 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and PHS Grant UL1 RR025008 from the Clinical and Translational Science Award program, NIH, National Center for Research Resources. The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NIH.

"Sponsoring the CSB2 Award is a natural fit for Merrimack, as our company mission is to use systems biology techniques to understand a disease mechanism and then discover and develop drugs to optimally treat that disease," said Birgit Schoeberl, Ph.D. Merrimack's Vice President of Research. "We are proud to support CSB2 and talented researchers like Melissa Kemp who continue to help the systems biology field reach its full potential."

Dr. Kemp receives this award in recognition of her work developing approaches to measure changes in a protein oxidation state and integrate ROS signaling with signaling by kinases and transcription factors. Dr. Kemp is an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering department at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar.

"Dr. Kemp is an extraordinary young investigator at the intersection between engineering and cell biology," said Professor Peter Sorger, Chair of CSB2. "Dr. Kemp's promising work studying the complex connections between signaling networks that are most commonly studied in isolation is the essence of contemporary systems biology."

About the CSB2 Prize in Systems Biology sponsored by Merrimack :The CSB2 Prize sponsored by Merrimack is awarded to a young scientist for exceptional contributions to the development and application of innovative new modeling and computational methods as judged by their technical quality, broad utility and fundamental theoretical insight. This prize is presented by the Council for Systems Biology in Boston (CSB2) which builds local, regional, and national links between academic and industrial laboratories active
in the areas of systems and computational biology.

CSB2 is dedicated to promoting quantitative, systems and synthetic biology in the Boston area and beyond by promoting interactions among academic and pharmaceutical laboratories, organizing international symposia and recognizing the achievements of promising young scientists and engineers. The International Conference on the Systems Biology of Human Disease (http://www.csb2.org/events/sbhd-2010) is a major annual symposium focusing on the application of network and systems biology to unmet medical needs.

About Merrimack

Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery and development of novel medicines for the treatment of cancer and inflammation. The Company is advancing arobust pipeline of engineered therapeutics paired with molecular diagnostics. Merrimack's first two oncology candidates, MM-121,partnered with sanofi-aventis, and MM-111, are in Phase 1 clinical testing with multiple pre-clinical development and research stage programs in the pipeline. MM-121 and MM-111 are investigational drugs and have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or any international regulatory agency.

The Company's proprietary Network Biology discovery platform, developed with the help of leading scientists from MIT and Harvard, integrates the fields of engineering, biology and computing to enable mechanism-based model driven discovery and development of both therapeutics and diagnostics. Merrimack is a privately-held company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For additional information, please visit http://www.merrimackpharma.com.

May 16-19, the Coulter Department hosted a meeting of research collaborators intent on studying living neural networks (LNNs) of rat brain cells in BME Associate Professor Steve Potter’s lab to see how those cells process dynamic situations, adapt and learn. From those studies, the researchers hope to create a "biologically inspired" computer program to manage and control complex power grids. Their project “Neuroscience and Neural Networks for Engineering the Future Intelligent Electric Power Grid” is being led by Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy, Missouri University of Science and Technology, in collaboration with co-PIs Potter, Ron Harley, Georgia Tech Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Donald Wunsch, Missouri S&T. The study is funded by the NSF Office of the Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation. View a video of Steve Potter discussing LNNs at http://brain2grid.com/movies/