In receiving their fellowships, Eva Dyer and Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professors in the Coulter Department, are ranked among “the best young scientists working today,” according to Adam F. Falk, president of the Sloan Foundation.
“Sloan Fellows stand out for their creativity, for their hard work, for the importance of the issues they tackle and the energy and innovation with which they tackle them,” Falk said. “To be a Sloan Fellow is to be in the vanguard of 21st-century science.”
Past Sloan Research Fellows include many towering figures in the history of science, including physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, and game theorist John Nash. Forty-seven fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective field, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 have received the National Medal of Science and 18 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.
“It is truly remarkable for one department to have two Sloan Research Fellowship winners in the same year,” said Susan Margulies, Coulter Department Chair. “Last year, Bilal Haider from BME won a Sloan Fellowship, and Annabelle Singer was awarded a Packard Fellowship. Three Sloan awards and a Packard Fellowship in just two years are evidence of the brilliance and thought leadership of our early-stage neuro-engineering faculty.”
Dyer’s research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, optimization and neuroscience. Her lab 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.
Pandarinath, who is also an assistant professor in Emory’s Department of Neurosurgery as well as the Emory Neuromodulation Technology Innovation Center, leads the Emory and Georgia Tech Systems Neural Engineering Lab. He’s part of an interdisciplinary team at Emory and Georgia Tech working to better understand how large networks of neurons in the brain encode information and control behavior. Pandarinath’s team hopes to design new brain-machine interface technologies to help restore movement to people who are paralyzed, including those affected by spinal cord injury and stroke, and by Parkinson’s disease and ALS.
Valued not only for their prestige, Sloan Research Fellowships are a highly flexible source of research support. Funds may be spent in any way a fellow deems will best advance his or her work. Drawn this year from 57 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, the 2019 Sloan Research Fellows represent a diverse array of research interests.
Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields — chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics — the Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in close coordination with the scientific community. Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists, and winning fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars on the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in his or her field. Winners receive a two-year, $70,000 fellowship to further their research.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in New York City. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-president and CEO of the General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economics.
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The startup business that was born in the Masters of Biomedical Innovation and Development (MBID) program at the Georgia Institute of Technology was one of just five companies chosen to present their plans as a finalist in the NFL’s 2019 edition of the “1st and Future” competition on Super Bowl weekend.
The annual competition, organized around the Super Bowl, is designed to spur innovation in player health, safety, and performance. Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Business Incubator (ATDC) was a cohost of the event at the Ferst Center for the Arts stage on the Tech campus, on the Saturday (Feb. 2) before the big game.
“The football game may not have been a classic, but the experience was unforgettable, pretty awesome really,” said Brett Rogers, one of four MBID students who launched TendoNova, which had to compete with more than 100 other applicants from across the planet to land a top-five spot in the 1st and Future finals.
This was an opportunity for TendoNova to showcase its innovative medical device, which targets chronic tendon pain, such as tennis elbow and plantar fasciitis. The company is developing a suite of specialized tools for minimally invasive orthopedic procedures that can be performed under ultrasound guidance in the physician's office.
Rogers and his teammates were in the first cohort of the accelerated graduate program (2013-2014), part of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
TendoNova did not win one of the two top prizes ($50,000 for first plus Super Bowl tickets, and $20,000 for second plus tickets), “but it was a tremendous experience just to be a finalist,” said Shawna Khouri, one of the MBID grads who co-founded TendoNova.
The company was represented on the national stage by co-founder and MBID grad Jonathan Shaw, and the CEO the team hired to lead the company, Roy Wallen. Meanwhile, Khouri, Rogers, and the company’s other co-founder/MBID grad, Luka Grujic, cheered them on from the audience.
Shaw and Wallen made their pitch in front of National Football League (NFL) players, coaches, owners, physicians, investors and viewers across the country. Judges included:
The full event, including TendoNova’s presentation, can be seen here on the NFL’s website.
"It was a tremendous honor to be named a finalist among so many other outstanding companies and to participate in the NFL ‘1st and Future’ competition,” said Wallen. “Support and mentorship from organizations like the NFL and ATDC are critical to our industry and help make these groundbreaking solutions a reality.”
While Grujic, a strategic product manager for Medtronic, came to Tech’s MBID program after earning his Bachelor of Science in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, Rogers and Khouri graduated from the BME program at Tech.
“When I was an undergrad, I co-oped for a medical device company and learned a lot from the experience,” Rogers said. “One of the things I learned was that medical device development is a whole different ballgame, very complex – there’s an alphabet soup that goes along with it.”
