“We’re concerned with the challenges he’ll face as he gets older and taller,” says his mom, Stephanie Harvey of Atlanta. “The last thing we want to do is inhibit him.”

“He needs functional tools that grow with him,” adds his dad, Stu.

With that in mind, last summer the Harveys contacted the BME Capstone program at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University.

Every semester through the Capstone program, BME seniors experience all aspects of product development, with an emphasis on medical devices, working towards the goal of producing functional prototypes to address the needs of a wide range of users. For the Fall 2017 semester, one of those users was John Harvey. Turns out, the Harveys already had a connection with Tech.

“At one point, all four of our babysitters were Georgia Tech seniors or graduates, and one of them knew all about the BME Capstone program,” says Stu.

So they contacted program director James Rains, then submitted their project proposal and soon made a new group of talented friends in BME seniors Zinka Bartolek, Renee Copeland, Samantha Houser, Davira “Tia” Widianto, and Brice Williams.

Perfect Fit

The students had “a bunch of projects to consider,” says Houser, but they quickly discovered that their goals and skill sets converged perfectly with the Harveys’ interests.

“John’s family was frustrated with some of his bracing solutions. They weren’t providing him with the mobility they’d like to see,” says Houser who, with her teammates, graduated following the fall semester. “This was a great fit for us.”

Williams, who like most of his teammates is planning on medical school, adds, “one of the main reasons this project appealed to me is, I’d like to go into pediatrics. This gave me a glimpse into that world, and the challenges in pediatric medicine.”

So, with the coordination of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the BME seniors and Harveys joined forces. The team spent about two months doing interviews with the Harveys, with John’s physical therapists, his orthotists, other professionals and patients they met through the Spina Bifida Association of Georgia, which sponsored the annual Walk n’ Roll for Spina Bifida on the Georgia Tech campus in October.

The timing of that event was fortuitous. Copeland – a former Petit Institute Undergraduate Research Scholar – was researching spina bifida and happened to read about the 12^th annual Walk n’ Roll. “And then we had two weeks to get everything ready, but it was really lucky for us, because we were able to get a lot of user interviews done that day,” Copeland says.

“By that point, we’d already sketched out almost 100 design iterations,” says Widianto. “We let the families that were there offer feedback, write down what they liked, what they didn’t. We had a lot of sticky notes.”

They gathered all of that data and gave it to the Harveys, who consulted with John’s therapists and orthotists, to pick a final design.

Brace for Awesomeness

Pediatric medical devices, like the knee-ankle-foot orthosics (KAFOs) John uses, can do wonders, but they are limited in few ways: They don’t grow with a child’s maturing body, and they don’t promote proper balance or natural ambulation, which can lead to bone growth issues down the road.

So the team’s mission statement was, “improve ambulation of pediatric spina bifida patients through a novel orthotic solution that allows knee mobility during walking while supporting the user’s weight, without deforming.” With that goal in mind, young John gave the team a name: Brace for Awesomeness.

When John wears his standard device for ambulation, it has to be locked in a fully extended position for structural support, but this results in an unnatural gait. The team’s final prototype, WalkSense, is a pressure sensor calibrated device that controls the locking state of the knee based on the walking cycle. WalkSense sends a signal from the heel of the KAFO up to the knee to a locking device.

Brace for Awareness unveiled its prototype at the fall edition of the Capstone Design Expo in December, when 136 teams put their work on display, (including Liv’R Little, which won in the BME category at the expo).

“We had a chance to show off what we’d done and where we’d been,” says Houser. Over the course of several months, the team became like members of the Harveys’ extended family, going to dinner at the house, going to doctor’s appointments, physical therapy.

“They truly took time to get to know and understand John and our family – they really went above and beyond,” Stephanie says.

Big Night, Big Hopes

It all came together at the Expo. The team used videos, a large poster, and the prototype to tell the story of their Capstone journey.

“The highlight of the night was showing the Harveys the device, and seeing the excitement in every single member of the family, including all three of the children,” says Copeland, the former Petit Scholar who’d been named Ms. Georgia Tech just weeks before the Expo. “Every family member played a part in the process, and it was exciting to see their reactions, and imagine what the final version of this device might be, and what it would mean to John.”

Their product, the WalkSense, was only a prototype and not ready for regular patient use yet, “but it’s definitely a prototype that can be leveraged into the next phase,” Stu believes.

It’s a work in progress, and the family has been discussing the future possibilities with John’s regular care team of physicians, therapists, and orthotists. The family is thinking long-range, with visions that extend beyond their own experience.

“When I think about my son’s life, the surgeries he’s had, and later, the medical devices, someone had to pave the way,” Stu says. “Our goal is to see if something could be developed to help John, but also to help the children like him 20 years from now.”

In the solution-based process, precursor chemicals adsorb to nanocrystal seeds before being reduced to atoms that fuel growth of the nanocrystals. The kinetics data is based on painstaking systematic studies done to determine growth rates on different nanocrystal facets — surface structures that control how the crystals grow by attracting individual atoms. 

In an article published December 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team from the Georgia Institute of Technology provided a quantitative picture of how surface conditions controlled the growth of palladium nanocrystals. The work, which will later include information on nanocrystals made from other noble metals, is supported by the National Science Foundation.

“This is a fundamental study of how catalytic nanocrystals grow from tiny seeds, and a lot of people working in this field could benefit from the systematic, quantitative information we have developed,” said Younan Xia, professor and Brock Family Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We expect that this work will help researchers control the morphology of nanocrystals that are needed for many different applications.”

A critical factor controlling how nanocrystals grow from tiny seeds is the surface energy of the crystalline facets on the seeds. Researchers have known that energy barriers dictate the surface attraction for precursors in solution, but specific information on the energy barrier for each type of facet had not been readily available.

“Typically, the surface of the seeds that are used to grow these nanocrystals has not been homogenous,” explained Xia, who is also the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine and holds joint appointments in School of Chemistry & Biochemistry and School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. “You may have different facets on the crystals, which depend on the arrangement of the atoms below them. From the standpoint of precursors in the solution around the seeds, these surfaces have different activation energies which determine how difficult it will be for the precursors or atoms to land on each surface.”

Xia’s research team designed experiments to assess the energy barriers on various facets, using seeds in a variety of sizes and surface configurations chosen to have only one type of facet. The researchers measured both the growth of the nanocrystals in solution and the change in concentration of palladium tetrabromide (PdBr₄ ^2-) precursor salt.

“By choosing the right precursor, we can ensure that all the reduction we measure is on the surface and not in the solution,” he explained. “That allowed us to make meaningful measurements about the growth, which is controlled by the type of facet, as well as presence of a twin boundary, corresponding to distinctive growth patterns and end results.”

Over the course of nearly a year, visiting graduate research assistant Tung-Han Yang studied the nanocrystal growth using different types of seeds. Rather than allowing nanocrystal growth from self-nucleation, Xia’s team chose to study growth from seeds so they could control the initial conditions.

Controlling the shape of the nanocrystals is critical to applications in catalysis, photonics, electronics and medicine. Because these noble metals are expensive, minimizing the amount of material needed for catalytic applications helps control costs. 

“When you do catalysis with these materials, you want to make sure the nanocrystals are as small as possible and that all of the atoms are exposed to the surface,” said Xia. “If they are not on the surface, they won’t contribute to the activity and therefore will be wasted.”

The ultimate goal of the research is a database that scientists can use to guide the growth of nanocrystals with specific sizes, shapes and catalytic activity. Beyond palladium, the researchers plan to publish the results of kinetic studies for gold, silver, platinum, rhodium and other nanocrystals. While the pattern of energy barriers will likely be different for each, there will be similarities in how the energy barriers control growth, Xia said.

“It’s really how the atoms are arranged on the surface that determines the surface energy,” he explained. “Depending on the metals involved, the exact numbers will be different, but the ratios between the facet types should be more or less the same.”

Xia hopes that the work of his research team will lead to a better understanding of how the autocatalytic process works in the synthesis of these nanomaterials, and ultimately to broader applications.

“If you want to control the morphology and properties, you need this information so you can choose the right precursor and reducing agent,” said Xia. “This systematic study will lead to a database on these materials. This is just the beginning of what we plan to do.”

In addition to the researchers already mentioned, the study also included Shan Zhou, Kyle Gilroy, Legna Figueroa-Cosme, Yi-Hsien Lee and Jenn-Ming Wu.

This work was supported in part by a research grant from the NSF (CHE 1505441) and startup funds from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The electron microscopy studies were performed at Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure supported by the NSF (ECCS-1542174).

CITATION: Tung-Han Yang, et al., “Autocatalytic surface reduction and its role in controlling seed-mediated growth of colloidal metal nanocrystals,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713907114

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986).

Writer: John Toon

The research road ahead feels endless, many neuroscientists say, and comprehending how the brain generates the human psyche may be decades beyond the horizon. But neuroscience is in a forward lunge powered by sweeping national funding programs such as the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), which is tapping into the brain to understand it and support well-being.

You can find the Research Horizons feature story here.

The annual national competition encourages graduate and undergraduate engineering students to direct their creative skills toward the needs of primary care – innovations that have a substantial potential to improve the delivery of care, whether they be technologies, instrumentation, devices, or systems.

The technologies of particular interest improve access to medical care, leverage the skills of caregivers, automate routine tasks, increase workflow efficiency, support patients with chronic disease, increase compliance with protocols, reduce error, or augment the physician-patient relationship.

Mannino, who works in the lab of Wilbur Lam, associate professor of BME and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, won the $100,000 top prize. It will support his research, based on his Ph.D. dissertation, which he’ll defend this year. He’s developing a smartphone app to non-invasively diagnose anemia. 

It’s research that hits close to home for Mannino, who was born with a rare genetic blood disorder, thalassemia major, which causes anemia and requires him to receive a blood transfusion every month. Basically, says Lam, “his Ph.D. is centered on developing new diagnostics for his own disease.”

He’s already completed an initial clinical assessment of the system, which uses smartphone photos of the patient’s fingernails for diagnosis.

The CAREER Award is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Robles’ award, including $597,366 over five years, will provide support for a new molecular imaging technique. The goal of his work is to gain a better understanding of the molecular and structural composition (so-called phenotypical “common-denominators”) of primary tumors that metastasize as a means to improve tumor staging. To accomplish this task, he will develop a novel optical microscopy technique, ultraviolet hyperspectral interferometric (UHI) microscopy, that probes unique endogenous absorptive and scattering properties of cells and tissues in the deep ultraviolet region of the spectrum.

“The information provided by UHI microscopy will yield unprecedented insight into a wide number of phenotypes, including molecular makeup, subcellular morphology, and nanometer-scaled structures to identify aggressive cancers,” said Robles, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. “The focus here is on melanoma, but the approach can potentially be used to improve prognosis of all cancers.”

In addition to funding innovative research, the NSF CAREER Award is also for educational outreach. As part of his award, Robles will develop a summer camp for middle school-aged children focused on introducing them to the use of light in life sciences.

CONTACT:

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

By statistically analyzing clues intercepted through espionage, computer science pioneers in the 1940s were able to work out the rules of the Enigma code, turning a string of gibberish characters into plain language to expose German war communications. And today, a team that included computational neuroscientist Eva Dyer, who recently joined the Georgia Institute of Technology, used cryptographic techniques inspired by Enigma’s decrypting to predict, from brain data alone, which direction subjects will move their arms.

The work by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Georgia Tech, and Northwestern University could eventually help decode the neural activity underpinning more complex muscle movements and become useful in prosthetics, or even speech, to aid patients with paralysis.

During the war, the team that cracked Enigma, led by Alan Turing, considered the forebear of modern computer science, analyzed the statistical prevalence of certain letters of the alphabet to understand how they were distributed in messages like points on a map. That allowed the code breakers to eventually decipher whole words reliably.

In a similar manner, the neurological research team has now mapped the statistical distribution of more prevalent and less prevalent activities in populations of motor neurons to arrive at the specific hand movements driven by that neural activity.

The research team was led by University of Pennsylvania professor Konrad Kording, and Eva Dyer, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Kording’s lab and now an assistant professor at Georgia Tech. They collaborated with the group of Lee Miller, a professor at Northwestern University. They published their study on December 12, 2017, in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.

Neuron firing pattern

In an experiment conducted in animal models, the researchers took data from more than one hundred neurons associated with arm movement. As the animals reached for a target that appeared at different locations around a central starting point, sensors recorded spikes of neural activity that corresponded with the movement of the subject’s arm.

“Just looking at the raw neural activity on a visual level tells you basically nothing about the movements it corresponds to, so you have to decode it to make the connection,” Dyer said. “We did it by mapping neural patterns to actual arm movements using machine learning techniques inspired by cryptography.”

The statistical prevalence of certain neurons’ firings paired up reliably and repeatedly with actual movements the way that, in the Enigma project, the prevalence of certain code symbols paired up with the frequency of use of specific letters of the alphabet in written language. In the neurological experiment, an algorithm translated the statistical patterns into visual graphic patterns, and eventually, these aligned with the physical hand movements that they aimed to decode.

“The algorithm tries every possible decoder until we get something where the output looks like typical movements,” Kording said. “There are issues scaling this up — it’s a hard computer science problem — but this is a proof-of-concept that cryptanalysis can work in the context of neural activity.

“At this point, the cryptanalysis approach is very new and needs refining, but fundamentally, it’s a good match for this kind of brain decoding,” Dyer said.

Brain decoding does face a fundamental challenge that code-breaking doesn't.

In cryptography, code-breakers have both the encrypted and unencrypted messages, so all they need to do is to figure out which rules turn one into the other. "What we wanted to do in this experiment was to be able to decode the brain from the encrypted message alone,” Kording said.

Hear PODCAST: The Brain, Cosmos in the Cranium, Part II -- neurons' secrets and how they make the brain compute

Brain-computer interfaces

A cryptanalysis approach to decoding neural activity is particularly attractive when it comes to brain-computer interfaces that control prosthetics.

Existing brain-computer interfaces can already use such data to move a robotic prosthesis, but Kording and Dyer’s experiment has achieved a significant innovation. Existing technology uses a process known as supervised learning, in which the interface can be trained to recognize which neural firings correspond to which intended physical movements, and can thus “replay” those movements when the subject's motor neurons produce a pattern the device has been trained to recognize.

The new research could do away with the training period required for existing brain-computer interfaces to function and allow robotic limbs to directly interpret their user’s thoughts without even having to be calibrated. It would represent a significant quality-of-life improvement for patients wearing them.

“Supervised training may sound simple, but actually, it can be long and troublesome, and in the end, it can even fail,” Dyer said. “For example, if the patient’s arm is not paralyzed but instead is missing, it’s really hard for the training to work.”

The researchers’ innovation could mean the difference between a patient straining to mentally picture how the arm should move with possibly cumbersome results, and willfully moving the arm in a virtually natural way.

Doorway to mindreading  

This cryptanalysis approach also offers promise for brain-computer interfaces to achieve literal mind-reading, the way decoding Enigma allowed for reading encrypted texts.

A patient repeatedly thinking the same sentences would generate neural patterns. “We could build a decoder that transforms those patterns until they look like language,” Kording said. “I think we should be able to do this within the next decade.”

A consistent improvement in brain recording technology could help put this goal within reach. This could become useful for patients unable to speak but could also possibly be abused in espionage, Kording warned. But there's still time to work out the direction future applications take on.

An evolutionary stroke of luck has made this cryptanalysis approach possible. “The brain ended up with this encryption system through natural selection,” Kording said. “So, it’s essentially making the same kind of ‘mistakes’ that allowed us to crack Enigma in the first place.”    

Modern encryption systems are so refined they’re impossible to crack. Enigma, on the other hand, was new enough during World War II that it had small imperfections that gave decrypters a pathway into its secrets, making its cracking a fitting inspiration for brain decoding.

PODCAST: The Brain, Cosmos in the Cranium, Part I - when the brain's fate hangs by a few molecules

PODCAST: The Brain, Part III - how we get around, how we focus, and how we zone out

Researchers Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar, Hugo L Fernandes, Matthew Peich, Stephanie Naufel and Lee Miller of Northwestern University coauthored the study. The work was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke through grants R01 NS053603 and R01 NS074044. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor.

To accommodate these functions, researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and around the world have developed ways that allow DNA strands to self-assemble into increasingly complex 3D structures. Yonggang Ke, now an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, was part of that pioneering team of researchers at Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow.

And most recently Ke, who also is a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, was corresponding author on a collaborative study with Harvard that leapfrogs the technology by two orders of magnitude, enabling next-generation DNA bricks to self-assemble into 3D nanostructures that are 100 times more complex than those created with existing methods. The research is published in Nature.

Click here to read the story and see the video from the Wyss Institute. Click here to read the research in Nature.

Emily’s leukemia is still in remission five years after undergoing a 2012 clinical trial at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia of the groundbreaking drug by Novartis, Kymriah (tisagenlecleuce). In a global trial, 83 percent of terminally-ill patients went into complete remission. In August of this year, Emily and her family celebrated the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the revolutionary T-cell therapy for acute lymphocytic leukemia, the world’s first genetically engineered immune therapy.

It’s the kind of epic story that reminds Roy, a researcher at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institution of Technology, why he does what he does.

“These patients, like Emily, are incredibly brave,” says Roy, who holds the Robert Milton Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “They face the unknown – these potentially risky, potentially promising therapies. At the end of the day, it is for them, for the patients. I think everybody who works in the cellular therapies space, works with that motivation in mind.”

Over the past few years, Roy has taken the lead role in expanding that space at Georgia Tech, where he is director of the Center for ImmunoEngineering, the Marcus Center for Cell-Therapy Characterization and Manufacturing (MC3M), and the recently-established National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT).

Roy is running point in a widespread endeavor at Georgia Tech to develop cutting-edge cell therapies, and CMaT, which launched this fall, is the latest highlight in a surge of cell therapy-related activity that goes back to the early 1990s, “when we went after a Whitaker Foundation development award and decided the focus should be on tissue engineering – the engineering of replacement tissues using living cells,” notes Bob Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute.

“We got that award and began our initiative with three initial focus areas,” Nerem adds. “The cardiovascular area, diabetes, and orthopaedic tissue engineering.  Later, we added the neural area, which in many ways has to be considered the holy grail, because there aren’t any viable treatments for many neural issues.”

And that’s the point of cell therapies: they offer a powerful alternative to patients with a dwindling supply of hope.

“We believe cell-based therapies can provide new treatment options," Nerem says. "We feel that’s the future, and we hope to make a major contribution for patients who are running out of options."

Collaborative Heft

In September 2017, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced it was awarding $20 million to a Georgia Tech-led consortium of universities to establish CMaT, which will serve as the catalyst for a new epoch in the evolution of cell therapies. CMaT researchers will collaborate with industry and clinical partners to develop tools and technologies for the consistent, scalable, and affordable production of living therapeutic cells, which could be used to battle cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, and other disorders.

Almost 20 years earlier, NSF sparked cell therapy research with a $12.5 award to establish GTEC – the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues.

“Georgia Tech has been showing great leadership in cell therapy research for a number of years,” says Bob Guldberg, executive director of the Petit Institute and professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “GTEC really helped build a critical mass of people here doing regenerative medicine research and established Georgia Tech as a national leader in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.”

GTEC has since evolved into the Regenerative Engineering and Medicine (REM) research center, a collaboration of Tech, Emory University, and the University of Georgia (UGA).

With CMaT, the number of collaborators has grown. In addition to Georgia Tech, major partners include UGA, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Puerto Rico (Mayaguez campus), as well as affiliate partners Emory, the Gladstone Institutes, Michigan Technological University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

A collaboration across many disciplines is going to be necessary to tackle the complex challenge of properly manufacturing cell therapies. Georgia Tech seems well-poised to lead such an effort, because of its own multidisciplinary capacity.

“Now we need a broad group of stakeholders to come into play, not only the clinicians and the biomedical and chemical engineers that have traditionally dominated the field,” says Roy, who led the National Cell Manufacturing Consortium – a collaboration of more than 25 companies and 15 academic institutions, along with government agencies and private foundations, that produced a national roadmap for large-scale cell therapy manufacturing.

“We’re bringing in electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, industrial engineers, basic scientists, as well as automation and robotics personnel and experts, data scientists, computational scientists,” Roy adds. “Bring all of that together with policy experts and our natural science programs, and it makes an ideal coalition. That crosstalk between so many disciplines at Georgia Tech makes it an ideal place for an effort like CMaT.”

Tech Marks the Spot

In the spring of 2014, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded a $500,000 advanced technology planning grant to Georgia Tech, funds specifically allotted for creating a national roadmap and consortium targeting cell manufacturing. The NCMC emerged from that, under the direction of Georgia Tech and the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA).

In June 2016 at the White House Organ Summit, the consortium presented its 10-year plan, Technology Roadmap 2025, that basically details the critical stages in the manufacturing pipeline, including cell processing, cell preservation, distribution and handling, quality control, standardization, and workforce development.

Six months before the roadmap’s public unveiling, Georgia Tech was already on the right path. In January 2016, The Marcus Foundation awarded Tech $15.7 million to build a new research center for the development of processes and techniques to ensure the consistent, low-cost, large-scale manufacture of high-quality cells to be used in cell therapies. With additional funding from the GRA and Tech, the $23 million MC3M – the first research facility of its kind – was launched.

“The Marcus Center is already serving as a cell characterization hub for a network of clinical trials around the country,” says Guldberg. “This is a tremendously exciting role, because Georgia Tech will have a lot of the data that will be used to correlate what the important attributes of a cell are that determine whether it’s going to work clinically.”

Initial funding for the MC3M was slated for five years, after which time the center would be expected to support itself with corporate, government, and nonprofit funding. So, through MC3M, Georgia Tech (in partnership with institutions around the state and country) applied for federal funding from NSF to further augment its research and development in cell manufacturing.

With a strategic roadmapping plan in place and funding for a unique cell manufacturing and characterization center secured, Georgia Tech was well positioned to apply for one of the highly competitive NSF Engineering Research Centers. From an initial group of more than 170 proposals nationwide, CMaT was selected as one of just four newly funded centers for 2017.  CMaT is headquartered in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and will focus on developing enabling technologies as well as the workforce needed by the emerging cell manufacturing industry.   

“I think we’re at a critical juncture in cell manufacturing,” says Johnna Temenoff, Petit Institute researcher, professor in the Coulter Department, and deputy director of CMaT.

“If we do this right, there’s a huge potential,” adds Temenoff, co-director of REM. “The long term goal is to have a large pool of high-quality cells that we can get to people around the world in developed and developing countries.”

This idea of creating affordable new-age medicine for a global population is a major goal for cell therapy and manufacturing researchers like Roy, who notes the high cost of cell therapies. The pioneering Novartis T-cell therapy that cured Emily Whitehead’s cancer is listed at $475,000.

“These treatments can be very expensive, and inaccessible to a majority of the people in the world,” Roy says. “So, the burning question is, how do we bring this to scale and make these therapies cost-effective and available for a broad population across the world, regardless of socioeconomic status? As long as we can develop reproducible product at a much lower cost and achieve manufacturing that is tightly controlled and delivers consistent high-quality cells, we’re going to get the answer.”

Homegrown Meds

Cell therapies can come from a couple of different sources. The two most common types of stem cell transplants for cell therapies are autologous and allogeneic. With an autologous transplant, the patient’s own cells are removed, expanded, modified for a therapeutic purpose – finding and attacking cancer, for example. In an allogeneic transplant, the patient receives cells – say, bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cells – from a matching donor, typically a sibling.

“Cells can do many things that a single molecule can’t do,” Roy says. “A cell is a complex entity – a living and breathing entity. They can multiply inside the body, attack and kill certain other cells, like cancer, change the behavior of other cells, like immune cells. These can be extremely powerful drugs. If not harnessed properly, they can be deleterious to a patient as well.”

The side effects with the Novartis drug almost killed Emily Whitehead. These include high fevers, low blood pressure, seizures, liver abnormalities, and heart irregularities. The company and clinicians have developed strategies to manage and minimize the risks.

In the end, for the great majority of patients in the study, the reward was well worth the risks. “Our daughter was going to die, and now she leads a normal life,” Emily’s father, Tom Whitehead, told the FDA panel that endorsed the therapy.

Wilbur Lam is a physician – a hemotologist/oncologist – as well as a researcher in the Petit Institute. He’s seen what happens when standard therapies fail and much prefers having an alternative.

“Cell therapies are the next generation of therapeutics. They offer hope,” says Lam, associate professor in the Coulter Department, and a pediatrician with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Emory School of Medicine.

His lab has developed a technology in which the patient’s own platelets – the cells that control blood clotting – can be used as a delivery system for drugs. “When it gets to a bleed, it can release its cargo, because the platelet is fine tuned to react to the environment,” Lam says.

It’s a treatment that can be used for patients with hemophilia, or patients who have experienced trauma and are bleeding. “We can also fine tune this system to go in the opposite direction, use it to deliver anti-clotting medications for patients who have heart attacks or strokes,” Lam says. “All of which is enabled by the patient’s own platelets, which act as the brain and muscle, releasing the drug only where it needs to be.”

Petit Institute researcher Melissa Kemp has some personal reasons for her interest and work in cell therapy research, which is based in computational systems biology. Her lab is interested in how intracellular and extracellular environments control the transmission of cellular information, studying living systems using engineering and computational tools, basically looking at complex protein networks the way an electrical engineer might look at a power grid.

“We want to understand how these things are connected together – if you have a failure at one spot, how does that propagate and cause a blackout in another location,” says Kemp, associate professor in the Coulter Department, whose family medical history includes conditions that cell therapies would address.

“Some of the target applications that Georgia Tech researchers have in mind include cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, cancer – all of which run in my family,” says Kemp, whose father is a cancer survivor. “So, I’m really excited about the potential of these end applications. The exciting aspect about cellular manufacturing is the ability to really revolutionize medicine in this century.”

Watch the Video

In his announcement of the selection earlier this week, Georgia Tech Provost Rafael L. Bras praised Robles for having the "potential to become an international leader in your field."

"We expect that the support provided by the Goizueta Foundation Junior Professorship will be used to further develop your educational and scholarly programs in the Department of Biomedical Engineering," Bras added.

During this rotating professorship, Robles, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, will be expected to work closely with the Goizueta Chaired professor, Rosario Gerhardt, and the director of Hispanic programs (Office of Institute Diversity), Jorge Breton, supporting institutional efforts to recruit and mentor Hispanic/Latino students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He will also be helping Georgia Tech recruit faculty of Hispanic origin.

The Robles lab focuses on developing and applying optical methods, along with advanced signal processing methods, to gain access to novel forms of functional and molecular contrast for a variety of biomedical applications. His research focus areas include cancer technologies and cardiovascular engineering.

"Our team had an amazing experience working with the advisors from BME, Medtronic, Piedmont, and Emory. We couldn’t have done it without all their support. I can also say that all the hours in the BME shop this semester were worth it!," said Asahi Murata, BME undergraduate and a member of the winning team.

"We designed HepatoLift to improve the liver maneuvering procedure during laparoscopic hepatectomies, a minimally invasive operation to remove liver tumors. Our design implements a finger-like bending mechanism and hernia mesh to provide surgeons better control and less risk of damage to the liver during operations. With HepatoLift, patients will be able to Liv’R Little better."

Their sponsor, Medtronic, is a global leader in medical technology and one of the world’s largest medical equipment development companies. The team’s advisor, James Stubbs, is a faculty member in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

Congratulations to these winning BME team members and their hometown:

Shyam Nathu, Johns Creek, GA

Aken Sanghavi, Mumbai, India

Monali Shah, Milton, GA

Asahi Murata, Roswell, GA

Customer Experience Central Focus for 2017 Fall Capstone Competition

In today’s highly competitive market, companies must differentiate themselves more than ever before, and for many that means optimizing the customer experience. So it’s no surprise that many of the 136 teams at this year’s fall Capstone Design Expo focused on products and services to improve some aspect of the life of the consumer through innovation. 

For many teams, the projects were all about making people’s lives easier. From a 2-D wearable sensor that makes it simple for runners to access their smartphone, to an app that provides a more transparent automotive service experience to car owners, student teams focused their energy on creating projects tailored to the customer. Two separate teams focused on the fan at the Mercedes-Benz and Braves stadiums in Atlanta, ensuring that game watchers could access food and beverages as efficiently as possible to enhance their game day experience. Another team helped customers coming into Home Depot find the exact screw they are looking for with a device that analyzes the screw type, removing shopping frustrations.

Other teams focused on enhancing the customer experience. Luxury car brands manufactured by GM had one team designing driver’s seats with sensors to increase the safety and comfort of commuters, ultimately delivering a higher quality driving experience. Mechanical engineering team members Doug Learnard and Golda Nguyen agreed that offering a novel car experience to drivers is a value add for customers when considering their buying options, and a tailored, personalized seat offers a better commute. 

At the end of the night there was a surprise in store for all competitors. For the first time in Capstone’s 10-year history, there was a tie for the overall winner. “Bacon and Eggs” and “Team 16 Emory Risk” shared the spotlight and $3,000 cash prize. Both teams were from ISyE.

“Bacon and Eggs” focused on system improvements for Waffle House to help the chain uphold their commitment to 24/7/365 quality customer service. The team optimized four areas for the restaurant, including restructuring the maintenance van inventory model, modifying geographic assignment of maintenance technicians, reprioritizing preventative maintenance procedures, and recommending a centralized maintenance management platform.

For “Team 16 Emory Risk,” students focused on enabling doctors at Emory to provide better healthcare, upholding Emory’s value equation which is “Quality Over Cost.” The team combined Emory’s medical and financial data to provide physicians a way to better allocate their resources and inputs, such as medications and beds for patients.

“Our team is so excited to win, we are really honored to have worked with Emory Healthcare, which is an awesome client,” said Sarah Both, ISyE. “In fact, we had our final handoff meeting with Emory today, and they are incredibly excited and looking forward to implementing our work into their system to preserve resources and provide a better experience to patients.” 

Many student teams are poised to take their projects even further after Capstone, either applying for a patent or joining the CREATE-X program to take their business idea to market. And those focusing on the consumer have a distinct advantage in today’s business world that offers high reward to companies who invest in the customer experience.

