<![CDATA[Buzzing the Vagus Nerve Just Right to Fight Inflammatory Disease]]> 31759 Is a treatment only making things better or maybe also making some things a little worse?

That can be a nagging question in some medical decisions, where side effects are possible. But researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have figured out a way to keep what helps, while blocking what harms, in a type of therapy to fight serious chronic inflammatory diseases.

It’s simple and works a little like a pacemaker: An implanted device electrically stimulates the vagus nerve, but, in addition, inhibits unwanted nerve activity in a targeted manner.

Forms of vagus nerve stimulation treatment against chronic inflammation have already been successfully tested in humans by private industry with the intent to make them available to patients. But the innovation by Georgia Tech researchers of adding an inhibiting signal could increase the clinical efficacy and therapeutic benefit of existing treatments.

Temporarily snipping a nerve

“We use an electrode with a kilohertz frequency that blocks unwanted nerve conduction in addition to the electrode that stimulates nerve activity,” said principal investigator Robert Butera, a professor jointly appointed in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “We’ve arranged the two near each other, so the blocking electrode forces the stimulation from the stimulating electrode to only go in one direction.”

The researchers’ innovation could theoretically by implemented relatively quickly by augmenting existing clinical devices. So far, tests in rats have returned very encouraging results, and they have been achieved without taking more drastic measures notable in other experiments to optimize this kind of treatment – such as a vagotomy, the cutting of part of the vagus.

“The original studies in animals on the anti-inflammatory benefits of vagus nerve stimulation resorted to nerve transections to achieve directional stimulation as well as boost effectiveness of nerve stimulation. But cutting the vagus is not clinically viable, due to the multitude of vital bodily functions it monitors and regulates. Our approach provides the same therapeutic benefit, but is also immediately reversible, controllable, and clinically feasible,” said lead researcher Yogi Patel, a bioengineering graduate student.

“We call it a virtual vagotomy,” Butera said.

Patel, Butera and former Georgia Tech researchers Tarun Saxena and Ravi V. Bellamkonda, published the results of their study in the journal Scientific Reports, which is published by Nature Publishing Group, on Thursday, January 5, 2017. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Ian’s Friends Foundation.

Vagus nerve: What is it?

To understand how this new bioelectronic fine-tuning works, let’s start with the vagus nerve itself.

It lies outside the spinal column and runs in two parts down the front of your neck on either side. It’s easy to forget about because, though it does help you feel some limited sensations like pain and heat from a handful of internal organs, those sensations are not as blatant and common as when you reach out and touch something with your hand.

Your voluntary, or somatic, nervous system is responsible for the reaching, touching, and feeling, and the vagus nerve belongs to your involuntary nervous system – actually called the autonomic nervous system. Though you may experience the effects less consciously, you couldn’t survive without a vagus.

“The vagus nerve conveys an incredible amount of information related to the state and function of the visceral organs – your digestive tract, your heart, your lungs, information about the nutrients you eat – anything required for homeostasis (physiological balance),” Patel said.

The vagus nerve is the lifeline between the vital function control centers of your brain and your visceral organs, passing messages constantly between your hypothalamus and organs to control things like pulse and respiration, certain secretions, and the limiting of immune response.

Inflammation: What role does the vagus nerve play?

That last one is where inflammation comes in, because it's part of the body's natural immune response. But when the immune system becomes hyperactive, it can attack not just pathogens but also uninfected tissue, as with patients suffering from diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn’s disease. Drug-based therapies often fail to significantly benefit them.

The two parts of the autonomic (involuntary) nervous system -- the sympathetic and the parasympathetic -- strongly influence your immune system. The vagus nerve belongs to the parasympathetic.

“It’s like a seesaw system. Your sympathetic nervous system helps kick the immune system on, and the parasympathetic nervous system tempers it,” Patel said.

Electrical stimulation is good: Any downsides?

Stimulating the vagus nerve supports that tempering effect, but it can also somewhat excite the part of the nervous system that stimulates the immune response, which is counterproductive if you're looking to calm it.

“Every circuit has a path coming from the brain and one going to the brain, and when you stimulate electrically, you usually have no control over which one you get. You usually get both.” Patel said. These paths are often in the same nerve being stimulated.

The path leaving the brain and going toward other organs, called the efferent pathway, is the one to stimulate to temper the immune system and help relieve chronic inflammatory conditions. The one going to the brain, called the afferent pathway, if stimulated, leads eventually to the hypothalamus, a pea-sized region in the center of the brain. That triggers a chain of hormonal responses, eventually releasing cytokines, messaging molecules that promote inflammation.

“You get a heightened inflammatory response when you stimulate the afferent pathways, which are actively conveying information about your internal state and trigger the immune system when necessary,” Patel said. “And if a patient is already in a hyperactive immune state, you don’t want to push that even more."

Stimulating downward (efferent), while blocking upward (afferent) vagus nerve activity keeps the good effect while preventing possible bad effects. In animals that received this treatment, blood tests showed that inflammation markedly decreased. Most importantly, this treatment can be turned on or off, and be tuned to the needs of each patient.

No additional authors were involved in the study, which was performed at Georgia Tech. Two of the authors, Saxena and Bellamkonda, are now at Duke University. Research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grant 2R01EB016407) and Ian’s Friends Foundation. All findings, conclusions, and opinions are those of the authors and do not represent views of the funding agencies.

]]> Ben Brumfield 1 1483637397 2017-01-05 17:29:57 1484336772 2017-01-13 19:46:12 0 0 news This innovation can reduce side effects in a novel implantable device to fight chronic inflammation. A buzz from an electrode to the vagus, a nerve on the front of the neck, can tamp down an overactive immune response at the root of diseases like Crohn's syndrome or rheumatoid arthritis. But, at the same time, it can somewhat boost that immune response inadvertently. Adding a second electrode with the right electrical frequency cancels the unwanted side effect.

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2017-01-05T00:00:00-05:00 2017-01-05T00:00:00-05:00 2017-01-05 00:00:00 Writer and media contact: Ben Brumfield

404-660-1408

ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

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585547 585550 585554 585553 585547 image <![CDATA[Implantable device to stimulate vagus and modulate stimulation]]> image/jpeg 1483634151 2017-01-05 16:35:51 1483635749 2017-01-05 17:02:29 585550 image <![CDATA[Lead researcher Yogi Patel and principal investigator Robert Butera]]> image/jpeg 1483634598 2017-01-05 16:43:18 1483635711 2017-01-05 17:01:51 585554 image <![CDATA[Nerve implant electrodes]]> image/jpeg 1483635608 2017-01-05 17:00:08 1483635631 2017-01-05 17:00:31 585553 image <![CDATA[Butera lab at Coulter]]> image/jpeg 1483635093 2017-01-05 16:51:33 1483635686 2017-01-05 17:01:26
<![CDATA[Children's Healthcare and Georgia Tech Collaborate on Business Practices for Pediatric Care]]> 27513 Georgia Institute of Technology and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta have enjoyed a robust and productive partnership over the years. For the first time, that partnership is expanding beyond innovative pediatric biomedical research, and is helping to find ways to improve business practices and management.


In November, a group of nine hand-picked Georgia Tech undergraduate students made a presentation to the CEO of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Donna Hyland, and her executive team. Two of the nine students, Catherine Edwards and Chris Hardin, are biomedical engineering undergraduate students. The report and recommendations represented the work product of an entire semester of study on the future of pediatric primary care in Georgia.


At the request of Children’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Dan Salinas, a special senior level inaugural elective course was created to look at ways to address the potentially fragile circumstances of pediatric primary care and its importance and impact on the hospital’s mission, “To make kids better today and healthier tomorrow.”


Four of the students came from the Scheller College of Business, four from the College of Engineering, and one from the College of Sciences, resulting in a rich interdisciplinary learning experience. The project was conducted in the classical consulting model of literature review, interviews of pediatricians and administrators, and synthesis and recommendations.


The practice model of pediatrics is quite different than one sees in adult medicine. The majority of pediatricians are organized in traditional small private practices as opposed to large groups and hospital employment as is the national trend in adult practice. There are tremendous pressures on these small pediatric practices including thin margins, few economies of scale, and difficulty incorporating innovation due to size.  The students in the Healthcare Management Practicum recommended a suite of consulting services that could be offered within the construct of a management services organization to small pediatric practices.


“It was an awesome experience to work with such bright and motivated students.  They were poised and professional, and their work product was outstanding” said Dr. Salinas.


The class was an outgrowth of the popular course Management in the Healthcare Sector, created by Scheller Professor of the Practice Bill Todd in 2012.


“We are so grateful to Children's for this wonderful learning opportunity. The students fully embraced Children’s noble mission and were pleased to contribute to solving a significant strategic challenge” said Professor Todd. 


Like many consulting engagements, there remain many issues needing further study, and both parties in the Georgia Tech – Children’s partnership hope for additional future opportunities to engage in addressing business strategy.

]]> Walter Rich 1 1482178946 2016-12-19 20:22:26 1482179152 2016-12-19 20:25:52 0 0 news 2016-12-19T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-19T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-19 00:00:00 Walter Rich

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585248 585248 image <![CDATA[Children's Healthcare and Georgia Tech Collaborate on Business Practices for Pediatric Care]]> image/jpeg 1482178560 2016-12-19 20:16:00 1482178560 2016-12-19 20:16:00
<![CDATA[Patiently Growing]]> 28153 Robert Matheny, a cardiothoracic surgeon, is giving last-minute instructions to another surgeon who is about to operate on a baby 2,000 miles away in a neon city.

“How old is the child? Thirteen months? Yeah, yeah, I think that would be fine,” Matheny says, then pauses a few seconds before continuing in the secret code of his profession. “OK, line up the seam at the seven o’clock position on the annulus, down to the septal papillary muscles, and make a good u-stitch and then put an extra bit through it so that you get three bites – even four if you feel like it’s necessary – through each anchor point, and it’s pretty forgiving.”

He pauses another second and adds, “That should work great.”

It does work great. The patient, known as “Baby Las Vegas,” is now at home and doing well after receiving a tricuspid valve replacement with a novel device created by CorMatrix, the company Matheny co-founded. Based in Roswell, Ga., CorMatrix has twice received a critical financial boost through the Atlantic Pediatric Device Consortium (APDC), headquartered at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In 2012, CorMatrix first received APDC funding for its prosthetic trileaflet valve. In September 2016, the company received a fresh round of APDC funding for its regenerating tubular mitral valve device for babies. Both projects utilize CorMatrix’s patented extracellular matrix (ECM).

ECM is a naturally occurring bioscaffold that surrounds cells in most tissues. It allows for cell adhesion, differentiation, division, and migration. CorMatrix’s ECM material acts as a scaffold into which the patient’s own cells migrate and integrate, stimulating wound healing mechanisms, which mature to form a strong, permanent tissue repair.

APDC leadership was particularly interested in how the company’s proposed products address one of the major issues related to pediatric medical devices: young people grow.