James Rains, professor of the practice and director of BME’s Capstone program and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, told Rogers about a new graduate program on the horizon, “that was hyper-focused on medical device development,” said Rogers, who enrolled for the first year of MBID.
Unlike his three teammates, all trained as engineers, Shaw came to the program after 10 years as a physical therapist and saw a lot of, “nagging injuries that just wouldn’t go away,” he said. “Matt Stinchcomb, a former pro football player is a friend of my family’s, and he’s still in pain from a ruptured tendon he had in high school. Construction workers suffer from these types of injuries, too.”
For two years before enrolling at Georgia Tech, Shaw had an idea for something that eventually became the Ocelot XT, a device for in-office ultrasound-guided orthopedic procedures. “I had a concept but no one around me who could build this stuff,” said Shaw, who was part of the Emory Sports Medicine team.
“What really drew our team together was the desire to solve a real unmet clinical need that Jonathan brought to us,” said Khouri, who is now the program manager of the Coulter Translational Fund at Georgia Tech. “He would treat people with chronic tendon pain and less than half of them would actually respond to physical therapy alone. So he knew exactly what needed to be happening at the tissue level.”
The TendoNova team has made both a business and a clinical impact, according to Sathya Gourisanker, professor of the practice and director of the MBID program. “They narrowed the need and their problem to create a novel system,” he said, describing the Ocelet XT, which allows for more percutaneous needle tenotomies, “which offers a low-cost tool to enable clinicians to perform procedures that were typically reserved for the operating room, right there in the physician’s office.”
Gourisankar explained that the team completed much of the concept phase and early pre-clinical activities during the MBID year. Following graduation, with a grant from the Georgia Research Alliance, TendoNova was able to advance its prototype. Meanwhile, each of the former students went into careers in the medical device industry.
“This called for tremendous commitment in terms of time and energy as well as teamwork in coordinating this extra project on top of their demanding professional activities,” noted Gourisankar. “But they were passionate, driven, and they succeeded in getting external funding for further development.”
The team eventually hired an experienced management team (Wallen and Chairman of the Board Lou Malice), and as they move forward to raise a new round of funding to get through regulatory clearance, being part of a Super Bowl, regardless of the game on the field, certainly can’t hurt.
“It was amazing,” said Khouri. “From the judges, to the interest we received from other folks in attendance, potential angel investors, the experience we had and the exposure we got was tremendous.”
]]>It’s a natural, powerful electromechanical pump that can keep on going for 80 years, in some people, without ever needing a single repair. And yet, heart disease remains the number one killer, taking 610,000 lives a year.
Researchers from the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory are exploring the root causes of major heart disorders like atherosclerosis and valve impairment, while others are engineering methods to detect and fix the damage caused by heart disease.
Read the story and watch the video, available now in Georgia Tech’s Research Horizons.
]]>How white blood cells called neutrophils work has not been understood well on a micron level, but researchers have gotten a closer look by chemically modeling one of their combat weapons, a kind of web, and trying it out on bacteria. The researchers then successfully double-teamed the bacteria with an antibiotic and their synthetic version of the white blood cell's web.
“One of their (the cells') weapons are neutrophil extracellular traps, also called NETs,” said J. Scott VanEpps, assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan. VanEpps co-led the study with Shuichi Takayama from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
NETs are microscopic networks of fibers made primarily of DNA that neutrophils produce to capture bacteria.
“It’s amazing to think that molecular DNA tape, on which our genetic code is recorded, can also be used as a bacteria-lassoing web. White blood cells can act like cellular Spidermen that net bacterial micro-villains to protect our body,” said Takayama, who is a professor in Georgia Tech’s Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences and in the Wallace H Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Takayama and VanEpps synthesized a rough chemical imitation of the NETs to study how they work by snaring bacteria in the lab in vitro. They also found antibiotics killed bacteria more effectively when combined with the synthetic web than when applied alone. The researchers published their results in the journal Advanced Materials on January 20, 2018.
“Although there are literally hundreds of different ingredients in natural NETs, we were able to recreate a lot of their structure and function with just two ingredients,” VanEpp said. “They look and function very similar to NETs produced by those neutrophil white blood cells and the synthesis method is much simpler than isolating them from neutrophils.”
The researchers first used their microwebs to snare and kill bacteria in order to better understand how white blood NETs work. Then they combined their microwebs with antibiotics in vitro to test for increased drug effectiveness.
Their results imply that the presence of white blood cell NETs in the body may increase the effectiveness of antibiotics. Also, the synthetic microwebs may have medical potential on their own.