Complete List of 2017 Fall Capstone Design Expo Winners

Overall winner – Tie

Bacon and Eggs - Waffle House maintenance handling system improvements

·       Rikhil Shah, ISyE, Duluth GA

·       Christopher Bush, ISyE, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania

·       Viral Shah, ISyE, Duluth, GA

·       Nick Rogstad, ISyE, St. Simons, GA

·       Scott Larson, ISyE, Marietta, GA

·       Hasit Dewan, ISyE, Duluth, GA

·       Roshan Balakrishnan, ISyE, Atlanta, GA

·       Melina Blasetti, ISyE, Marietta, GA

Team 16 Emory Risk - Emory Healthcare Risk Modeling and Patient Quality Metrics 

·       Alice Jinks, ISyE, Columbus, GA

·       Sarah Both, ISyE, Columbus, OH

·       Madeline Gaffney, ISyE, Atlanta, GA

·       Thomas Ross, ISyE, Cumming, GA

·       Brandon Wells, ISyE, Cartersville, GA

·       Nathan Stefanick, ISyE, Vienna, VA

·       Matthew Creatore, ISyE, Chapel Hill, NC

·       Michael Senoo, ISyE, Hillsborough, NJ

Aerospace Engineering

Ostrow Air - Commuter Aircraft/Air-taxi Aircraft 2030

·       Greg Hopkins, AE, Fayetteville, GA

·       Alexander Ostrow, AE, Atlanta, GA

·       Michael McCracken, AE, Duluth, GA

·       Blake Finlayson, AE, Andover, MA

Biomedical Engineering

Liv'R Little - Laparoscopic Liver Maneuvering Device 

·       Shyam Nathu, BME, Johns Creek, GA

·       Aken Sanghavi, BME, Mumbai, India

·       Monali Shah, BME, Milton, GA

·       Asahi Murata, BME, Roswell, GA

Civil & Environmental Engineering

J2AD Engineering - Bridge Replacement - Lee St Over Heart of Georgia Railroad 

·       Jiyoon Oh, CE, Seoul, South Korea

·       Jessie Lei, CE, Vancouver, Canada

·       Austin Foo, CE, Ipoh, Malaysia

·       Donald Smith, CE, Imperial Beach, California

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Brighter SoluSuns -  Intelligent Triport 

·       Hoai Thuong Nguyen, EE, Atlanta, GA

·       Malik Barton, EE, Grayson, GA

·       Michelle George, EE, Longmeadow, MA

·       Marcus Fisher, EE, Atlanta, GA

·       Jeremy Deremer, EE, Atlanta, GA

·       Natalie Chu, EE, Atlanta, GA

Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering

Rampion - Dance Ramp Assembly Optimization Project 

·       Julia Vorpahl, ME, Ellijay, GA

·       Enrique Garcia, ME, Caracas, Venezuela

·       Melissa Shi, ME, Nanjing, China

·       Jeffrey Ding, ME, Dallas, TX

Industrial & Systems Engineering

12 Textron Quality - Textron Quality 

·       Zhejing Liu, ISyE, Tainjin, China

·       Scott Berry, ISyE, Roswell, GA

·       Kerui Cui, ISyE, Suxi, Jaingsu, China

·       Andre Evans, ISyE, Dacula, GA

·       Saneel Prabhu, ISyE, Atlanta, GA

·       Conor Tanzman, ISyE, Wilton, CT

·       Ji Qi, ISyE, Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China

·       Gordon Nail, ISyE, Swainsboro, GA

Mechanical Engineering

Blankity Blank - Material Handling Revolution

·       Brandon Will, ME, Circle Pines, MN

·       Michael Bailey, ME, Canton, GA

·       Austin Forgey, ME, McDonough, GA

·       Hannah Larson, ME, Roswell, GA

·       Lauren Perrine, ME, Potomac, MD

Interdisciplinary

Miracle on Techwood - Lockblox 

·       Ben Ibach, MSE, Jacksonville, FL

·       Ben Rothschild, ME, Atlanta, GA

·       Will Byars, ME, Columbus, OH

·       Mick Baker, ME, Sandy Springs, GA

·       Jake Salesky, ME

Desai, who is also the associate director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, is being recognized by IEEE for contributions to medical and swarm robotics.

“This is indeed a rare honor to be recognized for contributions in two different areas of robotics,” says Desai, whose work in medical robotics over the last 15-plus years has encompassed micro-to-meso-to-macro-scale robotics.

His seminal research in swarm robotics during his graduate work using graph theory laid the foundation for formation control and enumeration of swarm formations that can be applied to ground, maritime, and aerial robotic systems. The work is highly cited even today.”

IEEE fellowship is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership, so this is a rare honor. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

Before joining Georgia Tech in August 2016, Desai was a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). A recipient of several NIH R01 grants and an NSF CAREER award, Desai was the lead inventor on the “Outstanding Invention of 2007” in the Physical Science category at UMCP.

Desai has more than 160 publications to his credit and is the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Medical Robotics. His research interests are primarily in the area of image-guided surgical robotics, cancer diagnosis at the micro-scale, and rehabilitation robotics. He’s also a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

With this grant, Haider’s project seeks to understand how specific neurons across layers of the visual cortex coordinate their activity during behavioral tasks that require detection of visual stimuli. There is much knowledge about the circuits and mechanisms underlying vision, but an outstanding challenge is to study circuits and mechanisms during well-defined visual behaviors.  Such studies would allow detailed measurement of visual response modulation caused by cognitive factors, such as attention and anticipation of reward.

“We are very excited to have the support of the Whitehall Foundation for this work. This award will help us identify how mysterious things like attention and anticipation arise from the electrical activity of defined neural circuits,” said Haider.

Overall, his lab’s research goal is to identify cellular and circuit mechanisms that modulate neuronal responsiveness in the cerebral cortex in vivo. His work showed for the first time that synaptic inhibition powerfully controls the spatial and temporal properties of visual processing in the awake cortex.

CONTACT:

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

Platt’s research team is investigating the cellular mechanisms occurring in arteries that trigger and increase the risk of strokes since the causes are unknown for children with SCD. The overall objective of his study is to determine the roles and regulatory mechanisms behind cathepsin mediated arterial remodeling in SCD, and identify methods to mitigate arterial damage to prevent strokes. This study could result in better treatments to prevent SCD strokes in children at risk. Furthermore, the study also seeks to develop better MRI protocols to monitor strokes such as quantifying stroke lesion number and size.

More than 300,000 babies are born with SCD every year globally—11 percent of these children will have a major stroke by age 16. Children who have suffered a stroke in the past have a high risk of having another stroke. Children with SCD have a 67 percent risk of recurrence with strokes.

Recurrent major strokes are not the only problem for SCD children. So-called “silent” strokes can also cause significant morbidity. Most strokes are usually diagnosed by observing motor deficits, but silent strokes occur without obvious symptoms like spotting movement difficulties. These “silent” strokes can only be detected through brain imaging devices such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. It’s estimated that up to 35 percent of children with SCD will have a silent stroke.

CONTACT:

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

Sports medicine today has become a specialized field with many facets. No longer just a study of orthopedics, sports medicine now encompasses new therapies and technologies that tackle all sorts of sports-related injuries and diseases, leveraging predictive analytics and wearables to keep athletes performing at their best.  

Tech’s sports medicine research program continues to grow, led by faculty such as Robert Guldberg, Omer Inan, Michelle LaPlaca and Johnna Temenoff, all leaders at the top of the field, all of them researchers in the Petit Institute. Guldberg is a professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Inan is assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Temenoff is a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, where LaPlaca is an associate professor.

Each of these engineers has made impactful contributions to sports medicine research, and their work is already seeing real-world application today. Each one of them is driven by a common desire to enhance the quality of life of athletes, both on and off the field. And even occasional exercisers can reap the benefits. 

Read the whole story in the CoE magazine right here.

But for medically fragile patients, invasive open-heart surgery may be too risky. Until fairly recently, these people faced long odds. That changed with the introduction of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), a procedure that became available in the U.S. in 2011, for people with limited choices for life-saving valve repair.

Minimally-invasive TAVR delivers a replacement valve through a catheter – no need to surgically open the chest. It’s proven to be an effective procedure, buying precious years and improving quality of life for patients who have run out of options. But it can be better. Research in the past two years reports the formation of prosthetic valve leaflet thrombosis (blood clotting), a condition which is potentially life-threatening and may cause the replacement valve to deteriorate prematurely.

A recent multi-institutional study published in the journal Circulation, led by researchers in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, is the first to provide a mechanistic insight into transcatheter valve thrombosis. And the research is impactful enough to stand out in a crowded field, becoming the subject for a glowing editorial in the same October edition of the journal.

“That was quite a good response to our work, and it validates the need for more studies like this, looking at the fluid mechanics of these valves,” says Ajit Yoganathan, Regents’ professor and associate chair for translational research in the Coulter Department (a joint department of Georgia Tech and Emory University), and senior author of the research, entitled, “Fluid Mechanics of Transcatheter Heart Valve Leaflet Thrombosis in the Neosinus.”

“The data shows that despite the short-term success of these valves, there can be problems, so the situation needs to be studied if we want to further the field and improve patient outcomes,” adds Yoganathan, a founding member of the Petit Institute, and principle investigator of the Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics Lab, which he started almost 40 years ago.

Guiding the Next Generation

Yoganathan and the paper’s lead author, Prem Midha (who recently earned his Ph.D. in Yoganathan’s lab) believe the research can help guide the development of improved next-generation devices with reduced thrombosis risk. The authors of the Circulation editorial are on the same page, writing, “Such information may help select specific valve types tailored to different anatomies, and also help modify future devices.”

The researchers also took heart from the bylines on the editorial – “They got some real heavyweights from a strong group,” Yoganathan says. The three MDs who wrote the editorial – Samir Kapadia, E. Murat Tuzcu, and Lars G. Svensson – are affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic.

The researchers used 4-dimensional CAT scan data from TAVR patients who are enrolled in the RESOLVE clinical trial registry, focusing on people who are using one of two different transcatheter heart valves – one from Edwards Lifesciences, the other from Medtronic.

Their aim was to identify and evaluate risk factors that contribute to transcatheter heart valve (THV) thrombosis through the combination of retrospective clinical data analysis and in vitro imaging of the space that is formed following deployment of a transcatheter valve into a native aortic valve. They identified this space, called the neosinus, as a critical region in THV thrombosis.

They explored the in vitro effect of valve position and geometry – how the valve was implanted, how it interacts with a given patient’s anatomy. “There are different valve design types and patient anatomies vary, so we were interested to know how a valve’s design interacts with one person’s anatomy versus another person’s,” Yoganathan says.

They suggest ways in which future designs and clinical practice may be improved, concluding that additional clinical and in vitro studies are needed. The editorial writers think that is all but inevitable, writing, “the authors should be congratulated for an important hypothesis-generating article. This study will undoubtedly stimulate further clinical research to understand the clinical implications of these interesting observations.”

“This was a completely independent study,” says Yoganathan, in that there was no industry support for the research paper, which carries 11 authors’ names. In addition to Yoganathan and Midha, the multi-institutional team included: Vrishank Raghav and Ikechukwu Okafor from Georgia Tech; Jose Condado, Gautam Kumar, Vinod Thourani, and Vasilis Babaliaros from Emory University; Rahul Sharma, Tanya Rami, and Raj Makkar from Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute (Los Angeles), and Hasan Jilaihawi from New York University’s Langone Medical Center.

Yoganathan says the goal is for transcatheter heart valves to be comparable to surgically-implanted valves, “to match their performance and longevity, which makes this kind of research exciting as we move forward. We need to be looking at this as a community to ensure the long-term success of these devices.”

Muscle spindles are skeletal muscle sensory receptors – a type of proprioceptor, which is a sensor that lets you do things like touch your finger to your nose when your eyes are closed, or play guitar without looking at the fretboard. Proprioceptors basically tell the brain where your body is and what it’s doing, and the brain analyzes the information, providing awareness of where your body is in space.

“They give rise to reflexes that help stabilize the body – this is what is tested when the doctor tests the knee-jerk response,” says Lena Ting, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

Ting is very interested in muscle spindles, and the study of them fits squarely within her lab’s goal of understanding how the musculoskeletal system interacts with the nervous system to produce movement. “Specifically, we are interested in balance control and how the system degrades in conditions that make people prone to falling,” she says.

To that end, her lab has produced some cutting-edge research, published recently in Public Library of Science (PLOS) journal, Computational Biology. The work may alter long-established views of muscle spindles, how they work, and how they affect people with neurological challenges and other movement issues.

“The prevailing hypotheses about muscle spindles have been in place a long time – some of the research that has relied on these hypotheses may need to be reexamined in light of our study,” says Kyle Blum, a graduate student in Ting’s lab and lead author of the paper, “Force encoding in muscle spindles during stretch of passive muscle.”

An Old Idea

In general, the idea established over the past 50 years or so, according to Ting, is that muscle spindles fire in response to, or encode, the length and velocity of the muscle.

“But we found that they fire in response to muscle force instead,” Ting says. “Time will tell, but I think this could ultimately be groundbreaking in how we understand movements and their disorders.”

Prior work by Ting’s group involved experimentally “pulling the rug out from under people,” which showed that the most rapid balance correcting response generated by the nervous system was related to acceleration signals originating from proprioceptive sensors in the muscles.

“This was puzzling, because this is not the standard description of proprioceptive sensory signals,” says Ting. “There had been some evidence of acceleration signals in muscle spindles, but it was not rigorously tested or broadly accepted.”

To see if human balance behavior could be explained by acceleration coding in muscle spindle sensors, Ting’s lab collaborated with investigators in Paris (where she’d been a postdoctoral researcher) who were doing advanced electrophysiological research, directly recording from sensory neurons as they fire during carefully imposed accelerations while stretching a muscle. In order to gather the right data, Ting developed customized computer programs to change the way standard muscle testing equipment generates experimental stretches.

There are two main aspects of sensory coding. The first, “is the mechanical signals being transformed into neural signals by the receptors themselves. The second is how the brain interprets these signals, giving rise to perception,” says Ting, whose team looked specifically at the first aspect.

In many cases, she notes, the muscle’s force and length are very similar. “However, we took advantage of special situations in which a muscle’s force and length diverge significantly, and our data showed the firing patterns follow force and not length or velocity,” says Ting, pointing out the implication of these findings on our understanding of perception.

“These special conditions are also analogous to conditions causing perceptual illusions or error in limb position and movement," Ting adds. "Therefore, our brains are interpreting a muscle force-dependent signal as joint position and velocity. This works well most of the time, but other times it can cause incorrect or illusory sensations.”

Imagine standing in an open doorway and moving your arms outward to press the door frame. You push as hard as you can for about a minute. Then leave the doorway, and though you may feel like your arms are at your side, they are actually floating effortlessly upward, pressing against a door frame that is no longer there.

Usually, these “illusory sensations” do not affect our movements very much, “but where it really matters is when there is abnormal muscle force or reflexes in neurological disorders, which underlies a number of poorly-understood motor disorders, such as spasticity, rigidity, and dystonia,” says Ting. “The findings have implications in the study of impaired reflexes. Shifting how we understand the function of muscle proprioceptors can give us insight into these debilitating conditions.”

The Next Phase

Ting’s team is now developing computational simulations that would allow them to predict the firing of muscle spindles during measured behaviors, such as balance control in humans.

“We want to develop methods that allow us to predict what is happening in the nervous system when we measure someone’s balance, or perform a knee-jerk response,” says Ting, whose co-authors included (in addition to lead-author Blum), Boris Lamonte D’Incamps and Daniel Zytnicki, both based at Université Paris Descartes.

Ting set out to understand how balance is impaired in sensory neuropathy, and she believes the research will help clarify how balance is impaired in Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. She wants to develop simulation of the fundamental stretch reflex response underlying those knee-jerk reactions, something that has always been difficult because of the long-held hypothesis about muscle spindles being sensitive to the length and velocity of muscles.

“But we now believe they are sensitive to the force and the rate change in force of muscle spindle fibers,” she says. “This finding may explain a lot of previously unexplained phenomena we see in sensorimotor behaviors and impairments.”

Since it was launched in 2000, the Petit Scholars program has provided a comprehensive research experience for hundreds of students who have gone on to careers in research, medicine, and industry. Originally established as a summer research experience for undergrads at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the program now provides a full-year opportunity for undergrads from colleges and universities across metro Atlanta area.

And the number of students continues to grow, from seven scholars that first year, to 23 in the class of 2018, which includes 20 students from Georgia Tech and one student each from Agnes Scott College, Emory University, and Morehouse College.

Now in its 19^th year, the program has funded more than 260 scholars so far. The new class of students come from seven different schools or departments. Nine of the students are majoring in biomedical engineering (including eight from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University).

These students are on pace to become the next generation of leaders in bioengineering and bioscience. Meet the 2018 class of Petit Scholars:

Alina Ulezko Antonova, Emory, Biology

Anthony Aportela, Georgia Tech, Physics

Ji Bok, Georgia Tech, Computer Science

Alexander Choi, Georgia Tech, Chemistry & Biochemistry

Kamaria Dansby, Georgia Tech, Biological Sciences

Will Flanagan, Georgia Tech, Mechanical Engineering

James Forsmo, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering

Bryan Jenkin, Georgia Tech, Chemistry & Biochemistry

Justin Kahla, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering

Harish Kamath, Georgia Tech, Computer Science

Zahra Mousavi Karimi, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering

Richard Kim, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering

Eun Chan Kwak, Georgia Tech, Mechanical Engineering

Yueyi Li, Georgia Tech, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

Wesley Matingou, Morehouse, Biomedical Engineering

Renee Julia Manalo, Georgia Tech, Chemistry & Biochemistry

Jonathan Mitchel, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering

Stephanie Sanchez, Agnes Scott College, Undecided

Andrea Santiago, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering

Fiona Splaine, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering

Samantha Torres, Georgia Tech, Chemistry & Biochemistry

Amitej Venapally, Georgia Tech, Chemistry & Biochemistry

Caroline Wu, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering

Funding for the Petit Scholars is supported by a number of individual donors and families, as well as corporations and foundations, including the Beckman Coulter Foundation, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Cook Regentec, Medtronic, and UCB Pharma.

The 2017 class of Petit Scholars are completing their independent research projects now. The 2018 Petit Scholars will begin developing their projects in January in state-of-the-art labs in the Petit Institute and other bio-focused Georgia Tech labs.

CONTACT:

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

• Faizah Asif, Biological Sciences
• Anneke Augenbroe, Biomedical Engineering
• Leo Chen, Computer Science
• Braden Gilleland, Mechanical Engineering
• Kian Halim, Computational Media
• Dongyuan He, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Hayden Mcleod, Business Administration
• Ellen Murphy, Environmental Engineering
• Gigi Pavur, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
• Benjamin Tasistro-Hart, Architecture

Through their research, the Fellows are learning about Living Buildings, performance dashboards, systems and complexity, and the design of human interfaces. Their work is being facilitated by Drs. Michael Chang (Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems) and Dana Hartley (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences). Beyond the inaugural year, it is the intent that this pilot project will serve as the basis for a new Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) that allows undergraduates to earn academic credits by working on faculty-led research projects over multiple semesters, with students participating for up to three years.

Across Georgia Tech, researchers, scientists, and students are creating the next breakthroughs in understanding this complex system, treatments of neurological diseases and injuries, and tools to improve neural function.

Read the Full Story: Neuroscience and Neurotechnology at Georgia Tech

Dyer is one of six distinguished young researchers who will provide feedback in both formal and informal settings to young scientists at the Allen Institute. The program recognizes the outstanding and innovative contributions from emerging scientific leaders and fosters professional development by providing opportunities and informal training on how to serve as scientific advisors.

“We are very pleased to welcome this group of impressive researchers as advisors to the Allen Institute,” says Christof Koch, President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “Their caliber and fresh perspectives make them invaluable to our team. We look forward to hearing their feedback as well as providing guidance as they build their own careers.”

Next Generation Leaders are selected each year through a competitive application process from a pool of international applicants. This fourth cohort of Next Generation Leaders includes members from institutions around the country, each of whom will serve a three-year term on the council.

Here’s a complete list of the newly appointed Next Generation Leaders Advisory Council members:

• Renata Batista Brito, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale University; Assistant Professor, Albert Einstein School of Medicine in 2018
• Andre Berndt, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Washington
• Denise Cai, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
• Eva Dyer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory Univesity
• Andrew Miri, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University; Assistant Professor, Northwestern University in January 2018
• John Tuthill, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Washington

Dyer’s research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, optimization, and neuroscience. She develops computational methods for discovering principles that govern the organization and structure of the brain, as well as methods for integrating multi-modal datasets to reveal the link between neural structure and function.

“As a computational neuroscientist, I see the Allen Institute for Brian Science’s open access datasets as a literal treasure trove,” says Dyer. “In my role as a Next Generation Leader, I look forward to building a strong and lasting relationship with the Allen Institute. I believe that our collaborative relationship will help facilitate the development of large-scale and open neural data analysis methods so greatly needed by the neuroscience community.”

The Next Generation Leaders council will convene at this year’s Showcase Symposium, held in Seattle Dec. 13-14, 2017. The new members will give presentations on their work and meet with Allen Institute researchers. Additional responsibilities of the Next Generation Leaders include attending a primary advisory council meeting at the Allen Institute in Seattle once per year, to provide feedback on Institute research projects that helps the Allen Institute plan and adopt the best methods for meeting its scientific goals.

About the Allen Institute for Brain Science: The Allen Institute for Brain Science is a division of the Allen Institute (alleninstitute.org), an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit medical research organization, and is dedicated to accelerating the understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease. Using a big science approach, the Allen Institute generates useful public resources used by researchers and organizations around the globe, drives technological and analytical advances, and discovers fundamental brain properties through integration of experiments, modeling and theory. Launched in 2003 with a seed contribution from founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, the Allen Institute is supported by a diversity of government, foundation and private funds to enable its projects. The Allen Institute for Brain Science’s data and tools are publicly available online at brain-map.org.

Contact:

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

The Winship 80 recognizes a broad range of people and organizations: scientists who mentor and inspire Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute leaders; philanthropists whose donations make groundbreaking research possible; community leaders who shine a light on the importance of cancer research and care in Georgia; patients and their family members who embody Winship's mission every time they tell their stories, volunteer their time, and offer unbounded compassion to all who face cancer.

Mitchell is a biomedical engineer, a Paralympian, and cancer patient who has touched many lives at Winship and Emory. She was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in the spring of 2016 and laid low by severe side effects from chemotherapy. Mitchell nevertheless qualified for the 2016 USA Paralympic team. Still undergoing treatment, she competed in Rio De Janeiro and came home with a silver medal in the discus throw and a bronze in the club throw.

Her doctor, Winship hematologist Vamsi Kota, supported her throughout. "She has been an inspiration to her entire healthcare team," says Kota. "I've never met anyone with her level of determination."

As an assistant professor in the Coulter Department, Mitchell’s research centers around expediting clinical translation from bench to bedside using data-enabled prediction. Akin to data-based models used to forecast weather, her research integrates disparate, multi-scalar experimental and clinical data sets to dynamically forecast disease.
 

Mitchell is the principal investigator of the Laboratory for Pathology Dynamics, which uses a combination of computational, analytical, and informatics-based techniques to identify complex disease etiology, predict new therapeutics, and optimize current interventions. Mitchell’s research has predominantly targeted neuropathology, but her research applications in predictive medicine expand across all clinical specialties.

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Emory is celebrating the 80^th anniversary of the founding of the Winship Cancer Institute. In 1937, Robert Woodruff, the president of Coca-Cola, lost his mother to cancer. He was determined that no one would have to leave the state of Georgia to receive the best cancer treatment. In her honor, he gave a generous gift to Emory University that helped create the Robert Winship Memorial Clinic, named for Woodruff’s maternal grandfather.

Related links:

Cassie Mitchell’s Winship 80 Honoree Profile:
https://winshipcancer.emory.edu/about-us/winship-80/cassie-mitchell.html#.Wfc9HhNSzew

The Winship 80:
https://winshipcancer.emory.edu/about-us/winship-80/index.html

Emory Winship 80 Announcement – Fall 2017:

https://winshipcancer.emory.edu/magazine/issues/2017/fall/features/winship-80-honorees/index.html

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich

Communications Manager

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

The Krones contributed a lead gift in support of the building, which opened in 2015 as an interdisciplinary facility for researchers from biology, chemistry, and engineering working to elevate understanding of living systems and bring about new cures for diseases. The Roger A. and Helen B. Krone Engineered Biosystems Building also houses the Children’s Pediatric Technology Center, a research partnership with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University.

“The research conducted at this University is pivotal for advancing the human condition,” said Roger Krone, chief executive officer of Leidos and a 1978 aerospace engineering graduate from Georgia Tech. “Tech is well known for creating innovation in engineering and lately in the areas of software and computer science. We believe that the next big area for Tech is the area of engineered bio-sciences.  It is through this research that we will find a cure for cancer, diabetes, and other chronic conditions that cause so much suffering to so many. It is my hope that the new Georgia Tech Engineered Biosystems building will become the cornerstone that enables acceleration of scientific discoveries in these areas.”  

The Roger A. and Helen B. Krone Engineered Biosystems Building is organized around research neighborhoods: chemical biology, cell and developmental biology, and systems biology, and provides 219,000 square feet of shared laboratories, offices, and common spaces. Stairs alternate on various floors, encouraging people to move within the neighborhoods and interact with one another.

“The Roger A. and Helen B. Krone Engineered Biosystems Building is a living example of what is possible through vision and collaboration,” said Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. “We’re grateful to the people who envisioned what this building could be, and then invested their creative energy to help make the dream a reality.

“Lives will be changed and enriched by the collaborative work in this incredible facility. Thousands of children will have the gift of a happy, healthy childhood. The potential impact is global,” Peterson said.

Roger Krone is the CEO of Leidos, a leader in science and technology solutions in defense, intelligence, homeland security, and civil and health markets. Before joining the company, he was president of Network and Space Systems for The Boeing Company, and was vice president and treasurer of McDonnell Douglas at the time of its 1997 merger with Boeing. Krone first began working at McDonnell Douglas in 1992 as director of financial planning after spending 14 years at General Dynamics. 

Helen Krone is secretary, treasurer, and financial manager for the Krone Foundation. She is a member of the board of trustees for the Mountain Retreat Association, which manages the Montreat Conference Center, a national Presbyterian conference center in North Carolina. 

The MRS Medal is awarded annually by the society for a specific outstanding recent discovery or advancement that has a major impact on the progress of a materials-related field. It is one of the highest recognitions a materials scientist can receive. Xia is being recognized for his seminal contributions to shape-controlled synthesis of metal nanocrystals with major impact on catalysis, plasmonics, and biomedicine.

Xia, who joined Georgia Tech in 2012 as the Brock Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine, has appointments in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, as well as Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

“I am pleased and honored to receive this award. I am grateful to my Ph.D. thesis advisor, professor George Whitesides at Harvard University, for providing me the solid training and for teaching me how to think creatively and pursue differently,” said Xia, also a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. “In his mind, the worst mistake that a junior faculty member can make is losing yourself while making other people more famous. I am also grateful to my former and current group members, as well as collaborators, for their invaluable contributions to our research. Of course, I can go nowhere without the support from multiple funding agencies and the opportunities from all three institutions I have worked for.” 

Xia has made key contributions to the synthesis of colloidal metal nanocrystals by bringing in both fundamental understanding and experimental control. With his mechanistic insights, the synthesis is no longer a “black box” and the protocol developed for one metal can be readily extended to other metals by knowingly modifying some of the key parameters. His pioneering and sustained research has helped create the intellectual framework—including both rationale and methodology—for engineering the properties of colloidal metal nanocrystals.

This novel class of nanomaterials has opened up a world of opportunities for new applications in areas ranging from catalysis to photonics, spectroscopy, photovoltaics, display, and biomedicine. For example, the silver nanowires invented by his group has led to the commercialization of flexible, transparent, and conductive coatings as a replacement for indium-tin-oxide (ITO) films in a wide variety of applications. The touchscreen technology based on silver nanowires is enabling the introduction of large, low-cost display interfaces with computers, dramatically changing how people can interact and communicate.

His other invention, based on gold nanocages, provides a multifunctional platform material for nanomedicine, including imaging contrast enhancement, externally controlled release, on-demand drug delivery, and photothermal cancer treatment.

A prolific researcher, Xia has been named among the Top 10 Chemists in 1999-2009 by Times Higher Education and the Top 100 Chemists and Top 100 Materials Scientists in 2000-2010 by Thomson Reuters. Xia has also been designated a Highly Cited Researcher in Chemistry and in Materials Science every year since the program’s launch in 2014 by Thomson Reuters.

Xia will be presented with the MRS Medal at the 2017 MRS Fall meeting in Boston at the society’s awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 29, at 6:30 p.m.

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich

Communications Manager

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

Hee Cheol Cho, Urowsky-Sahr Scholar in Pediatric Bioengineering and associate professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Cho was recognized as a “Hidden Gem” within Emory’s School of Medicine. Faculty members nominated for the Hidden Gem Award by their departments are in recognition of their outstanding, but often unnoticed or unrecognized, contributions to Emory or beyond.

Hanjoong Jo, John and Jan Portman Professor and professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Jo was recognized in the External Award category for his service as vice president of the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association.

Susan Margulies and Shuming Nie were recognized with the MilliPub Club award. Established in 2009, the MilliPub Club award recognizes the achievements of Emory’s faculty who have published individual papers that have been cited over 1000 times by their peers, as compiled by Thompson Reuters Web of Science. Margulies is chair of the Coulter Department, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics. Nie, a former Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair in Biomedical Engineering recently relocated to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He currently serves as a program faculty member in the Coulter Department.

Now, a research team led by Eva Dyer, a computational neuroscientist and electrical engineer, has imaged brains at that map-like or “meso” scale using the most powerful X-ray beams in the country. The imaging scale gives an overview of the intercellular landscape of the brain at a level relevant to small neural networks, which are at the core of the brain’s ability to compute.

Dyer, who recently joined the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, also studies how the brain computes via its signaling networks, and this imaging technique could someday open new windows onto how they work.

Highest-energy X-rays

A powerful X-ray tomography scanner allowed the researchers to image particularly thick sections of the brains of mice, which afforded them views into intact neural areas much larger than are customary in microscope imaging. The scanner operated on the same basic principle as a hospital CT scanner, but this scan used high-energy X-ray photons generated in a synchrotron, a facility the size of dozens of football fields.

“Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) generates the highest-energy X-ray beams in the country at its synchrotron,” said Dyer, who co-led the study with ANL’s Bobby Kasthuri at the Advanced Photon Source synchrotron. “They’ve studied all kinds of materials with really powerful X-rays. Then they got interested in studying the brain.”

The technique also revealed capillary grids interlacing brain tissues. They dominated the images, with cell bodies of brain cells evenly speckling capillaries like pebbles in a steel wool sponge.

“Our brain cells are embedded in this sea of vasculature,” said Dyer, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

The study on the new images appeared in the journal eNeuro on Tuesday, October 17, 2017. The team included researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Pennsylvania. The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Neural forest for the trees

Electron microscopy already captures neuronal details in impressive clarity. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) makes great visuals of brain structures and broad neural signaling.

So, why do researchers even need mesoscale imaging?

“FMRIs image at a high level, and with many microscopes, you’re zoomed in too far to recognize the forest for the trees,” Dyer said. “Though you can see a lot with them, you also can miss a lot.”

“If you look at brain signaling on the level of individual neurons, it looks very mysterious, but if you take a step back and observe the activity of a population of hundreds of neurons instead, you might see simpler, clearer patterns that intuitively make more sense.”

In an earlier study, Dyer discovered that hand motion directions corresponded with reliable neural signaling patterns in the brain’s motor neocortex. The signals did not occur across single neurons or a few dozen but instead across groups of hundreds of neurons. Mesoscale imaging reveals a spatial view on that same order of hundreds of neurons.

Also READ: The Brain – Cosmos in the Cranium

Megamap dreams

The researchers have also been able to couple their new meso-level imaging technique with extremely detailed electron microscopy. And that has the potential to take them closer to a kind of Google Earth for the brain by combining mesoscale or map-like views with zoomed-in or street-like views.

“We have begun doing X-ray tomography on large brain tissues, then we’ve gone deeper into specific tiny regions of interest in the same tissue with an electron microscope to see the full connectome there,” Dyer said. The connectome refers to the total scheme of the hundreds of individual connections between neurons.

The researchers hope to someday be able to switch from a mesoscale view to close-up view, a bit like Google Earth.

Zeroing in then zooming in

“I think what we’re going to need in neuroscience is this ability to traverse across different scales,” Dyer said. She envisions a future multi-scale imaging technology that is useful in understanding neurological diseases.

“We want to be able to tell somebody researching a disease what the underlying anatomy of their lab sample is in an automated way,” she said. “You could navigate using this mesoscale view to get the context of where the damage is.”

Then the user could zoom in on a blocked artery or destroyed tissue analogous to the way satellite imagery can zoom in on traffic jams to see what’s causing them.

From X-ray to graphic image

Like a navigational map, the final images in the study were colorful, clear, mesoscale graphic depictions. They were based on the X-ray tomography, but a lot was involved in getting from the X-ray to the image.