“Children are growing as they get older, and that can be a major stumbling block,” notes David Ku, who is APDC’s executive director as well as the Lawrence P. Huang Chair Professor of Engineering Entrepreneurship, a Regents’ Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Petit Institute researcher.

“Let’s say that a child at four needs a heart valve,” Ku says. “By the time he’s 12, that valve will probably need to double in size, which would mean another surgery. What’s interesting about this company is, they’ve addressed this major problem because their tissue grows with the child.”

CorMatrix is produced in manner that retains natural ECM molecules, including growth factors, proteins, and cytokines, which play important roles in host tissue repair and remodeling. So far, CorMatrix devices have been used as a biologic scaffold in a variety of surgical applications, especially cardiac and vascular repairs. The idea is to give surgeons the ability to create a growing native anatomy, serving as a better alternative to synthetic or cross-linked materials.

The company was founded as CorMatrix Cardiovascular Inc., in 2001. It has deep roots at Georgia Tech, but was built on technology that came out of Purdue University, where Matheny had been doing cardiovascular research. He moved to Atlanta in 1999 to start a lab at the facility now known as T3 Labs (T3, for Translational Testing and Training), next door to the Georgia Tech campus.

Matheny, who had been balancing his roles as researcher and physician, ultimately gave up his clinical practice as CorMatrix demanded more of his time.  Along the way, he’s partnered with Georgia Tech researchers to develop the CorMatrix technology and move it forward into other applications.

Most importantly, he partnered with Anna Fallon, who earned her Ph.D. while working in the lab of Petit Institute researcher Ajit Yoganathan, who is a professor and associate chair for translational research in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Fallon (who recently left CorMatrix to become director of research for MiMedx) was co-principal investigator with Matheny for CorMatrix’s first APDC-funded project.

“Anna had ECM experience. She wanted to work on valves, and she really was the product development person for us,” Matheny says of his former colleague. “And she’s the one who told me what was available through APDC.”

CorMatrix received its first clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2005. For a couple of years, before moving into its current facility in Roswell in January 2013, the company was actually headquartered in the basement of the Petit Institute building.

So far, CorMatrix has been used at nearly 1,000 hospitals, and been implanted in more than 145,000 cardiac and vascular procedures, including one in a 13-month baby in Las Vegas. Matheny likes his company’s odds going forward.

To date, all of the company’s funding has come from APDC or individuals, like Bernie Marcus. The philanthropist and Home Depot co-founder is particularly interested in mitral and tricuspid valves. Heart valves are taking up a lot of the company’s time and interest these days, but Matheny sees the opportunity for plenty of other applications for this biological tool that he has harnessed, a tool that can grow with the patient.

“Now that we’re learning the recipe, there really isn’t a tissue that’s off limits,” he says. “It (ECM) has moved into the clinical field, and I think it’s just a matter of time before it replaces most synthetics.”

CorMatrix

APDC

 

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1481825586 2016-12-15 18:13:06 1481832680 2016-12-15 20:11:20 0 0 news APDC-supported CorMatrix, develops devices that can grow with the patient

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2016-12-15T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-15T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-15 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

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585109 585110 585108 585111 585109 image <![CDATA[Robert Matheny and patient]]> image/jpeg 1481824402 2016-12-15 17:53:22 1481824402 2016-12-15 17:53:22 585110 image <![CDATA[Tricuspid valve]]> image/png 1481824485 2016-12-15 17:54:45 1481824485 2016-12-15 17:54:45 585108 image <![CDATA[Anna Fallon]]> image/jpeg 1481824330 2016-12-15 17:52:10 1481824330 2016-12-15 17:52:10 585111 image <![CDATA[CorMatrix ECM]]> image/png 1481824559 2016-12-15 17:55:59 1481824559 2016-12-15 17:55:59
<![CDATA[The Health Informatics Revolution]]> 27303 When your doctor diagnoses a condition and recommends a course of treatment, she relies on her extensive training, guidelines from professional medical organizations, and previous experience with thousands of other patients.

But what if your diagnosis and treatment could be further informed by the experience of millions of other patients, including those who not only had similar symptoms, but perhaps also were your age, gender, ethnicity — and with similar medical history? That’s among the benefits coming soon from health analytics and informatics.

Using massive data sets, machine learning, and high-performance computing, health analytics and informatics is drawing us closer to the holy grail of health care: precision medicine, which promises diagnosis and treatment tailored to individual patients. The information, including findings from the latest peer-reviewed studies, will arrive on the desktops and mobile devices of clinicians in health care facilities large and small through a new generation of decision-support systems.

“There are massive implications over the coming decade for how informatics will change the way care is delivered, and probably more so for how care is experienced by patients,” said Jon Duke, M.D., director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Health Analytics and Informatics. “By providing data both behind the scenes and as part of efforts to change behavior, informatics is facilitating our ability to understand patients at smaller population levels. This will allow us to focus our diagnostic paths and treatments much better than we could before.”

At Georgia Tech, health informatics researchers are partnering with both public- and private-sector organizations to develop and apply transformative technology that will connect incompatible systems and analyze vast data sets. This technology also will help clinicians track the latest research, potentially shortening the time required to move health care advances into practice.

“Our goal is to be directly involved with that health care transformation and to be one of the contributors focusing on what technology can do well,” said Steve Rushing, senior strategic advisor for health extension services at Georgia Tech. “Technology has to be leveraged in a way that will meet the goals of improving the quality of care, bettering the patient experience, and addressing the rising cost of health care.”

Georgia Tech’s health informatics effort combines academic researchers in computing and the biosciences, practitioners familiar with the challenges of the medical community, extension personnel who understand the issues private companies face, and engineers and data scientists with expertise in building and operating secure networks tapping massive databases.

“It takes all of these components to really make a difference in an area as complex as health informatics,” said Margaret Wagner Dahl, Georgia Tech’s associate vice president for information technology and analytics. “This integrated approach allows us to add value to collaborators as diverse as pharmaceutical companies, health care providers, large private employers, and federal agencies.”

See the complete article from Research Horizons magazine.

]]> John Toon 1 1481416741 2016-12-11 00:39:01 1481416849 2016-12-11 00:40:49 0 0 news When your doctor diagnoses a condition and recommends a course of treatment, she relies on her extensive training, guidelines from professional medical organizations, and previous experience with thousands of other patients. But what if your diagnosis and treatment could be further informed by the experience of millions of other patients, including those who not only had similar symptoms, but perhaps also were your age, gender, ethnicity — and with similar medical history? That’s among the benefits coming soon from health analytics and informatics.

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2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-09 00:00:00 John Toon

Research News

(404) 894-6986

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584904 584903 584904 image <![CDATA[Research on Death Information ]]> image/jpeg 1481416345 2016-12-11 00:32:25 1481416345 2016-12-11 00:32:25 584903 image <![CDATA[Jon Duke at Children's]]> image/jpeg 1481416124 2016-12-11 00:28:44 1481416124 2016-12-11 00:28:44
<![CDATA[Noninvasive Visual Stimulation May Illuminate a Path for Alzheimer’s Disease Treatment]]> 27513 A new breakthrough discovery by a team of scientists, which includes Annabelle Singer, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, has found that modifying oscillating gamma brain waves substantially reduces the build-up of beta amyloid plaques which are closely associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Singer was the co-lead author of the MIT research team that recently published its findings in the journal Nature this December.

 

Scientists have known that certain diseases negatively affect normal brain wave activity, particularly the type known as gamma oscillations which are in the range of 30-90 Hz. These oscillations are associated with neural processes that include learning and memory; the disruption of these oscillations is associated with Alzheimer’s disease, brain trauma, and schizophrenia. This disruption may be contributing to the build-up of beta amyloid proteins (plaques) — a common hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

 

Success with a series of biochemical, neural modifications to improve gamma activity and reduce beta amyloid build up in mice transitioned to the idea of using a noninvasive light technique to induce the same brain wave modification. Previous research showed that flickering light at specific frequencies induced gamma oscillations in the brain.

 

To the delight of researchers, this noninvasive flickering light treatment delivered at a specific frequency to induce gamma oscillation brain waves suppressed beta amyloid production and invigorated microglia — immune cells responsible for eliminating plaque buildup.

 

“We found that gamma brain waves were weaker in mice programmed to develop Alzheimer’s, even before plaques built up and mice had memory problems,” said Singer. “That led us to wonder if we could drive gamma brain waves to alter amyloid, the protein that accumulates in Alzheimer’s and forms plaques.”

 

When the researchers drove gamma, using both optogenetics and non-invasive light flicker, they found amyloid levels were drastically reduced.

 

“We found that driving gamma had two beneficial effects,” Singer said. “First, amyloid production slowed down. And second microglia, immune cells that act like trash collectors in the brain, changed so that they collected more amyloid.”

 

Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and, eventually, the ability to carry out the simplest tasks. More than five million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease and unless it can be effectively treated or prevented, the number of people affected will increase significantly as current population growth continues. Alzheimer’s is currently ranked as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.

 

“While there are many steps to go to translate these discoveries in mice to a therapy for humans with Alzheimer’s, we think this radically different, non-invasive approach is very promising,” Singer said. “We are working hard on the next steps: Figuring out the most effective way to non-invasively drive gamma in brain regions essential for learning and memory and testing out this approach in humans.”


Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

]]> Walter Rich 1 1481225759 2016-12-08 19:35:59 1482330869 2016-12-21 14:34:29 0 0 news 2016-12-08T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-08T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-08 00:00:00 Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

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584844 584848 584844 image <![CDATA[Gamma oscillation brain waves suppressed beta amyloid production and invigorated microglia]]> image/jpeg 1481225541 2016-12-08 19:32:21 1481225541 2016-12-08 19:32:21 584848 image <![CDATA[Annabelle Singer, Ph.D.]]> image/jpeg 1481225948 2016-12-08 19:39:08 1481225948 2016-12-08 19:39:08
<![CDATA[CathART Takes BME Capstone Award]]> 28153 A team sponsored by worldwide medical device manufacturer Boston Scientific took home the award for best biomedical engineering (BME) project at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Fall 2016 Capstone Design Expo, Tuesday night at McCamish Pavillion.

 

The four seniors in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (a joint department of Georgia Tech and Emory University) set out to improve catheters used during the fertility treatment, intrauterine insemination (IUI).

 

It is a less invasive and less expensive option, as compared to in vitro fertilization, but it can be a very painful procedure for a lot of women, explains CathART’s Derek Fritz, who will share the $1,000 prize with teammates John Baek, Yuna Oh, and Kaitlyn Wilmer-Fierro.

 

“The catheters on the market are a single piece, and the problem comes when a patient has curves and turns inside their cervix anatomy, which is a very tight enclosure,” Fritz says. “The catheter can poke and prod, and that friction can cause local tissue trauma. But when we noticed that the catheters have no moving parts, we thought of the ballpoint pen, and the idea of a catheter with an embedded rolling ball on the tip.”