“As bacteria develop resistance even to last-resort antibiotics, there is worry of untreatable infections. We found that microwebs can help antibiotics break through such resistance,” said Takayama, who is also Price Gilbert, Jr. Chair in Regenerative Engineering and Medicine at Georgia Tech.
“The knowledge gained in this study could be helpful in the future in designing new and better antibiotics that mimic the body’s natural defense mechanisms, as well as potentially change how we dose antibiotics given the potential synergy between the immune system and certain antibiotics,” VanEpps said.
The new microwebs also serve as a foundation for future research on even more functions of DNA ejected outside of cells.
“The ability to readily customize the microweb composition opens many opportunities to engineer new DNA materials that mimic biology and increase our understanding of the role of NETs and other types of extracellular DNA in the body,” Takayama said.
These authors contributed to this study: Yang Song from Georgia Tech; Usha Kadiyala, Priyan Weerappuli, Srilakshmi Yalavarthi, Cameron Louttit, Jason S. Knight, and James J. Moon from the Unversity of Michigan; Jordan J. Valdez and David S. Weiss from Emory University School of Medicine. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health: the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences; and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, (grants: NIH NIAID U19 AI116482, R01 AI141883, and K08 AI128006; NIGMS R01 GM123517; NHLBI R01 HL134846 and U01 CA210152), the Veterans Administration (merit award BX‐002788), and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease award.
Writers / media contacts:
Kylie Urban, University of Michigan, kylieo@med.umich.edu
Ben Brumfield, Georgia Institute of Technology, ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu, 404-660-1408
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Carrion’s advisor is Joe Le Doux, associate professor, in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
The award is more than a financial stipend – it is intended to intellectually support the development of an emergent scholar’s program(s) of research and help scholars craft questions, strengthen their theoretical frameworks, and improve their research skills. Jumki Basu scholars are required to participate in the NARST Equity and Ethics committee sponsored pre-conference workshop before the annual international NARST conference. This year’s 2019 international conference will be held March 31 - April 3 in Baltimore, Maryland. Scholars are also invited to participate in other NARST events and to contribute to science education research, scholarship, and leadership more broadly.
Carrion received her degree in Teaching and Learning with a concentration in Science Education from Georgia State University. She is half Colombian and has grown up in a bicultural world. Her unique cultural perspective influenced her research. The majority of her research is in Title 1, low socioeconomic schools with high minority populations. Carrion is researching new interventions which may make science and engineering more accessible to all types of students but specifically minority students. Her current work is using school gardens as an avenue to facilitate science and engineering practices in middle school students. She hopes to continue her garden research with undergraduates here at Georgia Tech.
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Active learning practices supported by research, also described as EBIPs, are absent from many college and university classrooms. Instructors tend to teach how they were taught, and simply “telling” instructors to change how they teach is only minimally effective at changing attitudes and practices.
Ross is working with the NSF-funded Community College Anatomy & Physiology Education Research (CAPER) project. The project hypothesizes that engaging community college instructors in research efforts investigating EBIP effectiveness will create lasting change.
To that end, twelve community college instructors will take an introductory course delivered by the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS) introducing EBIPs and educational research techniques and subsequently plan then undertake a research project in their own classroom.
They are supported throughout the project by a team of mentors, data analysis consultants, and writing consultants from a variety of 2-year, 4-year, and research-intensive institutions like Georgia Tech, and will be presenting their work at the annual meeting of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS).
Participants also benefit from interactions with other community college researchers involved in SABER (Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research) and the NSF-funded CC Bio INSITES project. Moreover, the entire team is collaborating on a multi-institutional research project investigating the impact of active learning practices on aspects other than academic performance, such as student anxiety, as well as the influence of individual differences such as social anxiety on the effectiveness of EBIPs. The project has the added benefit of gathering data in community college settings that are often ignored by education researchers.
The CAPER project is unique in that it involves a partnership between larger, four year schools and community colleges—research funding from the NSF typically goes to large research universities. While the CAPER project directly involves educators and researchers, the larger goal is to help students learn anatomy and physiology in classrooms that use best practices in teaching and learning.
“Our research team hopes to provide the necessary support for community college faculty to learn more about EBIPs and successfully implement them in their human anatomy and physiology courses,” said Ross. “We also believe that empowering these faculty to complete teaching as research projects in their own community college classrooms will change their mindset towards instructional excellence.”
]]>GloShieldTM, a product from Jackson Medical, is a new medical operating room solution that reduces the risk of fires and burns attributed to fiber-optic light cables. A fiber optic cable can reach temperatures of over 550° F. Using GloShieldTM to insulate the fiber optic like cable tip, the risk of fire is significantly reduced. Jackson Medical was founded by James Rains, CEO, and Kamil Makhnejia, COO. In the beginning, Makhnejia was a BME student at Georgia Tech while Rains was, and still is, a Coulter BME faculty member.