First, the thick section of brain rotated in the high-energy X-ray beam, which was transformed into an image analogous to the output of a CT scanner. Then structures and characteristics were identified by humans and algorithms before they were computed into three-dimensional, color-coded vasculature and cell bodies.

The details of individual cells were very basic. In neurons, often the nuclei were visible in the X-ray tomography image, and axons wrapped in myelin (white matter) sometimes appeared as well.

Pragmatic computation

The new mesoscale imaging of brain samples also has pragmatic advantages.

It may be possible to examine minuscule brain regions piece by piece with electron microscopes then compute them together into a complete image of the brain, but it’s hardly practical. “Producing a three-dimensional map of just a cubic millimeter of the brain with an electron microscope requires processing petabytes of data,” Dyer said.

By contrast, the researchers need 100 gigabytes of data to compute a one-cubic-millimeter image of brain tissue using mesoscale X-ray tomography scans of thicker brain sections. But the researchers’ goal is to not have to slice the tissue at all.

“Eventually, we want to be able to image whole brains, as is, with this method to see the entirety of their neural networks and other structures."

Also read: Alzheimer’s: Killing the Mind First

This study was co-authored by William Gray Roncal and Joshua T. Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, Judy Prasad of the University of Chicago, Hugo L. Fernandes of Northwestern University; Doga Gürsoy, Vincent De Andrade, Kamel Fezzaa and Xianghui Xiao of Argonne National Laboratory; Chris Jacobsen of Argonne and Northwestern, and Konrad Körding of the University of Pennsylvania. Research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facilities operated by Argonne National Laboratory (contract DE-AC02-06CG11357), the National Institute of Mental Health at the National Institutes of Health (grant U01MH109100), the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity MICrONS project, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency SIMPLEX program (contract N66001-15-C-4041) and DARPA GRAPHS program (contract N66001-14-1-4028).

Writer: Ben Brumfield

But now, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, working with collaborators in Sri Lanka, have shown that a portable scanning device, developed in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology, can measure limb enlargement and disfigurement more quickly and easily in patients with elephantiasis. The research tool makes it easy to obtain accurate measurements and determine whether treatments to reduce swelling are effective.

The study is published this month in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

“This is important because it will allow doctors and researchers to take very accurate limb measurements in developing nations, where there are often limited tools to monitor swollen limbs,” said senior author Philip J. Budge, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases.

In patients with elephantiasis, the parasitic worms that cause the disease make their way into the lymphatic system and prevent the lymph vessels from working properly, which leads to swollen legs. This condition also is referred to as lymphedema.

“Unfortunately, the medication does not usually reverse lymphedema in those already affected,” Budge said. “The ability to get these measurements rapidly will make it much easier to treat patients, including those in clinical trials exploring better treatment therapies.”

The device, created by Atlanta-based LymphaTech, is essentially an infrared sensor, mounted on an iPad, that produces a highly accurate, virtual 3-D reconstruction of the legs using scanning technology similar to that found in Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect video game system.

“The technology was developed in our lab as part of a study funded by the Georgia Research Alliance,” said Petit Institute researcher and LymphaTech co-founder Brandon Dixon, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, and LymphaTech’s chief scientific advisor. LymphaTech CEO Mike Weiler, earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering as a member of Dixon’s lab. Both Dixon and Weiler are authors in this new study, spearheaded by Washington University.

“The study was extremely beneficial to Georgia Tech and LymphaTech’s efforts to develop technology for commercialization in clinical lymphedema monitoring,” Dixon said. “It provided third-party validation of the accuracy of the scanning approach by placing the scanner in the hands its intended clinical users.”

After learning about the technology, Washington University researchers Budge and Ramakrishna Rao, Ph.D., teamed up with international partners to test the device on 52 patients with varying stages of lymphedema at a clinic in Galle, Sri Lanka. Working with physicians at the clinic, the team compared scanner results with results from two other techniques frequently used to ascertain the severity of elephantiasis: use of a tape measure, and water displacement.

Tape measures allow researchers to measure limb circumference near the knees, feet and ankles. However, Budge said, the method can be difficult to standardize and unreliable in assessing leg volume because of bumpy, uneven skin surfaces caused by the swelling.

The water displacement procedure entails patients submerging a leg in a water tank and then measuring how much water is displaced. Each leg is done separately. “This is the gold standard for measuring limb volume, but it is cumbersome and impractical to use in field studies,” Budge said. “Some patients have lymphedema so severe, they have difficulty getting a leg into the water tank or standing still long enough for all the water to drain out. Or they may have open wounds that complicate the process.”

The study showed that the infrared scanner provided measurements of leg volume and of limb circumference at multiple points that were just as accurate and precise as those obtained by tape measure and water displacement. 

“But the most encouraging news is that the scanner produced highly accurate results in only a fraction of the time of the other tests,” Budge said.

Researchers found that the average time required for scanner measurements of both legs was 2.2 minutes. In comparison, the tape measure and water displacement methods took an average of 7.5 minutes and 17.4 minutes, respectively. 

“The scanning tool also offers convenience,” Budge said. “Many patients with swollen limbs often have great difficulty traveling from their homes to the clinic to have their measurements taken. The scanner should make it possible to take extremely accurate limb measurements in the patients’ homes or villages, without cumbersome equipment or inconveniencing patients.”

“To our knowledge, this is the first time that infrared 3-D scanning technology has been used in patients with filarial lymphedema,” Budge said. “It worked so well that it has been added as a measurement tool in future clinical trials in which we are collaborating.”

That study is a two-year, multisite, international clinical trial to determine whether the antibiotic, doxycycline, can reduce the severity of swelling and disfigurement in patients with lymphatic filariasis. Enrollment for Washington University’s partner site in Sri Lanka is scheduled to start this fall.

• • •

Yahathugoda C, Weiler MJ, Rao R, De Silva L, Dixon JB, Weerasooriya MV, Weil GJ, Budge PJ. Use of a Novel Portable Three-Dimensional Scanner to Measure Limb Volume and Circumference in Patients with Filarial Lymphedema. Published online October 9, 2017. DOI: 10.4269/ajtmh.17-0504.

This research was funded by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Disclosures: Co-author Michael J. Weiler is employed by LymphaTech. Weiler and J. Brandon Dixon, a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, have an equity stake in the company. 

Fellows, who are considered among the most innovative early-career scientists in the nation, will each receive $875,000 over five years to pursue their research.

“The expectation with this fellowship is that you will tackle big problems,” said Singer, also a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. “This gives us the freedom to pursue some outside-the-box projects that could be really impactful. Unlike most grants, there are very few funding restrictions, meaning we can go wherever the science takes us.”

The Packard Fellowships are among the nation’s largest nongovernmental fellowships, designed to allow maximum flexibility in how the funding is used. Packard Fellows have gone on to achieve significant accomplishments, receiving additional awards and honors that include the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Fields Medal, the Alan T. Waterman Award, MacArthur Fellowships, and elections to the National Academies. Their work has led to impressive research outcomes, including the development of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique, sequencing the Ebola virus genome, the creation of Bose-Einstein condensates, and pioneering research on glaciology and abrupt climate change.

“These scientists and engineers are tackling unanswered questions and pushing the boundaries of their fields,” said Frances Arnold, Chair of the Packard Fellowships Advisory Panel and former Packard Fellow, of this year’s class. “Their innovations could lead to breakthroughs in how we live our lives and our understanding of nature. Is there another planet in our solar system? Can we find a way to predict earthquakes? Can learning more about how we make memories help us preserve them? If past fellowships are any indication, the possibilities are boundless.”

Singer sees the fellowship as validation for her research, which employs novel techniques to identify and restore failures in brain activity that lead to memory impairment.

“Ultimately our goal is to understand how neural activity both produces memories and protects brain health and then use this knowledge to engineer neural activity to repair brain function,” she said. “Using non-invasive approaches, we’re working to develop new ways to treat diseases that affect memory, like Alzheimer’s, for which there are no effective therapies.”

Since 1988, the foundation has awarded $394 million to support 577 scientists and engineers from 54 universities.  The fellowships program was inspired by David Packard’s commitment to strengthen university-based science and engineering programs in the United States, recognizing that the success of the Hewlett-Packard Company, which he cofounded, was derived in large measure from research and development in university laboratories.

This year, the foundation increased its overall grant budget in response to new challenges to promote stronger national support for science and greater reliance on evidence-based decision-making. The Packard Foundation’s work is grounded in science and research to ensure its investments have lasting impact.

“David Packard was passionate about investing in our country’s scientists and engineers because he believed philanthropy could play a unique role in sparking discovery,” said Lynn Orr, Packard Fellows Advisory Panel member and former Foundation Trustee. “Unrestricted, flexible funding, coupled with support from universities, the public sector, industry, and nonprofit organizations provides scientists and engineers creative space to unearth new knowledge.”

Each year, the foundation invites 50 universities to nominate two faculty members for consideration. The Packard Fellowships Advisory Panel, a group of 12 internationally-recognized scientists and engineers, evaluates the nominations and recommends fellows for approval by the Packard Foundation Board of Trustees.

“It’s great to know that some really smart people think our research plans are worth supporting,” said Singer. “Current and former Packard Fellows are a very impressive group so it’s an honor to be among them.”

Faculty members across the Georgia Tech campus read Singer’s application and, she said, gave excellent feedback. Particularly helpful was the advice she received from Petit Institute researchers Greg Gibson (professor in the School of Biological Sciences) and Will Ratcliff (assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences), both former Packard Fellows.

Singer believes the fellowship is a reflection on the work being done at Emory and Georgia Tech.

“We’re in the midst of a big plan to expand neuroscience, and I hope this will help get the word out that it's a great place to do cutting edge neuroscience and neuroengineering,” she said.

Packard Fellows must be faculty members who are eligible to serve as principal investigators on research in the natural and physical sciences or engineering, and must be within the first three years of their faculty careers. Disciplines that are considered include physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, astronomy, computer science, earth science, ocean science, and all branches of engineering.

Meet the recipients of the 2017 Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering:

Jonathan C. Barnes

Department of Chemistry, Washington University, St. Louis

Discipline: Chemistry

The human musculature consists of tightly bundled fibers that are capable of changing their size, shape, and mechanical properties. Barnes’ lab explores the design and synthesis of functional polymer-based materials, for the development of non-toxic combination drug delivery systems, stimuli-responsive materials, new polymer architectures, and templates for biomacromolecules. They hope to find macromolecular solutions to major challenges in chemistry, medicine, and materials science.

Konstantin Batygin

Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology

Discipline: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology

The most distant bodies within an expansive field of icy debris beyond Neptune’s orbit have a peculiar orbital alignment, and collectively point to the existence of an additional, Neptune-like planet in the solar system. Batygin plans to conduct an extensive suite of theoretical and numerical calculations that will identify the distant planet’s location, and discover it observationally, seeking to unravel the dramatic narrative of the formation and evolution of planetary systems.

Michael Birnbaum

Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Discipline: Biological Sciences

Birnbaum’s research group combines mechanistic immunology, protein engineering, and computational methods to better understand and manipulate immune recognition and signaling. By identifying the determinants of successful immunity, his research group works to create safer, more effective treatments for infectious diseases, autoimmunity, and cancer.

Ilana Brito

School of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University

Discipline: Biological Sciences

Bacteria can rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions by incorporating novel DNA into their genomes. This process of gene transfer underlies the spread of antibiotic resistance among the world’s most notorious pathogens. Brito’s lab is developing new tools to better predict the spread of genes in natural microbial communities.

Marine A. Denolle

Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University

Discipline: Geosciences

Major urban areas are often developed on soft soils and subject to strong seismic amplification during earthquakes. Exploiting underground natural resources alters the structure and may affect our understanding of seismic hazard. Denolle’s research characterizes the evolution of seismic hazard due to earthquake ground motions and natural resource exploitation, and seeks to predict the evolution of seismic hazard in urban areas.

Elaine Hsiao

Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology, University of California, Los Angeles

Discipline: Biological Sciences

Inspired by the amazing and complex interactions between organ systems, the Hsiao lab is studying how changes in the microbiome and immunity impact brain function and behavior. They aim to uncover mechanisms for communication between gut bacteria, immune cells, and neurons, toward understanding how these signaling pathways impact neurological disease.

Pinshane Huang

Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Discipline: Materials Science, Nanotechnology

Huang’s research develops techniques that use electron microscopes to characterize matter with single atom precision, with the ultimate goal of enabling an era in which materials can be designed and perfected at the level of individual atoms.

Christoph M. Keplinger

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder

Discipline: Engineering – Civil or Mechanical

The Keplinger Research Group aims to synergize concepts from soft matter physics and polymer chemistry with advanced engineering technologies in order to solve problems that impede human progress. Their current research is focused on the development of high-performance, self-healing artificial muscles, as well as on generating sustainable energy from untapped sources of renewable energy, such as ocean waves.

Alexie S. Leauthaud-Harnett

Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Discipline: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology

Understanding the nature of dark energy and dark matter, which together make up 95% of the mass-energy density of the current-day universe, are two of the most fundamental questions in modern physics. Leauthaud-Harnett’s group specializes in the design, analysis, and theoretical interpretation of maps of the sky containing millions of galaxies, in order to characterize dark energy and understand how galaxies and dark matter structures grow with time.

Nir M. Navon

Department of Physics, Yale University

Discipline: Physics

Turbulence is among the most mysterious phenomena in nature, with extensive ramifications in biology, mathematics, and physics. Using a novel experimental approach, Navon’s research group synthesizes highly-controllable quantum matter to explore complex many-body phenomena in extremely pure conditions: from the production of new quantum phases of matter, to the study of turbulence in dilute quantum fluids.

Hosea M. Nelson

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles

Discipline: Chemistry

Nelson’s lab is focused on discovering new chemical reactions that will enable the efficient and environmentally-benign syntheses of fuels, materials, and medicines. They take an interdisciplinary approach, exploring novel concepts in chemical catalysis that lie at the interface of organic synthesis, inorganic chemistry, and molecular biology.

Magdalena R. Osburn

Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University

Discipline: Geosciences

Microbes are the catalysts and engines that drive major element cycles on Earth, yet the vast majority of microbes are known only as DNA sequences. The Osburn Lab seeks to cultivate environmental microbes from deep underground to better understand both the microbes and their role in shaping the Earth.

John V. Pardon

Department of Mathematics, Princeton University

Discipline: Mathematics

Pardon’s research explores problems in geometry and topology (the study of shapes up to continuous deformation) and related fields. Although topological problems are insensitive to the geometry of objects in question, geometric structures often play an unexpected role in the answer to topological questions.

Mikael C. Rechtsman

Department of Physics, Pennsylvania State University

Discipline: Physics

Rechtsman’s lab studies the physics of light propagating through complex structures, combining experiments and theory to study the interplay between structure and function. They seek to demonstrate new fundamental physics, as well as device designs that have potential application in medical imaging, high-power lasers, and solar energy.

Amir Safavi-Naeini

Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University

Discipline: Physics

Current electronic circuits are ill-suited for the emergence of quantum information. Safavi-Naeini’s group develops chips that process photons (light and microwaves) and phonons (mechanical motion) in the quantum regime, enabling fundamentally new functionality. His research seeks to form the basis of future quantum networks, sensors, and distributed quantum computers.

Annabelle C. Singer

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Discipline: Neuroscience

Singer’s research uses novel techniques to identify and restore failures in brain activity that lead to memory impairment. Using non-invasive approaches, she is translating her discoveries from rodents to develop radically new ways to treat diseases that affect memory in humans, like Alzheimer’s.

Michael Yartsev

Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley

Discipline: Neuroscience

What is it about the human mammalian brain that allows us to learn our language? The Yartsev lab studies the neural basis of complex spatial and acoustic behaviors, and uses cutting-edge technologies to examine one of the only known vocal learning mammals: the bat. Yartsev’s lab hopes to uncover the mysterious neurobiological underpinning of language learning in the mammalian brain.

Laurence Yeung

Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, Rice University

Discipline: Geosciences

What can the atmosphere tell us about the state of a planet? Using the Earth as a test case, Yeung is developing a toolkit for uncovering how a planet’s atmosphere can broadcast its geological, biological, and climatic machinery through patterns in its chemical and isotopic composition.

For more detailed information on each of the Fellows, please visit the Fellowship Directory.

About the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering

For 29 years, the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering program has awarded $394 million to support 577 scientists from 54 top national universities. It is among the nation's largest nongovernmental fellowships, designed with minimal constraints on how the funding is used to give the Fellows freedom to think big and look at complex issues with a fresh perspective. Packard Fellows have gone on to receive additional awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Fields Medal, the MacArthur Fellowships, and elections to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. Visit the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering webpage to learn more about the program and watch a video about the Fellowships.

About the David and Lucile Packard Foundation

David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private family foundation created in 1964 by David Packard (1912–1996), cofounder of the Hewlett-Packard Company, and Lucile Salter Packard (1914–1987). The Foundation provides grants to nonprofit organizations in the following program areas: Conservation and Science; Population and Reproductive Health; Children, Families, and Communities; and Local Grantmaking. The Foundation makes national and international grants and also has a special focus on the Northern California counties of San Benito, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Monterey. Foundation grantmaking includes support for a wide variety of activities including direct services, research and policy development, and public information and education. Learn more at www.packard.org.

The pair met through a first-of-its-kind traineeship in health care robotics offered by Georgia Tech and Emory University. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Accessibility, Rehabilitation and Movement Science (ARMS) Traineeship Program is a unique opportunity for engineering students to learn the particulars of health care robotics technologies in the places they are actually used—health care facilities and hospitals.

Created in partnership with faculty from Emory University and led by Ayanna M. Howard, the chair of the School of Interactive Computing and Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the two-year program has an interdisciplinary design that integrates engineering, robotics, rehabilitation, neuroscience, physiology, and psychology.

“Besides the really unique immersion experience, we also had a group of people to connect with right at the start of our time at Georgia Tech. Not knowing anyone at a new school can be daunting. ARMS is our little community. We have a lot of fun,” said Fry.

As the program is so new, the first cohort of trainees, which includes Fry and Drnach, consists of just six students. The close-knit group meet monthly, attend courses together, and go on grand rounds at local hospitals and clinics. The students also collaborate and volunteer as subjects for each other’s research. Drnach recalls persuading Fry and another ARMS student to don motion capture suits to test a concept for his research.

“It was pretty funny to see them all lit up. They looked like Christmas trees,” said Drnach.

In addition to their individual research, the ARMS program introduces students to unique clinical experiences in an effort to broaden their horizons and give them hands-on experience with the people their research will eventually serve. Students take a Clinical Experiences for Engineers course during their first or second summer in the program. Trainees participate in one week of clinical rotations where they visit different medical facilities and shadow doctors, surgeons, physical and occupational therapists, and even patients. Students can choose from a variety of clinics to visit including the Shepherd Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory ALS Center, and the Emory Brain Health Center. These rotations give them the opportunity to make clinical observations on a multitude of health care challenges.

At the end of the course, each student gives a presentation on a clinical need that is identified along with a solution. Fry’s presentation resulted from her work with a speech therapist at the Emory ALS Clinic. The project involved customizing a text-to-speech device that matched the sound of the patient’s actual voice—a humanizing improvement over the robotic voice currently used in such technology.

For his final presentation, Drnach conceived of a solution to a common problem experienced by those with Parkinson’s disease. Through shadowing a patient, Drnach learned that many Parkinson’s patients have trouble regulating the volume of their speech in relation to ambient noise. His device would give the user a physical cue to let them know if they needed to quiet down or speak louder based on their surroundings.

Fellows in the program are funded through ARMS for the first two years of their Ph.D. This is a nice perk according to Drnach, as it provides the flexibility to work with a variety of faculty members and do lots of interdisciplinary research before settling into a particular research group.

The program actually gave Drnach a different perspective on his studies and he ended up changing the direction of his research. Coming from an undergraduate bioengineering program, his experience had been more user focused. He finds that his interest now lies in more traditional engineering challenges having to do with the mechanics and controls of machines and devices. 

“I like the idea of fusing the knowledge of how people behave with how robots behave and creating solutions to problems. I can take all the technical classes I want and then apply them to projects that have a humanitarian purpose,” said Drnach.

Drnach’s home school is ECE and he is advised by Lena Ting, a specialist in neuromechanics and a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. Currently, his research focuses on a “robotic gait coach” that helps elderly patients learn to adjust their walking patterns to improve strength and balance.

One goal of the program is to set up students with a main advisor in engineering and a co-advisor who focuses on medical research. For example, Fry is advised by Professor Ayanna Howard in ECE and Dr. Yu-Ping Chen in the Georgia State University Department of Physical Therapy and the Center for Pediatric Locomotion Sciences. Dr. Chen’s research involves early detection of cerebral palsy in infants. Fry is working on developing a system that gathers data from sensors attached to a baby’s legs as they kick. Based on patterns in movement, the hope is that one day a reliable test can be created to detect the disease in the first few months of life, enabling early intervention and treatment.

“Yes, I get to work with real babies. No, I don’t have to change diapers. I also use a NAO robot to simulate kicking. Oh—and I have a kicking baby doll! Her name is Babby. I love her,” said Fry.

Fry chose Georgia Tech because of its reputation in robotics research, but the tipping point that made Georgia Tech the best choice over other programs was ARMS.

“The opportunity to work very closely with the people who would ideally be the end users of your research—that was a big draw. The friends that I’ve made through ARMS are the icing on the cake.” said Fry.

The ARMS Program is currently looking to expand and engage with more students and faculty advisors. To learn more visit the ARMS website.

Bringing the total number of Petit Institute multidisciplinary member researchers to 209 are Vinayak Agarwal, Saad Bhamla, Lily Cheung, Erik Dreaden, Hicham Drissi, Brooks Lindsey, Shuichi Takayama, Michael Varenberg, and W. Hong Yeo.

Agarwal is an assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, where he is interested in questions involving (meta)genomics, biochemistry, structural and mechanistic enzymology, mass spectrometry, analytical chemistry, and how natural product chemistry dictates biology. His lab is particularly interested in natural products, which are at the forefront of fighting the global epidemic of antibiotic resistant pathogens.

Bhamla is an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. His research seeks, among other things, to: understand ultra-fast motility at the single-cell level; leverage the fundamental principles and understanding of biological soft matter for human-health applications (including diagnostics to artificial therapeutic replacements and biomedical devices); design and build scientifically rigorous, affordable tools and health care devices.

Cheung is an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. As principal investigator of the Plant Genetic Engineering Lab, her goal is to bring quantitative techniques and mathematical modeling to plants in order to gain systems-level insight into their physiology and development, particularly to understanding how metabolic and gene regulatory networks interact to control homeostasis and growth.

Dreaden is assistant professor in Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, holding a joint appointment in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory’s School of Medicine. His lab uses molecular engineering to impart augmented, amplified, or non-natural function to tumor therapies and immunotherapies, with the overall goal to engineer molecular and nanoscale tools that can improve understanding of fundamental tumor biology and simultaneously serve as cancer therapies that are more tissue-exclusive and patient-personalized.

Drissi is a professor in Emory’s Department of Cell Biology as well as the Department of Orthopaeidics, where he serves as vice chairman. In that role, he is leading a new strategic vision for musculoskeletal and orthopaedic research, and overseeing the recruitment of new faculty and other essential employees to be engaged in the research mission. He has extensive experience mentoring junior faculty, research fellows, and lab personnel.

Lindsey is an assistant professor in the Coulter Department. His lab is focused on developing new tools, techniques, and systems for medical imaging. All of his team’s research involves ultrasound, including the development of novel sensors, contrast agents, and image and signal processing algorithms. Lindsey is also a member of the Georgia Center for Medical Robotics.

Takayama is a professor in the Coulter Department (where he holds the Price Gilbert Jr. Chair in Regenerative Engineering) and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. His work has focused on the development of micro- and nano-fluidic technologies (organs-on-a-chip systems, for instance, and therapeutic microfluidic systems for treating infertility), and applying that to the study of cells, proteins, DNA, and chromatin.

Varenberg is an assistant professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Relative motion between a solid surface and a contacting substance is essential for the function of natural and artificial mechanisms. So, the research in his Tribology and Surface Engineering Lab seeks to understand and mimic the behavior of interacting surfaces in the world of animals and plants, while uncovering the biological side of adhesion, friction, lubrication, and wear.

Yeo is also an assistant professor of micro- and nano-engineering in the Woodruff School. Working with a wide range of multidisciplinary collaborators from around the world, the Yeo lab’s work in bio-interfaced translational nano-engineering focuses on soft electronics for human health monitoring, human-machine interfaces (via wearable electronics), low-profile implantable electronics, high-throughput fabrication of micro- and nano-structures, nano-biosensors for disease diagnostics, as well as sensors and actuators for radiotherapy.

“If you’re going to start making medical predictions, you have to be careful,” said Dahlman. “Most people are not equipped to interpret statistics correctly, which can lead to negative predicting and ethical dilemmas. In a few years, genetic counselors will be in high demand so folks can make better decisions about their health.”

Dahlman is fascinated by genetics, citing gene therapy as the most interesting field in the world. And it’s a field that he is revolutionizing through his research. Gene therapy is an experimental technique that uses genes to treat or prevent diseases, including hemophilia, Parkinson’s, cancer and HIV. It can help manage a number of diseases by leveraging genes instead of drugs or surgery. Although gene therapy shows promise, there are still risks involved, including unwanted immune system reactions or the risk of the wrong cells being targeted. That’s where Dahlman’s research comes in.

Dahlman’s lab focuses on drug delivery vehicles, which are nanoparticles. The nanoparticle delivers gene therapies to the right place in the body to fight disease. It’s critical that the gene therapies only target the unhealthy cells to avoid damaging healthy ones. Dahlman is laser focused on ensuring the nanoparticles know what paths to take to reach the correct organ to start the healing process.

“The issue with genetically-engineered drugs is that they don’t work unless they get to the right cell in the body,” said Dahlman. “You can have the world’s best genetic drug that's going to fix a tumor or eradicate plaque, but it’s not going to be effective unless it travels to the right organ. In my lab, we design different nanoparticles to deliver the genetically-engineered drugs to the correct location.”

Dahlman is redefining the field of genetic therapy with a testing system he invented called FIND (Fast Identifiable Nanoparticle Delivery). During the course of identifying effective nanoparticles for drug delivery, thousands of nanoparticles must be tested, which presents scalability issues. Mice must be used for the tests because a cell plate isn’t going to replicate organs in the human body. But ethically, researchers cannot inject thousands of mice for an experiment of this magnitude. So Dahlman developed a testing system that leverages DNA barcodes (a stand-in for the actual drugs) to label each nanoparticle. Once those are injected, researchers can see where the barcodes went in the mouse. For example, if a significant number of barcodes numbered 30 all went to the heart, Dahlman can deduce that the nanoparticle represented by barcode 30 is best suited for that organ.

“The barcode system is redefining our field because we are now able to do several really important things that we couldn’t before,” said Dahlman. “First, we can test thousands of nanoparticles at once, which has been a pipedream in our field forever. Second, we can now study the biology of drug delivery, understanding which genes affect how well a drug will work. And third, we can apply big data and artificial intelligence to drug delivery for the first time. With thousands of nanoparticles being tested at once, we can mine giant data sets for bioinformatics.”

Dahlman’s research and barcoding system has universal implications; he is designing testing systems that everyone can use. Labs across the country can leverage FIND to accelerate their studies. If the technology is used by more labs, Dahlman believes it will increase the rate that gene therapies are developed, advancing the entire field.

Non-liver gene therapy delivery is one of the biggest challenges today that Dahlman hopes to contribute to with his work. The liver has been easier to target with gene therapy because of its filtration system; larger blood vessels let the nanoparticles pass more easily into the organ. Diseases such as hepatitis and cirrhosis have responded well to gene therapies.

“All types of drug therapies have to be delivered,” said Dahlman. “Our field has had the best success with the liver, with 15 clinical trials already successfully running using the same nanoparticle delivery mechanism. The liver is responding extremely well to these therapies, and we are healing livers and curing people. The next frontier will be organs other than the liver, like the heart and brain with tighter blood vessel systems.”

After 12 months, Dahlman’s lab is coming into its own with nine graduate students and four undergraduates working in the lab. Much of the energy and excitement in Dahlman’s lab come from the fact that he is a young professor.  He’s only 30 and easily relates to the students in his lab. Dahlman’s had great experiences with faculty members too and describes senior faculty as extremely helpful and supportive.

“I’ve gotten carded at two different faculty events, and I’ve been mistaken as a student more times than I can count!” said Dahlman. “But there haven’t been any challenges here with being a young faculty member. That was one thing that really attracted me to Tech – the young faculty seemed truly happy here.”

Dahlman’s personal and professional goal is to be working on high risk, innovative science for as long as possible. He never wants to be in a rut, and he wants to have the courage to pursue interesting and risky science even if lower risk work is safer. In his lab, his goal is to produce great students. In 20 years, he wants to see his students as leaders in the field.

“I want people to say, ‘That person went through the Dahlman lab, we have to hire them,’” said Dahlman. “That’s what I want for my students, and I think we can get there.”

By Georgia Parmelee

RSV is the most common cause of acute lower respiratory infections in infants and young children globally, often leading to bronchiolitis or pneumonia, sending about 3 million children to the hospital each year. In spite of its prevalence, there is no effective vaccine yet. But researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are on the case.

“Treatments and vaccines are currently being investigated, and there might be a vaccine soon, but we really don’t know a lot about the cellular events that occur during RSV,” says Phil Santangelo, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

Santangelo’s lab decided to look closer at RSV, to dig a little deeper,

“We’re imaging the genome of the virus, the guts of it, looking at what happens inside the cell in the hopes of developing new drug targets,” says Santangelo, whose lab’s research was published recently in the journal Nature Communications. “Live cell imaging was the key to this research.”

The research, entitled RSV glycoprotein and genomic RNA dynamics reveal filament assembly prior to the plasma membrane, could lead to the development of antivirals against RSV and other viruses that use the secretory membrane system during assembly.

Finding the Unexpected

RSV is a cell membrane-wrapped, single-stranded RNA virus (which is closely related to other RNA viruses, such as measles and mumps) that assembles into viral filaments that can be seen on the outside of the cell.

The researchers utilized live cell imaging (with a major assist from research scientist Aaron Lifland, technical director of the microscopy core facility), as well as protein probes developed in Santangelo’s lab, and bioconjugation techniques –  Lead author Daryll Vanover (a grad student in Santangelo’s lab) used fluorescently-labeled soybean agglutinin to selectively label the RSV G protein (which plays an important role in the assembly of filamentous virions) in living cells. And the results were remarkable, something Santangelo calls, “a mind-blowing event.”

It turns out, most of the viral components needed for filament formation in RSV assemble within the cytosol, not at the plasma membrane.

“The long filamentous structures we see on the outside of the cell, are made inside of the cell,” Santangelo says. “This is not what we expected at all. The dynamics we saw inside the cell are amazing. We’d never seen these structures inside the cell.”

There’s a lot of protein traffic inside of a cell. Future research from the Santangelo team will explore, in a deeper way, what components of the secretory membrane system are critical for specific protein trafficking into the assembly pathway, and applications of this research may lead to the development of new, effective drugs, “small molecules that would inhibit the trafficking and assembly process – assembly inhibitors,” Santangelo says.

“We haven’t seen that class of drugs – that actually inhibit assembly,” he adds. “It would be fantastic if you trap the virus inside the cell. If the virus stays there, it’s going to be degraded.”