 

The results: less force is applied on the instrument, less friction, and less pain. Also, Fritz adds, “the success rate of the procedure increases when you have less tissue trauma.”

 

Like all 117 teams (from six different schools and two colleges) in the competition, time might have presented the greatest challenge for CathART – these teams of engineering seniors are required to devise and carry out their plans (which is supposed to result in a working prototype) in a single semester.

 

“Yeah, time definitely was a constraint, but the big production challenge for us was the sheer size of the device,” Fritz says. “These are very tiny catheters and our part was too small for 3D printing.”

 

So they tediously produced it on a lathe out of an engineering thermoplastic used for precision parts requiring high stiffness and, importantly, low friction. The sponsor was delighted with the team’s solution.

 

“We’re interested in this market space and wanted to make this procedure more comfortable for women, and this team did a great job of addressing that,” says Stacy Kromenhoek, the senior project manager for global technology at Boston Scientific who personified the company’s sponsorship.

 

CathART was one of 22 teams from BME that tackled a wide range of problems. One team (TraceLess) designed a device to minimize the risk of tumor-seeding caused during biopsy. Another team (Caring Heart Folks) developed a remote monitoring system for people recovering from congestive heart failure. A team Up & Running Shoes designed shoes that act as self-charging fitness trackers, converting the wearer’s motion and body heat into energy. And at least two teams – UreTech and The Rolling Stonez – designed devices to improve the treatment of kidney stones.

 

These teams and more than a hundred others from across the engineering spectrum drew a shoulder-to-shoulder procession of science lovers and other onlookers (family, friends, faculty, judges, etc.) to what is a rite of passage for undergraduate students in several disciplines at Georgia Tech.

 

Capstone Design is a semester-long course that gives students real-world, open-ended interdisciplinary challenges, which are typically proposed by industrial and research project sponsors. Student teams design, build, and test their prototypes, then showcase their work at an Expo (there are two each academic year, one at the end of each semester).

 

The event gives sponsors a chance to see how their project was conceptualized. For its part, Boston Scientific liked what it saw.

 

“We funded this project because we knew there was exceptional talent here,” Kromenhoek says. “This team taught us so much. They mentored us as much as we mentored them. We loved supporting them, and we plan to be here again next semester.”

 

CAPSTONE DESIGN EXPO

Mechanical Engineering Grabs Spotlight

 

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1481141963 2016-12-07 20:19:23 1481307818 2016-12-09 18:23:38 0 0 news Team sponsored by Boston Scientific designed a better catheter for fertility treatment

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2016-12-07T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-07T00:00:00-05:00 2016-12-07 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]>
584886 584796 584797 584798 584799 584800 584801 584886 image <![CDATA[Team CathART]]> image/jpeg 1481307794 2016-12-09 18:23:14 1481307794 2016-12-09 18:23:14 584796 image <![CDATA[Caring Heart Folks]]> image/jpeg 1481140632 2016-12-07 19:57:12 1481140632 2016-12-07 19:57:12 584797 image <![CDATA[VasDifference]]> image/jpeg 1481140797 2016-12-07 19:59:57 1481140797 2016-12-07 19:59:57 584798 image <![CDATA[Don Solo]]> image/jpeg 1481140934 2016-12-07 20:02:14 1481140934 2016-12-07 20:02:14 584799 image <![CDATA[CrossARM]]> image/jpeg 1481141185 2016-12-07 20:06:25 1481141185 2016-12-07 20:06:25 584800 image <![CDATA[Sore Sight]]> image/jpeg 1481141338 2016-12-07 20:08:58 1481141338 2016-12-07 20:08:58 584801 image <![CDATA[Capstone Awards]]> image/jpeg 1481141416 2016-12-07 20:10:16 1481141416 2016-12-07 20:10:16
<![CDATA[Yonggang Ke Selected to Receive NSF CAREER Award]]> 27513 Yonggang Ke, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, has been selected to receive a National Science Foundation CAREER Award which recognizes the highest level of excellence among early-stage researchers. The $500,000 NSF CAREER award will be allocated over a five year period.

 

A key challenge in synthetic molecular self-assembly is to construct artificial, controllable systems that imitate intricate structures and complex behaviors in biological systems. Ke’s project aims to harness the power of DNA self-assembly to design and construct scalable, modular, dynamic nanostructures that simulate some of the key aspects of information transfer observed in signaling cascades (e.g. T cell activation signaling cascades initiated by T cell receptor binding), including programmable initiation, propagation, and regulation of information transfer within the artificial DNA nanostructures. His project will provide an enabling platform for self-assembly of dynamic nanomaterials and nanodevices for a variety of important scientific research and applications. Students participating Ke’s project will receive training in cutting-edge biomolecular assembly and nanoscience research. The research program will also be integrated with the development of extensive educational outreach activities that are designed to recruit, educate and train the next generation scientists.

 

Yonggang Ke, Ph.D., joined the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University in 2014. He is an associate member of the cancer genetics and epigenetics research program at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. Ke received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, affiliated with the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. 

 

Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

]]> Walter Rich 1 1480444418 2016-11-29 18:33:38 1480444418 2016-11-29 18:33:38 0 0 news 2016-11-29T00:00:00-05:00 2016-11-29T00:00:00-05:00 2016-11-29 00:00:00 Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

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584377 584377 image <![CDATA[Yonggang Ke, Ph.D.]]> image/jpeg 1480444254 2016-11-29 18:30:54 1480444254 2016-11-29 18:30:54
<![CDATA[Serving a Larger Cause]]> 28153 Of course Alyssa Pybus was a cross-country runner in high school.

A first-year student in the BioEngineering Graduate Program, headquartered at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Pybus spent her childhood moving across country, across oceans, across the planet.

“That’s life in a military family,” says Pybus, whose home school is the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

She enjoyed the life, so when it was her time, she also chose to serve in the military. Pybus, who earned her undergraduate degree in bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is now a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserves.

“I guess that makes me kind of the black sheep of the family,” she adds, smiling, because her father, two brothers and sister are in the Navy, all of which means Veterans Day is something like a family holiday for the Pybus clan.

That dedication to serving a larger cause, a trait Pybus says she inherited from her father, is shared by her fellow BioE grad student, Troy Batugal, an Army reservist who is currently attending mandated Basic Officer Leader Course (BOLC) in military intelligence, a four-month training exercise at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Like Pybus, Batugal was inspired by his family to serve.

“My father is a doctor and my mother is a nurse, so I grew up around healthcare, and this concept of helping others, of service to others. That influenced my decision to serve in the military,” says Batugal, a second-year grad student who earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University.

Both BioE students were involved in ROTC. They were commissioned as second lieutenants upon earning their undergraduate degrees and successfully completing their ROTC commitments.

“That ROTC experience was so valuable,” says Batugal, whose academic base at Georgia Tech is the School of Materials Science and Engineering. “ROTC helped pay for my undergraduate education, but more important, it made Georgia Tech possible because of the discipline it taught me, the lessons in time management.”

Batugal, who grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, works and studies in the lab of Ravi Kane, a Petit Institute researcher and professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, whose group specializes in the design of polyvalent ligands. It’s not exactly the path Batugal expected years ago.

“I wanted to be a physician for a long time, up until my early undergraduate years,” he says. “That’s when I really got into engineering, particularly materials science engineering. I discovered the biomedical applications of materials, discovered how versatile polymers were, how they can be used in a medical environment, and that led me to bioengineering.”

Going forward, Batugal says he’d like to continue lab research, perhaps working in government, combining his bioengineering background with his Army specialty – military intelligence. “I went in that direction because I wanted to pick up new skills that were very different from engineering,” Batugal says.

Meanwhile, Pybus wanted experience in engineering of a different sort. At Georgia Tech, she works in the lab of Petit Institute researcher Levi Wood, an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering, whose work is focused on applying systems analysis approaches and engineering tools to identify novel therapeutic targets for inflammatory diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

In the Army, she’s part of a construction company, the platoon leader for about 25 Army engineers (plumbers, electricians, carpenters, heavy equipment operators, and so forth). The main task is planning, designing and constructing roads and buildings. Like Batugal, the ROTC experience gave her an appreciation for time management, mentorship, “and how to tactfully get things done. I developed good leadership skills and organizational skills balancing classes and ROTC while I was at MIT,” she says.

But her experience as a military kid taught Pybus how to roll with the punches and get used to new environments. Her past addresses include North Carolina, Virginia, Panama, Rhode Island, Germany, Tennessee, Florida, California, Hawaii (where she did most of her high school), Bolivia and two weeks in Bahrain.

When she was considering her military options, Pybus was leaning toward active duty, the fulltime option. It wasn’t until her senior year at MIT, after spending a summer doing research that she decided on the best of both worlds: grad school and military service.

“I really liked the research and when I heard my friends talking about their grad school plans, I thought more about it and realized that this was what I really wanted, long-term,” says Pybus. “So I can still serve in the military as a reservist, but my primary focus is going to be on bioengineering, because I realized that this kind of research is just another form of public service.”

 

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1478872970 2016-11-11 14:02:50 1478872970 2016-11-11 14:02:50 0 0 news BioE students Alyssa Pybus and Troy Batugal balance military and lab commitments

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2016-11-11T00:00:00-05:00 2016-11-11T00:00:00-05:00 2016-11-11 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

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583772 583773 583772 image <![CDATA[Troy Batugal]]> image/jpeg 1478872547 2016-11-11 13:55:47 1478872547 2016-11-11 13:55:47 583773 image <![CDATA[Alyssa Pybus]]> image/jpeg 1478872622 2016-11-11 13:57:02 1478872622 2016-11-11 13:57:02
<![CDATA[Fighting the Good Fight]]> 28153 The war on cancer is 45 years old. And while there have been some significant advances since passage of the National Cancer Act in 1971, the conflict has spread out along many fronts.

With the realization now that there are more than 200 types and subtypes of cancer, the battle plan has evolved from a one-size-fits-all strategy to a data-driven, more personalized approach, which means the army of researchers and clinicians devoted to fighting cancer also has evolved.

“We’re seeing the emergence of the new cancer biology,” says John McDonald, director of the Integrated Cancer Research Center (ICRC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It’s actually being driven now by technologies and expertise that lie outside the traditional framework of cancer biology. That’s why I think you’re probably going to see major breakthroughs in cancer research coming out of places like Georgia Tech and M.I.T., as opposed to traditional medical schools.”

Advances in genomics and high throughput sequencing have generated massive amounts of data, “and it’s opened up the field to people that were not trained as cancer biologists, but have the necessary skillsets for the analysis of all this new, big data,” says McDonald, a faculty researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and professor in the School of Biological Sciences, who has definitely seen his share of breakthroughs in his own recent research focused on ovarian cancer.

The cancer biology that McDonald knew when he was a college student has moved from an era of specialization into an era of multidisciplinary research, in which researchers from a wide range of areas now work together on common projects.