“It is an honor to be recognized by such a great organization. Our success could not be possible without the critical support from local resources such as The Coulter Translational Program, the Global Center for Medical Innovation, VentureLab, and the Georgia Research Alliance,” said Rains, who is also a member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “We are fortunate to be part of the culture that Georgia Tech has structured that encourages and supports innovative efforts to help create new businesses.”
Scott Hollister, BME professor, Patsy and Alan Dorris Chair in Pediatric Technology at Georgia Tech, and a researcher in the Petit Institute, along with a team of physicians at Children’s, were recognized for the state of Georgia’s first-ever procedure to place 3D-printed tracheal splints in a pediatric patient. A cross-functional team of Children’s surgeons used three custom-made splints, which biomedical engineers at the Georgia Tech helped create using an innovative and experimental 3D-printing technology, to assist the breathing of a 7-month-old patient battling life-threatening airway obstruction.
“The possibility of using 3D printing technology to save the life of a child is our motivation in the lab every day,” said Hollister, who is also the director of the Center for 3D Medical Fabrication at Georgia Tech.
The Pediatric Technology Center (PTC) within Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta won in the Community Awards category. The award is presented to individuals, companies or institutions whose contributions to Georgia’s life sciences community are worthy of special recognition. The Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Technology Center brings clinical experts together with Georgia Tech scientists, and engineers, including many from the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, to develop technological solutions to problems in the health and care of children. The Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Technology Center provides opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration in pediatrics, creating breakthrough discoveries that often can only be found at the intersection of multiple disciplines.
Georgia Bio Innovation Award winners:
* GloShieldTM from Jackson Medical
* 3D-printed Tracheal Splint
Georgia Bio Community Awards winner:
* Pediatric Technology Center (PTC) within Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
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The grant, entitled “A novel brain-machine interface for rehabilitation,” aims to develop new strategies to help restore movement to people who are paralyzed, including those affected by spinal cord injury and stroke. Brain-machine interface systems interface directly with the brain to allow people with paralysis to control external assistive devices, such as robotic arms or exoskeletons, or to control the movement of their own limbs through direct electrical stimulation of muscles.
In previous work at Stanford, Pandarinath and colleagues developed brain-machine interfaces that focused on a particular portion of the brain known as the motor cortex. In the current study, Pandarinath, in collaboration with colleagues in the departments of Neurosurgery and Neurology at Emory, hopes to test whether multiple areas of the brain, which each control different aspects of movement, might provide complementary signals for controlling brain-machine interfaces.
The mission of the Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Engineering Career Development program is to recruit and train scholars with engineering and other quantitative backgrounds to become successful rehabilitation scientists in basic, translational, and/or clinical research. These rehabilitation scientists will have the ability to integrate knowledge from the various disciplines involved in Movement and Rehabilitation Science (MRS) research, including engineering, quantitative neuroscience and physiology, and affiliated clinical sciences.
The program is supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under award number K12HD073945.
]]>One of these, cerebral cavernous malformation (CCM), the abnormal development of blood vessels in the brain, has long captured the attention of Denis Tsygankov, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech.
“This actually started for me as a project when I was at the University of North Carolina and was approached with a challenge,” said Tsygankov, who worked in a computational lab of his principal investigator, Timothy Elston, in collaboration with the experimental lab of Gary Johnson, who studied molecular mechanisms of CCM pathogenesis. “There is no cure. Some people who have the disease may live their whole lives and not know it.”
The thing is, CCM can be a genetic hand-me down: Children stand a 50 percent of inheriting CCM from a parent with the condition. Typically, the disease lies quietly within a person’s brain or spinal cord until there are symptoms. These include seizures, headaches, paralysis, lost vision, cerebral hemorrhage. And sometimes, because of severe bleeding or pressure, CCMs can be deadly.
The few treatment options vary. Anti-epileptic drugs can control seizures, but surgery (with all the potential side effects of an invasive procedure) may be necessary to remove a CCM.
“People go under the knife again and again,” Tsygankov said. “It’s not a super common disease, but it is important to find a pharmacological alternative to its treatment.”
Toward that end, Tsygankov’s lab recently produced a research paper in iScience (an interdisciplinary open-access publication in the Cell press family of journals), entitled, “Biomechanics of Endothelial Tubule Formation Differentially Modulated by Cerebral Cavernous Malformation Proteins.” Their findings in the article are significant in developing a fuller understanding of CCM.