In addition to Vanover, Santangelo, and Lifland, authors of the research include biomedical engineering (BME) grad students Emmeline Blanchard and Jonathan Kirschman, BME undergrad Daisy Smith, as well as Eric Alonas (a Santangelo lab alum who earned his Ph.D. last year), and Coulter Department research scientist Chiara Zurla.

CONTACT:

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

The National Institutes of Health has awarded Kim over $2.3 million in funding to boost his innovative research using life-mimicking laboratory chips to explore the treatment of atherosclerosis. No other health hazard appears to be deadlier, as the condition is also behind stroke, some chronic kidney diseases, peripheral artery disease, and carotid artery disease.

Known for its high prestige, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award is one of four High-Risk, High-Reward awards given annually, which recognize promising new projects that address challenges in biomedical research of pressing importance to human health.

Everyone is at risk

We are all at risk for clogged arteries or hardening of the arteries, common terms for atherosclerosis.

If atherosclerosis is detected in time, bypass surgery, drugs that lower bad cholesterol, and lifestyle changes can save lives. But many patients’ conditions worsen in spite of these, and there is a strong need for better treatment options.

Failures in clinical trials of new potential treatments that raise levels of “good cholesterol” have underscored the need for better understanding of the therapeutic role of good cholesterols known as high-density lipoprotein (HDL). They are the focus of the research for which Kim’s grant was awarded.

Bad ‘good cholesterol’

Recently, researchers have uncovered that good cholesterols are not always good. There are thousands of different HDLs, and, take together, they don’t work as they should in patients with coronary artery disease. Some HDLs even do bad things.

“Researchers tried raising HDL levels in patients’ bloodstreams thinking patients’ conditions might improve, but the coronary artery disease did not get better,” said Kim, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Also, high levels of HDLs in the bloodstream don’t always protect people from atherosclerosis.”

Kim is interested in HDLs’ hit-or-miss qualities in atherosclerosis patients, and in how inflammation leads to HDLs’ diminished effectiveness. Proinflammatory proteins in the bloodstream junk up good HDLs. “HDLs remake themselves all the time, and they can incorporate proinflammatory proteins, which disturb the traditional good cholesterol functions that HDL is known for,” Kim said.

The Kim group could better understand the mechanisms behind that, and also find ways to leverage these for treatments. His team may be able to identify some HDL cocktails that reduce atherosclerosis despite raised proinflammatory proteins levels in the bloodstream of patients with coronary artery disease or chronic kidney disease.

Artery-on-a-chip

Kim’s proposed research that won the NIH award illuminates HDL interactions with proinflammatory proteins and with vascular tissues by mimicking some of them in the lab. Kim makes aspects of these interactions observable via a special slide called a human-coronary-artery-on-a-chip.

It’s a clear plastic chip with microfluidic passages lined with living arterial cells to form an artificial coronary artery. Inside the artificial arteries, Kim’s research group experiments with what are called engineered high-density lipoproteins (eHDLs), nanoparticles synthesized to be near faultless samples of specific HDLs.

Natural HDLs are often not as uniform in composition and size because of interactions with other proteins. On the other hand, Kim’s group can produce eHDLs with uniform properties, allowing for reliable experimental parameters. The eHDLs are highly reproducible, as are the experiments, the latter of which is essential in research for cementing trustworthy results.

Innovative microfluidic technology allows for the robust production of multicomponent nanomaterials, in this case, the eHDLs and inflammatory proteins, in large quantities and varieties. As a result, Kim’s team can compile a comprehensive eHDL library with various functional proteins to see how they affect the artificial artery the way actual HDLs might in combination with inflammatory proteins affect real arteries in the body.

Once the in vitro chip experiments yield results, Kim’s research group will work to corroborate them in vivo in experiments on a mouse model of atherosclerosis in collaboration with cardiology engineering researcher Hanjoong Jo at Emory University School of Medicine.

Atherosclerosis brief description

The old explanation about how cholesterol gunk coats blood vessels like lard is not quite correct, but animal fats are involved in atherosclerosis. Here’s a brief description of how the disease clogs arteries.

Oil and water don’t mix.

So, lipoproteins, which are large collections of particular protein molecules, wrap around lipids, which include oily fats called triglycerides, to transport them through the bloodstream, which is water-based. Some lipoproteins, like the infamous low-density lipoproteins (LDLs), deliver lipids to cells, but HDLs pick them up from cells when it’s time for them to leave and take them to the liver for breakdown, a process called reverse cholesterol transport.

If there aren’t enough well-functioning HDLs in the bloodstream, reverse cholesterol transport can slow down, and the lipids amass in artery walls behind endothelial cells, which make up the lining inside of arteries.

A healthy body maintains a balance between anti-inflammatory and proinflammatory proteins, so normally not too many HDLs are corrupted too badly. But when levels of proinflammatory proteins in the bloodstream rise, more HDLs get corrupted.

As a result, lipids congregate in the arterial wall, along with immune cells that get stuck there, together forming plaque, which causes the arteries to narrow and constrict blood flow. The plaque can burst into the artery, clogging it even more.

A heart attack or stroke can result.

Also READ: Alzheimer's research, its vexing past, its future hopes

High-Risk, High-Reward

The name of the category of the NIH grant Kim received is High-Risk, High-Reward for a reason. The risk refers to a bold move into uncharted territory, according to the NIH.

The potential reward, in this case, could mean discovering new effective treatments against what appears to be the single deadliest killer of our times.

Kim sees high reward potential in the unique possibilities combining the human-organ-on-a-chip technology and the bioinspired nanotechnology provides. “You can’t do this type of work in vivo,” Kim said. “And the high reproducibility is very valuable to sort out truly good candidates for treatment trials.”

Should the experiments result in nailing down a drug candidate, Kim’s lab will leverage its high-throughput manufacturing method to produce ample substances with high consistency for drug testing.

And the high risk in his view?

“Even if we find HDLs with specific functions, they may not work in the same way in our bodies because of HDLs’ compositional and functional complexity. The body can still introduce unidentified proteins into the HDLs,” Kim said. “It’s always like that in human trials. Things we still don’t know about the body’s enormous biochemistry can get in the way.”

“Even so, the experiments may provide unprecedented insights into these complex nanoparticles and still move research forward toward better treatments. I think that, combined with all the engineering and scientific possibilities the work taps into, the high rewards dampen the potential risk.”

The NIH Director’s New Innovator Award covers five years of research funding and is given to a principal investigator who is in an early career stage and has never received a large-category NIH grant before.

Tony Kim is also affiliated with Georgia Tech’s Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, Georgia Tech’s Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology.

Also READ: Successful human trials of painless vaccine you give to yourself: Microneedle patches

The NIH T32 grant, entitled “Research Training Program in ImmunoEngineering,” starts this month and will support five biomedical engineering and bioengineering doctoral students this academic year, and new cohorts of students in subsequent years.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for this program,” says Julia Babensee, director of the training program, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

And it may be the first of its kind.

“NIH didn’t have a training grant program in this space before,” says Babensee, who applied for the grant and is managing the program. “It’s the first ImmunoEngineering training grant that we know of. NIH recognizes that this is an important, emerging discipline.”

The five trainees selected for 2017-2018 are Nicholas Beskid (from Babensee’s lab), David Francis (from the lab of Susan Thomas), Midori Maeda (from the lab of Shuichi Takayama), Katily Ramirez (from the lab of Todd Sulcheck), Cory Sago (from the lab of James Dahlman). Another trainee, Jeff Noble (from the lab of M.G. Finn) deferred to 2018-2019.

The program’s co-directors, Susan Thomas (Petit Institute researcher, assistant professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech) and Rafi Ahmed (director of the Emory Vaccine Center) will leverage the $191,090 award to prepare engineering students for advanced careers in immunoengineering.

Competition for the inaugural slots was stiff, according to Babensee, who is on the executive committee of the Center for ImmunoEngineering at Georgia Tech. That research center, based in the Petit Institute, brings together multi-disciplinary researchers, engineers and scientists, to develop solutions for patients battling cancer, infectious diseases (HIV, hepatitis, etc.), autoimmune and inflammatory disorders (diabetes, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, etc.), as well as those undergoing regenerative therapies (organ transplantation, spinal cord injury, etc.).

“These trainees will have the ability to tackle those complex problems, having both an engineering approach and a deep understanding of immunology,” Babensee says. “Our intention is to train people who will be able to take on leadership positions in either academia or industry. This is a prestigious designation from NIH – it says a lot about Georgia Tech and Emory, about our faculty and students.”

CONTACT:

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

The grant is also a collaboration with professor Stuart Factor, director of the Movement Disorders Clinic at the Emory Brain Health Center, Madeleine Hackney, a research health scientist in the Atlanta VA and the Department of Medicine at Emory, and Erin Buckley and Lucas McKay, both assistant professors in Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Ting’s research will use combined experimental and computational approaches to systematically isolate the causal linkages and interactions between muscle rigidity, muscle activity, and balance ability in Parkinson’s disease. Her goals are to identify the causal role of rigidity on impaired balance in PD, to validate novel optically-based and clinically-feasible methods to measure muscle rigidity during standing, and to establish a computational model of neuromechanical balance to simulate how multiple mechanisms interact to cause balance impairments. This research will facilitate the identification of treatment targets for the rational development of rehabilitation and other therapies for balance impairments across a variety of neurological movement disorders.

“It was surprising to me that the effects of muscle rigidity on balance is so poorly understood,” said Ting. “People with Parkinson’s disease have both muscle rigidity and postural instability, yet the effects of muscle rigidity have not been considered as contributing to balance impairments. One reason is that we can’t yet measure low levels of muscle activity reliably, nor predict how it would alter movement. In our research, we will address both of these problems.”

The Neuromechanics Lab based at Emory and directed by Ting, uses a broad range of techniques from neuroscience, biomechanics, rehabilitation, robotics, and physiology to discover new principles of human movement. Her lab’s basic science findings have facilitated advances in understanding movement disorders and in identifying mechanisms of rehabilitation. In 2016, The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) inducted Ting into its College of Fellows. The College of Fellows is comprised of the top two percent of medical and biological engineers in the country.

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich

Communications Manager

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

at Georgia Tech and Emory

For Gerrish, who is retiring in December, the last fair (Sept. 21 in the Molecular Sciences and Engineering Building) will certainly be the most memorable.

“Talk about going out with a bang,” says Gerrish, who’d initially planned the event for Sept. 14. It had to be pushed back a week because of the unwelcome intrusion of Hurricane Irma, which meant a quick reorganization as industry representatives had to change schedules at the last minute. What could have been disastrous wound up being an unqualified success, as most of the companies that committed still participated, and 438 students and alumni attended.

“This was definitely one for the books,” says Gerrish, manager of student, alumni and industrial relations for the Coulter Department. “Everyone – students, faculty, staff, the participating companies – rose to the occasion. I couldn’t be prouder.”

The Biotech Career Fair, like most of the other departmental career fairs on campus, had to be nimble as the hurricane aimed its fierce rain and winds at Atlanta. These events were all planned around Georgia Tech’s All Majors Career Fair, which happens every fall semester, typically drawing more than 400 companies and 5,000 students. That one, planned for Sept. 11-12, was moved to the 18^th and 19^th.

Of the 20 companies that committed to the Biotech Career Fair, 16 showed up for the event on Sept. 21^st. Two actually came on the 14^th and set up tables in the lobby of the Whitaker Building (home of the Coulter Department). Considering all of the travel arrangements company representatives had to make or change, Gerrish says, “I consider that a great success. Real life happens, and everyone responded. Space was still available and everything went off without a hitch.”

The turnout was just slightly less than last year’s record-high, and faculty responded to the rescheduling challenge by working tests and assignments around the fair.

“They did a fantastic job of working with students, because they know how important this is for them to get out there and speak to prospective employers,” Gerrish says. “This is a great experience for students – not the end all, do all, but it is the beginning of the recruitment season, and I was so pleased with the faculty support.”

Industry feedback, Gerrish says, followed along similar lines to previous years. The skills that students gain through the Coulter Department and its lauded curriculum, which focuses on problem-based learning, always come across at these events.

“Companies want people with good communication and problem-solving skills, which our BME curriculum does so well,” Gerrish says. “Our students know how to work in a team environment, which is important to a large segment of industry.”

Georgia Tech has become a top recruiting stop for a wide range of companies, and particularly companies in the biomedical space, because of the Coulter Department’s emphasis on a team approach to problem solving.

“Our students are able to present a problem in an articulate way, and communicate resolutions,” Gerrish says. “In our classes, we don’t give away the answers. We provide direction, and the students find the solutions. If they run into a brick wall, they find another way. These are creative, innovative thinkers who aren’t afraid of confronting difficult challenges. The one thing that I keep hearing from our industry partners over and over again is, they love BME students because they are fearless.”

Gerrish led a team of about 30 student volunteers to organize, set up, and break down the Biotech Career Fair, an event that launched in 2005. She began her career at Indiana University in 1983 and came to Georgia Tech in 1999, joining the staff at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

“I’ve been working with students for several decades, and I feel lucky to have been in a career where I love getting up to go to work every day,” she says. “One of the things that stands out most about this year’s fair is, we had so many alums come back to Georgia Tech, this time as industry representatives, enjoying their careers. That was the icing on the cake for me. That’s what makes you feel like you’ve done something that was a success.”

BIOTECH CAREER FAIR

PARTICIPATING COMPANIES

Sept. 21

Abbott

Bard Medical Division

Beckman Coulter

Biosense Webster

BIOTRONIK

BW-Barry Wehmiller Design Group

Cryolife

Ecolab

Edwards Lifesciences

GEMU Valves

Halyard Health

Hamilton Company

Koning Corporation

Procter & Gamble

QGenda

Varian Medical Systems

Sept. 14

KBI Biopharma, Inc.

Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation

The seed grant required researchers from the two different institutions to bring their respective strengths together on projects designed to improve human health.

“That seed grant program was absolutely essential and its influence on success of the Emory-Georgia Tech partnership can’t be underestimated,” said Bob Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute, which launched in 1995. “It provided a foundation for everything else that has taken place since.”

That spirit of partnership has evolved in many ways, one of the most significant being the Regenerative Engineering and Medicine (REM) research center, which brought the University of Georgia (UGA) and its research strength into the mix with Emory and Georgia Tech, and the seed grant program remains as critical as ever, sparking multidisciplinary collaboration between the three institutions.

Recently, the REM research center awarded this year’s seed grants, totaling $700,000 for eight teams of interdisciplinary researchers working to harness the body’s own potential to heal or regenerate in response to injury or disease.

Here’s a rundown of the projects:

• Project Title: Using Pluripotent Stem Cells to Treat Male-Factor Infertility: Towards a Potential Regenerative Medicine Strategy.

• Principal Investigators: Charles Easley (UGA) and Anthony Chan (Emory)

• Synopsis: The researchers are developing a novel approach for differentiating human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells into advanced spermatogenic lineages. If successful, this proposal would show that functional male gametes can be derived from no greater starting material than a skin biopsy.

• Project Title: Identification of Molecular and Epigenetic Signatures of Cell Potency and Enhanced Embryonic Stem Cell Reprogramming for Regenerative Biomanufacturing.

• Principal Investigators: Rabindranath De La Fuente (UGA) and Yuhong Fan (Tech)

• Synopsis: The researchers propose to use their recently-developed episomal sensor of histone H4 acetylation to conduct a quantitative analysis of changes in genome-wide chromatin structure and the dynamics of epigenetic reprogramming in real-time. Their studies will provide a genome-wide map of the chromatin regulatory landscape and transcriptome profiles with predictive value to evaluate potency for neuronal differentiation.

• Project Title: Hydrogels for Mesenchymal Stem Cells to Treat Graft-vs-Host Disease.

• Principal Investigators: Andrés J. García (Tech), Muna Qayed (Emory)

• Synopsis: The objective of this project is to engineer synthetic hydrogels that encapsulate Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and promote their survival and expansion in alternative transplant sites, resulting in enhanced immunomodulatory activities for the treatment of Graft vs Host Disease.

• Project Title: Elucidating Natural Killer Cells as a Cell Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease.

• Principal Investigators: Jae-Kyung (Jamise) Lee (UGA) and Levi Wood (Tech)

• Synopsis: The research team’s goal is to obtain new data determining if Natural Killer cells have the capacity to protect neurons and modulate microglial activation in the context of a Alpha-synuclein.

• Project Title: Exploring Mechanosensitive Cues to Enhance Mitochondrial Structure and Function During Regeneration.

• Principal Investigators: Jarrod Call (UGA) and Khalid Salaita (Emory)

• Synopsis: The primary goal is to determine mechanical signals that influence mitochondrial structure and function. The central hypothesis is that mitochondria structure and function are sensitive to mechanical stimuli.

• Project Title: Pro-Regenerative Immunomodulatory Therapies to Repair Volumetric Muscle Injuries.

• Principal Investigators: Nick Willett (Emory) and Edward Botchwey (Tech)

• Synopsis: The researchers’ proposed research will investigate whether engineered immune modulatory nanofibers will enhance regenerative capacity in rodent models of volumetric muscle loss (VML).

• Project Title: Condyle Regenerative Medicine.

• Principal Investigators: Scott Hollister (Tech), Shelly Abramowicz and Steven Goudy (Emory)

• Synopsis: The researchers want to develop a patient specific, 3D printed biologic pedicled flap approach to temporomandibular joint (TMJ) reconstruction. Specifically, they’ll design and optimize a porous mandibular condyle scaffold, fabricate the condyle from polycaprolactone (PCL) using 3D printing laser sintering, adsorb bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2) to the scaffold and implant the scaffold in the temporalis muscle. After attaining vascularization and bone growth in the construct at 1 month, the locally pedicled tissue engineered flap will be surgically positioned to function as a mandibular condyle.

• Project Title: Skeletal Muscle Stem Cells are Novel Regulators of Collateral Blood Vessel Formation.

• Principal Investigators: Laura Hansen and Robert Taylor (Emory), and Young Jang (Tech)

• Synopsis: This project will determine if satellite cells are crucial to collateral vessel formation in a murine peripheral arterial disease (PAD) model as well as investigate if the positive effects of exercise therapy are dependent on satellite cells. The potential ability of satellite cells to restore blood flow through vascular growth and repair muscles damaged from ischemic myopathy makes them a promising and novel therapy for patients with PAD and critical limb ischemia.

The Coulter Foundation Translational Fund of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, provides annual awards to Emory and Georgia Tech research teams working on products with commercial potential that meet a significant unmet or underserved clinical need.

The projects are selected by an award committee composed of Emory doctors, Georgia Tech engineers, industry experts, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, angel investors and technology transfer experts from each school.

“The award of funds is just the beginning of the program for these teams,” said Shawna Khouri, managing director of the Coulter Translational Fund. “Over the next year, our teams will work together to push these technologies from academia and into start-ups and industry. This marriage of PI (principal investigator) clinical and technical acumen with the industry and start-up experience from my team makes the distinct difference in translational success.”

Of the 60 projects evaluated during the funding cycle, five emerged as this year’s winners:

Antiviral Peptide: a therapeutic peptide, originally harvested from frog secretions, has shown broad-spectrum antiviral activity, including evidence of efficacy against Zika, Dengue serotypes 1-4, and Influenza H1N1, H3N2, H1N2 and H3N1 viruses. Principal Investigator: Joshy Jacobs (Emory).

Biological Pacemaker: a heart pacing treatment for pediatric patients; this RNA and small molecule combination therapy converts cardiomyocytes into pacemaking cells, eliminating the need for an implantable heart-pacing device. Principal investigators: Hee Cheol Cho (Coulter Department at Emory and Georgia Tech/Petit Institute researcher), Jonathan Langberg (Emory), Phil Santangelo (Coulter Department at Emory and Georgia Tech/Petit Institute researcher).

Inhaled GeneRegs: an antisense technology consisting of a topical gold nanoparticle coated with specific deoxyribozymes (DNAzymes), which regulate and silence pro-inflammatory cytokines that cause severe asthma exacerbations. Principal investigators: Cherry Wongtrakool (Emory) and Khalid Salaita (Emory).

Nephrogenic Diabetes Insipidus: a new therapeutic that restores water balance in pediatric patients with nephrogenic diabetes insipidus (NDI), an x-linked genetic disorder that can lead to mental retardation as a result of dehydration. Principal investigators: Janet Klein (Emory) and Jeff Sands (Emory).

Periurethral Targeting Device: a device that will allow direct, controlled placement of bulking agents into the female urethra thereby increasing the efficacy of stress urinary incontinence treatment. Principal Investigators: Niall Galloway (Emory).

The translational research program has fiscal roots in the $25 million grant the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation made to the Georgia Tech-Emory biomedical engineering program in 2001. This gift resulted in the naming of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, while also targeting $10 million toward the ongoing support of translational research.

“The Coulter Translational Program is a jewel in our crown, providing an individualized training program with an enviable track record in guiding innovative research teams to conquer translation challenges to successfully commercialization”, said Susan Margulies, chair of the Coulter Department, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics.

Including the Georgia Tech-Emory department, there are 15 universities with similar translational research partnership programs supported by the Coulter Foundation, including Columbia, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford universities.

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich

Communications Manager

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

This alliance is celebrating 10 years of research advancement by expanding across the state through a five-year, $51 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Emory University-led Georgia CTSA will focus on transforming the quality and value of clinical research and translating research results into better outcomes for patients.

The Georgia CTSA unites the strengths of its academic partners: Emory University, Morehouse School of Medicine, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Georgia. Emory is a national leader in health care and biomedical research as well as an outstanding leader in clinical and translational research training and education. Morehouse School of Medicine is a nationally recognized historically black institution that brings ethnic diversity to biomedical research, addresses health disparities through successful community engagement research, and serves as a pipeline for training minority researchers. Georgia Tech is a national leader in biomedical engineering, bioinformatics  and the application of innovative systems engineering to health care solutions. The University of Georgia has a proven track record in outstanding basic and translational research and, as the state’s land grant institution, offers a robust statewide network that enhances community outreach, service and research.

“Continuing such an alliance and involving these leading state institutions is extremely important and in line with Georgia’s goals for the promotion of clinical and translational research, innovation and development,” said Georgia Governor Nathan Deal. “Having an active Clinical & Translational Science awardee in Georgia has brought our citizens cutting edge cures and the latest in clinical and translational research.”

Georgia CTSA is one of 64 Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) at major academic medical centers across the country, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Science, and it is the only CTSA in Georgia. The award will fund cores focused on improving quality, efficiency and collaboration of the research process; provide consultative support and new tools in informatics and biostatistics; pilot funding for new research projects, training and workforce development, while integrating special populations and focusing on participant interactions, and creating local centers tackling clinical trial inefficiencies.

The Georgia CTSA welcomes contact principal investigator (PI) at Emory, W. Robert Taylor, M.D., Ph.D., and a new multi-PI leadership structure: 

W. Robert Taylor, MD, PhD
Contact Principal Investigator, Georgia CTSA
Interim Chair, Department of Medicine
Director, Division of Cardiology
Marcus Chair in Vascular Medicine
Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering
Emory University School of Medicine

Elizabeth O. Ofili, MD, MPH
Principal Investigator, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia CTSA 
Professor of Medicine, Cardiology
Senior Associate Dean of Clinical and Translational Research
Director, Clinical Research Center 
Morehouse School of Medicine

Andrés J. García, PhD
Principal Investigator, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia CTSA 
Rae S. and Frank H. Neely Endowed Chair and Regents' Professor, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience
Director, Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program
Georgia Institute of Technology

Bradley G. Phillips, PharmD, BCPS, FCCP
Principal Investigator, University of Georgia, Georgia CTSA
Millikan-Reeve Professor and Head, Clinical & Administrative Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy 
Director, Clinical and Translational Research Unit (CTRU), Office of Research
University of Georgia

Henry M. Blumberg, MD
Principal Investigator, KL2 and TL1, Georgia CTSA
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, Division of Infectious Diseases
Emory University School of Medicine

"The Georgia CTSA creates a unique opportunity for synergy among historic partners in health care, education, and cutting edge research, and has emerged as an innovative and integrated environment where clinical and translational researchers can flourish," said Taylor. "The Georgia CTSA is a catalyst and incubator for clinical and translational research across the state, with impacts throughout the Southeast and nation."

The Georgia CTSA has improved health care and research for Georgia citizens through collaboration with the Grady Health System, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Atlanta VA Medical Center, Georgia Research Alliance, Georgia Bio, and multiple community medical groups throughout the state. 

"Georgia CTSA continues established, strong clinical and research partnerships by leveraging the infrastructure support of the NIH-funded Research Centers at Minority Institutions (RCMI) at Morehouse School of Medicine. We will continue to implement innovative patient centered and participatory care delivery models, toward the elimination of health disparities," said Ofili.

“Georgia CTSA’s innovative support of discovery and collaborative partnerships help to rapidly translate scientific discoveries and new technology, which positively impacts patient care in Georgia. This is an exciting story for the state,” said Garcia. “The new alliance is improving health care and clinical research for the citizens of Georgia and continues to create synergies that foster and accelerate new and emerging technologies and discoveries.”

“The addition of the University of Georgia provides the Georgia CTSA a statewide footprint to connect with every county in the state to address health and wellness needs, particularly in rural and underserved populations; opportunities for continued excellence in research by strengthening existing and expanding new research collaborations; and the ability to enrich interprofessional education to include students and trainees from pharmacy and other disciplines so that they can learn how to work together as a team to discover new approaches and treatments that improve health and patient care,” said Phillips. “As a new member of the Georgia CTSA, faculty and students across our campus will have unique support and infrastructure that builds upon current capabilities and increases our trajectory in fostering clinical and translational science in the state and beyond.” 

Written by Georgia Clinical & Translational Science Alliance.

For more information, please visit www.GeorgiaCTSA.org  

The researchers aim to identify metabolic features in head and neck cancers that are predictive of tumor response to a new chemotherapeutic drug, ß-lapachone, currently in clinical trial at the University of Texas-Southwestern (UTSW). Fellow leaders of the project are David Boothman, Ph.D., from the UTSW Medical Center and Cristina Furdui, Ph.D., from the Wake Forest School of Medicine.

Joshua Lewis, an Emory M.D./BME Bioinformatics Ph.D. student in Kemp’s lab, developed a genome-wide model of metabolism in head and neck cancer that explained why the cytotoxicity to ß-lapachone differed between radiation-sensitive and radiation-resistant cancer cells.

The research team identified new molecular targets for enhancing cell death with the drug—validating the results with a 332 gene RNAi screen. The modeling analysis suggests that the radiation-resistant cells rerouted metabolism and altered the enzymatic cycling of ß-lapachone, rendering them more susceptible to the chemotherapy.

“I’ve learned through this project how devastating head and neck cancer (HNC) is for patients, and the incidence of HNC is particularly high here in the Southeast compared to the rest of the US,” said Kemp, a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.

“There are very few FDA-approved drugs for HNC and the survival rate for the late-stage cancer patients we are examining has been relatively stagnant for the past three decades," Kemp added. “Our goals are to develop computational models that factor in patient-to-patient variability in HNC metabolism and use these tools to predict who will respond well to the new ß-lapachone therapies.”

Head and neck cancers include cancers of the larynx (voice box), throat, lips, mouth, nose, and salivary glands.

As part of the award, the researchers will join and participate in the NCI Cancer Systems Biology Consortium. The multidisciplinary Cancer Systems Biology Consortium, funded by the National Cancer Institute, aims to tackle the most perplexing issues in cancer to increase our understanding of tumor biology, treatment options, and patient outcomes.

Media Contact:

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

“This recognition of our continued excellence in creating and delivering a transformative undergraduate biomedical engineering education underscores the talent of our faculty, staff and students. Using innovative hands-on learning experiences inside the classroom and beyond, we prepare students to tackle the important problems in health and disease,” said Susan Margulies, chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “Our programs are training the pioneers of tomorrow for a diverse range of career paths—leveraging the strengths of our in-depth engineering and medical knowledge across Georgia Tech and the Emory School of Medicine.” 

Georgia Tech's undergraduate engineering program is tied for No. 4 in the country by U.S. News & World Report, continuing the placement of the College of Engineering among the elite stature in American engineering education.

“This is indeed a reflection of the strong and sustained efforts demonstrated by our engineering chairs, faculty, staff and students,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, incoming dean of engineering at Georgia Tech. “We continue to strive to provide the best engineering education possible, and create an environment where today’s students are developed as tomorrow’s thinkers, leaders, and creators. While rankings do not tell the whole story regarding a campus or program, they do demonstrate the commitment that each of the individual Schools have toward our students and to excellence in education and research.”

Program scores are based on surveys of deans and faculty members at other universities. The U.S. News rankings can carry heavy influence among current undergraduates, professors, prospective students, peer institutions and the media. 

The overall College of Engineering (CoE) ranking –  marks the fifth time CoE has grabbed this spot on the U.S. News chart, and it again ties the College with the California Institute of Technology's engineering program.

The Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering held on to its No. 1 ranking for the 23rd year in a row, while the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering earned its discipline’s top slot for the second time. A joint venture with Emory University, the Coulter Department was also ranked No. 1 in last year’s review.

All engineering specialties, but one, at Georgia Tech placed in the top 5 of their kinds, a unique distinction for a program as large as CoE’s. The College also had three number two programs in the country - aerospace engineering, civil engineering, and environmental engineering.

Media Contacts:

Walter Rich

Communications Manager

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

Sukhatme is currently Chief Academic Officer and Harvard Faculty Dean for Academic Programs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the Victor J. Aresty Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

"I am delighted to join President Sterk and Provost McBride in announcing this new appointment," says Lewin. "Dr. Sukhatme is a highly recognized and exceptional biomedical scientist, clinician, and teacher. I am confident that under his leadership, the medical school will continue its upward trajectory in reputation and impact and will further enhance the Woodruff Health Sciences Center's place as one of the world's premiere academic health centers."

Sukhatme's appointment is the culmination of a nearly year-long national search. He succeeds David S. Stephens, MD, who has served as interim dean and will continue his roles as vice president for research in Emory's Woodruff Health Sciences Center and as chair of the Department of Medicine in Emory University School of Medicine.

"Dr. Sukhatme's eclectic academic background as a basic science researcher, a clinician, and a translational scientist will be a major asset to the School of Medicine, the University at large, Emory Healthcare, and to the full array of diverse communities with which Emory interacts," said McBride. "We look forward with great excitement to the future of the School of Medicine under his stewardship."

"I am deeply honored to have been selected as the Dean of Emory University School of Medicine," Sukhatme says. "With a stellar leadership team, an extraordinary faculty, an outstanding cadre of staff, trainees and students, and distinguished alumni and supporters, Emory's future is bright. Now is the time to take on some of the most challenging problems in medicine and biology, and to tackle them through innovative, interdisciplinary approaches."

Sukhatme was born in India and raised in Rome, Italy. He completed a bachelor's degree and then a doctorate (ScD) in theoretical physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1979, he received an MD from Harvard Medical School in the Harvard-MIT program in Health Sciences and Technology. Following his residency in medicine and a clinical fellowship in nephrology at Massachusetts General Hospital, he spent two years at Stanford in immunology research.

His first faculty appointment was at the University of Chicago, where he was also appointed an assistant investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 1992 he moved to Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) as chief of the renal division in the Department of Medicine, and he subsequently received an appointment in the hematology-oncology division. He is also the founding chief of the Division of Interdisciplinary Medicine and Biotechnology at BIDMC. For eight years, he has been the Chief Academic Officer and Harvard Faculty Dean for Academic Programs at BIDMC.

Sukhatme's research spans numerous areas of medicine in both fundamental science and clinical care. He has over 200 scientific publications that have been cited more than 31,000 times. His longstanding interest in cancer currently centers around tumor metabolism and tumor immunology and on "outside-of-the-box" approaches for treating advanced cancer. He has conducted studies on genes important in kidney cancer and polycystic kidney disease.