“Twenty five years ago, these people probably wouldn’t have spoken to each other because they didn’t have any common interests,” says McDonald. “I was like a kid in a candy store when we first came to Georgia Tech, and it still feels like that – the idea of being in a place where all of this expertise and creativity exist. Cancer research is not a one-person endeavor. It’s all about collaboration.”

And McDonald has plenty of collaborators within and beyond the ICRC, which occupies a busy space where molecular biology, computational science, engineering and nanotechnology converge. Together, these scientists and engineers are developing next generation cancer diagnostics and therapeutics.

 

Family Affair

Fatih Sarioglu trained as an electrical engineer in his native Turkey and later at Stanford University, developing particular expertise in microsystems and nanosystems, developing sensitive, small-scale devices to look at atoms. After earning his Ph.D., he says, “I wondered how I could use these skills to benefit humanity.”

Sarioglu, assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Petit Institute faculty researcher, he spent three years as a post-doc at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, learning about cancer. He found his opportunity, “to give biologists and biomedical scientists and clinicians capabilities they don’t have.”

There was a personal reason for Sarioglu’s interest in cancer, as well. The disease took the life of two grandparents. But he was particularly motivated when his mother-in-law was diagnosed, back in Turkey, with late-stage brain cancer.

“It was devastating. I knew life expectancy was about four or five months,” says Sarioglu. “But their diagnosis was based purely on the pathology, a biopsy slice.”

He asked a colleague at Mass General, David Lewis, one of the world’s top pathologists, for another opinion. Lewis’ conclusions were vastly different. The cancer was benign, operable, and Sagioglu’s mother-in-law is alive and well.

“It showed me that we still have to improve how we diagnose cancer,” says Sarioglu, whose lab develops microfluidic chips that can isolate tumor cells out of billions of other cells. At Mass General, he worked on a device that captures clumps of tumor cells before metastasis, preventing the spread of cancer.

He’s continued that work since arriving at Georgia Tech in 2014, developing microchip technology that analyzes cells accurately and at very high speeds. Essentially, it is a better way to find the needle in the haystack, a minimally invasive way to diagnose cancer, liquid biopsy.

“The possibilities are endless, really,” says Sarioglu, who counts McDonald and Fred Vannberg (an expert in DNA sequencing who specializes in the molecular analysis of cancer) among his research collaborators. “The technology is applicable to all types of cancer.”

 

Doing Better

The primary tumor is rarely the killer in cancer. Nine times out of 10, cancer kills because it spreads to other parts of the body. So when a patient gets a cancer diagnosis, one of his first questions is, “has it metastasized?”

“You can obviously appreciate the anxiety. The physician and patient wonder the same exact thing. That’s the first question,” says Stanislav Emelianov, professor in the Georgia Tech/Emory Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“Then there are more questions. What is the prognosis, the treatment, how do I deal with this – a lot of questions that can be better answered if we know the answer to the first question,” says Emelianov, whose team designs ultrasound imaging devices and algorithms, and has embarked on a project supported by a grant from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation to use light and sound and a non-radioactive molecularly targeted contrast agent, to answer that anxious first question.

The traditional approach has been to inject radioactive material and tracking that, then biopsy, which involves incision of the skin to expose the lymph node and taking pieces out to look for cancer.

“It is accurate, but it is also invasive, complicated and uses radioactive material,” Emelianov says. “We can do better.”

Emelianov speculates that in the future, we may be able to “weaponize” these contrast agents to actually kill cancer cells. Meanwhile, his team also is using its advanced imaging technology in collaboration with colleagues at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Center, to diagnose thyroid cancer and differentiate between malignant and benign tumors.

 

Tech’s Cancer Army

There are more than 40 faculty researchers at Georgia Tech who are members of the ICRC. They come from 12 different departments or schools. And there are an additional 16 researchers from academic and medical institutions that are affiliate members. It’s a diverse intellectual force that is giving Georgia Tech its own identity in cancer research.

“We can be a major player in cancer,” says McDonald. “How many medical schools have this breadth of expertise?”

He’s talking about young researchers like Susan Thomas, awarded Georgia Tech’s first grant from Susan G. Komen (breast cancer research foundation), supporting her work in immunotherapy for breast cancer; and Manu Platt, whose lab developed a new technique to give patients and oncologists more personalized information for choosing breast cancer treatment options.

And he’s referring to computer scientists like Constantine Dovrolis, who has spent the last few years investigating a phenomenon called “the hourglass effect” that is present in both technological and natural systems. He’s adapting what he learned studying embryogenesis with Georgia Tech biologist (and Petit Institute researcher) Soojin Yi to his collaboration with McDonald in cancer research.

He’s also thinking of BME-based researchers James Dahlman and William Lam.

Dahlman, an assistant professor who came to Georgia Tech earlier this year, works on cancer in two ways. Focusing extensively on primary lung tumors as well as lung metastasis, his team works on delivering genetic drugs to tumors.

“We have changed their gene expression, and either slowed tumor growth or caused established tumors to recede,” says Dahlman, an expert in gene editing. “In some cases, we have delivered multiple therapeutic RNAs to tumors, so that tumor cells are hit with a genetic ‘one-two’ punch that affects multiple cancer causing genes.”

His lab also creates tools to understand how cancer genes cause tumor resistance, studying how combinations of genes influence tumor growth, “because cancer is such a complicated disease and the genetics of cancer are notoriously difficult to understand,” Dahlman says. “It’s driven by many genes working together at once.”

For Lam, the war on cancer is waged in a lab and on the front lines, in a clinical setting. In addition to being a biomedical engineer, he’s also a pediatric hematologist-oncologist who treats patients at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

His Ph.D. was actually focused on the biophysics of childhood leukemia, and his research in this area has focused on a small percentage of patients who develop leukostasis (stroke-like symptoms and lung failure).

“We always thought it was due to the biophysical properties of leukemia cells, which become big and sticky and jam up the plumbing of our blood vessels in our brain and lungs, which happen to have the smallest blood vessels,” says Lam, who is collaborating with Todd Sulchek, associate professor in mechanical engineering and a Petit Institute researcher.

“We’re combining some of Todd’s microfluidic technologies and our microfluidic technologies, to develop more high throughput ways to address this issue,” says Lam.

He’s also collaborating with the lab of BME professor Krish Roy on developing a ‘lymphoma on the chip’ model, to study how new cell therapies can directly affect the killing of cancer cells, as a way to determine whether those therapies have what it takes to work in the patient.

It’s all part of the multidisciplinary, “basement to bench to bedside” approach that Lam’s lab, with its connections to Georgia Tech, Emory University and Children’s Healthcare, has become known for.

“Within our lab, we’re certainly interested in technology development,” Lam says. “But then, we’re also interested in the assessment of the technology and, ultimately, directly translating that to the patient. Our lab lives in that entire space.”

 

LINKS

Integrated Cancer Research Center

McDonald Lab

Georgia Tech Cancer Army

 

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1478277869 2016-11-04 16:44:29 1478700043 2016-11-09 14:00:43 0 0 news Integrated Cancer Research Center developing new weapons for war on cancer

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2016-11-04T00:00:00-04:00 2016-11-04T00:00:00-04:00 2016-11-04 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

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583539 583540 583539 image <![CDATA[Cancer Cells Nov. 16]]> image/jpeg 1478277701 2016-11-04 16:41:41 1478277701 2016-11-04 16:41:41 583540 image <![CDATA[John McDonald]]> image/jpeg 1478277830 2016-11-04 16:43:50 1478281061 2016-11-04 17:37:41
<![CDATA[Q&A: C. Ross Ethier]]> 28153 C. Ross Ethier stepped into his post as interim chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering on August 1. A month later the news broke that the Coulter Department (a joint department of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University) was ranked No. 1 on U.S. News and World Report’s latest rankings of the nation’s undergraduate biomedical engineering programs.

“We’re still pretty charged about that news, and I’d love be able to take credit for it, but you know, it’s just being in the right place at the right time,” says Ethier, BME professor, Georgia Research Alliance Lawrence L. Gellerstedt, Jr. Eminent Scholar in Bioengineering, and faculty researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

Ethier, whose research has netted groundbreaking discoveries in the areas of glaucoma and VIIP (a condition affecting astronaut health in long-term space missions), took on his temporary role in the wake of previous chair Ravi Bellamkonda’s move to Duke University.

Ethier’s appointment coincided with a period of dramatic growth for the Coulter Department, which continues to expand its mission, adding world-class researchers and educators to its faculty roster. The interim chair took some time recently to discuss the department’s status and growth.

“Let’s start off with the ranking,” he says. “That’s a good piece of news and everybody likes to be number one.”

 

• OK, what about that ranking?

Ethier: “It’s definitely an attention grabber. One of the defining characteristics of undergraduate education here is our innovative, problem-focused curriculum. That’s been part of our Departmental DNA. We’ve always encouraged our students to be fearless in their approach to complicated problems, not to be constrained by preconceived notions about what is or isn’t ‘too difficult’. We have worked hard to inculcate that mindset in students, so that they can go out there and do the things that will change the world, quite frankly.”

 

• Are there specific activities within the undergraduate program that stand out for you?

Ethier: “One that springs immediately to mind is BME Healthreach that Wilbur Lam leads. Undergraduate BME students at Georgia Tech teach math and science to patients at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, using their own disease or condition as the focus for learning. The patient is taught in a highly contextualized way, which makes learning a good bit easier, and our students are seeing first-hand what is involved in the clinical care of a pediatric patient who may have a long-term condition. This is one of those fantastic wins for everybody involved.”

 

• This is a time of transition for the Coulter Department, with a national search ongoing for the next department chair. Meanwhile, the department hasn’t exactly stood pat on pursuing its strategic goals.

Ethier: “No it hasn’t. On the contrary. We continue to grow our faculty both at Georgia Tech and at Emory, and we’ve specifically identified areas that we’d like to continue hiring in.”

 

• Such as?

Ethier: “A good place to start is an area that we see huge traction in: personalized medicine driven by big data. There are all kinds of medical data now being delivered in real time. And there’s huge potential to mine that data to understand and better treat disease, to personalize the treatment of disease. It’s going to be transformative, and we need people who understand the data science side, people who are quantitatively literate and can work with that complex information within a clinical context. The CODA building that is being developed in Tech Square will be a big data computational hub, and Georgia Tech and Emory will have a footprint there. We’ll be well positioned to contribute to that effort and lead the medical side of the biomedical side of the equation.”

 

• What are some of the other faculty hiring and research priority areas?

Ethier: “Stem cell engineering is one, and it’s related to the Marcus Center project that Krish Roy has been heading up. We also see imaging as a big factor in our approach to personalized medicine. There’s a revolution happening in terms of functional imaging, which is very technology driven, and it’s a very good fit for BME. We’re also recruiting in cancer technology, and that meshes well with our imaging and big data endeavors. But basically, it’s about looking at technologies that help us better diagnose or better treat cancer. That can be around robotic surgery. It can be novel functional probes. It can be around imaging modalities designed to understand basic biological processes in a lab setting. We still don’t understand a lot of the basic biology of cancer.