Sukhatme's laboratory played a key role in the discovery of the cause of preeclampsia, a blood vessel disorder and a major cause of morbidity in pregnant women. His research also has provided insights into how blood vessels leak in patients with severe infections, and on how new vessels form to feed growing tumors. He has elucidated mechanisms by which statins can cause muscle damage.

Sukhatme is known to be equally passionate about teaching medicine and educating communities outside of medical school. He initiated a course to bring MD/PhD students up to speed as they returned to the clinic after their graduate studies, as well as a mini-medical school series for the general public, and one for industry scientists highlighting unsolved clinical problems. 

According to Alan Garber, provost of Harvard University and himself a physician, "Vikas is a superb researcher with remarkable breadth and sophistication, all in the service of improved human health. He has a deep, discerning intellect and is dedicated to the success of his colleagues and students. Emory is fortunate to have attracted him as dean."

Sukhatme also is an entrepreneur, having cofounded several biotechnology companies based on discoveries from his laboratory. Along with his wife, Vidula Sukhatme, he is co-founder of a not-for-profit organization, GlobalCures, to conduct clinical trials on promising therapies for cancer not being pursued for lack of profitability.

Contact

Holly Korschun
404-727-3990
hkorsch@emory.edu

Led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT) could help revolutionize the treatment of cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and other disorders by enabling broad use of potentially curative therapies that utilize living cells – such as immune cells and stem cells – as “drugs.” Examples of these highly promising therapies include T cell-based immunotherapies for blood cancers, such as the one developed at the University of Pennsylvania and approved in August by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, and a gene-modified stem cell therapy recently approved in Europe for a form of the so-called “bubble boy” syndrome.

To facilitate the widespread application of these cutting-edge emerging treatments, CMaT will develop robust and scalable technologies, innovative analytical tools, and engineering systems that will enable industry and clinical facilities to reproducibly manufacture efficient, safe and affordable cell-therapy products. The center, one of four ERCs announced September 12 by the NSF, will also develop improved models for a robust supply chain, storage and distribution system for these therapeutic cell products.

“For over 30 years, NSF Engineering Research Centers have promoted innovation, helped to maintain our competitive edge, and added billions of dollars to the U.S. economy,” said NSF Director France Córdova. “They bring together talented innovators and entrepreneurs with resources from academia, industry and government to produce engineers and engineering systems that solve real-world problems.  I am confident that these new ERCs will strengthen U.S. competitiveness for the next generation and continue our legacy of improving the quality of life for all Americans.”

In addition to the consistent manufacture of  cell-based therapies, the public-private CMaT initiative will also help develop a skilled, diverse and inclusive bio-manufacturing workforce through extensive education and training activities at the K-12, technical college, undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels.

Living cells become “drugs”

“Unlike pharmaceuticals and other products now used in medical treatments, cells are living entities whose properties can significantly change depending on nuances in the way they are grown, stored or otherwise manipulated,” said Krishnendu Roy, director of CMaT and the Robert A. Milton chair professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “The center will develop new engineering tools and scalable methods to better characterize, expand, differentiate, separate, transport and store high-quality cells so they provide consistent therapeutic effects, allowing them to be used in standardized therapies by clinicians to serve large numbers of patients worldwide.”

Beyond Georgia Tech, the center will include major partners – the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus – as well as affiliate partners such as the University of Pennsylvania, Emory University, the Gladstone Institutes and Michigan Technological University. Additional international academic partners, as well as industry and the U.S. national laboratories, will also be critical collaborators in the effort.

Moving discoveries into application

“Georgia Tech has a long history of building collaborative partnerships with industry, the national labs and other research universities. With the support of the NSF and this new ERC, we will be able to capitalize on expertise in multiple areas, taking transformative research from the laboratory to practice much more quickly,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. “The Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies will also help us educate, train and prepare the workforce in a new industry, thereby continuing to strengthen the U.S. economy.”

Clinical trials have already established the effectiveness of several cell-based therapies and many other trials are underway. But for these exciting therapies to advance into broad healthcare use, the cells will have to be produced in much larger quantities and with more consistent quality than is now available. There are also very few, if any, established industry standards for analytics and processes in cell manufacturing, which hinders consistent production of safe and efficacious cells. Another key limitation identified by industry is the need for a highly-trained workforce.

CMaT would address these barriers through transformative innovations that build upon a series of earlier efforts, including the National Cell Manufacturing Consortium (NCMC) roadmap, infrastructure established at Georgia Tech with support from the Marcus Foundation, quality and other standards programs from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and independent industry-led bodies, and translational activities by industry, entrepreneurs and other partners.

The NSF’s multidisciplinary engineering research centers address unique, complex engineering challenges by stimulating knowledge and tech transfer between different sectors, from electronics to energy to infrastructure. Each center takes on a specific engineering research challenge.

“The overall goal of the NSF Engineering Research Centers program is nothing less than to revolutionize engineering research and education in the United States,” said Dawn Tilbury, NSF assistant director for engineering. “We look forward to the exciting advances and outcomes in these important areas.”

Accelerating clinical trials

Beyond established cell-based therapies, the work of CMaT should accelerate the development of new therapies and the testing needed to bring them into the clinic, said Steven Stice, director of the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center (RBC). Regenerative medicine applications could offer new ways of treating diseases for which there are now essentially no treatments, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and stroke.

“There are a significant number of cell therapy clinical trials and investments in the field,” Stice said. “But there is little or no investment in a set of consistent standardization methods to optimize how these therapies should work. For instance, we know that cell therapies will improve human health, but right now it’s difficult to guarantee that each dose produced will be as potent as the next. The work done by CMaT researchers will help solve some of these problems.”

The University of Pennsylvania develops cellular therapies and has conducted more than 40 clinical trials of cell-based therapies, including those for engineered T cell therapies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. An example is recently-approved treatment for relapsed and refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia in pediatric and young adult patients.

“The cell and gene therapy fields are on the cusp of multiple regulatory approvals in the near term,” said Bruce Levine, Barbara and Edward Netter Professor in Cancer Gene Therapy in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “The challenges ahead lie in developing manufacturing and testing processes incorporating automation that can bring costs down and allow access to more patients.”

Developing broad-based innovations

Critical innovations often occur at the boundaries of disciplines, and CMaT will bring together relevant specialties for both research and workforce development, noted Madeline Torres-Lugo, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus.

“Due to the complexity of cells as living organisms, a team with a strong background in biology, chemistry, physics, materials science, and engineering is required for this initiative,” Torres-Lugo said. “Our participation and contribution to CMaT will ensure that Puerto Rico not only remains at the forefront of pharma manufacturing, but also supports cell manufacturing technologies here and around the world by educating highly talented engineering students.”

CMaT testbeds have been selected to address several cell types that are in early stages of clinical adoption or moving toward clinical applications, but it isn't yet clear what cell types will have the greatest therapeutic impacts, noted Sean Palecek, the Milton J. and A. Maude Shoemaker Professor in chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Therefore, one of the center’s challenges will be to ensure that fundamental discoveries, and tool and technology development efforts, will apply to multiple cell types.

“Our work will provide safer and more potent cell products that will allow clinical studies to establish the effectiveness of these cells as therapeutics,” Palecek said. “In addition, our work on scaling cell production will enable manufacturing of sufficient numbers of cells to replace damaged organs, such as the loss of heart muscle after a heart attack, at a cost that makes these therapies accessible to broad segments of society. We will also train the future leaders of the emerging therapeutic cell manufacturing industry. These students and their work establishing this industry will be the most significant impact of CMaT.”

New centers among 19 ERCs

Since the program’s inception in 1985, NSF has funded a total of 74 ERCs and will support 19 in this fiscal year, including four new centers. Each center receives NSF funding for up to 10 years. During this time, centers build partnerships with industry, universities and other government agencies that will sustain them for years to come.

In May, the National Academies published a report, “A new vision for center-based engineering research,” which was the result of an NSF-funded study to examine the future of the NSF ERC program.

The report identifies and recommends strategies to enable NSF multidisciplinary engineering research centers to continue addressing key research, education and innovation needs of the United States in a changing global context.

“ERCs are widely known as outstanding examples of successful partnerships between universities, private industry and government that have made significant contributions to address national challenges,” said Don Millard, acting division director for the NSF Division of Engineering Education and Centers. “We are continually working with the scientific and engineering communities, as well as private industry and government partners, to ensure NSF-funded centers and grantees are best-equipped to match societal needs with research abilities.”

Research News

Georgia Institute of Technology

177 North Avenue

Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Ben Brumfield (404-660-1408) (ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

Ethier, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Biomechanics and Mechanobiology, studies the biomechanics and mechanobiology of cells, tissues and organs, with the goal of understanding how cells respond to mechanical stimuli, and how this response in turn affects the function and properties of tissues and organs. His lab research focus areas are glaucoma, a common cause of blindness; and VIIP, a condition that affects astronaut health in long-duration space missions.

Fellow status is awarded to Society members who demonstrate exceptional achievements in the field of biomedical engineering, and a record of membership and participation in the Society.
 

This year's class includes 20 members who were nominated by their peers. 

“This year's class truly exemplifies what it means to be a BMES Fellow. In addition to conducting ground-breaking research, BMES Fellows are leaders in education, promoting diversity and supporting all fields of science.” said Lori Setton, BMES President.

BMES Fellows are invited to pursue leadership positions within the Society and work to improve the future of BMES. Fellows also play an integral role in supporting the field of biomedical engineering.

The Class of 2017 joins 124 other BMES Fellows who have been recognized for their outstanding work and leadership.

The Class of 2017 Fellows will be recognized during the BMES Annual Meeting held this October 11-14, in Phoenix.

The new research center at the Georgia Institute of Technology is partnering with Emory University, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Morehouse School of Medicine, and is led by Jaydev Desai, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (a joint department of Georgia Tech and Emory University). Desai is also the associate director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM) leading the medical robotics and human augmentation area, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.

Desai’s lab is a place where tiny technology is being used to foster big ideas, where small robots are being designed to carry out great tasks that would improve the lives of patients and the clinicians who treat them.

“We’re interested in making the little fingers at the tip of an elephant arm,” says Desai, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (a joint department of Georgia Tech and Emory University), associate director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM) leading the medical robotics and human augmentation area, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.

Those little fingers are kind of the reason Desai came to Atlanta last year from the University of Maryland. They’re part of the impetus that led to creation of the Georgia Center for Medical Robotics (GCMR), the multidisciplinary research initiative being launched at Georgia Tech.

“Really, this is a vision I’ve had for a very long time, to develop a center in the area of medical robotics,” explains Desai, founding director of the GCMR. “It’s one of the primary reasons I came to Georgia Tech.”

He was particularly lured by the prospect of collaborating with the Emory and Morehouse schools of medicine, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

“The question I ask myself is, ‘how can we make an impact in different areas of medical robotics,’ and the answer is, you bring together a combination of excellent engineering and top notch medicine,” says Desai, who has been pleasantly floored by the feedback and interest among clinicians like Josh Chern, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

“A surgeon’s ability to see and to physically manipulate tissues are two of the basic tenets of surgery,” says Chern. “I believe surgical robotics will be an important next step to improve the precision and accuracy of surgical manipulations.”

Using engineering principles to solve medical problems is a burgeoning field that will keep growing, offering patients more options, notes David Stephens, interim dean at the Emory School of Medicine.

“Traditional drug therapy and diagnostics will continue to develop and improve, but new technological applications and innovative approaches will be critical in improving outcomes and increasing efficiencies in health care delivery,” Stephens says.

Meanwhile, Desai’s lab is already working on robots that can take a surgeon like Chern outside his line of sight – machines that can be lowered into the brain and sweep side to side, or rotate 360 degrees, offering previously impossible vantage points.

Chern also points to trends in healthcare delivery that have “focused on efficiency, minimizing errors and waste, and minimizing patient discomfort, to name a few.” He and fellow GCMR stakeholders see the research center as a pathway to further improvements in the safety and quality of care.

“With a desire to curb health care costs but also provide improved care, the application of robotics for precision surgery and in rehabilitation is very promising,” notes Steve Cross, Georgia Tech Executive Vice President for Research. “Georgia Tech, with its large array of regional health care organizations and the industry base, make this the perfect place to do leading edge research, co-innovate with health care professionals, and accelerate translations of research into medical use.”

Team Approach

Desai has invited a wide-range of experts into the fold, and is thinking beyond robotics, strictly speaking. You may not be working on robots, but perhaps, for example, you’ve developed imaging processing technology that could be applied to one of these machines. The point is, Desai and his colleagues are encouraging the questions and the conversation, and identifying needs in the delivery of care – needs that change quickly.

“Healthcare is undergoing a time of rapid change in terms of human augmentation, automation, and quality control of diagnostic processes,” notes Carolyn Meltzer, GCMR advisory board member and associate dean for research at Emory University School of Medicine, where she chairs the Department of Radiology and Imaging Services.

One of the center’s distinguishing characteristics, Desai says, is its focus on pediatric as well as adult patients. He’s developing patient-specific devices, utilizing 3D printing technology to create tailor-made medical robots.

“We’re trying to develop very small, miniature technologies that are, by comparison, much smaller than existing devices in the marketplace,” says Desai.

In addition to building new bridges between multiple disciplines (with more than 40 faculty researchers already, all of them aimed toward developing better medical robotic devices), the center also helps the Coulter Department further its two-headed mission of creating academic as well as research opportunities.

Susan Margulies, chair of the Coulter Department, calls the GCMR, “an exciting, timely initiative in biomedical engineering at the intersection of engineering, computing sciences, medicine, and health that will offer educational, training, and research opportunities for faculty and students. The Coulter Department has a rich history of excellence in transformational research and in translating biomedical engineering research to improve quality of life, and the GCMR will be one of our signature programs.”

The development and growth of GCMR also helps solidify Atlanta’s reputation as a hub for medical robotics research. With a long-established culture of collaboration between different institutions, the city is a natural location for this kind of endeavor, according to Stephens, who points to some of the region’s proven benefits: the highly-ranked Coulter Department; an existing partnership between Tech, Emory, and the Morehouse School of Medicine in the NIH-funded Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute; Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta; and the Georgia Research Alliance.

“Atlanta’s well-established academic and health care partnerships will provide a strong foundation,” Stephens assures. “And the center will create even more opportunities for shared initiatives.”

Desai, who heads up the RoboMed lab in the Coulter Department, may be the first faculty member at Georgia Tech to be fully engaged in the area of surgical robots, but he doesn’t expect to be lonely. In fact, he’s already working on bringing the world to Atlanta, creating the International Symposium on Medical Robotics, which debuts next year.

Some of the world’s top researchers from academia and industry will come together March 1-3, 2018, at the historic Academy of Medicine, to exchange ideas and foster future developments in the field. And the symposium should also serve as a fitting grand-opening for Georgia Tech’s newest research center.

“We want the Georgia Center for Medical Robotics to become a sustainable central hub of research and thought leadership,” says Desai. “So we’re making ourselves visible to the outside world.”

LINKS:

Georgia Center for Medical Robotics

International Symposium for Medical Robotics

Robomed Lab

Creating the Next in Robotics

CONTACT:

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

It’s not every day that you get to work on the forefront of cutting edge technology. It’s not every day that you get to collaborate with brilliant, talented and innovative engineers that are just as invested in your future as you are. It’s not every day that you get the chance to transform healthcare as we know it – unless you work at Stryker.

Stryker Corporation has an exceptionally strong intern program that allows students to thrive well beyond limits they set for themselves. Want to get more exposure to a skill? Ask your manager. Want to get involved in more projects that interest you? Contact those team members.

There are so many opportunities to acquire technical skills, gain professional skills, and improve personal skills. This is a company that cares about developing not only their employees but also their interns.

All employees and interns go through a Gallup StrengthsFinder exercise upon arrival that provides their top five strengths and gives a detailed leadership report of what those entail. Walking around the office, almost every employee has their own strengths pinned up on their desk. It’s a Stryker must.

Stryker’s mission statement says it all: “Together with our customers we are driven to make healthcare better.” The projects that interns work on align with these goals. They are significant, meaningful, impactful, and yes, sometimes quite challenging.

The best part about it is that anyone and everyone is ready to help and truly want you to succeed. I had a great time on my project and got lots of exposure to processes such as design, development, and testing. It’s comforting to see that what I learned in college can be applied to deliver results.

Interns don’t go unnoticed, either. From events like Intern Appreciation Day (filled with fun, games, and even a gelato food truck) to an intern-exclusive talk held with the CEO, Stryker does an excellent job integrating interns into the work environment. When the office hosted “Diversity Day,” an event celebrating different cultures and foods, everyone – including interns – got to make signature dishes, bring decorations, and dress up in their cultural attire.

From town hall sessions to events celebrating Stryker’s success, interns are part of a collective impact – like a family. I’m so lucky that I got to spend my summer at a company that is not only “driven to make healthcare better,” but that is making a difference.

Manasi Deshpande is an undergraduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering who spent the summer as an intern with medical device manufacturer Stryker Corporation. To read her original blog post on the Stryker Interns web site, click here.

“The MBID program filled all the knowledge gaps I didn't realize I had in the medical device lifecycle,” said Samir Jain, one of the students in this year’s graduating class. “Not only was it crucial to get a strong familiarity with the vernacular and nuances of the [medical device] industry, but also how to go through the components and requirements of a medical device lifecycle with an interdisciplinary team tasked with completing a year-long design project.”

At the end of July, five student teams wrapped up their final MBID projects with in-depth presentations to clinicians, faculty, industry leaders, and fellow students. Sathya Gourisankar, MBID program director, presided over the two-hour event and solicited challenging questions from the crowd.

“The MBID curriculum and training are founded on the twin pillars of real world exposure and start-up industry experience,” said Gourisankar. “This kind of focus has enabled the program to be very well accepted by the medical device industry, resulting in repeat hiring and requests for candidates from industry leaders such as J&J, Medtronic, Cook Medical, Facett and others.”

Before graduating, students must present the results of their bench to bedside product development efforts on medical devices. Project team therapeutic areas encompassed urology, spinal disc replacement, respiratory assistance, intensive care, and vascular surgery.

In all, five teams of students gave their project summaries as noted below:

* AbTeks: team members are Kali Chiapetta, Ossman Cossio, Brandon Graham, Samir Jain, and Anqi Tong. Clinical mentor: Pravin Reddy, M.D. The team developed Polar Compass, a cervical disc replacement device to treat cervical radicular pain at a lower cost than the gold standard along with strengthened durability and an innovative stabilization system. The Polar Compass utilizes readily available industrial magnets to restore and maintain disc height between cervical vertebrae five years longer than competitive devices while aiming to improve patient pain relief and quality of life. AbTeks is working with orthopaedic surgeons in Atlanta to streamline the usage of the device and reduce the burden of high reoperation rates of current procedures on the healthcare system.

* Adscensio: team members are Sahil Bellare, Elizabeth Coyle, Thomas Gallerani, Nicole Gervasi, Aaron Katz, and Filip Popovic. Clinical mentors: Lekshmi Kumar, M.D. and Samuel Shartar. The team developed G-Flex, a non-invasive ventilation device, to be used in the EMS setting as well as the hospital setting. In an ambulance, there are two people—one person driving and one person in the back. Devices on the market now are very difficult to use with one person and often lead to ventilation failure and resorting to invasive ventilation which has a high failure rate in the ambulance. G-Flex tackles the problem of a faulty seal around the airway leading to ventilation failure. G-Flex fixes this problem by replacing the thick non-elastic bladder with a thin but durable elastic bladder filled with IP-protected gel. This allows the bladder to spread across the face and better adapt to various facial structures and features. An additional feature is that the body of the device has a more ergonomic design for people with smaller hands to prevent ventilation failure from occurring due to lack of grip on the device. This device improves patient outcomes, saves time, money, and results in fewer patient complications.

* Grady Bunch: team members are Dan Bonistalli, Pranav Challa, Emily Macmillan, Koushal Patel, Houston Rhodes, Swetha Surianarayanan. Clinical sponsors: Spencer Kozinn, M.D.; Raymond Park, M.D., and Jaimie Wong, M.D. The Grady Bunch team developed Urolink which is a device that has been developed for use in prostate cancer cases requiring radical prostatectomies. The device allows for a more efficient method in the anastomosis between the bladder and the urethra after the removal of the prostate. This cuts down on procedural time reducing costs (or time), and allows for better outcomes with less complications.

* Macer Medical: team members are Rosalee Celis, Emily Churchwell, Alan Komisarcik, Roshni Malik, Megha Mathur. Clinical mentor: Gautam Kumar, M.D. It is estimated that 30 percent of patients undergoing an angiogram are diagnosed with chronic total occlusion (CTO) which is defined as a near-100% blocking of the coronary arteries. The current gold standard to treat CTO is through a coronary artery bypass graft which is a very invasive and costly surgery. Alternatively, patients may elect to treat CTO through a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) since this procedure is minimally invasive, cheaper, and requires less recovery time. However, the current PCI success rate to treat CTO is at 60 percent. Procedures typically fail because the physician can’t penetrate the proximal lesion cap to clear the blockage. The team proposed a technology to treat CTO via PCI known as Spyra. Their Spyra technology utilizes an electromagnetic probe inserted through the antegrade pathway. A guidewire inserted through the retrograde pathway is utilized to penetrate the distal lesion cap. Once the retrograde guidewire is at close proximity to the proximal cap, the electromagnetic probe which is part of the Spyra system is switched on to attract the guidewire with an additional magnetic “pull” force and helps to bring the guidewire successfully through the proximal cap. Afterwards, a stent can be deployed via balloon angioplasty.

* MEDLife Technologies: team members are Eric Beckelhymer, Felicia Canipe, Shima Habibollahzadeh, Josh Liebowitz, Saumitra Sinha Ray, and Christopher Silva. Clinical mentor: Prem Kandiah, M.D. The MEDLife Technologies team developed a technology, the Natria System, capable of improving sodium monitoring for neurocritical care patients. Current problems with the gold standard are mislabeling and lost samples, long lead times to read the samples, and over/under correction resulting in adverse events. This team identified a need to improve sodium monitoring by allowing the measurements to be performed in a patient’s room, at the bedside, via an ion specific sensor. The Natria System will reduce ICU admissions, prevent secondary brain injuries, reduce blood transfusions, reduce length of stay and decrease nurse workload. Upon adopting the Natria System, hospitals could increase their margins and prevent negative revenues since Natria can prevent secondary injuries from occurring. Currently, MedLife Technologies is trying to establish commercial potential through a health economics study which will also publicize their device in the arterial line space. 

“As a student in the MBID program, I learned to connect the dots [in the biomedical device industry],” said Houston Rhodes, another student in this year’s graduating class. “Throughout the program, my vision for innovating medical devices to meet clinical needs was coupled with new knowledge on how to take concepts from ideation to commercialization. I learned high level information about the industry that I couldn't have gotten anywhere else.”

Josh Leibowitz achieved a rare honor following his recent graduation from MBID—he is one of only six master level engineers in the country accepted into the highly acclaimed and competitive Johnson & Johnson R&D Leadership Development Program in the company’s medical device division.

“It is my goal to be the CEO of a medical device company, but I wanted to acquire a fundamental knowledge of the medical device industry from concept to commercialization,” says Liebowitz. “I knew that if I wanted to lead a medical device project or company, the MBID cross-functional exposure would be very helpful. I was drawn by [the Coulter Department’s] reputation as the best biomedical engineering program in the country and its intimate partnership with Emory. I really enjoyed the clinical exposure, observing surgeries, and interacting with healthcare professionals.”

Another MBID graduate of this year’s class, Elizabeth Coyle, was recently among six Georgia Tech students, and only 10 nationally, selected to participate in the first Polish President Internship (May 24-June 4, 2017). The students spent 10 days traveling through Poland, visiting political and cultural sites in some of its greatest cities, as well as meeting with the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda. “From learning about R&D prototyping methods to learning about quality, regulatory, marketing, and business strategy, everything we learned is extremely applicable to the medical device industry,” says Coyle, who is from Cleveland, Tennessee. “I always tell people that I learned more in this one year of my graduate studies than I did in all four years of undergrad.”

Graduation photos.

Media Contacts:
Walter Rich

Communications Manager

Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

“Actually, my four weeks here have had a huge impact,” says Martin, one of three cadets from the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point to take part in a summer REU (research experience for undergrads) program in the lab of Manu Platt, a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.

“Before, I wasn’t really considering medical school,” says Martin, a rising sophomore from Connecticut majoring in chemistry, who envisions a career in clinical research. “This experience in Dr. Platt’s lab has convinced me: I do want to pursue being a neurologist, and I love the research aspect.”

All three of the West Point cadets – Martin, Jacob Klamm, Dan Whitfield – in Platt’s lab plan on going to medical school eventually. They’ll have their work cut out for them, because the USMA’s medical school program is very competitive – only 10 to 20 members of each class may proceed directly to medical school following graduation. But Platt isn’t going to bet against them.

“These are disciplined, motivated students, and I’m thinking how great it would be to have them here for grad school when the time comes,” says Platt, director of diversity for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center on Emergent Behavior of Integrated Cellular Systems (EBICS) at Georgia Tech, which facilitated the students’ summer REU experience (as part of Tech’s larger initiative, SURE, for Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering/Sciences).

EBICS aims to create a scientific discipline for building living multi-cellular machines to address problems in health, security, and the environment. To get there, the program relies on integrated research and education efforts, human resource development, diversity and outreach programs, and knowledge transfer activities.

In addition to Georgia Tech, participating institutions include Morehouse College and the University of Georgia, in addition to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, City College of New York, Morehouse College, University of California-Merced, Boston University, Gladstone Institutes, Princeton University, and Tufts University.

The USMA cadets, who completed their stint at Georgia Tech last week, were sold on the research experience during a visit by Platt to the military academy earlier this year.

“A friend of mine – we were postdocs together – is a professor at West Point, and he invited me to give a talk there,” says Platt, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “These students have a limited time frame, only a month. But they are amazing students. Going forward, I’d like to grow that pipeline.”

Whitfield, a rising junior majoring in life sciences, had previous research experience at West Point, but wanted a summer program to develop skills and methods for his own research.

“At West Point, we’re doing work on Acinetobacter baumannii, a multi-drug resistant bacteria causing a lot of trouble for soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Whitfield, who is from Eagle, Idaho.

Klamm, from Enid, Oklahoma, is a rising senior life sciences major who says he’d always been more clinically oriented, but gained a greater appreciation for research while working in Platt’s lab, where the mission is to fuse engineering, cell biology, and physiology to understand how cells sense, respond, and remodel their mechanical and biochemical environments for repair and regeneration in health and disease – and then to translate the results to address global health disparities.

“This was my first real research experience,” Klamm says. “I wasn’t sure what to expect, or how I’d feel about spending eight or nine hours a day in a lab. But it was really cool. I enjoyed it, and I’m definitely more open now to the idea of doing research.”

When transplant recipients see their doctors, they undergo tests to check whether their immune system is damaging their new organs. These are usually blood tests that check for kidney or liver function, at least to begin with. But to diagnose immune rejection, a biopsy is required.

Andrew Adams, MD, PhD, assistant professor of surgery at Emory University School of Medicine, and Phil Santangelo, PhD, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, are proposing to use PET (positron emission tomography) instead.

PET is already used to diagnose heart disease and monitor cancer. Using a variant called "immunoPET," the researchers can see particular types of immune cells infiltrating the transplanted organ. The grant is for work with mice and non-human primates, but Adams envisions benefits for transplant medicine: earlier detection of rejection and reduction of risk associated with biopsies.

"Patients often require multiple biopsies to assess response to treatment, thus putting them at risk of complications each time they undergo a separate procedure," Adams says. "In addition, a biopsy only samples a small part of the transplanted organ."

Santangelo, in collaboration with Tab Ansari, PhD at Emory, Francois Villinger, DVM/PhD at the Univerity of Louisiana at Lafayette and researchers from the NIH, has used a similar approach to study the persistence of SIV infection in non-human primates, which could guide efforts to suppress HIV infection for long periods without antiretroviral drugs. The research also builds upon work by Adams on improved post-transplant drug regimens.

"ImmunoPET clearly has the potential to characterize immune cell dynamics in the face of allograft rejection.  This work could also open the door to the use of PET in fields such as cancer immunotherapy," Santangelo says.

Written by Quinn Eastman, Emory University

In the announcement, Gary May, former dean of Tech’s College of Engineering, said, “Susan has the vision, scholarship, and experience in fields critical to the department that make her ideally suited and prepared to lead.” David Stephens, interim dean, Emory University School of Medicine and vice president for research, Woodruff Health Sciences Center, added, “throughout her career, she has distinguished herself as an educator, scientist, mentor, and a national and international leader in the biomedical sciences.”

Before her official start date of August 1, we sat down with Margulies to ask a few questions and learn more about her view of the Georgia Tech and Emory biomedical engineering collaboration.

What attracted you to the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory?
I was particularly attracted to the Coulter Department because it’s a top ranked biomedical engineering department, embedded in both a school of medicine and a college of engineering, that consists of a community of engaged faculty, staff, students, trainees, and alumni who are all passionate about continuing to set an even higher bar for impactful research and education. This is a truly unique department, and I am thrilled to lead the next phase of our journey together.

Based on your extensive interactions with leaders and faculty during the hiring process, have you outlined some initial tasks or priorities?
My goals are to increase the impact, engagement, and the community aspects of this department. Already in two schools, I consider it a high priority to increase opportunities to form and strengthen bridges. I’ll give you some examples. It’s important to increase our partnerships with industry, government, foundations, and alumni to expand our translation of basic science and engineering discoveries to understand disease and improve healthcare. A second type of bridge is to expand our interdisciplinary research and education with partnerships with other entities at Emory and Georgia Tech—and I look forward to those collaborations. A third bridge is to increase opportunities to translate engineering discoveries to biomedical applications. These startup opportunities can originate from our undergraduates, master’s students, doctoral students, trainees, and faculty. 

How would you describe your leadership style? 
I would describe my leadership style as collaborative, inclusive, and I appreciate the importance of shared governance. I look forward to involving students, faculty, and staff in the future directions of the department. I value the perspectives others bring to the table.

What led you to pursue a career in biomedical engineering?
Growing up in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, I was always interested in applying math and science to improve human health and understand disease. As an undergrad, I was a mechanical and aerospace major, but all of my research projects and summer research experiences were in the area of biomedical engineering. I’ve had a long commitment to using math, science, and engineering to understand and detect diseases, and develop treatments to improve health.

What plans do you have for your research and where will your lab be located? 
My research in head injury will continue to focus on how and why head injuries occur in adults and children and to improve detection and treatment strategies. At Georgia Tech, I will be continuing that research, looking at innovative biomarkers and new devices to detect mild traumatic brain injuries. At Emory, my research will be focused on animal models for diffuse as well as focal brain injuries—incorporating developments at Georgia Tech into our preclinical model. I also look forward to close collaborations with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University faculty to improve the outcomes after traumatic brain injuries.  

What are your thoughts about the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) and its benefit to Georgia?
The GRA is focused on the translation of research to new enterprises in Georgia. My conversations with the GRA have linked me with other universities in Georgia and with leaders in industry and translation training. The GRA has opened doors in a very tangible way. Even before my arrival on campus, I am developing research collaborations throughout Georgia!

What are your hopes for the future of the department and its national leadership role in biomedical engineering education, research, and translation into patient care?
My hope for the future of the Coulter Department at Georgia Tech and Emory is that we are the pacesetter when it comes to training the pioneers of tomorrow in the discovery of new BME knowledge and its translation to practice proactive and innovative educational methods. My hope is that we accelerate our research discoveries to improve the lives of others.

Anything else you would like to share?
I want to communicate that my doors are open. I welcome students, faculty, staff, and alumni to visit me during my weekly office hours. I look forward to developing a deeper engagement with the BME community, and together, developing strategic initiatives that enhance our impact, engagement, and community.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SUSAN S. MARGULIES
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Ph.D. Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania
M.S.E. Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania
B.S.E. Mechanical Engineering & Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University

Major Research Interests: Biomechanics of brain injury, pediatric head injury, soft tissue mechanics, ventilator-induced lung injury, lung mechanics, pathways of cellular mechanotransduction, and tissue injury thresholds.

Honors and Awards:  ALA Young Investigator Award, Whitaker Foundation Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, Stapp Car Crash Conference Award, S. Reid Warren Award for Distinguished Teaching, Ford Motor Company Award for Faculty Advising, American Society of Mechanical Engineering Award, Association of Women in Science Elizabeth Bingham Award for the Advancement of Women in Science, Fellow - American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Fellow - American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Fellow - Biomedical Engineering Society.

Hobbies: Cooking with family and friends, gardening, traveling, and my morning walks in Piedmont Park.
 

Genetic therapies, such as those made from DNA or RNA, are difficult to deliver into the right cells in the body. For the past 20 years, scientists have been developing nanoparticles made from a broad range of materials and adding compounds such as cholesterol to help carry these therapeutic agents into cells. But the nano­particle carriers must undergo time-consuming testing — first in cell culture, then in animals. With millions of possible formulas, identifying the optimal nanoparticle to target each organ has been challenging.

Using DNA strands just 58 nucleotides long, researchers from Georgia Tech, the University of Florida, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new evaluation technique that skips the cell culture testing altogether — and could allow hundreds of different types of nanoparticles to be tested simultaneously in just a handful of animals.

Read the entire story in Research Horizons.

The research, entitled “Machine Learning Approach to Breast Cancer Localization,” was authored by Park, in the third year of his Ph.D. studies, and Desai, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

“In this paper, a feasible way of breast cancer localization at the micro-scale using tissue indentation and machine learning is presented,” explains Park, whose hometown is Daejeon, South Korea, where he completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. “This approach consists of two main parts, namely, obtaining mechanical signatures of breast tissue through micro-indentation and applying machine learning algorithms to the experimental data for cancer diagnosis.”

The worldwide prevalence of breast cancer was the main inspiration behind Park’s research.

“Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women and early diagnosis is a key factor for increasing survival rates and improving patients’ quality of life,” he says.

In Desai’s lab, researchers have found several biomarkers of breast cancer, “such as mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties of breast tissue,” says Park.

“We have been inspired machine learning, which is a powerful tool for data analysis and classification to utilize those biomarkers more effectively in breast cancer diagnosis,” he adds. “We are now moving forward to automate the breast cancer diagnostic process by combining micro-scale characterization with machine learning.”

“It is my goal to be the CEO of a medical device company,” says Liebowitz, who earned an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and technology innovation (Boston University). “But I wanted to acquire a fundamental knowledge of the medical device industry from concept to commercialization.”

And that led him to Atlanta and the Master of Biomedical Innovation and Development program, or BioID, offered through the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

The program is designed to address a gap in current professional biomedical education – the bench-to-bedside progression that transforms research into practical, usable techniques and products for improving patient care.

BioID is an intensive one-year ride, exposing students to clinical practice, engineering design and development, best-practices manufacturing, financial planning, and commercialization – bringing together the strengths of a top-ranked engineering university (Tech) and leading medical school (Emory) with the expertise of guest lecturers from throughout the diverse healthcare industry.

“I knew that if I wanted to lead a medical device project or company, the BioID cross-functional exposure would be very helpful,” says Liebowitz, a 2017 BioID graduate. “I was drawn by [the Coulter Department’s] reputation as the best biomedical engineering program in the country and its intimate partnership with Emory. I really enjoyed the clinical exposure – observing surgeries and interacting with healthcare professionals.”

Following graduation, Liebowitz begins his career as part of the Johnson & Johnson R&D Leadership Development Program. For the next two years, he’ll work in the company’s medical device division, one of only six master level engineers in the country accepted into the competitive program.

So, it’s a rare honor and opportunity, but not the only one accorded to this year’s class of diverse BioID graduates. Recently, Elizabeth Coyle was among six Georgia Tech students, and only 10 nationally, selected to participate in the first Polish President Internship (May 24-June 4, 2017). The students spent 10 days traveling through Poland, visiting political and cultural sites in some of its greatest cities, as well as meeting with the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda.

Coyle was the only Georgia Tech student from the College of Engineering to win an internship. She graduated from the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.) with a degree in biomedical engineering.

But after the past year in Atlanta, Coyle says she has more confidence, and hopes to parlay the wide-ranging skills gained through the BioID graduate program into a career in the medical device industry (she’s currently interviewing for positions with some of the corporate giants, including St. Jude/Abbot, Medtronic, and Boston Scientific).

“From learning about R&D prototyping methods to learning about quality, regulatory, marketing, and business strategy, everything we learned is extremely applicable to the medical device industry,” says Coyle, who is from Cleveland, Tennessee. “I always tell people that I learned more in this one year of my graduate studies than I did in all four years of undergrad.”

BioID Program

CONTACT:

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

But LDLs also help serve a number of beneficial and necessary roles, including synthesizing Vitamin D in the skin from sunlight exposure, and aiding in the communication of neurons. The main function of LDLs involves the transportation of cholesterol from the liver to other tissues, to facilitate the formation of cell membranes.

These mobile little particles also taxi triglycerides, phospholipids, antioxidants, fat soluble vitamins, and proteins. And LDLs, which home-in on LDL receptors in cells, may be the perfect vehicle for another, potentially life-saving payload: In a number of studies, they’ve shown promise as nanocarriers for the precision deployment of cancer drugs.

“Since most normal cells do not express as many LDL receptors as tumor cells do, LDLs can be considered a good candidate for targeted drug delivery,” notes Chunlei Zhu, the lead author of a recently-published research paper in Angewandte Chemie (a peer-reviewed journal of the German Chemical Society).

Zhu was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Younan Xia, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience who supervised the research and co-authored the paper, “Reconstitution of Low-Density Lipoproteins with Fatty Acids for the Targeted Delivery of Drugs into Cancer Cells.”

While this isn’t the first study to demonstrate the potential of reconstituted LDLs for targeted drug delivery, the contribution from Xia’s lab lies in the development of a new class of promising biomaterials in the form of naturally occurring fatty acids, which enable drug loading and release.

One way to introduce a therapeutic payload is encapsulation in the hydrophobic core of LDLs, which seems well-suited to drug delivery because of the simple procedure and relatively large loading capacity. Basically, it’s like redesigning and rebuilding the interior of a custom delivery van for better performance, at the molecular level.

The conventional encapsulation process involves use of a nonpolar organic solvent (heptane) to extract the hydrophobic lipids from the core, which is then refilled with a mixture of cholesterol esters and drugs, or cholesterol-drug conjugates.

“However, the presence of excess cholesterol in the bloodstream greatly increases the risk of forming atherosclerosis plaques in the aortic vasculature,” notes Zhu, who has returned to China to take a university faculty position.

In the study from Xia’s lab, researchers replaced the endogenous core lipids with a mixture of lauric and stearic acids, which serve as a matrix for drug loading, and provide several advantages: First, they’re naturally occurring biomolecules, so they serve as biocompatible and biodegradable hydrophobic environment for hydrophobic drugs. Fatty acids also are an important fuel source that may enable metabolism-triggered drug release. They can protect the drug payloads from hydrolysis. And there’s an added bonus: lauric acid has a favorable effect on the increase of “good cholesterol” (high-density lipoprotein, or HDL), and stearic acid enables the decrease of “bad cholesterol,” or LDL, in the bloodstream.

“As such,” the authors write, “these naturally occurring compounds can be considered safe materials for the substitution of cholesterol ester in LDL reconstitution.”

In addition to Zhu and Xia, contributing authors include Petit Institute researcher Krish Roy (professor in the Coulter Department and director of the Marcus Center for Cell-Therapy Characterization and Manufacturing), Pallab Pradhan (research scientist in Roy’s lab), Da Huo and Jiajia Xue (postdoctoral fellows in Xia’s lab), and Song Shen (associate professor at Jiangsu University in China and a visiting scholar in Xia’s lab).

Among people who make it to age 85, some 50 percent will have Alzheimer’s, which afflicts slightly more women than men. Consequently, most everyone knows someone who is suffering or has died from the disease.

Late last year, U.S. research on Alzheimer’s received a significant boost in funding. And recently — aided by new tools — scientists, doctors, and engineers around the world have been making fascinating inroads, including at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which collaborates with Emory University’s highly regarded Alzheimer’s research center.

Some of their insights include: Alzheimer’s may work much like mad cow disease. It also may have aspects of inflammatory disease. And a special light has caused immune cells in the brains of mice to clean up bad proteins that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s.

Read the whole story and watch the video from Research Horizons here.

The spring-loaded stairs compress when someone comes down the stairs, saving energy otherwise dissipated through impact and braking forces at the ankle by 26 percent. When going up, the stairs give people a boost by releasing the stored energy, making it 37 percent easier on the knee than using conventional stairs. The low-power device can be placed on existing staircases and doesn’t have to be permanently installed.

Each stair is tethered by springs and equipped with pressure sensors. When a person walks downstairs, each step slowly sinks until it locks into place and is level with the next step, storing energy generated by the user. It stays that way until someone walks upstairs. When a person ascending the stairs steps on the sensor on the next tread up, the latch on the lower step releases. The stored energy in the spring is also released, lifting up the back leg.

The paper is currently published in the journal Public Library of Science PLOS ONE. The authors say the initial idea was to use energy-recycling prosthetic shoes to help people going up stairs.

“Unlike normal walking where each heel-strike dissipates energy that can be potentially restored, stair ascent is actually very energy efficient; most energy you put in goes into potential energy to lift you up,” said Karen Liu, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. “But then I realized that going downstairs is quite wasteful. You dissipate energy to stop yourself from falling, and I thought it would be great if we could store the energy wasted during descent and return it to the user during ascent.”

Liu is a co-author of the paper with colleague Lena Ting, a professor of biomedical engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech.

Walking down stairs is like tapping the breaks of your car while revving the engine," said Ting. "Your legs use a lot of energy bracing each steop to avoid falling too fast. Our stairs store that energy rather than wasting it."

The researchers didn’t expect, prior to designing the device, that the stairs would actually ease the impact of going downstairs.

“The spring in the stairs, instead of the ankle, acts as a cushion and brake,” said Yun Seong Song, who built the device as a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech. He’s currently an assistant professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “The gentle downward movement alleviates work by the trailing ankle, which is what keeps you balanced and prevents you from falling too fast on normal stairs.”

Liu initially got the idea for the project when she attended a conference and saw an ankle brace that stored and released energy. Her 72-year-old mother has no problems walking but has difficulty climbing steps, and Liu knew she wouldn’t wear special sneakers just for stairs. So she decided to make smart stairs that act like the shoe.

“Current solutions for people who need help aren’t very affordable. Elevators and stair-lifts are often impractical to install at home,” Liu said. “Low-cost, easily installed assistive stairs could be a way to allow people to retain their ability to use stairs and not move out of their homes.”

“Maintaining mobility is very much a use-it-or-lose-it thing. It’s important to keep people walking and independent through injury and aging to maximize quality of life,” said Ting.

The researchers think the temporary stairs could also be helpful for those recovering from surgery or pregnant women — people who only need help for short periods of time and don’t need to permanently alter their homes.

The researchers are looking for partners to extend the project, which currently runs on a staircase with only two steps and can be used by just one person at a time. It was supported by the National Science Foundation (EFRI-1137229).

The paper, "Stair negotiation made easier using novel interactive energy-recycling assistive stairs," was published on July 12.

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Since the new degree program was approved by the Board of Regents on Valentine’s Day 2017, nearly 200 students clamored to sign on.

This enthusiastic response was surprising — but then again, not, says Tim Cope, chair of the Undergraduate Neuroscience Curriculum Committee and professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

“Hardly a day goes by that there’s not something in the news — a health concern or a recent breakthrough or societal challenge — that doesn’t involve neuroscience,” he says. “It’s a growing field with so many opportunities, and it’s inspired a lot of interest from our students.”

One of them is Yeseul Heo.

“I got really excited when I learned about the new major,” the rising second-year student says. “I think I was one of the first to turn in my paper to switch.”

Heo’s original major was psychology — and she is keeping that as a minor, along with a double major in international affairs — but she sees neuroscience as a way to put her studies on a more quantitative footing.

“Along with psychology, I wanted to focus more on hard research, specifically on brain activity, and working with quantitative data,” she says.

Heo has gotten a taste of neuroscience already as a student assistant in the lab of Associate Professor of Psychology Eric Schumacher, whose research uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other experimental techniques to investigate the neural mechanisms for vision, attention, memory, learning, and cognitive control.

A Research Community

Schumacher is one of more than 50 faculty members from disciplines across Georgia Tech who are involved in neuroscience research — and have been for years. But however collaborative, widespread, and even world-renowned these neuroscience efforts have been, what they have lacked, Cope suggests, is “community.”

He and many others anticipate this new undergraduate degree will build that necessary component, for both faculty and students. “It’s a very important, symbolic event in the development of neuroscience on this campus,” he says.

Neuroscience is “the perfect incarnation of an interdisciplinary subject,” says College of Sciences Dean and Sutherland Chair Paul M. Goldbart. 

“It’s also a subject of deep intellectual interest. Who couldn't be curious about how the brain and nervous systems work at the most basic level?”

Goldbart “couldn’t be more excited” about the new degree, because “It opens up a marvelous new channel to a wide variety of career paths and will make Georgia Tech even more appealing to prospective undergraduates in the sciences.”

“I am grateful to everyone who worked so hard to create a program that defines 21^st-century neuroscience education for a 21^st-century technological research university.” 

NeuroX Factor

Getting from neuroscience activity to neuroscience community at Georgia Tech has been something of a journey, starting with the formation of a “NeuroX” committee back in 2014 and ending with Board of Regents approval for the new undergraduate degree in February 2017.

To reach this place, certain boxes had to be checked. It was not enough that faculty were engaged in neuroscience and students wanted it, although that was clearly the case.

Every time the Institute offered a neuroscience course, it maxed out, and professors were constantly asked if there would be more courses, or if they could open up another section.

Still, Cope points out, “It’s a legitimate thing for the administration to think about these things exceedingly carefully. No university can be everything — there’s a limit to resources and we have to be strategic with our planning.”

Basically, the key questions were: Is there a demand for this major from employers? Is there a demand for this degree from students? How would a neuroscience degree program advance Georgia Tech’s strategic plan? And would the program be redundant within the University System of Georgia?

This last question sent Cope over to Georgia State University — the only other USG school with an undergraduate neuroscience degree — to meet with the leadership of their Neuroscience Institute.

“I said, ‘Here’s what we’re planning to do,’” Cope recalls.

“They said, ‘Oh, this is fantastic, with Georgia Tech’s traditions and resources, you bring something unique to the table,’ and they wrote a letter for me right on the spot — they endorsed our plan 100 percent.”

'Kind of Pulsing'

While every neuroscience program has its “multiplication tables,” as Cope terms them — certain facts every neuroscientist has to know — the bigger challenge is, where do students take it from there?

Heo eventually wants to take her neuroscience focus into the study of first impressions. “You develop this first impression within two seconds in your brain, and you don’t control that, ever,” she says.

“So, I want to figure what’s the reason behind it, and if we learn the reason, is there a way to, not eliminate it, but maybe try to understand each other better, avoid racism and discrimination, and bring about more peace.”

As a neuroscience undergraduate, Heo will learn what Cope calls “the three flavors of neuroscience” — cell and molecular, behavioral, and systems.

Beyond these basics, Heo can branch out into one of 10 different specializations — biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, health and medical, physics, physiology, or psychology.

In her case, completing the psychology specialization will qualify her for a minor in that field.

Students are coming into the program from disciplines all over campus, and all these areas can and do intersect with neuroscience, notes Cope. “To have a degree in neuroscience means you have to be conversant in wide-ranging concepts,” he says.

“In my mind’s eye, I have the sense of neuroscience kind of pulsing — it borrows concepts and technologies from all the fields, but it doesn’t only take, it gives back.”

The undergraduate neuroscience degree will — as with all Georgia Tech disciplines — culminate in a senior research or capstone project.

“We want to leave our students with an experience that really gets their creative juices going and gives them a tantalizing view of what they might do next,” Cope says.

The program website lists 50 occupations for which neuroscience can serve as preparation or grad school foundation, and then, of course, there’s entrepreneurship.

Among the many other student startup and business incubators in and around Georgia Tech, there’s even one called NeuroLaunch, which introduces itself as “the world’s first neuroscience startup accelerator.”

Proving It

Georgia Tech’s Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience launched this fall.

As the community builds and the degree program gains visibility, Cope expects Georgia Tech to carve its niche among neuroscience programs as only Georgia Tech can.

“We’re especially mindful of active learning here, of inquiry-based education, where the students are led to discovery, not just have the discovery dumped in their laps,” he says.

“What we’d like to bring to neuroscience is the strong analytical, deep understanding of concepts and methods that Tech brings to its curriculum in all fields.”

Down the road, Cope sees the undergraduate degree program leading to more and bigger grants for neuroscience research at Tech, and ultimately a Ph.D. program.

In the meantime, he says, there’s much to learn and do, quoting a fortune cookie slip he’s kept in his wallet for more than 25 years now: “It says, ‘You are respectable, you are intelligent, you are creative — prove it.’

I think that applies here. We’ve got a lot of what we need to do some really great things in neuroscience. Now we’ve got to prove it.”

Neuroscience Research in the College of Sciences

Neuroscience is “the perfect incarnation of an interdisciplinary subject,” says College of Sciences Dean and Sutherland Chair Paul M. Goldbart. “It’s also a subject of deep intellectual interest. Who couldn’t be curious about how the brain and nervous systems work at the most basic level?”

Neuroscience majors interested in research have a broad array of options. Researchers at Tech seek to understand the mechanics of brain function and the emergence of normal, aberrant, or developmental behavior from the components of the nervous system at multiple scales of complexity.

The details of every faculty member’s research are diverse, but they all aim to address one or more of the following overarching questions:

1. How does the brain perceive the world, learn new information, express emotions, and produce behaviors?
2. How does the nervous system cooperate with the body it lives in?
3. How does the brain compute responses and commands?
4. How do behaviors emerge from molecules, cells, and systems?
5. How can genetic and environmental factors impact neural functions?

Here are examples of research led by College of Sciences faculty members.

The Reorganization Problem of Neurons: Addressing the neurotoxicity of chemotherapy

By A. Maureen Rouhi

Even as a child, Tim Cope was fascinated by how physically disabled people move. Why can’t they move normally? That fascination led to scientific curiosity about why it can be so difficult to recover normal movement after disease or damage.

One path of inquiry Cope has pursued is the organization of sensory signals to the spinal cord. Over more than two decades of research, he and others have shown that sensory signals can be restored to normal when damaged sensory nerves regenerate and reconnect with muscle; however, their connections in the central nervous system reorganize.  

Central reorganization changes the flow of sensory information, so some neurons completely lose sensory signals, while others receive twice as much input. Thus, regeneration is not synonymous to recovery, says Cope, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB).

Another condition that may cause peripheral nerve damage, and subsequent reorganization is chemotherapy. “We have peripheral nerve regeneration after chemo, but we don’t regain normal function,” Cope says. “Maybe it’s this reorganization problem again.”

To explore this possibility, researchers in Cope’s lab recorded sensory signals of rats after chemotherapy. In this case, the sensory signal itself showed long-lasting abnormality. However, they also found that even when nerves are not structurally damaged by chemotherapy, the sensory signal remains atypical.

These puzzling findings led to the discovery that chemotherapy affects cellular mechanisms responsible for translating mechanical stimuli — for example, muscle stretch — into sensory signals. As with peripheral nerve trauma, sensory information changes, but for a very different reason. 

Cope relishes this unexpected turn of the research. “Our chemo studies led us to a way of restoring the signals to normal, and I think our findings may have some translation to humans,” he says. “We believe if we can fix the signal, then we can improve the daily movement activity in patients who otherwise might experience disability long after chemotherapy is discontinued.”

Fixing the signal means restoring the damaged proteins, or just bypassing them. Cope’s team has identified a drug to do the latter. “But a better solution is to find out exactly what protein is damaged and restore it through genetic therapy or other molecular techniques.”

Next, Cope hopes to do genetic screening to try to get a comprehensive list of the proteins damaged by chemotherapeutic neurotoxicity, particularly those involved in generating sensory signals. This work would be in collaboration with John McDonald, a cancer expert, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and member of IBB.

Meanwhile, other work goes on in the Cope lab. “If you’re interested in how we generate movement and how sensory information is required to generate that movement, and what goes wrong in various disease and damage situations, then whether you’re a chemist, an engineer, or interested in behavioral science, there is an entry level for you in my lab to study those things,” he says.

Memory, Emotion, and Aging: Exploring “memory clutter” and the neuroscience of human cognition

By Renay San Miguel

Forget where you parked your car? Misplaced your keys? Can’t remember what a restaurant dinner companion just said to you? All signs of early-onset dementia, right?

Not quite, says Audrey Duarte, associate professor in the School of Psychology and principal investigator in Georgia Tech’s Memory and Aging Lab. “There are memory changes we think of as being associated with dementia, and that’s very concerning, but that’s not really what we’re talking about,” Duarte says. “Just by getting older, we experience more memory impairment.”

Take that restaurant dinner, for example. When you’re younger, people coming in and out of the dining room, nearby conversations, and any other distractions are easier to tune out. “As we get older and we have that impaired ability to ignore distracting information, it gets incorporated into our memories,” Duarte says. “That information is there even at the subconscious level, and that creates what we call memory clutter.”

That clutter gums up the brain and forces older adults to work harder than before to recreate that restaurant experience in their minds in the hopes of remembering information.

Duarte’s 2016 study on memory clutter is the latest example of her focus on human cognition. How does the brain process new information, and how is that tied to emotions and behaviors?

“I’m a memory person, so I always think memory is the most important thing,” she says. The information we take into our brains has to be processed by our sensory systems — what we see, hear, etc. — and then filtered through our past experiences. “Those memories have emotional associations with them, some positive, some negative. If it comes down to why a particular emotion is stronger than others, we don’t really understand why the brain is organized that way.”

Duarte’s research involves exploring which areas of the brain are necessary for emotional processing. She and her team in the Memory and Aging Lab use electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine which parts of the brain make those connections between memory and emotion.

It’s known that the amygdala, located within the brain’s medial temporal lobes, is associated with processing emotions. Duarte says her research shows that “if you see something that’s negative, the amygdala is sensitive to that.” But she emphasizes that other brain regions also seem to process stimuli associated with bad emotions such as disgust, sadness, anger, etc.

Duarte is determined to discover how disease, injury and aging effect all aspects of human cognition. She believes the future of her field will bring an interdisciplinary focus, folding in computational modeling, biology, genetics and biomedical engineering.

The research tools she’s using now are noninvasive. “We’re not implanting electrodes in people.” But to get a complete picture of neural communications — how that supports human cognition and what happens when that communication breaks down — “we’re going to have to drill down to the neuron level itself.”

Protective Responses: Neurons linked to itch and bronchoconstriction

By A. Maureen Rouhi

Itch. Just seeing the word makes you feel itchy. The sensation that makes you want to scratch your skin does the same to other mammals, amphibians, reptiles and birds. “Itch sensation is an evolutionarily conserved way used by many animals to sense environmental irritations and respond accordingly,” says Liang Han, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences. 

Han’s laboratory strives to understand how the nervous system receives, transmits, and interprets stimuli to induce responses. In particular, she is interested in the mechanisms of nocifensive — or protective — responses. She wants to know how alterations in neural pathways that mediate these responses lead to chronic disease. For now, she’s focusing on two protective responses: itch and constriction of the lungs’ airways, or bronchoconstriction.

“Everyone experiences itchy feelings — when they get a mosquito bite or are wearing a prickly wool sweater.” Han says. In these cases, the itch is relieved by scratching. But imagine if the itchiness goes on and on!

“Chronic itch accompanying disease can be devastating,” Han says. More than 40 percent of patients receiving dialysis for end-stage renal disease suffer from severe itching, as do 60 to 70 percent of patients with advanced liver disease, according to Han. Persistent itching can lead to sleep deprivation and depression. Despite the clinical importance of itch sensation, Han says, the mechanisms governing it are largely unknown.

A long-standing question is whether itch-sensing neurons are itch specific or also signal other sensations such as pain. In earlier work using molecular genetic approaches, Han discovered a subpopulation of sensory neurons specifically linked to itch sensation. When those neurons are removed from experimental mice, the animals do not sense itch from multiple stimuli, but they continue to sense pain or pressure. Conversely, when these neurons are activated by painful stimuli, they elicit itch, not pain. “The data demonstrate the existence of the dedicated itch-sensing neurons,” Han says, “and advances our understanding of the cellular mechanisms of itch sensation.”

Now at Georgia Tech, Han aims to discover the mechanisms of chronic itch and find therapeutic targets for treatment, while also advancing understanding of bronchoconstriction.

The lungs’ sensory nerves help regulate the respiratory system, for example, by controlling breathing patterns and evoking airway-protective behavior such as coughing, airway constriction, and mucus secretion. Han’s lab recently discovered a subpopulation of sensory neurons that, when stimulated, induce bronchoconstriction and airway hyperresponsiveness, both of which are hallmarks of asthma.

“Current investigations of the pathogenesis of asthma have largely focused on immune responses,” Han says. “However, anti-inflammatory treatment only partially controls asthma symptoms. We need to understand the involvement of non-immune systems in the disease.”

Recent studies, including Han’s, indicate an important role for the nervous system in the pathogenesis of asthma. “We are currently using molecular genetic tools to investigate whether blocking those neurons can inhibit asthma in a mouse model,” she says. “We hope to obtain insights into the neural mechanisms of asthma and identify neuronal targets for management of asthma symptoms.”

Muscle-Neuron Connections: Maintaining contact as aging occurs

By A. Maureen Rouhi

Young C. Jang aspires to understand the aging process, particularly as it relates to muscle loss. An assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Jang hopes that therapeutic interventions could be developed to treat muscle loss, whether from aging or disease.

In considering scientific questions, Jang’s approach is to look at the forest. “You can be interested in muscle,” he says, “but you can’t just work on muscle to understand the whole biological process.”

Motor neurons connect muscles to the nervous system; however, the muscle-neuron connection can be severed by injury or disease. When the muscle is restored to function, the junction can be reconnected.

With age, the reconnection between muscle and neuron becomes increasingly difficult. When contact disappears, Jang explains, “muscles cannot communicate with the spinal cord and brain, and they start to degenerate.” Jang studies how to keep these connections going in hopes of developing ways to prevent or treat muscle loss. 

Aging and disease have some common pathways, Jang says. One is oxidative stress. When the body has an excess of reactive, oxidizable species, aging occurs faster than usual.

Jang’s work has shown that oxidative stress contributes to disconnection of the muscle-neuron junction. Oxidative stress is a well-accepted theory of aging, Jang says. It posits that when the body’s balance of antioxidant enzyme and oxidizing free radicals tilts in favor of free radicals, aging accelerates.

Jang’s early work showed that, in mice, removing the antioxidant enzyme — which increases reactive oxygen species — promotes severance of the muscle-neuron junction. In humans, Jang notes, genetic mutation of the same enzyme leads to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a motor neuron disease.

“We’ve found one mechanism that promotes detachment,” Jang says. “Can we reverse the process or slow it down?” Looking for ways to halt or reverse muscle-neuron detachment has taken Jang to multiple paths of inquiry, including caloric restriction, parabiosis, and organs-on-a-chip.

Jang’s caloric restriction research showed that mice receiving only 60 percent of the normal caloric requirement form fewer reactive oxygen species, and the treatment promotes muscle-neuron attachment. Furthermore, caloric restriction rejuvenates muscle stem cells, which help restore the function of muscles degenerated by aging or disease. With aging, these stem cells’ number and viability diminish, thus making muscle more prone to damage, a trend that slows with caloric restriction. 

In physiological research, parabiosis is the physical joining of two individuals. Jang turned to this approach because blood is a way for cells, tissues, and organs to communicate. When Jang joined a young mouse to an old one so that they share the same circulating blood, he found that the muscle-neuron junction in the old animal is rejuvenated. However, “if you put two old animals together, that junction detaches,” Jang says. “Something in young blood is helping preserve the muscle-neuron junction.”

Indeed, Jang has reported a circulating protein in the blood that seems to be an important factor in connecting the muscle-neuron junction. However, this protein “is not the only one,” Jang says. “We need more research.”

Meanwhile, how could parabiosis be applied to humans? “Obviously, we can’t put two humans together,” Jang says. But it is possible to faithfully mimic parabiosis of organs on microfluidic chips. Jang is collaborating with YongTae (Tony) Kim, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, to design organ-on-a-chip systems for parabiosis of human organs.

Sensory Input, Neural Networks, and Locomotion: Creating a new rehabilitation paradigm

By A. Maureen Rouhi

So you think walking across a room is easy, peasy? Think again.

“Walking across the room is one of the most complicated things we do,” says T. Richard Nichols, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Locomotion is complex, he says, the result of networks of nerve cells communicating, processing information, and integrating myriad sensory signals.

In studying how sensory information from muscles helps regulate movement, Nichols has focused on the Golgi tendon organs (GTOs). These sensory receptors in the muscle tell the central nervous system — which consists of the brain and the spinal cord — the amount of force generated by muscles. The spinal cord then distributes the information to different muscles in the limb. The feedback of muscular forces is thought to help determine how the body responds to obstacles or unexpected circumstances.

So far, what we know about GTOs comes from research on animal subjects. Injury to the spinal cord disrupts communication between the central nervous system and the muscles and causes malfunctioning of the spinal cord’s neural circuits, Nichols says. “Muscle weakness or paralysis can result, as well as loss of balance and stability.”

Working with Dena Howland at the University of Louisville, Nichols has discovered a link between the disruption of the force-regulating system and motor disorders from partial spinal cord injury in animal models. They recently started two projects based on the GTO research.

One project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), aims to discover how the brain stem controls the GTO-generated neural circuits in the spinal cord to meet the needs of different movement tasks. The other project, funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs, will help define the extent to which malfunction in the force-regulating system contributes to motor dysfunction in partial spinal cord injury. It will also test the efficacy of a potential new treatment for spinal cord injury in humans that would not require special equipment.

The potential new treatment is based on the force-regulating neural networks of cats walking up — or down — hill. Researchers in the Nichols lab have shown that these networks are organized for propulsion when cats walk uphill and for suspension and braking when cats walk downhill.

“It turns out that in spinal cord injury, the downhill pathway becomes extreme” Nichols says. “Animals with spinal cord injury tend to crouch; it’s like an exaggeration of walking downhill.”

Suppose animals with spinal cord injury are rehabilitated by exercising under downhill-walking conditions? The idea is counterintuitive but, Nichols thought, “maybe the central nervous system has some internal wisdom that will say, okay, now we need to repair this injury.” Could training in this particular way promote recovery from partial spinal cord injury?

Nichols and Howland proposed this rehabilitation treatment to Veterans Affairs and received funding. “At the same time, because of our work at Tech, we can find whether the same exercise causes a change in the neural networks of the spinal cord,” Nichols says. Through the NIH grant funding, Howland and Nichols aim to mechanistically connect the recovery with restoration of normal function in the spinal network.