Basically, our message is, ‘we’re open for hiring.’ You know, I’m constantly humbled and honored by the innovative work of our faculty, the exciting programs they are developing and the fresh new outlook they bring to important problems in biomedical engineering. There is a can-do attitude that is part of the institutional mindset, and we’re fortunate because we tend to get the best people and turn them loose on the world’s medical challenges. It’s a reflection of the institutional commitment from senior leadership at Emory and Georgia Tech.”

 

• With the growing number of faculty members, and more than 1,300 undergraduate students and 200 graduate students, this is the biggest BME department in the country. So, a lot of brainpower. That said, what are your thoughts on diversity within the department?

Ethier: “Well, a lot has been made of the fact that we now have more female students than males. To me, it’s personally very heartening and I’m very proud of the fact that we’ve historically had and continue to have good gender parity in our students. There aren’t as many women as we’d like to see in leadership roles, though I think that’s getting better. I’m excited that we recently had two women, Johnna Temenoff and May Wang, promoted to full professor. Further, we’ve always tried to be very welcoming to underrepresented minorities, and there’s still work to do there. It’s an important part of what we are and what we aspire to be.”

 

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1478272584 2016-11-04 15:16:24 1478272606 2016-11-04 15:16:46 0 0 news BME interim chair guiding department during transition period

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2016-11-04T00:00:00-04:00 2016-11-04T00:00:00-04:00 2016-11-04 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

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550431 550431 image <![CDATA[C. Ross Ethier, Professor, Georgia Research Alliance Lawrence L. Gellerstedt, Jr. Eminent Scholar in Bioengineering, and interim chair for BME]]> image/jpeg 1467727200 2016-07-05 14:00:00 1475895345 2016-10-08 02:55:45
<![CDATA[Biocuration Process Selected as Outstanding Neuroscience Laboratory Article]]> 27513 Cassie Mitchell, research engineer in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, and her coauthor’s published article, “Undergraduate Biocuration: Developing Tomorrow’s Researchers While Mining Today’s Data,” was picked by the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience and editors of the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education as the Outstanding Article of 2015. Their results reveal undergraduate biocuration is scalable for a group of 8-50 undergraduate students with relatively minimal required resources. Moreover, with average accuracy rates greater than 98.8 percent, undergraduate biocurators are equivalently accurate to their professional Ph.D. level counterparts.

 

Biocuration is a time-intensive process that involves extraction, transcription, and organization of biological or clinical data from disjointed data sets that are selectively entered into a database. The primary goal of biocuration is to accurately and comprehensively present this newly integrated data as a user-friendly resource for working scientists and as a basis for computational analysis.

 

Biocuration is traditionally considered a Ph.D. level task, but a massive shortage of curators to consolidate the ever-mounting biomedical “big data” opens the possibility of utilizing biocuration as a means to mine today’s data while teaching students skill sets they can utilize in any career. By developing a biocuration assembly line of simplified and compartmentalized tasks, Mitchell’s lab has enabled biocuration to be effectively performed by a hierarchy of undergraduate students.

 

“While automation is helpful, human biocurators are required to construct the accurate, multi-faceted ‘smart’ data sets required for breakthrough informatics analysis and personalized predictive medicine.  We are thrilled to be recognized for our innovative, highly accurate and expedient biocuration protocol which is molding ‘big data’ into ‘smart data,’ said Mitchell. 

 

“My undergraduate researchers are equally impressive on the analytical side where, in 2015 alone, we had nine undergraduate-authored journal articles that made key breakthroughs in the cellular physiology, epidemiology, and clinical prediction of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). We will have four posters with a total of 12 undergraduate authors at the Society for Neuroscience, where this award will be presented.  Beyond the lab, our biocuration protocol and hierarchy of positions has prepared over 368 undergraduates for careers in project management, data analytics, epidemiology, graduate school, MD, and MD-PhD degrees.”

 

The article, coauthored with now former biomedical engineering undergraduates Ashlyn Cates, Renaid Kim, and Sabrina Hollinger, summarizes the necessary physical resources, process for establishing a data path, biocuration workflow, and undergraduate hierarchy of curation, technical, information technology (IT), quality control and managerial positions. Further, the paper details the undergraduate application and training processes and provides detailed job descriptions for each position on the biocuration assembly line.

 

Ashlyn Cates (B.S. BMED 2015) now works as a project manager/consultant for Huron Engineering. She was formerly the quality control manager in Mitchell’s lab. Renaid Kim (B.S. BMED 2016) spent four years in Mitchell’s lab and won the 2016 Undergraduate Research Award, authoring six articles while in the lab. He is now a MD-PhD student at the University of Michigan. Sabrina Hollinger (B.S. BMED 2012) worked in Mitchell’s lab as both an undergraduate and a graduate student. She is now working as an epidemiologist for the Georgia Department of Health and Human Services.

 

Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

]]> Walter Rich 1 1478021703 2016-11-01 17:35:03 1480516659 2016-11-30 14:37:39 0 0 news 2016-11-01T00:00:00-04:00 2016-11-01T00:00:00-04:00 2016-11-01 00:00:00 Walter Rich

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583388 583388 image <![CDATA[Cassie Mitchell, Ph.D.]]> image/jpeg 1478021575 2016-11-01 17:32:55 1526910058 2018-05-21 13:40:58
<![CDATA[APDC Picks Best of the Best]]> 28153 A device to measure a child’s pain. A video game to treat lazy eye. A tool that assesses concussions in real time. These are just some of the innovative medical device projects that were selected to receive critical seed funding when the Atlantic Pediatric Device Consortium (APDC) hosted its sixth annual innovation competition in September at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

Six projects in all, designed to improve the healthcare options for children, emerged as the big winners in the annual competition, an opportunity for the scientific and business community (entrepreneurs, clinicians, scientists, businesses, academic researchers, graduate and undergraduate students) to develop and commercialize a pediatric medical device. 

The winners (which included Michelle LaPlaca, Petit Institute researcher and associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering) were selected from 11 finalists who presented their projects in front of a review committee, the APDC Executive Board, and an audience of their peers, during September’s event.

The six awardees represent a wide range of projects. Here’s a rundown:

 

Project: Brain Buddy/VR Detect, multimodal concussion assessment in children using virtual reality

Principal Investigator: Michelle C. LaPlaca

Company: Georgia Institute of Technology / Emory University (Atlanta, GA)

The Device: This is a multi-modal tool for objective concussion assessment that can be deployed in real-time to aid in medical decision-making in non-traditional environments. In contrast to currently marketed technologies, this tool incorporates the three key pillars of concussion assessment (neuropsychological, balance, and oculomotor testing) within a single unit that is portable, rapid, and simple to use.

                                                                                                           

Project: In vivo regenerating tubular mitral valve device for neonates and infants

Principal Investigator: Robert Matheny

Company: CorMatrix Cardiovascular, Inc. (Roswell, GA)

The Device: Based on proven CorMatrix products and technology, this regenerating tubular Extracellular Matrix (ECM) mitral valve replacement remodels into a patient’s own tissue by the attraction of host cells and stem cells to the matrix. Over the course of several months the valve matrix will be infiltrated with host cells that will slowly remodel it into a functional mitral valve with growth potential.

 

Project: Binocuclear, a binocular medical device for the treatment of amblyopia

Principal Investigator: Joseph Koziak, Robert Derricotte, and Vidhya Subramanian

Company: Amblyotech Inc. (Marietta, GA)

The Device: Binocuclear is a novel and patented medical device for the treatment of amblyopia, an ocular disorder also known as "lazy eye" that develops in infancy or early childhood. The binocular game is pre-loaded in a gaming device (iPad or a similar tablet device) and prescribed by a physician.

 

Project: LifeFlow, a novel rapid infusion device for pediatric resuscitation

Principal Investigator: Mark Piehl

Company: 410 Medical Innovation (Durham, N.C.)

The Device: The LifeFlow™ rapid infuser is a single-use, hand-operated device that allows health care providers to quickly and efficiently deliver recommended fluid volumes, improving the care of children with sepsis, a potentially life-threatening complication of infection and a leading cause of childhood death worldwide.  The device also has the potential to improve care in other conditions where rapid volume infusion is required. 

                                                                                               

Project: AlgometRx, a novel device and method for the objective measurement of pain and analgesic drug effect in children

Principal Investigators: Julia C. Finkel and Dan Gura

Company: Children's National Medical Center (Washington D.C.)

The Device: AlgometRx integrates a novel smartphone-based pupillometer and a specific neuro neuro-stimulator. The device measures objective pupillary constriction and dilation to gather vital data about a patient’s pain experience or drug effect that can be recorded, characterized and assessed.                        

 

Project: LIFEbubble, a standardized device that protects and stabilizes umbilical catheters to reduce central line-associated bloodstream infections in the neonatal intensive care unit

Principal Investigator: Eric Chehab, Carl Dambkowski, Eric Johnson, Shivani Torres, James Wall, and Ross Venook

Company: Stanford University (Stanford, CA)

The Device: Umbilical catheterization is a lifeline for delivering medication and nutrition to critically ill newborns.  The proposed product standardizes and simplifies umbilical catheter securement, enhances protection of the umbilical stump, and minimizes translation of the catheter. LIFEbubble targets the major sources of infection and works to prevent infections by protecting against bacteria and bacteria migration, and stabilizing the umbilical catheter                                                                        

                              

The APDC Innovation Competition Review Committee (comprised of pediatricians, engineers, business professionals and venture capitalists) selected winners based on the following factors: 1) clinical significance of the pediatric device, 2) approach to product development, 3) likelihood for marketing success, 4) project team, environment, and resources, and 5) potential for additional funding. 

The six projects that were awarded seed grants are placed under contract to APDC to complete a specific set of tasks that move their pediatric medical device project along the product development pathway – a route to market defined by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as concept to prototype to pre-clinical to clinical to manufacturing to marketing, right on to commercial use.

The APDC monitors project progress and offers assistance with device development, prototyping, biostatistical consulting and trial design, selection of manufacturing partners, determining regulatory strategy, and business development and planning.

With funding from the FDA Office of Orphan Products Development, the APDC’s mission is to enhance the lives of children through the development of novel, safe, and effective pediatric medical devices. The consortium fosters an environment of creativity, where innovative ideas are reviewed, tested, and developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts from Georgia Tech, Emory, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

 

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1476989363 2016-10-20 18:49:23 1486563729 2017-02-08 14:22:09 0 0 news Six innovative pediatric medical device projects selected for seed grant awards

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2016-10-20T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-20T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-20 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

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582883 582884 582886 582883 image <![CDATA[APDC finalists 2016]]> image/jpeg 1476987647 2016-10-20 18:20:47 1476988166 2016-10-20 18:29:26 582884 image <![CDATA[APDC device]]> image/jpeg 1476987977 2016-10-20 18:26:17 1476987977 2016-10-20 18:26:17 582886 image <![CDATA[David Ku and Martha Willis]]> image/jpeg 1476988144 2016-10-20 18:29:04 1476988144 2016-10-20 18:29:04
<![CDATA[BME Mentor Families Pay it Forward]]> 28153 Bhargav Earla was a typical nervous freshman when he arrived at the Georgia Institute of Technology to begin his studies in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME).