Biomechanics of Locomotion: Toward next-generation artificial limbs

By A. Maureen Rouhi

Research in the lab of Boris I. Prilutsky aims to understand the biomechanics and control of locomotion, which comprises the movements that take two- and four-footed animals from place to place.

During locomotion, sensations from the limbs (called sensory feedback) inform the nervous system about the state of the movement. Prilutsky studies how this sensory feedback affects locomotion. In particular, he investigates feedback from foot pressure and limb motion.

Disrupting the feedback, through injury for example, can lead to instability and falls during locomotion. “We modify sensory pathways in experimental animals and in computational models and observe the effects on locomotion,” says Prilutsky, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and a member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

A key research tool is a neuromechanical model the Prilutsky group developed in collaboration with the group of Ilya A. Rybak, at Drexel University. This model accurately reproduces the walking mechanics and muscle activity of cats. Computational experiments have pinpointed the sensory feedback pathways that produce mild and severe locomotion defects when interrupted. These predictions have been experimentally tested.

In a recent study, for example, Prilutsky’s team injected local anesthetic to the paw pads on one side of a cat to block the sense of touch. Under this condition, the animal loses the symmetry of its gait and becomes less stable. The effect can be reversed, however, by electrically stimulating the nerves that convey the sense of touch to the central nervous system. When that happens, the cat’s walk becomes symmetric and stable again.  

In other experiments, they removed muscle stretch feedback – or stretch reflex – from selected muscles and investigated the effects. “We found that this feedback is task- and muscle-dependent,” Prilutsky says. For example, loss of feedback from certain muscles of the ankle causes problems only in downslope walking. More recently, they found that removing the stretch reflex from hip flexors causes profound changes in locomotion, as predicted and explained by their computational model.

“From our experimental and computational studies, we gain insight into how spinal circuits cooperate with the moving body segments during locomotion,” Prilutsky says.

Those insights are now propelling Prilutsky and others toward prosthetic devices that behave like natural limbs. For example, Prilutsky is applying discoveries about sensory pathways, feedback loops, and natural control signals from the nervous system in the field of osseointegrated — or bone-anchored — limb prostheses. In this approach to attaching prosthetic devices, the artificial limb is directly anchored to the bone through a titanium rod, similar to a dental implant. Potentially this implant can be used as a neural interface between the prosthesis and nerves in the stump.

Although used in Europe, bone-anchored limb prostheses are not approved in the U.S. because of the high rate of skin infections, which develop when skin fails to form a close connection with the bone implant. However, Prilutsky and others have shown that, in rats, use of porous titanium allows skin to grow into the implant, thereby reducing infections. Recently they experimented with cats to test this implant in natural walking conditions to see whether it forms a tight bond with skin and bone and whether and how the animals use a bone-anchored prosthesis for walking. “It works,” Prilutsky says.

Now the stage is set for the next phase: using the implant as a neural interface between the prosthetic device and the nerves in the residual limb so that the nerves and prosthesis talk to each other, and the prosthesis is controlled naturally without the person’s attention. If the promise of this approach is fulfilled, it could revolutionize prosthetics.

Moving in a Complex World: How do insects do it?

By A. Maureen Rouhi

How do animals navigate their environments? That question motivates the research of Simon Sponberg. An assistant professor in the School of Physics with a joint appointment in the School of Biological Sciences, Sponberg studies animals to discover how they move around in a complex world.

“Perceiving and then navigating the irregular terrain of Earth requires sophisticated processing by the brain,” says Sponberg, who received a National Science Foundation Early-Career Award in 2016 in recognition of his promise as a teacher-scholar and is a member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “It also demands that the brain work in conjunction with an animal’s body and the environment surrounding it.”

Animals have evolved to negotiate almost every environment on this planet. To do this, Sponberg says, their nervous systems acquire, process, and act upon information. “Yet their brains must operate through the mechanics of the body’s sensors and actuators to both perceive and act upon the environment,” he adds.

In Sponberg’s lab, researchers are studying how muscles operate as soft, living matter. They’re trying to understand the physics of moving animal bodies and the computational principles implemented in the sensors — such as eyes or antennae — of animals in motion.

“Our research investigates how physics and physiology enable animals in motion to achieve the remarkable stability and maneuverability we see in biological systems,” Sponberg says. “We explore how animals fly and run stably even in the face of repeated perturbations, how the multifunctionality of muscles arises from their physiological properties, and how the tiny brains of insects organize and execute movement. We study how the grace and agility of animal movement arises from the synthesis of its parts. Among these is the brain — a crucial part, but not the only one.”

The hawkmoth is a frequent subject of Sponberg’s investigations. The swift-flying insect typically imbibes nectar while hovering over a flower. Feeding usually takes place at dusk, when light is limited. It’s hard enough to see in dim light and even more when it gets dimmer with time. Yet hawkmoths also hover in air while following a flower that’s swaying with the wind. How do they do it?

Sponberg’s group has shown that hawkmoths slow their brain down to improve vision in dim light, much like increasing the exposure on a camera.  However, this adjustment can cause their motion to blur, so they only slow down to the point where they can still track the wind-blown motions of the flowers they prefer in nature. The behavior demonstrates that their neural circuits adapt exquisitely to the environment.

More recent work on three hawkmoth species tracking the group’s “roboflowers” suggests that simple models of neuronal processing can account for interspecies differences in adapting to different light intensities, and the moths actually use touch sensors on their proboscis to help feel the flower’s movements.

“Behavior, especially movement, arises from the context in which the brain acts,” Sponberg says. “We start by asking questions like, “If we know something about the biophysics of how muscles works, how might the brain activate and control muscle to enable an animal to be most agile and versatile?

“What we are finding is that how brains process sensory input and program motor output is intimately coupled to the physics of the surrounding systems and the features of the environment the animal most cares about. Figuring out these coupling principles is a huge task but one that we are confident will help us better understand how we think and act.”

Intent and Action: Unpacking a little-understood aspect of skilled movement

By A. Maureen Rouhi

Lewis A. Wheaton wishes to play golf like a pro. He could raise his game by watching videos of star players like Rory McIlroy. But Wheaton knows from experience — and his research — that observation alone doesn’t always help motor learning.

Research in Wheaton’s lab is explaining why observing people who are highly skilled at motor tasks may not be helpful to those who are far less proficient. Wheaton is interested in unpacking how the brain integrates information to effect motor behavior, particularly highly skilled tasks that involve hands and tools. His findings underscore the importance of intent.

Consider an array of objects on a table: pens, paper, mug, stapler. “You need intent to use things together,” Wheaton says. “If you decide to write a note, you’ll focus attention on the pen and paper.”

That’s obvious, yet some people with certain neurological injuries have trouble understanding what they need to do to write a note. “It’s not automatic that you can string the information together,” Wheaton says. “Part of our work is understanding the relationship between intent and action and how that falls apart in case of neurological injury.”

Using brain-imaging techniques, Wheaton identifies neural signals that capture intent.

Recently he conducted an experiment with people with sound limbs wearing artificial limbs. The participants were asked to learn how to use the prosthetic limbs by watching a video of another prosthetic-device user.

“The norm in prosthetic limb rehabilitation is to let people figure it out themselves, with help from physical therapists,” Wheaton says. “But most physical therapists have two hands. They don’t know what it’s like to be an amputee.”

The study showed that people who watched other prosthetic-device users became more efficient than those who watched people with sound limbs. 

Another tool is eye-tracking, based on the well-known correlation of eye and arm movements. “Particularly in tasks that involve reaching, the eyes precede the hand,” Wheaton says. Can we see intent from what the eyes are doing?

New research suggests that a key to rehabilitation gains might be rooted in visual strategies that capture specific action intent. The eyes see differently when observing different people do the same task, like bringing an object from one side of a barrier to the other side. When watching a person with sound limbs, the prosthetic-device user’s eyes look only at the task itself: The object starts on one side and ends on the other, Wheaton says.

When watching another prosthetic-device user, the subject’s eyes go over the barrier and are paying attention to the shoulders, which power the prosthetic limb. “They are paying attention to the motor intent instead of just the task,” Wheaton says. “Instead of training execution, which we do a lot in rehabilitation, perhaps we should be training intent.”

Back to golf, Wheaton suggests, “Its’ hard to understand the intent of a professional when you are an amateur, until you develop more skill. Instead of watching Rory, take a different approach. You may be more like Joe, who will help you progress to the next step. Then you’ll meet Mary, who’s a bit better than Joe. She’ll take you farther.”

When to Make a Decision: Accumulating and evaluating evidence

By A. Maureen Rouhi

What was your dinner last night? How about the previous night? How about the week before?

Mark E. Wheeler is interested in memories and what happens in the brain that allows us to remember. Part of what he studies is how we make decisions about the accuracy of what we retrieve. “You can’t remember immediately what you had for dinner a week before because you lack information,” he says. “If you think about it a bit more, you may remember. How can you evaluate the accuracy of your memory? What is happening in the brain when we decide whether our memories are accurate or not?”

Memory is difficult to study, however. “People are often not good at describing how they remember,” says Wheeler, a professor in the School of Psychology. “Some retrieved information may not be easy to communicate, people may ignore some memories, or they may be unaware of other memories.”

To get at memory, Wheeler studies perception, which is easier to manipulate and measure. The hope is that understanding how we evaluate evidence in making decisions based on perception can help us understand what happens when retrieving memories.

When viewed from the brain’s perspective, even simple tasks — such as deciding whether an object is green or yellow — consist of a sequence of processing stages, Wheeler says. These stages can be represented by different patterns of brain activity. “If we understand the process as a system,” Wheeler says, “then we can ask: What parts of this system are involved when things break down or don’t function well?” 

Central to Wheeler’s work is the concept of an accumulation-to-boundary mechanism. “In the midst of gathering evidence, you reach some threshold of evidence: Okay, now I’m going to decide,” Wheeler explains. “The idea is that brain activity that is thought to reflect evidence builds up, and when it crosses that threshold, that is the signal that you have enough information to commit to a decision. We don’t understand precisely how that works, which is why we’re studying it, but there’s a lot of data that this happens at the neural level.”

Instead of asking experimental subjects to remember what they had for dinner, Wheeler asks them to lie still while being scanned by a functional MRI (fMRI) machine at the Georgia State University/Georgia Tech Center for Advanced Brain Imaging. Amid the constant beeping of the scanner, participants receive visual stimuli and make decisions about what they see.

Brain activity data reveal how much evidence participants accumulate before they decide. The basis for this approach was developed a decade ago, when Wheeler and others showed that fMRI allows identification of distinct neural processes that work together when people make decisions based on perception.

Currently Wheeler is interested in how aging affects the way decision-making evidence accumulates and how that manifests in brain activity. His recent work, funded by the National Science Foundation and Georgia Tech, examines how noise — anything that degrades information — affects the accumulation of evidence and decision-making as we get older.

“Perception and decision-making,” Wheeler says, “can involve a series of stages, where you take in sensory information, analyze the information, and accumulate evidence, until you can make a decision. Suppose that aging affects the first stage most significantly, but the latter two are fine. You could target interventions more precisely, if you know where the problem lies.”

The experimental approach, Wheeler notes, can apply to other conditions, such as drug addiction or alcoholism. If one can deconstruct how the brain of an alcoholic takes in and processes information, it may be possible to develop better ways to train alcoholics to avoid that first drink.

The annual seed grant program run by the Petit Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology pairs two researchers from the Petit Institute as co-principal investigators, one based in the College of Engineering, and one based in the College of Sciences.

The teams and their projects are:

• Ed Botchwey (associate professor, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering) and Greg Gibson (professor, the School of Biological Sciences) are working on a project entitled “RNA-Seq and Mass Spectrometry Based Lipidomics of Mesenchymal Stem Cells.” Their long-term goal is to develop processes to maintain and enhance the immune modulatory potency of bio-manufactured mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) based on modulation of sphingolipid (SL) metabolism.

• Frank Hammond III (assistant professor, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering) and Gil Weinberg (professor/director of Center for Music Technology) are working on a project entitled, “Ultrasound–Based Recognition of Human Intent for Skillful Control of Dexterous Robotic Prostheses.” Ultimately, they plan to use portable ultrasound and deep learning methods to recognize subtle, complex patterns of change in skeletal muscle morphology (shape changes during muscle contraction and relaxation) and leverage that information to predict human motion intent and enable dexterous, skillful control of feedback-related robotic prostheses.

• Melissa Kemp (associate professor, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering) and Facundo Fernandez (professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Their project is entitled “Metabolic phenotyping in pluripotent systems via MALDI imaging.” They plan to develop novel imaging tools that will have broad applicability to a large variety of biological problems of interest to Petit Institute researchers, including developmental biology, tumorigenesis, and regenerative medicine.

The funding period for each of these grants started July 1, 2017, and the duration will be up to two years, contingent on submission of NIH R21/R01 grant proposal, or an equivalent collaborative grant proposal, within 12 to 24 months of the year-one start date.

This year’s group of grant recipients epitomize the goal of the seed grant program, which is designed to stimulate interdisciplinary research between world-class PIs that haven’t previously worked together.

CONTACT:

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

“I’m very honored by it,” Nichols says. “It’s unusual because you have to be a physical therapist to be a regular member. I am not a physical therapist, I’m a basic scientist.”  

Nichols' research areas of interest include motor control, sensory feedback, spinal cord injury, muscle physiology, and limb mechanics. In addition to his research in the School of Biological Sciences, Nichols is also a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, a partnership between Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine.

Nichols was chair of the School of Applied Physiology until 2016, when it joined the School of Biology to form the School of Biological Sciences.  

APTA cites Nichols as “an internationally recognized scholar whose research has contributed to the advancement of scientific knowledge related to the control of movement.” APTA also calls Nichols a “stalwart advisor” who has done exemplary work to help train future physical therapists and advanced physical therapist clinicians.

APTA’s approximately 95,000 members include physical therapists, their assistants, and those who are studying to become therapists. The organization represents their interests in the legislative and regulatory arenas. 

The symposium, organized by the National Academy of Engineering, gathers what the academy calls “exceptional” engineers from 30 to 45 years old to facilitate “cross-disciplinary exchange and promote the transfer of new techniques and approaches across fields in order to sustain and build U.S. innovative capacity.”

“The Frontiers of Engineering program brings together a particularly talented group of young engineers whose early-careers span different technical areas, perspectives and experiences,” said NAE President C. D. Mote, Jr. “But when they come together in this program, their mutual excitement is palpable, and a process of creating long-term benefits to society is often initiated.”

It’s a highly competitive and prestigious invitation, according to the National Academy of Engineering news release about the event.

“It is a privilege to be selected to join the Frontiers of Engineering Symposium,” said Kwong. “I am excited about the opportunity to interact with the brightest young minds within the engineering community, and exchange ideas across seemingly disparate disciplines.”

For 2017, the symposium will focus on the latest advances in four areas: mega-tall buildings and other future places of work, unraveling the complexity of the brain, energy strategies to power our future, and machines that teach themselves.

Kwong’s own research program is conducted at the interface of engineering and immunology. He and his multidisciplinary team develop nanotechnologies that interact with immune cells, enabling new applications in biomedical diagnostics and cell-based therapies. He has ten issued or pending patents and has launched one startup company.

“I often remind my lab that as bioengineers, we need to develop fluency in multiple academic languages before we can begin to innovate solutions to the most important problems in society” said Kwong. “I aim to bring my unique background in the physical and life sciences, and entrepreneurship to the fold.”

Invited participants for 2017 include three Georgia Tech assistant professors, as well as rising stars from organizations like Google, DARPA, 3M, IBM research labs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and others.

The 2017 US Frontiers of Engineering program will be hosted by United Technologies Research Center in East Hartford, Conn., September 25-27.

Media Contact:

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

Though he couldn’t have known it at the time, Darwin was describing the kind of enlightened (and evolved) self-interest that can also be found in a manmade entity such as the long bio-research partnership between the Georgia Institute of Technology (with its multidisciplinary engineering heft) and Emory University (with its sprawling medical school and clinical research capacity).

 It’s a partnership that has produced biomedical discoveries for decades, one of the most dramatic being the recent successful human clinical trial of a microneedle patch for flu vaccines, a project headed up for years by Georgia Tech researcher Mark Prausnitz, whose own appraisal echoed Darwin’s 19th century assertion: "From the very start of this project, our team at Georgia Tech has been working with the Emory team to develop the microneedle patches,” Prausnitz said. “And the success of the project has been due to the strong collaboration between Georgia Tech engineers and the bioscience and medical experts at Emory."

                                          * * *

The Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University are connected by twisting ribbons of asphalt, five or six miles long depending on your destination. It’s a route that Bob Guldberg, executive director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, knows really well.

“When I started I was going to Emory almost every day for my in vivo studies, and to be honest, if it wasn’t for Emory, I would not be at Georgia Tech,” says Guldberg, who came to Atlanta fresh from the University of Michigan in 1996, and has been a grateful beneficiary and influential proponent of another kind of connection between the two universities – a longstanding, ever-evolving biomedical research partnership.

Guldberg arrived as an up and coming leader in orthopedic musculoskeletal research, which didn’t really have a presence at Georgia Tech at the time, “but there were potential collaborators in orthopedics at Emory," he says.

So he joined the unique and growing research partnership that existed between a private university (Emory) and a public one (Tech).

A year after Guldberg arrived, that partnership took a bold and historic step with the creation of a new academic unit. The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME, launched in 1997) was the result of several things converging in the ecosystems of Emory and Georgia Tech.

This joint academic department formally linking private and public institutions is the first of its kind and rated among the best in the world. BME was the organic offspring of earlier developments, such as the Emory/Georgia Tech Biomedical Technology Research Center and its seed grant program, which nurtured an expanding faculty interest in collaborative research when it was established in 1987.

“That seed grant program was absolutely essential and its influence on success of the Emory-Georgia Tech partnership can’t be underestimated,” says Bob Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute, which launched in 1995. “It provided a foundation for everything else that has taken place since.”

Airport Diplomacy

As Mike Johns remembers it, a conversation in 1996 on an airport escalator with Nerem ultimately led to the creation of a joint BME department. Johns had recently been named executive vice president director of Emory’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center and CEO of its Healthcare System.

Nerem had been at Georgia Tech since 1987, playing a leading role in growing the collaborative bioengineering research efforts between the two universities. Now he was settling into his role as director of the fledgling Petit Institute, a multidisciplinary research center that strengthened the bond between Georgia Tech and Emory, with its faculty from both universities and focus on a team approach.

Johns and Nerem had been attending a meeting in Washington, D.C., “and as we were coming up the escalators I said, ‘Hey, Bob, I really think Emory and Georgia Tech need to come together and form a biomedical engineering department. We don’t have an engineering school and you guys don’t have a medical school. This is something we can do together,’” Johns recalls.

So Nerem put him in touch with Georgia Tech’s provost at the time, Mike Thomas. “We agreed that if we were going to do something in any formal way, we needed a task force and that the logical person to lead it was Don Giddens,” says Nerem. “We had to bring him back from Hopkins to Atlanta.”

Giddens left Georgia Tech in 1992 to become Dean of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he worked closely with Mike Johns, who had been dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

“The opportunity to work with Mike Thomas and Mike Johns and build this thing from scratch was very appealing,” says Giddens, who led the task force through the summer of 1997. The team wrapped up its report and sent its recommendations to the Georgia Board of Regents, as well as Emory’s Board of Trustees. “Then things started moving very quickly.”

By September, the department was approved, Giddens was named as its inaugural chair, and a new era of collaboration had begun.

Team Bioscience

In 1889, an Emory graduate and former Emory president, Isaac Stiles Hopkins, became Georgia Tech’s first president. Then it took almost a hundred years for the two institutions to embark on an official partnership. When that happened, bioengineering and biomedical research were the sparks.

Interest in applying engineering principles to biomedical research was percolating at Georgia Tech by the mid 1970s, Giddens says.

“It was people like myself, Ray Vito, Ajit Yoganathan, Art Koblasz, and a couple of others,” recalls Giddens, who eventually became dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering (2002-2011). “A lot of that interest was clustered within the ‘mechanics department,’ which no longer exists, and electrical engineering. Georgia Tech faculty would interact and collaborate with Emory faculty.”

Giddens was among the researchers who banded together to form the Georgia Tech Bioengineering Center, “which was kind of a key cornerstone for building the rest of what’s happened,” says Giddens. He and his colleagues had some ideas about research and education opportunities between the two universities. “One of the first things we did was to approach Emory,” Giddens adds.

Bill Todd, a Georgia Tech graduate who was Emory’s assistant vice president of health affairs at the time, remembers getting a call from his boss, Charles Hatcher (Johns’ predecessor at Emory). Hatcher had been talking to Georgia Tech’s Vice President for Research Tom Stelson, and he reached out to Todd, who recalls, “He said, ‘Georgia Tech and Emory have been talking for years about collaborating in a more formal way. Everybody says the right words, but we’ve got to do something deliberate.’ He told me to connect with Don Giddens, and leadership at both schools promised support and money to move forward in a structured, intentional way.”

The way forward led to the establishment in 1987 of the Emory/Georgia Tech Biomedical Technology Research Center and the influential seed grant program.

 “That was our venture into the first phase of the Georgia Tech-Emory relationship on a formal basis,” says Yoganathan, Regents professor and Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair in Biomedical Engineering. “And I’m not even sure if ‘venture’ is the right word. Maybe ‘adventure’ is correct, because we were really trying out something new.”

Todd and Giddens understood the potential of collaborative research between the two universities – one a hotbed of bioengineering and biomedical research, the other home to one of the nation’s leading medical schools and healthcare systems. So they devised a seed grant that required faculty from both institutions to work together.

“That seed grant was catalytic in getting researchers to move into the biomedical research environment,” notes Wayne Alexander, former chair of Emory’s Department of Medicine.

One of those researchers was Nerem, who came to Georgia Tech after being recruited from the University of Houston, where he chaired the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “One of the main attractions for me coming to Georgia Tech was the fact that the seed grant had been set up,” Nerem says.

Years later, Nerem’s successor at the Petit Institute could say the same thing. Guldberg credits the program with catalyzing his sustained collaborative research with Emory’s Bob Taylor (division director of cardiology). “Our initial $25,000 Georgia Tech/Emory seed grant led to four funded multi-investigator R01 awards from NIH, probably totaling about $10 million in funding,” he says. Just as importantly, it’s helped train the next generation of investigators. For example, there’s Craig Duvall, co-advised as a student by Guldberg and Taylor, and now an associate professor of BME at Vanderbilt, working on NIH-funded research.  

The seed grant experience was also particularly educational for Todd, who took the idea with him when he became the founding president and CEO of the Georgia Research Alliance in 1990. “The Emory-Georgia Tech program was illustrative to me as we set up the GRA, because we were learning things – learning how to navigate the complexities of a joint venture, when two parties have their own sets of needs,” says Todd, now professor of practice in the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech.

Academic Standing

While the Georgia Tech/Emory seed grant program helped spur collaborative research, the two schools focused on academic pursuits, another objective of the biomedical research center, and began attracting the interest of major donors, like the Whitaker Foundation.

In 1993 the Emory-Georgia Tech partnership secured one of just three Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Engineering Program Development grants, which supported development of a Ph.D. program in bioengineering (BioE). The first faculty member recruited through that grant was Mark Prausnitz, the microneedle patch leading researcher, a long-time member of the Petit Institute who now holds the J. Erskine Love Chair in the School of Chemical Biomolecular Engineering.

Under Yoganathan’s guidance, the multidisciplinary BioE program soon became one of the top rated academic programs of its kind in the nation. Then, with the creation of the BME department in 1997 (it wasn’t named for Wallace H. Coulter yet), began a push to develop new academic programs, including graduate degrees in BME awarded jointly.

While he was dean of engineering at Johns Hopkins, Giddens guided the top ranked biomedical engineering department in the U.S. When he returned to Atlanta, he was charged with building a department from the ground up. The BME task force led by Giddens that summer of 1997 pitched the idea to Emory’s trustees, writing, “There is every reason to believe that Atlanta can be a national center for biomedical research and education if our two institutions pool capabilities. On the other hand, failure to act decisively at this time may create a handicap that will be difficult to surmount.”

They acted decisively, both Emory’s trustees and the University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents (which governs public universities, like Georgia Tech), approving the department in a matter of weeks.

The plan was to hire 15 to 18 new faculty within five years, and create a brand new graduate program. That task fell into Yoganathan’s capable hands, so he led the effort to map out a joint Ph.D. program in biomedical engineering, which was approved in 1999, while Paul Benkeser (currently senior associate chair of BME) led development of the undergraduate program. Students began enrolling in both programs in 2000, the same year the Whitaker Foundation granted a $16 million leadership development award.

“We knew the Whitaker Foundation wanted to support an undergraduate program,” Giddens says. “Their belief was that by developing an undergrad program, you ensure the permanence of the discipline.”

In 2001 the Georgia Tech/Emory Department of Biomedical Engineering was renamed for Wallace H. Coulter (one of the influential engineers of the 20^th century, who shaped the fields of automated cell analysis and hematology) when the Coulter Foundation committed $25 million to the department. The gift supported a department chair, faculty chairs at Georgia Tech and Emory, labs, graduate fellowships, undergraduate clinical education, and the Coulter Endowment for Translational/Clinical Research.

Learning Science

Early on in the life of the Emory-Georgia Tech BME venture, Giddens made one of the most significant moves of his career: he brought Wendy Newstetter, a learning scientist, to the department.

“I’d become aware of the cognitive and learning scientists that were working at Georgia Tech in the College of Computing and thought that since we were going to build a curriculum, undergraduate and graduate, maybe we could get them interested in collaborating and using us as guinea pigs,” Giddens says.

That move began a culture of innovation in education that still fuels the department today, according to Joe Le Doux, one of BME’s first faculty hires, and now the department’s associate chair of undergraduate learning and experience.

“Don had the foresight and vision for what BME could become as a major and as a discipline,” Le Doux says. Hiring a learning scientist like Newstetter, “was a bold move and made the statement that education and learning was a top priority in our program.”

Newstetter, now director of learning science research for the College of Engineering, developed a new way of teaching engineering based on problem-based learning (PBL), “a pedagogical approach that came from medical school, that we adapted to a biomedical engineering environment,” she says. “We were able to observe classes at Emory, which uses problem-based learning, and figure out what we wanted it to look like at Georgia Tech.”

They created an environment for undergraduate students that emphasized collaboration over competition, immersing students in real-world, complex problems. As student enrollment soared and faculty resources were stretched thin, grad students and post docs (and later, upper classmen among the undergrads) were recruited to serve as PBL facilitators.

There were no BME textbooks at the undergraduate level. “There was no curriculum that could be considered the curriculum for BME,” notes Larry McIntire, who became chair of the department after Giddens vacated the post to become dean of the College of Engineering. “We were fortunate to have some very creative people.”

The curriculum has evolved but the focus is still on PBL, more than ever. There are fewer lecture courses now in BME, and more design courses. The BME curriculum continues to get rave reviews nationally, which is manifested in annual department rankings. Over time, both the graduate and undergraduate programs have climbed in the rankings with the undergraduate program currently listed No. 1 on the U.S. News and World Report annual rankings and the graduate program No. 3.

“Innovative, problem-focused learning has always been part of our departmental DNA,” says Ross Ethier, a Petit Institute researcher and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar who became interim chair of BME after Ravi Bellamkonda left the post to become dean of engineering at Duke University the summer of 2016. “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.”

Beyond Borders

The Georgia Tech-Emory partnership gained further momentum in 1998 when the National Science Foundation awarded $12.5 million for establishment of the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues (GTEC). Headed by Nerem, that joint research center has evolved into its current incarnation, the Regenerative Engineering and Medicine research center, a collaboration of Emory, Georgia Tech, and the University of Georgia.

Two years later, success followed success as Emory and Georgia Tech, with support from the GRA, created EmTech Bio, a biotech incubator with lab space and scientific equipment for start-up and early-stage companies on the Emory Briarcliff campus.

Through the first decade of the 21^st century, the Georgia Tech-Emory partnership continued to attract large grants, especially from the National Institutes of Health, for nanotechnology research. In 2004, NIH made awards totaling $10 million to launch a multidisciplinary research program in cancer nanotechnology.

In 2005, the National Cancer Institute of NIH awarded $19 million to the two universities for the creation of the Emory-Georgia Tech Nanotechnology Center, one of seven National Centers of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence. That same year, NIH awarded Tech and Emory scientists $11.5 million for a new program to create advanced nanotechnologies aimed at detecting and analyzing plaque at the molecular level.

“Our researchers were doing cutting edge research in nanotechnology before nanotechnology was being done by everyone. It brought us some high profile grants and gave us a lot of visibility in the scientific community,” says McIntire, who came to Georgia Tech from Rice University in 2003, as the U.A. Whitaker Building (home of BME on the Tech campus, next door to the Petit Institute) was still getting its final touches, while over at Emory, labs and offices were renovated for BME in the Woodruff Memorial Research Building.

In 2007, the NIH awarded more than $31 million over five years to a partnership that included Emory, Tech, the Morehouse School of Medicine, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. The partnership focused on accelerating the translation of lab discoveries into healthcare innovations for patients. The result is the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute (ACTSI).

Biomedical Bridge

Ravi Bellamkonda, who was the third Coulter Department chair (2013-2016) always thought of BME as, “the firm, successful bridge between the two universities, a corridor that links Georgia Tech and Emory.”

BME remains one of a number of powerful links between Emory and Tech, whose partnership continues to draw major support, such as the $15.7 million grant from the Atlanta-based Marcus Foundation in early 2016 to create the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing (MC3M) on the Georgia Tech campus.

Directed by Petit Institute researcher and BME Professor Krishnendu Roy, the new center will partner with institutions around the country, such as Emory and the University of Georgia, among others.

Meanwhile, leadership at both universities envision even more of this kind of high-octane collaboration. It’s vital. What used to be a pioneering notion has become something of a necessity.

“Team science is increasingly a strategic goal for our researchers and is certainly a focus of our federal funders,” says David Stephens, interim dean of Emory’s School of Medicine and vice president for research, Woodruff Health Sciences Center. “The Emory-Georgia Tech partnership is perfectly suited for that. So I’d like to see even more emphasis on team science, involving a broader group of faculty in more areas of health care.”

The two schools began a new chapter with the announcement in May that Susan Margulies had been named chair of the Coulter Department (and a GRA Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics). Currently a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Margulies is the fourth chairperson and first woman to head what is now the largest BME department in the country with more than 1,500 undergraduate and graduate students.

“Dr. Margulies will be an outstanding addition and leader for our joint department of biomedical engineering,” says Stephens. “Throughout her career, she has distinguished herself as an educator, scientist, mentor, and a national and international leader in the biomedical sciences, and I look forward to working with her in our many shared initiatives.”

Although the leadership has changed over the years, one constant has been the continual commitment to the Georgia Tech/Emory partnership.  In January of this year, Jon Lewin, the president, CEO, and chairman of Emory Healthcare visited Georgia Tech for a half day discussion of the partnership history and future opportunities.

Lewin envisions an expansion of BME, as well as regenerative medicine and immuno-engineering research, “and embracing new joint programs in critical areas of medicine, such as cancer and neuroscience, and emerging fields of antibiotic resistance and the microbiome, as well as precision medicine – taking advantage of health care informatics and big data is an obvious area of future collaboration,” he says.

“I believe we can have an even greater impact on advancing biomedical research generally and on patient outcomes here in Atlanta and globally,” adds Lewin. “We also can jointly continue to impact the economies of Atlanta and Georgia through research dollars, faculty recruitment, retention of talented graduates, and startup companies. I see an even brighter future for our partnership.”

As a first-year biomedical engineering student, I worried about how I was going to apply my engineering knowledge. Sure, I can tell you about stress-strain curves, write pages of code, analyze deformable bodies, or apply Bernoulli’s equation, but my biggest concern was always learning to channel that knowledge into an idea that could make or break a research endeavor. My worry began to fade by my second semester, though, when I took my first problem-based learning design class.

Here, BME students were organized into teams of six. Each was given a major problem to consider, a set of deadlines and a goal to contribute a legitimate idea or solution to the problem. To solve it, teams could take on any approach, from building a mechanical device to developing a new type of sensor. There is no better way to grow confidence in handling the research and development process than to brainstorm, plan, manage, and implement an innovation you and your team created from scratch.

The problem-based learning rooms are a critical component of these design classes. Whiteboards are on every wall of the work room, and an experienced facilitator is always available to answer questions and help keep the teams on track. In addition, professors are encouraging and focused on asking questions that guide the team’s advancement. In the beginning of the semester, most classroom time is spent discussing research and making lists on the walls with relevant information. By the end, the whiteboard space is used to find creative solutions to issues standing in the way. Questions like “Why did this fail?”, “How strong would it need to be to prevent rupture?” or “How do we calculate rotational acceleration from shear force?” cannot be solved easily. The most motivating factor, however, is that those questions (once answered) can be incorporated into the design that team is building to solve the given problem.

Another defining factor in problem-based learning is the use of presentations and papers to illustrate work and progress. Since every team member is responsible for oral presentations, the group is only as strong as its weakest member. As a result, everyone is equally invested in making sure each group member has a solid understanding of the project. Students learn that working in cooperation with each other is paramount. Emotional intelligence, patience, and communication are just as important to research as innovation, technical expertise and creativity.

In my first semester taking a problem-based learning class as a second-year student at Georgia Tech, my team’s topic was concussions, which we eventually narrowed down to detecting concussions in football players. With eight group members in one room, the white boards were soon covered with all sorts of potential ideas, from an on-field camera tracking system to a blood test based on biomarkers released on impact. Our first major deadline forced us to focus on just three of our solutions, and another team member and I presented our ideas to a panel of students.

Based on the panel’s feedback, our group had to narrow down the three solutions to one, and from there develop a mathematical model that would solve a potential problem in the idea’s development. My team hoped to develop a silicone helmet sensor that would detect force impacts at different angles and translate it to known values for linear or rotational acceleration that cause concussion on the human brain. Our biggest challenge was using principles of deformable bodies to calculate the relationship between a force impact at some angle and the corresponding rotational acceleration. In our next big presentation, my team and I had to explain this relationship to another student panel, which included a graduate student working in the field of deformable bodies. With the new feedback from that presentation, we developed a physical mold of the silicone sensors at 10 times the actual size and performed tests on it, dropping all sorts of different weights from a known height to see if the sensor would work as it was predicted to.

Several professors in the biomedical engineering department went out of their way to help us, even allowing us to use a wet lab when it was needed. In the end my team and I created a mathematical model, tested a fabric and silicone prototype, and gave another oral presentation to demonstrate our solution. Learning what it took to solve a real-world problem from hypothesis to solution taught me more about scientific research, problem solving, conflict resolution, and diligence than any class I have ever taken.

Internships, co-ops, and careers all require an engineer to apply his or her knowledge in unconventional and innovative ways, and any biomedical engineer who has taken a problem-based learning class will be readily prepared to take on those challenges. By participating in classes that require well-communicated solutions based on technical skills, research, creativity, and teamwork, we learn how to translate theory into practice. Problem-based learning is an excellent introduction to real-world research and development, and it has been one of the most motivating classes in my college career.

By Joseph Novack,
Biomedical engineering undergraduate

The arrays' inventors say they could be harnessed to make nanotech sensors or amplifiers. Potentially, they could be combined to form logic gates, the parts of a molecular computer.

The arrays' properties are scheduled for publication online by Science.

The DNA machines can relay discrete bits of information through space or amplify a signal, says senior author Yonggang Ke, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech.

"In the field of DNA-based computing, the DNA contains the information, but the molecules are floating around in solution," says Ke, who also is a researcher at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. "What's new here is that we are linking the parts together in a physical machine."

Similarly, several laboratories have already made nanotech machines such as tweezers and walkers out of DNA. Ke says his team's work with DNA arrays sheds light on how to build structures with more complex, dynamic behaviors.

The arrays' structures look like accordion-style retractable security gates. Extending or contracting one unit pushes nearby units to change shape as well, working like a domino cascade whose tiles are connected.

The arrays' units get their stability from the energy gained when DNA double helices stack up. To be stable, the units' four segments can align as pairs side by side in two different orientations. By leaving out one strand of the DNA at the edge of an array, the engineers create an external trigger. When that strand is added, it squeezes the edge unit into changing shape (see illustration).

To visualize the DNA arrays, the engineers used atomic force microscopy. They built rectangular 11x4 and 11x7 arrays, added trigger strands and could observe the cascade propagate from the corner unit to the rest of the array.

The arrays' cascades can be stopped or resumed at selected locations by designing break points into the arrays. The units' shape conversions are modulated by temperature or chemical denaturants.

For reference, the rectangular arrays are around 50 nanometers wide and a few hundred nanometers long - slightly smaller than a HIV or influenza virion.

To build the DNA array structures, the engineers used both origami (folding one long "scaffold" strand with hundreds of "staple" strands) and modular brick approaches. Both types of arrays self-assemble through DNA strands finding their complimentary strands in solution. The origami approach led to more stable structures in conditions of elevated temperature or denaturant.

In the Science paper, the engineers showed that they could build rectangles and tubes of array units. They also include a cuboid that has three basic conformations, more than the two-dimensional array units with two conformations. Ke says his team is working on larger, more complex machines with three-dimensional shapes, which can be made using the same basic design principles.

The laboratory of Chengde Mao, PhD in Purdue University's Department of Chemistry contributed to the paper. The co-first authors of the paper are postdoctoral fellow Jie Song, PhD, now at Shanghai Jiaotong University, postdoctoral fellow Pengfei Wang, PhD, and Purdue graduate student Zhe Li.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (CAREER DMR-1654485, CMMI-1437301), the Marcus Foundation, the Office of Naval Research (N00014-15-1-2707) and the National Natural Scientific Foundation of China (21605102).

Media Contact

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

In a time when vast amounts of bioimaging data are produced in labs around the globe every day, effectively extracting salient information from this growing resource of data is paramount to understanding complex biological questions. The CYTO 2017 Image analysis challenge proposed four tasks where the aim was to classify fluorescence microscopy images from the Human Protein Atlas database (www.proteinatlas.org) presented in a recently published study (Thul et al., Science, 2017). The images visualized immunostaining of human proteins and the aim of the challenge was to recognize the patterns of protein subcellular distribution to major organelles and fine substructures. (http://www.proteinatlas.org/learn/events).

A brief description of the dataset contained in each challenge:

Challenge 1:​ 1802 fields of view containing multi-label data for 2 protein localizations

Challenge 2:​ 20,000 fields of view containing multi-label data for 13 protein localizations

Challenge 3:​ 870 fields of view containing multi-label data for an additional 3 classes of localizations to be combined with the dataset from Challenge 2

Challenge 4:​ Using images in challenges 2 and 3, identify novel localizations that may be subtypes of the localizations in the previous challenges.

But if you were inside the room, you’d find that this class is anything but typical.

The students sit in pairs, facing each other, four to a table. The instructor, Maysam Nezafati, is not lecturing; he’s demonstrating a problem. Teaching assistants walk the room, depositing desk blotter pads onto the tables. Notebooks and laptops aren’t allowed — each student tandem must tackle Nezafati’s problem on the giant pads.

Welcome to the spring semester session of BMED 2210, an early course in biomedical engineering where students apply material and energy equations to address real-life situations.

Solving problems is foundational to engineering courses, but the “Problem Solving Studio” approach taken in BMED 2210 is somewhat revolutionary. In a traditional lecture class, the professor talks and models equations, then sends the students off to try it on their own. Conversely, nearly all class time in the Problem Solving Studio (PSS) is spent team-tackling complex problems with little or no previous instruction on how to do so. By using the requisite desk blotter pads, the students must present not only their solution but also how they arrived at it.

“The power of this environment is that the students learn by doing, in public, and in cooperation with their peers,” says Joe Le Doux, an associate professor of biomedical engineering who created the PSS method. “And because the work is done in the open, the instructor can make real-time changes to the difficulty of the problem to make sure each student is being challenged at the appropriate level.”

Today’s session illustrates the concept perfectly. After Nezafati assigns two problems and a practice quiz, the class is quiet. Eyes dart up to the ceiling, down to the desktop, over and around the room. Some signal anxiety; most reflect deep thought.

Then the buzz of low conversation begins to emerge, the volume steadily growing louder as 24 pairs of undergraduates start to confer with each other. A hand is raised here, another over there, summoning Nezafati and teaching assistants Brandon Holt and Cassidy Wang, whose job is to roam the room and help students maneuver through their mental logjams.

“The first problem was fairly simple, and if they write down the 10-step solving method and do the analysis, they could find the answer,” Nezafati says later. “But the second problem was harder. They needed to figure out a component that was missing and how to work that into the solution.”

Therein lies a hallmark of the Problem Solving Studio: The problems are designed to be hard enough to inhibit solving them individually, but not so difficult that students find them impossible.

“Other problem-solving approaches begin with completely open questions, like ‘how do you stop cholera in Haiti?’” says Le Doux. “Our studio is at the other end of the spectrum. We’re working on a rigorous analysis of a particular question, only the complexity is not already filled in, like it is in a textbook problem. Many different variables have to be considered, and the students need to work together and apply different ways of thinking about the question.”

Le Doux decided to pioneer the method back in 2009. “I was teaching a class lecture style, and it wasn’t going well,” he says, adding that the students didn’t seem to be connecting to the material. He consulted with Wendy Newstetter, a learning scientist on staff at the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, who encouraged him to try some different techniques. One was problem-based learning found in medical education. So they added an hour to the 3-hour credit course to create a problem-solving supplement to the lecture.

“But I quickly learned that not everyone would interact in the exercise,” Le Doux says. “Some watched while others worked. That’s when I tried the desk blotters — they had to take notes on the big blotter pad.”

After more trial and error, the course became entirely dedicated to in-class problem solving, with no lecture. “It used to be you really needed the lecturer because you didn’t have as much access to information as you do today,” says Joe Le Doux. “A good lecturer helped determine which facts are most important. But that lecturer can only make the material appropriate for a fraction of the students. The Problem Solving Studio allows the instructor to personalize the experience for each student.”

“It definitely pushes me to think beyond how I previously thought,” says Mary Kathryn Clark, a freshman BME major. “I draw a picture of the system, because every problem requires a level of visualization. Then I ask, ‘what can I manipulate to find out something else? And how do I set up a series of equations to find that?’” To prepare for quizzes, she explains the steps of her problem solving to her roommate, whom she acknowledges “sometimes zones out.”

That level of explanation and demonstration is key to the PSS approach. Cassidy Wang, one of Nezafati’s TAs who took the course in fall 2015, says it’s what makes the approach most challenging. “I’d never been a fan of rigid rules, and this class has a lot of conventions in solving engineering problems,” Wang says. “But if you can’t explain something in a way that someone else can understand, then you really don’t understand it enough yourself.”

If there’s a “secret sauce” to the Problem Solving Studio, it’s a concoction of collaboration and communication — working with a partner out in the open, then detailing the step-by-step journey to a solution. So far, it’s shown to be effective. Le Doux says the class garners more positive feedback from students compared to traditional classes as well as a higher level of mastery of course content, as evidenced by change scores on concept inventory tests.

“Plus, we looked at about 300 students longitudinally to see how they did in the follow-on course,” he says. “The PSS students, on average, do about a half-letter grade better than those who took the lecture-based version. And the biggest gains were made by students who have ‘average’ GPAs

overall.”

Nezafati is now one of four faculty members teaching BMED 2210 using the Problem Solving Studio approach, and the method is gaining traction within the College of Engineering and beyond. A generation from now, it may be far more commonplace in higher education.

“Unlike a lecture environment, you’re constantly getting feedback about what the students know and where they are in the learning process,” Le Doux says. “And you get to know the students better, too.”

by Michael Baxter.

Originally published in Georgia Tech’s Engineers magazine, Spring 2017

Researchers know that much. The problem is, underlying causes of memory problems in Alzheimer’s disease are still poorly understood. 

Annabelle Singer, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, is trying to change that. Through studying brain activity in mice genetically programmed to get Alzheimer’s, she hopes to help chart earlier signals of disease – and maybe even engineer ways to prevent or reverse it. 

Instead of jumping right to plaque, her Alzheimer’s research focuses on brain activity before plaque forms. 

“If we understand these patterns of neural activity that predict behavior and memory deficits,” said Singer, who began in the Coulter Department in mid-2016. "Then we can use these as a marker for the disease.”

That’s a big ambition, but for now, its setting is relatively modest. Singer and members of her lab work in a space equipped with computers, neural-recording devices and a curved screen. They train mice to navigate a virtual-reality maze (which looks a little like a 1980s video game) projected on the screen, and then they record brain activity as the mice respond to challenges and rewards they find there. 

The idea is to track deficits in neural activity, because they can have sharp impacts on behavior. If doctors and scientists can change patterns in this activity early on, Singer reasons, there might be a chance to prevent Alzheimer’s altogether. 

She’s already made significant strides in her research. Working with Hannah Iaccarino, a graduate student in Professor Li-Huei Tsai’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she published an article in Nature. Its central study, which focused on mice with early signs of Alzheimer’s, revealed huge potential for driving brain waves as an Alzheimer’s disease treatment. Surprisingly, they could drive these therapeutic brain waves with a simple flickering light, like a strobe light but faster.

Under the right conditions, the lighting could do more than just impact brain waves; it could actually redirect them to help clear beta amyloid plaque. Eventually, Singer would like to see similar kinds of noninvasive treatments – light therapy that can change patterns in brain activity, for example – tested on people. 

But for now, there’s a lot more work to go with mice. Singer, who received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, saw Georgia Tech could offer the kind of interdisciplinary atmosphere her research requires. 

“I wanted to go to a place that did excellent neuroscience and excellent engineering,” she said, “and I wanted to know that there would be students who were comfortable with both sides of it.”

In her lab, she’s taken on students with backgrounds in both areas, and Emory University’s joint stake in the Coulter Department means Singer has access to its Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. She also appreciates the supportive atmosphere among Tech faculty members.

“I feel like people are rooting for me as a young faculty member, regardless of whether or not it helps them, and that’s nice,” she said.

Singer was always interested in psychology. In graduate school, she got involved with the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, where patients were tested for memory problems and thinking issues. What really interested her, though, was how to bridge that kind of work with what she was already doing. Her own research centered on neurons and the ways they work together to create new memories, and she wanted to link that research with the wider world of human brain function.  

Later, during her postdoctoral years, she saw she could explore her interests in “understanding Alzheimer’s disease at what we call the circuit or system level.” That is to say, she wanted to learn more about how a brain’s neurons might misfire long before an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

Singer knows the stakes are high. Though her current work is concentrated on mice in the lab, she’s always conscious of its implications on human life.

“We think about our lives, ourselves, in terms of stories,” she said. “I am who I am because of the things I’ve done and the experiences I’ve had. If you lose that, it’s like you lose yourself.”

Still, Singer thinks some of Alzheimer’s most devastating realities might also signal hope for new treatments. She noted that patients don’t experience “a steady decline in cognitive function, so it’s not like every day you get a little worse. Instead, patients can shift between seeming pretty normal and seeming pretty lost and disoriented, even in the same day.”  

“That kind of spontaneous shift from highly functional to dysfunctional – that's not cell death,” she explained. “Those are reversible things in the brain. If we can figure out what's going on there, that's a potential route to a therapy.”

Story by Lyndsey Lewis

New approaches are needed to conquer these and other challenges — and Georgia Tech is delivering. Faculty are teaching students not only how to solve problems, but also how to find and identify them; to think like designers and storytellers as well as mathematicians; to observe with curiosity and without preconceptions; to fail, get back up and try again.

The College of Engineering is a source and setting for much of this activity, and the four stories that follow illustrate how. Collectively, these stories reflect a guiding principle from the college: Meeting the world’s demands for invention requires originality and ingenuity in education.

STEM from storytelling: A teaching model comes to life

Begin with a clear jar (a mason jar will work). Add corn syrup — that’s plasma. Next, add red and white beads, the red and white blood cells. Smaller white beads are platelets. Then, shake it up.

At this stage, the fluid in the “blood jar” is sticky and viscous; or, as you might say to a group of 7-year-olds, it’s “gloopy.” So you add some water until the fluid flows naturally, providing an object lesson on why it’s important to stay hydrated.

The “blood jar” is the most popular activity devised by Dr. Wilbur Lam’s unique HealthReach class, in which biomedical engineering undergrads teach STEM concepts to hospitalized children using the kids’ illnesses as a springboard. Chronically ill children often struggle academically. They tend to miss school and combat high stress that comes with health problems. But with the hands-on experiments created by Georgia Tech students, children in Atlanta-area hospitals are enjoying their STEM lessons and often earning better grades. Lam is an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

One of Lam’s key goals with HealthReach is to teach his students how to communicate science concepts effectively to all audiences. The first semester of HealthReach is spent exploring design concepts and practicing presentations in what Lam describes as a “boot camp” for learning how to teach sick kids. Students work in groups to create activities and demonstrations like the “blood jar” and then present them to their peers in class.

Often, after developing and sharing their experiments and gadgets, students will tweak their designs. “At the core, it’s very much a design course in engineering,” Lam says. “The class enables students to really become engineers in the sense that they get to design, develop and invent and go straight to the end user, a child with a chronic disease.”

In their second semester, HealthReach students visit local Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta hospitals a couple times a week and work directly with kids. So far, they’ve interacted with about 400 student-patients, many of whom are repeat customers.

Next, Lam wants to implement a study to assess the program’s long-term impact on the academic performance of chronically ill kids. If Lam and his colleagues can produce concrete data on HealthReach’s value, it could inspire similar projects elsewhere.

Developing an entrepreneurial mindset

A young man arrives at the intensive care unit of Massachusetts General Hospital, suffering from congestion, cough, fever and chills. He is diagnosed with bronchitis, prescribed steroids, and sent home.

But a day later, he’s back in the emergency room, vomiting and struggling to breathe. The hospital admits him; doctors struggle to save him. Their efforts are unsuccessful. After two weeks, he’s removed from life support and passes away.

This case study, examined at length in the New England Journal of Medicine, forms the basis of the Engineering Physiology course taught by Kyla Ross and Phil Santangelo. Both are faculty members in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

At the beginning of the course, Ross and Santangelo tell their students: “You’ve been hired by Mass General Hospital to evaluate this case. Your team is looking for missed opportunities in disease detection, progression and intervention. Your assignment is to make recommendations for a different standard of care.”

For the entire semester, students work in groups to assess this case from every conceivable angle and develop models to explain what went wrong. In the process, students synthesize and apply knowledge and techniques from many past courses.

They also draw on the considerable expertise of their professors and teaching assistants. Ross’s area is systems physiology; Santangelo’s is cell biology. Graduate assistants cover mathematical modeling and algorithm coding.

According to the final conclusions of the case study, the young man died from influenza A virus, complicated by staphylococcal pneumonia and herpes simplex virus (HSV) type II. Those complications present a number of variables. It’s up to the students to decide what problem they want to solve — and how to solve it.

One group explores how influenza’s suppression of the immune system could lead to reactivation of HSV II or accelerate staph infections; perhaps immunotherapy could have helped. Another group examines the drugs the patient received in the emergency room and modeling interactions; maybe there was an unintended immunosuppressant effect. And another group analyzes the window in which antivirals for flu would have been most effective.

Each group then analyzes their problem through mathematical models, refined through trial and error and the input of their professors and classmates. “We have them try it once, reflect on that, try it again,” Santangelo says. “The philosophy of this class is fail fast, and fail often. But it’s failure with a purpose, because the students gain the insight and competence to find and solve problems for the rest of their lives.”

Student invention from keen observation

The first-time Jorge Mena noticed a dirty ultrasound machine circulating in the emergency room, he didn’t really think about it. Someone would clean it before the next patient, right? But then he noticed the same thing again. And again.

Mena was a biomedical engineering senior, enrolled in Dr. Jeremy Ackerman’s clinical observation design course offered by the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. In this class, students spend 6-8 hours a week in emergency rooms across Atlanta, and their job is to watch, listen, and learn.

Ackerman isn’t just a biomedical engineering professor; he’s also a practicing emergency physician who sees patients at some of those same Atlanta hospitals. With that interdisciplinary mindset, Ackerman challenges his students to think like designers and storytellers, and identify the hospital’s flaws in architecture, process, and technology. “We know there are problems around here somewhere,” he says. “You find them.”

For Mena, that problem was dirty ultrasound wands. A typical emergency room has just a few ultrasound machines. When a patient arrives with abdominal trauma or internal bleeding, staff grab the nearest ultrasound machine. Then, it’s on to the next patient. In the rush to save lives, there’s often no time to assemble cleaning supplies to sterilize the machine.

Mena observed that the ultrasound wands in use were sometimes soiled with dried gel or smears of blood, potentially exposing patients to infections. So when he began his senior design capstone project, he told his teammates about it, and together they came up with a solution: a disposable polymer pad that attaches to the ultrasound wand. One side has a slick coating that replaces the ultrasound gel. The other is adhesive so it adheres easily to the surface of the wand. After the ultrasound is performed, the technician can throw away the dirty pad.

The young entrepreneurs took their idea and launched a start-up company, SonoFAST. Today, Mena is helping to get it off the ground while also attending medical school at the University of California, San Francisco.

FlexSpark, which developed a device to prevent deep vein thrombosis, is another startup to originate from the course. Syed Hasnain, the company’s co-founder, credits Ackerman’s class with the start-up’s success. As of early 2017, the startup had raised $1.2 million in venture funding and landed a $65 million distribution contract.

“You realize, going into the corporate world, just how unprecedented this access to medical staff is,” Hasnain says. “When we began the accelerator, we were the underdogs, a bunch of undergrads competing with Ph.D.’s and working doctors. But we’d been able to get the input of about 97 different medical professionals on our device.”

This gave his team the edge, Hasnain says — and enabled them to design a device that would meet a genuine need for both patients and hospital staff.

“Most biomedical engineering courses focus on developing tools to solve problems,” Hasnain says. “But Dr. Ackerman’s course is unique in giving us the opportunity to unleash our curiosity in a practical environment and identify and solve actual problems in healthcare. It’s really a transformative experience for students who take it.”

Remaking labs for the real world

Here’s one way to practice calculating the acceleration of an object: Get a long, curved track, a pinewood derby car and a handheld accelerometer.

But the method has a few problems. For one, it’s a hassle to transport and construct such a system, so it’s very difficult to use as a classroom demo. And you can only handle one such track, which means just a few students take a hands-on role, while others have to watch.

So a Georgia Tech research group, aptly named Hands-On Learning, decided to create a replacement: a small, portable pendulum, the bottom of which holds a smart phone with a built-in accelerometer (commonplace in smart phones today).

When the pendulum starts swinging, the phone swings with it, allowing students to track and gather data about the rate of acceleration. Because the pendulum device is affordable and easy to make, every student in class gets an opportunity to work the experiment.

Hands-On Learning is one of Georgia Tech’s unique Vertically Integrated Projects or VIPs. The projects bring together interdisciplinary teams of undergraduate and graduate students, post-doc researchers and professors to tackle ambitious research challenges.

Through the Hands-On Learning VIP, undergrads earn course credit as they design better ways to explore engineering principles in the classroom. In the process, they create valuable tools and approaches to improve the learning experience for their classmates and themselves.

The group is led by Bonnie and Al Ferri, both professors and associate chairs for undergraduate affairs in their respective schools. Professor Bonnie Ferri in ECE has spent 13 years exploring ways to incorporate hands-on experiments into her electrical engineering courses. Her husband, professor Aldo Ferri, is implementing similar projects in his mechanical engineering courses.

Together, the Ferris have received three National Science Foundation grants to develop mobile hands-on experimental modules, and the experiments they’ve developed benefit about 2,500 Tech students each year.

This year, the Hands-On Learning VIP is tackling their most ambitious project yet: programming and modifying a remote-control car that rides on a customized table-top treadmill. From the car’s electronic circuitry to the mobile apps used to control it, every aspect of the project offers a way to help engineering students apply their lessons in the real world.

by Desirina Frew.

Originally published in Georgia Tech’s Engineers magazine, Spring 2017

Aquart, who is mentored by postdoc Jessica Weaver in the lab of Andrés García in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, earned a $1,000 prize for his research, titled, “Engineering and Anti-Inflammatory Drug Delivery System for Islet Transplantation,” in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics category.

It’s a fitting encore for Aquart, who is completing his second and final year in the ENGAGES program, based in the Petit Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A new class of high school students will be introduced to the program in June.

To qualify for the international fair, Aquart had to compete and win top prizes in science fairs at the school, local, and state level.

“This is a big deal for Jahizreal and a big deal for Project ENGAGES,” noted Manu Platt, co-founder and co-chair of the program with Bob Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute. “The bar has been raised.”

Project ENGAGES had just recently experienced another “big deal” earlier in the month with its annual Senior Celebration (May 8). Aquart was among 16 high school students being recognized for their participation in ENGAGES who were treated to a keynote speech by pioneering author, physician, and educator Louis Sullivan.

“This is an opportunity I didn’t want to pass up,” said Sullivan, who was Secretary of Health and Human Services for President George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) and founding dean and former president of the Morehouse School of Medicine. “I’ve worked primarily at trying to improve the lives of my fellow man by helping to develop new generations of contributors.”

This was not just a hint for the gathered ENGAGES students and families, who come from six minority-serving public high schools in Atlanta. This was expectation from a giant in the realm of health policy and minority health advocacy.

Sullivan looked out at the people packed into the Suddath seminar room and continued, “I was the beneficiary of many role models during my life. The things I’ve been able to do are because of the inspiration, encouragement, and support I received from many people along the way. We are a great nation, but as you all know, we still have many imperfections. Those imperfections are going to be erased by the activities of you, our young people, as you work to achieve your greatest potential.”

Aquart will continue working toward that potential this fall when he begins attending the University of Hartford. While all of his fellow ENGAGES seniors are making post-graduation plans, a number have already made commitments: Lauren Bailey (Spelman College), Kyte Harveywork (Georgia Tech), Chrisangela Martin (Georgia State), Dre’Quan Riley (Georgia Southern), Ayan Robinson (Georgia National Guard), and Ashley Scott (Georgia Southern).

Now completing its fourth year, Project ENGAGES (Engaging New Generations at Georgia Tech through Engineering and Science) is a unique, year-round high school STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education program started at Georgia Tech by Platt, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Nerem, the Parker H. Petit Distinguished Chair for Engineering in Medicine and Institute Professor Emeritus.

The program, which offers two tracks for students – biotechnology and engineering – is a partnership with six minority-serving public high schools in Atlanta: Coretta Scott King Young Women's Leadership Academy, B.E.S.T Academy, KIPP Atlanta Collegiate, Charles R. Drew Charter High School, South Atlanta High School, and also Benjamin E. Mays High School, named for Sullivan’s mentor, longtime president of Morehouse College, and a leader of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

Sullivan, a 1954 Morehouse graduate, told his audience that he and his contemporaries received an important charge from Mays and the other faculty at Morehouse: change the world, not just fit in.

“Dr. Mays had an expression he liked to share: ‘Each of you were born to this world to do something special, so you must find out what that is, because if you don’t, the world will be at a loss,’” Sullivan said. “Those are the things that inspired us.”

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“Anytime I go to the zoo, I always hear a kid ask why or how they do that,” says Young-Hui Chang, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences who studies locomotion in animals from both a neurological and a biomechanical lens. “It’s a natural question.”

Because science has yet to provide a definitive answer, Chang and fellow researcher Lena Ting investigated how flamingos are able to stand and sleep on one leg so easily for so long. Ting is a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech who studies balance control in humans and mammals.

Their findings, published this week in Biology Letters, suggest a reason that differs from most previous suggestions: it’s about reducing muscular effort.

Potential applications stretch from better robotics, orthopedic braces, and artificial limbs, to more focused treatments for neurological or balance problems.

But Chang argues that simply providing clarity to long-standing questions about long-standing flamingos has great value as well.

“There’s something to be said for just scientific curiosity and learning how nature works,” he says. Flamingos aren’t the only birds that stand on one leg, he adds, but “the extreme example is the flamingo. It’s precisely from these extreme examples in nature where you can really gain a lot of insight.”

A firmer foundation for flamingos

Surprisingly, Chang says, given how long the question about flamingos has been around, “there hasn’t been a whole lot of research done.” Others have suggested that the birds engage in this behavior to avoid muscle fatigue or to conserve body heat.

Chang and Ting studied live birds at the Zoo Atlanta flock, one of the largest breeding flocks of Chilean flamingos in the U.S. They also used two cadaver birds from the Birmingham Zoo and flamingo skeletons from the University of California at Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. 

Zoo Atlanta and Georgia Tech Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) approved all procedures using live animals. No animal was killed or harmed for the purposes of the study.

Their research shows that a “passively engaged gravitational stay apparatus” helps the birds support their weight and maintain balance while on one reed-thin leg. The bird’s specialized anatomy, clever posture, and gravity combine to give the flamingo this ability, which does not involve bones locking into position. Chang says it’s more like a hammock or sling than a lock, but it does require the unique anatomy of flamingos.

“The biomechanics are such that when they stand on one leg, they become very stable and are able to maintain that posture without activating muscle,” Ting says. “If they deviate from that posture to two legs, that no longer holds. It’s very posture-specific, a one-legged posture that can support their body weight.”

The “passively engaged” part of the flamingo’s gravitational stay apparatus is exactly as it sounds: It requires minuscule, if any, active muscular or nerve control, Chang adds.

Those who marvel at a large, fluffy pink lump of flamingo body held up by one slender leg may be surprised to learn that the “joint” in the middle of that leg is actually an ankle, not a knee. “Most people don’t realize that knee and hip joints are not actually in view in most birds,” Chang says. “They’re near the body, kind of behind the wing. The flamingo thigh is almost perfectly horizontal.”

All that contributes to biomechanics that might actually require greater muscular effort if not for the flamingo’s ability to “stay” in a pose, which flamingos can get out of easily in flight-or-fight situations.

Giving robots - and people – stronger legs to stand on

A one-legged standing test, actually termed a “flamingo test,” is used to diagnose human balance disorders with the help of pressure plates, instruments that measure balance, force, and other data. Humans are usually more than willing to stand on pressure plates. But flamingos? They tend to squawk at things foreign in their environment.

“The zoo didn’t want us to interact with the adult flamingos because they don’t handle change in their environment very well,” Ting says. But zoo workers could handle juvenile flamingos and placed them near the plates after they were fed, hoping that postprandial sleepiness would yield measurable data.

The cadaver birds actually provided a eureka moment for Chang. After putting one into the one-legged pose, “I don’t know what made me do it, but I just kind of grabbed the leg and picked it up,” he says. The bird maintained its posture. “Here we have a non-living animal able to stand on one leg. Obviously, if it’s not alive, then the muscles are not activated.”

Can flamingo biomechanics help treat human movement and balance disorders?

“If we know how much is passive mechanics and how much the nervous system has to control, it puts researchers in a better position to treat people,” Chang says. Flamingo biomechanics can mean better wearable artificial limbs and longer battery life for stability supports.

Robots could also benefit. Getting robots to balance can be difficult; sensing the environment and making adjustments is how they currently do it. “But if you design the biomechanics of a robot in the right way, not so much sensing but a sort of feedback control,” Ting says, “then they would have this passive ability, and they would be more robust in uncertain environments.”