He was stressed out a lot, had a hard time making friends and finding the right balance between school and the rest of his life.

Then he got a mentor. And in a way, it was the beginning of a new family for him.

“I always tell people there’s been a huge change between my freshman year and now, and the change is not academics,” says Earla, a third-year BME undergraduate student. “Obviously, I’ve learned lot in classes, but that was going to happen anyway. It’s my confidence that’s changed. That’s been the biggest difference.”

Earla joined the BME Undergraduate Mentor Program, which means he has become part of a growing family tree of mentors, with Dhara Patel at or near the top, as outgoing chair of the BME Learning Commons Leadership Program, and one of the students who helped develop the mentoring program.

“The program is still a work in progress – a learning process. I don’t think that will ever change,” says Patel, a fourth-year BME undergraduate student who has been involved with Learning Commons leadership (the commons is located on the fourth floor of the Whitaker Building) and the mentorship program since they were launched in 2014.

According to Joe Le Doux, BME associate professor and associate chair for undergraduate learning and experience, “the Learning Commons is about giving student leaders a chance to create meaningful change in the lives of BME students. And the mentorship program is the most important program the student leaders developed.”

As the program has evolved, improving how it matches students with mentors (a face-to-face “speed dating” meet-up is part of the process), its impact is spreading across the Georgia Tech campus. According to Le Doux, recent BME graduate Bharat Sanders (who helped start the mentorship program) modeled the BME program in creating the campus-wide, student-managed K.N.I.T. Mentorship program.

Patel is typical of the original student leaders who created the program – all in, totally committed. She’s mentored at least six students so far, some who have gone on to become BME mentors, and have started begetting more mentors along the way.

Take Subhi Al-jabi, for example. He’s a second-year student that found an excellent match in Sydney Fain as a mentor. Patel is her mentor, so Al-jabi calls Patel, “my grand-mentor. So it’s like I have two mentors, Sydney and Dhara.”

There is something like an intergenerational family dynamic going on. Fain introduced Al-jabi to Patel, and The three of them – Patel, Fain and Al-jabi – go to lunch together, compare notes, help each other out. This year, Al-jabi has taken on a mentee, which means Patel is now a great-grand mentor.

“I should probably feel old by now,” says Patel, who describes her relationship with her grand-mentee, Al-jabi, as, “more like a friendship, with a little bit of mentoring thrown in.”

That’s kind of how Earla describes his relationship with his mentor, fourth-year undergraduate Andrew Akers who, like Patel, has been in the program since its start, and has mentored 10 fellow students so far. The friendship part is key, but so is the useful advice, based on experience.

Creating a healthy balance between classes, labs, and a social life are critical, says Akers, who recalls an early meeting with his mentee, Earla.

“Bhargav’s entire focus was, he had to do really, really well in class, because he wants to go to med school,” Akers notes. “It was the second wave of midterms his first year, and he was having a freakout. So we went to dinner and I told him he didn’t need to worry about it. He was already a great student, so I told him, ‘when you sit down and look at what’s important 20 years from now, it’s not going to matter if you had a 4.0 or a 3.8. What will matter is that you made some good friends and found something that you enjoy doing – maybe hiking or kayaking – that really adds to your quality of life.”

According to Earla, Akers showed him the ropes, taught him about choosing the right professor, about scheduling classes, about time management.

“But he also made sure that I was personally alright, not too stressed out,” says Earla, who made Akers a grand-mentor this year by taking on a mentee of his own (freshman Omari Weems, a former Project Engages high school student in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience).

“Basically, he’s always tried to make sure that I was doing as well personally as I was academically,” adds Earla, now part of the leadership committee that manages the mentoring program. “That’s where mentorship really becomes important. You can personally invest yourself in someone. He willingly invested his time in me.”

It’s something Earla intends to do with Weems, a paying-it-forward ideal that has grown organically among participating BME students, which does not surprise Le Doux.

“Mentorship is a two-way street,” explains Le Doux. “I’ve heard that time and time again. It works best when the mentor and mentee can connect personally and see the value in the relationship.”

From his vantage point, Akers can see the value clearly.

“Everyone has struggles, it doesn’t matter who you are,” he says. “Being able to guide someone through challenging times, mentoring someone that you want to do better than you did, is one of the most rewarding experiences you can have.”

 

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1476818634 2016-10-18 19:23:54 1476818634 2016-10-18 19:23:54 0 0 news Learning Commons program helping students navigate the challenges of higher education

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2016-10-18T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-18T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-18 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]>
582748 582748 image <![CDATA[BME Mentors]]> image/jpeg 1476818150 2016-10-18 19:15:50 1476818150 2016-10-18 19:15:50
<![CDATA[Strength Tests for Platelets]]> 27513 Bleeding disorders could one day be diagnosed by putting platelets through strength tests, researchers have proposed.

Biomedical engineers from Georgia Tech and Emory have devised a microfluidic testing ground where platelets can demonstrate their strength by squeezing two protein dots together. Imagine rows and rows of strength testing machines from a carnival, but very tiny. Platelets are capable of exerting forces that are several times larger, in relation to their size, in comparison with muscle cells.

After a blood clot forms, it contracts, promoting wound closure and restoration of normal blood flow. This process can be deficient in a variety of blood clotting disorders. Previously, it was difficult to measure individual platelet’s contributions to contraction, because clots’ various components got in the way.

The prototype diagnostic tools are described in Nature Materials.

"We discovered that platelets from some patients with bleeding disorders are ‘wimpier’ than platelets from healthy people," says 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. "Our device may function as a new physics-based method to test for bleeding disorders, complementary to current methods."

The first author of the paper is instructor David Myers, Ph.D. Lam is also a physician in the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Collaborators at North Carolina State University led by Ashley Brown, Ph.D., contributed to testing the device.

The scientists infer how strong or wimpy someone’s platelets are by measuring how far the protein dots move, taking a picture of the rows of dots, and then analyzing the picture on a computer. The dots are made of fibrinogen, a sticky protein that is the precursor for fibrin, which forms a mesh of insoluble strands in a blood clot.

In addition to detecting problems with platelet contraction in patients with known inherited disorders such as Wiskott Aldrich syndrome, Myers, Lam and colleagues could also see differences in some patients who had bleeding symptoms, but who performed normally on standard diagnostic tests.

The researchers also used chemical tools to dissect the process of platelet contraction. They showed that inhibitors of Rho/ROCK enzymes shut down platelet contraction, but inhibitors of a related pathway, MLCK (myosin light chain kinase), did not. Individual platelet contraction could become an assay for development or refinement of blood thinning drugs, Lam says.

The research was supported by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (R01HL121264, U54HL112309) and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. 


Emory Contact:

Quinn Eastman
404-727-7829
qeastma@emory.edu

 

Georgia Tech Contact:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

]]> Walter Rich 1 1476131904 2016-10-10 20:38:24 1476132364 2016-10-10 20:46:04 0 0 news 2016-10-10T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-10T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-10 00:00:00 Georgia Tech Contact:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

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582367 582371 582367 image <![CDATA[Strength Tests for Platelets]]> image/png 1476131621 2016-10-10 20:33:41 1476131621 2016-10-10 20:33:41 582371 image <![CDATA[Wilbur Lam]]> image/jpeg 1476132066 2016-10-10 20:41:06 1522236112 2018-03-28 11:21:52
<![CDATA[NIH Grants Support Research on Balance in Parkinson's and Other Diseases]]> 27513 Two new grants to researchers at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology will support studies that will increase our understanding of how balance and movement are affected in people with disorders such as Parkinson's disease, stroke and dystonia.

J. Lucas McKay, Ph.D., MSCR, assistant professor (research) in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, was awarded a four-year, $500,000 Mentored Quantitative Research Career Development Award from the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research (NCMRR), a sub–institute of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD) entitled "Neural mechanisms of balance deficits, falls, and freezing of gait in Parkinson's disease."

The grant will allow McKay to apply his engineering background to help improve clinical outcomes for Parkinson's patients, working with faculty mentors, including Thomas Wichmann, M.D., director of Emory's Morris K. Udall Center of Excellence for Parkinson's Disease Research, to better understand the scientific mechanisms of Parkinson's disease, and Stewart Factor, DO, director of the Emory Movement Disorders Clinic, to understand how recent advances in human movement science can be applied to the clinical management of Parkinson's disease.

McKay will work with Lena Ting, Ph.D., professor of rehabilitation medicine at Emory and professor of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, to conduct laboratory-based movement studies in people with Parkinson's disease to identify new physiologic markers of fall risk.

Ting was recently awarded a $1.7 million Collaborative Research Grant from the NICHD/NCMRR to develop computer simulations of how sensory signals are generated within the muscles for balance control. Tim Cope, Ph.D., a neuroscientist in the Coulter Department at Georgia Tech and Emory, and in the School of Applied Physiology at Georgia Tech, is co-principal investigator of the grant, along with Ken Campbell, Ph.D., a muscle physiologist at the University of Kentucky.

The research is aimed at developing a fundamental understanding of how muscle spindle proprioceptive organs provide sensory awareness during movement. Proprioceptors feed information to the brain about the position and length of joints and muscles and the position of limbs in space, allowing people to maintain balance and move their limbs effectively.

"We plan to predict changes in sensory function associated with chemotherapy-based sensory loss and other sensory neuropathies," explains Ting. "The establishment of this new model will provide a new basis for understanding and treating other sensorimotor disorders such as spasticity seen in stroke and spinal cord injury, rigidity in Parkinson's disease, and abnormal muscle contractions in dystonia."

The awards follow a recent scientific paper by McKay, Ting, and collaborator Madeleine Hackney, PhD, research health scientist at the Atlanta VA Center for Visual and Neurocognitive Rehabilitation and assistant professor (research) in the division of general medicine/geriatrics at Emory. The paper describes changes in mechanisms of balance control in individuals with Parkinson's disease after dance-based rehabilitation. The work is published online and will be in the October issue of the Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy.


Emory Contact:
Holly Korschun
404-727-3990
hkorsch@emory.edu

Georgia Tech Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

 

]]> Walter Rich 1 1475857973 2016-10-07 16:32:53 1475858044 2016-10-07 16:34:04 0 0 news 2016-10-07T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-07T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-07 00:00:00 Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

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582278 582278 image <![CDATA[J. Lucas McKay and Lena Ting]]> image/jpeg 1475857664 2016-10-07 16:27:44 1475857664 2016-10-07 16:27:44
<![CDATA[Atlanta Business Chronicle Honors Manu Platt with 40 Under 40 Award ]]> 27513 Manu Platt, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, honored as an Atlanta Business Chronicle 40 Under 40 awardee in 2016. This Atlanta area award honors 40 leaders under the age of 40 who have made significant career achievements and have demonstrated substantial involvement in community service.

Platt’s research covers HIV-mediated cardiovascular disease, early cancer detection technologies, and sickle cell disease where he investigates mechanisms to stop children with sickle cell disease from having strokes. These research areas are recognized as global problems, but are also health disparities in the United States. He trains a diverse cadre of students and postdocs to complete this work using biomedical engineering strategies to address them.

One of Platt’s mottos is “think globally, act locally, then act globally.” This has been enacted in his projects starting with HIV which have taken him to South Africa, which has the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the world. Platt established collaborations there to develop a blood test to determine if HIV positive patients were adhering to their antiretroviral medication regimen. Through another collaboration and extension of this work, his lab started projects in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, first on HIV related studies, then later assisting with the training of Ethiopian graduate students to process cancer samples and characterize differences between tumors. He assisted academic colleagues in Ethiopia with obtaining Ethiopian government grants to initiate training and research programs related to cancer tumors.

At Georgia Tech, Platt has been hosting and mentoring high school students working in his lab under the Project ENGAGES (Engaging the Next Generation At Georgia Tech in Engineering and Science) program—now in its fourth year. This is a high school research program started with professor emeritus Bob Nerem that has brought through 60 African-American students from the Atlanta Public School system. 

The 40 Under 40 winners will be honored at an awards celebration held at American Spirit Works on Thursday, November 3, from 6-9 p.m. They will also be profiled in a special section to be published by the Atlanta Business Chronicle on November 4. 

 

Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

 

 

 

]]> Walter Rich 1 1475689316 2016-10-05 17:41:56 1475689316 2016-10-05 17:41:56 0 0 news 2016-10-05T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-05T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-05 00:00:00 Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

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582148 582149 582148 image <![CDATA[Manu Platt, Associate Professor]]> image/jpeg 1475689015 2016-10-05 17:36:55 1475689015 2016-10-05 17:36:55 582149 image <![CDATA[Manu Platt, Associate Professor - lab image]]> image/jpeg 1475689088 2016-10-05 17:38:08 1475689088 2016-10-05 17:38:08
<![CDATA[Research Shows Adapted Tango Program Alters Balance Control in Parkinson's Disease Patients]]> 27513 Researchers from Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have found that balance responses in people with Parkinson's disease (PD) are altered after a three-week Adapted Tango dance rehabilitation program. The study, published in the October issue of the Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy, also show that the three–week program may be as effective as longer programs with similar amounts of class time. A video abstract is available on the journal website.

"Balance and gait speed of participants showed improvements that lasted for at least one month after the program ended," says Madeleine Hackney, PhD, assistant professor in the Emory University department of medicine and research scientist at the Atlanta VA Center for Visual and Neurocognitive Rehabilitation.

The authors tested participants in a laboratory with a custom-designed moving floor to see whether involuntary balance functions also improved after the program.

"We simulated slips using the moving floor to show that rehabilitative dance can change how the nervous system uses sensory information and muscles during balance," says Lena Ting, PhD, professor of rehabilitation medicine at Emory University and professor of biomedical engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech.

"While the study sample was small and did not include an untreated control group, it provides evidence that even a short intervention may benefit balance functions performed by deep parts of the brain and spinal cord," says J. Lucas McKay, PhD, MSCR, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech.

The study was supported in part by NIH R21 HD075612-01, NSF EFRI 1137229, Tango Under the Tent, Inc., and by the Emory Udall Center.  

 

Emory Contact:
Robin Reese
404-727-9371
robin.j.reese@emory.edu


Georgia Tech:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

 

 

]]> Walter Rich 1 1475612135 2016-10-04 20:15:35 1475612379 2016-10-04 20:19:39 0 0 news 2016-10-04T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-04T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-04 00:00:00 Media Contact:

Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

]]>
582118 582118 image <![CDATA[Adapted Tango Program]]> image/jpeg 1475611461 2016-10-04 20:04:21 1475611461 2016-10-04 20:04:21
<![CDATA[Gabe Kwong Receives $1.5M NIH Director’s New Innovator Award]]> 27513 Gabe Kwong, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, was named a recipient of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) New Innovator Award on Oct. 4.

The High-Risk, High-Reward Research (HRHR) program, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s Common Fund, awarded 88 grants to highly creative and exceptional scientists with bold approaches to major challenges in biomedical research. The awards span the broad mission of the NIH and include groundbreaking research, such as engineering immune cells producing drugs at the site of diseased tissue; developing a sensor to rapidly detect antibiotic resistance of a bacterial infection; understanding how certain parasites evade host detection by continually changing their surface proteins; and developing implants that run off the electricity generated from the motion of a beating the heart.

 “The program continues to support high-caliber investigators whose ideas stretch the boundaries of our scientific knowledge,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “We welcome the newest cohort of outstanding scientists to the program and look forward to their valuable contributions.”

Kwong is a recipient of the New Innovator Award for his project “Noninvasive and Predictive Biomarkers of Organ Transplant Rejection.” His research program is directed towards the advancement of human health by developing biomedical technologies that draw from the fields of engineering and immunology.

“Detecting early signs of organ transplant rejection is critical for the survival and health of the recipient, but the diagnostic gold standard is the biopsy – it is invasive and lacks predictive power. Our proposal is to develop an entirely new class of synthetic biomarkers that have the capacity to amplify disease signals and predict the onset of rejection at the earliest stages,” said Kwong.

NIH traditionally supports research projects, not individual investigators. However, the HRHR program seeks to identify scientists with ideas that have the potential for high impact, but may be at a stage too early to fare well in the traditional peer review process. These awards encourage creative, outside-the-box thinkers to pursue exciting and innovative ideas in biomedical research.

In 2016, the NIH issued 12 Pioneer awards, 48 New Innovator awards, 12 Transformative Research awards, and 16 Early Independence awards. The awards total approximately $127 million and represents contributions from the NIH Common Fund; the National Cancer Institute; National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences; National Institute of General Medical Sciences; National Institute of Mental Health; and the Big Data to Knowledge initiative.


About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

 

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich

Communications Manager

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

 

]]> Walter Rich 1 1475594317 2016-10-04 15:18:37 1475594317 2016-10-04 15:18:37 0 0 news 2016-10-04T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-04T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-04 00:00:00 Media Contacts:

Walter Rich

Communications Manager

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

]]>
582084 582084 image <![CDATA[Gabe Kwong, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory]]> image/jpeg 1475593669 2016-10-04 15:07:49 1475593669 2016-10-04 15:07:49
<![CDATA[Collegiate Inventors Competition Selects Georgia Tech/Emory Team as 2016 finalists]]> 27513 The Collegiate Inventors Competition has selected a team of two Georgia Tech and Emory graduate students as finalists in its 2016 annual competition. Aaron Blanchard and Kevin Yehl are students in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and in Emory’s Laney Graduate School. Their advisor, Khalid Salaita, Ph.D., is associate professor of chemistry in Emory College. The team is one of only six graduate teams and five undergraduate teams selected nationally.

The Emory-Georgia Tech team invented Rolosense, a DNA-powered diagnostic machine that turns chemical energy into rolling motion. This molecular vehicle carries a bead just five microns in diameter at speeds 1,000 times faster than previous motors. The speed of the bead through a sample can indicate the presence of a single gene variation or detect a variety of molecules such as lead using a smartphone application. This could make advanced testing for diseases and contaminants more efficient in remote areas when it’s needed most.

Founded in 1990, the Collegiate Inventors Competition recognizes and rewards the nation’s top collegiate inventors. In partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the Collegiate Inventors Competition is the nation’s foremost competition encouraging innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity in students who are working on cutting-edge inventions at their colleges and universities. The Competition is a program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and is sponsored by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and AbbVie Foundation, with additional support from Arrow Electronics.

Each year, individuals representing a broad cross-section of technological fields serve as first round judges, evaluating entries based on originality of the idea, process (or technology used), level of student initiative, and potential value and usefulness to society.

The Finalists will travel to Alexandria, Va., to present their inventions to an esteemed panel of final round judges, comprising the most influential inventors and invention experts in the nation – National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductees, United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) experts, and AbbVie scientists. The top three entries in the undergraduate and graduate divisions will receive cash prizes.

The Awards Ceremony will take place on Nov. 4, 2016, at the USPTO Madison Building in Alexandria, Va. Before the ceremony, from 11 a.m.-noon, competition finalists will showcase their inventions and interact with thousands of USPTO patent and trademark examiners, sponsors, media, and the public at the Collegiate Inventors Competition Expo, which is free and open to all in the community.

“The USPTO is proud to host the 2016 Collegiate Inventors Competition,” says Michelle K. Lee, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO. “Each year, these students bring innovation to the forefront, developing unique solutions to real world problems. As we continue to promote innovation, we are inspired by the young entrepreneurs who provide us with a glimpse into the future of American technological advancement.”

The 2016 Collegiate Inventors Competition final round judges include 10 Inductees from the National Inventors Hall of Fame: Eric R. Fossum (CMOS Active Pixel Image Sensor Camera-on-a-Chip), Marcian “Ted” Hoff (Microprocessor), Don Keck (Optical Fiber), Alois Langer (Implantable Defibrillator), Victor Lawrence (Signal Processing in Telecommunications), Radia Perlman (Robust Network Routing and Bridging), Steve Sasson (Digital Camera), Gary Sharp (Polarization-Control Technology), and Jim West (Electret Microphone). Additional expert judges include Elizabeth L. Dougherty and George Elliott representing the USPTO, and Jeffrey Y. Pan, and David Chang-Yen representing AbbVie, Inc.

Follow the National Inventors Hall of Fame on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for live updates, exclusive interviews with Finalists and winners, and additional information. All Expo attendees are encouraged to post a comment, photo or video and tag #RoadtoCIC.

Additional resources include:

Collegiate Inventors Competition

www.collegiateinventors.org

 

National Inventors Hall of Fame

www.invent.org

 

United States Patent and Trademark Office

www.uspto.gov

 

About the Collegiate Inventors Competition

For 25 years, the Collegiate Inventors Competition (as part of the National Inventors Hall of Fame) has recognized and rewarded graduate and undergraduate students who are committed to research, discovery, invention, and innovation as they address the problems of today's world. The Competition specifically recognizes and rewards the innovations, discoveries, and research by college and university students and their advisors for projects leading to inventions that may have the potential of receiving patent protection. Introduced in 1990, the Competition has awarded more than $1 million to winning students for their innovative work and scientific achievement through the help of its sponsors.

 

About the National Inventors Hall of Fame

The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) is the premier non-profit organization in America dedicated to recognizing inventors and invention, promoting creativity, and advancing the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. Founded in 1973 in partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, NIHF is committed to not only honoring the individuals whose inventions have made the world a better place, but also to ensure American ingenuity continues to thrive in the hands of coming generations through its national, hands-on educational programming and challenging collegiate competitions focused on the exploration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. To date, NIHF has served over 1 MILLION children and 125,000 educators and interns, and awarded more than $1 million to winning college students for their innovative work and scientific achievement through the help of its sponsors.

 

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich

Communications Manager


Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering


Georgia Institute of Technology

]]> Walter Rich 1 1475499989 2016-10-03 13:06:29 1475500090 2016-10-03 13:08:10 0 0 news 2016-10-03T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-03T00:00:00-04:00 2016-10-03 00:00:00 Media Contacts:

Walter Rich

Communications Manager


Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering


Georgia Institute of Technology

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581989 581990 581989 image <![CDATA[Aaron Blanchard and Khalid Salaita, Ph.D. - 1]]> image/jpeg 1475499586 2016-10-03 12:59:46 1475499586 2016-10-03 12:59:46 581990 image <![CDATA[Aaron Blanchard and Khalid Salaita, Ph.D. (image 2)]]> image/jpeg 1475499702 2016-10-03 13:01:42 1475499702 2016-10-03 13:01:42
<![CDATA[Institute Diversity Honors Four Gender Equity Champions at the Eighth Annual Diversity Symposium]]> 27465 In light of this year’s Diversity Symposium theme, “Celebrating Women at Georgia Tech,” Institute Diversity created the Gender Equity Champion Awards to recognize members of the faculty, staff, and student body, and a unit (office, department, school, or lab) for significantly demonstrating gender diversity, equity, and inclusion within the campus community.

The Gender Equity Champion Award winners were honored at the Eighth Annual Diversity Symposium on Friday, September 16.

“I am excited to be part of an effort that celebrates and recognizes the remarkable contributions of campus community members who are advancing gender equity at Georgia Tech,” said Julie Ancis, associate vice president of Institute Diversity and chair of the Gender Equity Champion Awards Committee.

Gender Equity Champion Award recipients have demonstrated one or more of the following in the last three years:

Award recipients included:

Mary Frank Fox’s research focuses on gender, science, and academia — the study of women and men in academic and scientific organizations and occupations — with significant implications for science and technology policy. “The Gender Equity Champion Award embodies values that are close to my heart — equitable conditions that benefit all,” said Fox.

Shannon Sullivan is a licensed professional counselor whose passion is empowering young people to develop themselves personally and professionally. “My work is about daily conversations with people. For someone to recognize that our individual conversations make a difference in students’ lives, I am deeply touched by this honor,” remarked Sullivan.

Kendall Rankin is the founder and executive director of The Diamond Campaign, a nonprofit she started during her sophomore year to empower women through service and education. As Rankin stated, “I believe that Georgia Tech is committed to gender equity as we have made huge strides in recent years, but I encourage each of you to find a way to support women on campus and to ensure we have an inclusive community.”

Diversity is a top priority to the School of Physics, and the school is committed to recruiting and retaining women faculty and students. “For the past two years, the incoming class of graduate students is 30 percent female in the School of Physics, which is currently above the national average,” explained Pablo Laguna, school chair and professor.

These awards at the Eighth Annual Diversity Symposium come on the heels of Georgia Tech’s Gender Equity Initiatives announcement at the Institute Address in fall 2016 and the Office of the President’s listening sessions on gender equity in fall 2015.

“One of the impact areas of the Gender Equity Initiatives is to create recognition opportunities and increase the visibility of the Institute’s commitment to gender equity,” said Archie Ervin, vice president of Institute Diversity. “The annual Diversity Symposium is one of the best opportunities to come together as a campus community, honor campus leaders who are committed to diversity, and have robust, informed discussions on important issues like gender equity.”

To learn more about the Gender Equity Champion Awards and the Diversity Symposium, visit diversity.gatech.edu.

]]> Annette Filliat 1 1474232397 2016-09-18 20:59:57 1653584976 2022-05-26 17:09:36 0 0 news 2016-09-19T00:00:00-04:00 2016-09-19T00:00:00-04:00 2016-09-19 00:00:00 Annette Filliat - Communications Manager - Institute Diversity

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578641 578651 578661 578671 578681 578641 image <![CDATA[Gender Equity Champion Awards]]> image/jpeg 1474247743 2016-09-19 01:15:43 1475895388 2016-10-08 02:56:28 578651 image <![CDATA[Gender Equity Champion Awards - Unit Winner]]> image/jpeg 1474248413 2016-09-19 01:26:53 1475895388 2016-10-08 02:56:28 578661 image <![CDATA[Gender Equity Champion Awards - Faculty Winner]]> image/jpeg 1474248833 2016-09-19 01:33:53 1475895388 2016-10-08 02:56:28 578671 image <![CDATA[Gender Equity Champion Awards - Staff Winner]]> image/jpeg 1474249171 2016-09-19 01:39:31 1475895388 2016-10-08 02:56:28 578681 image <![CDATA[Gender Equity Champion Awards - Student Winner]]> image/jpeg 1474249561 2016-09-19 01:46:01 1475895388 2016-10-08 02:56:28
<![CDATA[BEST Chance of Success]]> 28153 After a few years of grad school at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working toward his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, it dawned on John Nicosia: He could not envision a future for himself in a traditional academic role.

“But there weren’t a lot of resources to explore other ideas,” says Nicosia. “I knew people were doing cool stuff out there, but didn’t really have a sense of what other careers would be available to me.”

Nicosia, beginning his fourth year in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (a collaboration of Georgia Tech and Emory University), still doesn’t know what he wants to do with the rest of his life, but now he feels like he has more options, and he has the Atlanta BEST program to thank for that.

BEST (Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training) is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded program for biomedical-related Ph.D. students and postdocs who want to explore career options.

Several years ago, the NIH became concerned that the long training time combined with a declining percentage of Ph.D. graduates obtaining academic positions would make biomedical research a less attractive career.

“Historically, after your Ph.D. you got a postdoc position, then you became a faculty member somewhere, and that was it,” says Tamara Hutto, the Atlanta BEST program manager. “But now we are graduating way more Ph.D.s than there are faculty jobs available. Faculty positions just aren’t opening up fast enough. Also, our trainees have a wide variety of interests and skills that add value and are critical to sustaining the broader biomedical ecosystem here in the U.S.”

The BEST program was launched in 2013 to experiment with programming and initiatives on a variety of campuses around the U.S. to figure out ways to enhance PhD training preparation and opportunities for the current and future biomedical workforce.  The Emory/Georgia Tech partnership was among the first 10 recipients of the NIH BEST awards (later, NIH funded more institutions so that there are now 17 awardees that comprise the NIH BEST Consortium).

The Atlanta BEST program has several aims:

• Expose trainees to a broad variety of career pathways and career development approaches.

• Provide trainees deep immersion in a specific career pathway beyond academic science.

• Better equip faculty at Emory and Georgia Tech to support and train grad students and postdoctoral fellows for the 21st century workforce.

Ultimately, NIH wants to identify best practices developed through the BEST Consortium and disseminate them to other institutions.

One cohort of 20 to 30 trainees per year is admitted into the Atlanta BEST program. The fourth cohort begins this fall. Trainees spend two years in the program, during which they go through a series of workshops and experiences that include:

• A variety of self-assessments to determine an individual’s interests, bringing awareness to preferred work environments and styles.

• Hands-on, practical career and professional development workshops.

• Exploration of career options through speakers, networking, informational interviews, resources, BEST staff and faculty, and part-time internships.

• Leadership training, with a nod toward communication skills, team building, peer mentoring, emotional intelligence, and conflict management.

• A commercialization series to learn the basics of patent and business law, and technology transfer.

“What we’re learning is, there is no one size fits all – what works at Georgia Tech may not work at Emory, and vice versa. Also, what works for one trainee, may not work for another,” Hutto says. “So we’re trying a lot of different things and tweaking them as we talk with, and get feedback from, trainees and faculty on both campuses.”

The one component that is working very well across the board, according to Hutto, is the cohort model, “because it means the trainees are working with each other, building community, mentoring their peers.”

Georgia Tech student Alyson Colin is particularly interested in that mentoring part, and sees herself as a good resource for her lab group (she works in the lab of Amit Reddi, researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and assistant professor the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry).

“Hopefully I can use what I’ve learned and pass it on to my colleagues, friends, and other graduate students in the program,” says Colin, in her fourth year pursuing a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Colin feels well prepared for work as an academic researcher. If only that was her career choice. She was the first grad student to join Reddi’s lab after he arrived at Georgia Tech and set up shop.

“I have a good idea of what it takes to start up a lab by seeing, first hand, the sacrifices and dedication it takes,” she says. “I feel like the Ph.D. experience gives us a clear picture of how to build a career in academia. But I want to discover what the industry and government sectors look like.”

After three years as a Ph.D. student and now with exposure to the BEST program, Colin says her dream job would be, “something like 25 percent research and 75 percent outreach and communication.”

She likes sharing what she’s learned and sees a future in which she prefers lectures to labs, so she’s pursued a variety of teaching assistant opportunities and volunteers at the Georgia Aquarium, “where I can interact with the public and tell them cool things about chemistry, such as how a sea anemone stings you. I find that I’m the happiest when I’m communicating and discussing science. I love sharing my enthusiasm with others and seeing their light bulbs come on.”

Nicosia is also interested in the communication part of the equation.

“I really like writing, and the challenge of communicating effectively with both peers and a lay audience,” says Nicosia, who works in the lab of Petit Institute researcher Wilbur Lam, assistant professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering in the Coulter Department. “There’s a whole breadth of career options in that area, communicating science to the general public, medical and science writing, even interpreting research to members of Congress and other policy makers.”

He’s also developed a growing interest in technology transfer and is even considering a job that previously never occurred to him: medical science liaison, the person in a medical device or pharmaceutical company who establishes peer-peer relationships with physicians, “the people who are actually using the products,” says Nicosia, who has developed better career clarity.

“I feel like I’ve broadened my horizons,” he says. “Like I’ve got more agency now regarding my career decisions.”

 

Atlanta BEST Program

 

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

 

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1473868133 2016-09-14 15:48:53 1475896957 2016-10-08 03:22:37 0 0 news Program offers trainees a wide-angled glimpse of biomedical career options

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2016-09-14T00:00:00-04:00 2016-09-14T00:00:00-04:00 2016-09-14 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

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576761 576771 576761 image <![CDATA[Alyson Colin]]> image/jpeg 1473881517 2016-09-14 19:31:57 1475895386 2016-10-08 02:56:26 576771 image <![CDATA[John Nicosia]]> image/jpeg 1473881996 2016-09-14 19:39:56 1475895386 2016-10-08 02:56:26