“We know about the mutations that cause it. On a molecular level we can do genetic studies, biochemical studies, and say, ‘here is the signaling network involved.’ But when you look at the disease you look at collective cell behavior,” Tsygankov said. “You see how the blood vessels form and then you see there is a huge gap between what you know on the molecular level and what you know on the tissue level. This is a challenging problem in general for any disease.”
He and his team took an integrative approach, using computer modeling and experiments in studying coordinated endothelial cell behavior at the earlier stages of vasculogenesis.
“Through iterative cycling of modeling and experiments, we investigated the biomechanics of multicellular patterning in the context of healthy and diseased cell populations,” said Tsygankov, whose team developed a comprehensive simulation model with a sufficient level of detail to account for single-cell dynamics – protrusive activity, cytoskeletal stiffness, shape change, and then used it to simulate thousands of interacting cells.
“This approach allowed us to relate molecular regulation of the cytoskeleton to the multicellular patterns that developed during endothelial tubule formation,” said Tsygankov. The team used a well-controlled disease model and endothelial cells with a knockdown of each of the three CCM proteins known to be responsible for similarly disruptive (but mechanistically different) effects on the formation of tubular structures.
“Specifically, our methodology allowed us to dissect causal effects of CCM-1, CCM-2, and CCM-3 knockdowns on the resulting multicellular structures and explain the incomplete rescue of the disease phenotypes by the inhibition of one of the key regulators of the cytoskeleton, Rho kinase, which become overactivated in CCM,” said Tsygankov, whose study also addressed a somewhat controversial observation – despite well-documented commonalities in the effects of the three proteins on the downstream signaling, CCM-3 cells have surprisingly low cytoskeletal stiffness as compared to CCM-1 and CCM-2.
“We’ve taken very, very nascent steps,” Tsygankov said. “But ultimately the goal is to learn enough about this system and how it works so that we can interfere and fix it.”
For Tsygankov, this project also served as a proof of the power of integrative systems biology, an important factor to a researcher who started his scientific journey as a theoretical physicist interested in complex dynamical systems and soon discovered that biological tissue is the ultimate complex dynamical system.
“Signaling and regulatory networks don’t just happen in a well-mixed soup or a vacuum,” he said. “They happen within the complex cytoskeletal organization of cells, and cells are active. They are moving and interacting. So, my ultimate goal is to bridge two fields – biomechanics and traditional molecular systems biology. And I’m very proud that we could merge our careful computational modeling with experimentation. That’s sort of our lab’s philosophy.”
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In addition to Tsygankov, the iScience paper’s authors were Olga Chernaya (postdoctoral researcher in Tsygankov’s lab); Todd Sulchek (assistant professor in Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering with appointment in Coulter Department, and a Petit Institute researcher); Anastasia Zhurikhina, Siarhei Hladyshau, and William Pilcher (graduate researchers in Tsygankov’s lab), Katherine M. Young, Jillian Ortner, and Vaishnavi Andra (BME undergraduate researchers).
The work was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO) grant W911NF-17-1-0395 and by funds from the Marcus Foundation, The Georgia Research Alliance, and the Georgia Tech Foundation through their support of the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing (MC3M) at Georgia Tech.
]]>The process, which has been particularly useful in neuroscience, involves bringing a pipette filled with electrolyte solution and a recording electrode connected to an amplifier, into contact with the membrane of a single cell. So basically, researchers can eavesdrop on the furtive chattering of neurons in the ongoing effort to unlock the brain’s secrets.
“Thousands of people practice this technique every day around the world,” says Craig Forest, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. “But it is painfully tedious and time consuming.”
So Forest and his colleagues decided to speed things up a bit. And now, their automated patch clamping robot – the ‘patcherBot’ – is being commercialized and will be made available to researchers worldwide with the signed licensing agreement between Georgia Tech Research Corporation (GTRC) and Sensapex, an electrophysiology device company based in Finland.
“This is exciting, because this technology is going from the lab, from some research journal articles, into the real world,” says Forest, associate professor in Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and in the Coulter Department for Biomedical Engineering at Tech and Emory University.
“Our mission is to develop tools that make new science possible,” he adds.
Forest’s lab has been working on iterations of the patcherBot for at least six years, developing an image guidance version to target cells and automation technology to create a tight seal between the glass pipette (one micron in diameter) and the cell membrane, which provides a direct electrical connection to the inside of the cell.
In 2016 the research team overturned decades of dogma in the field, developing a robotic technique for reusing the pipettes – for years, went the assumption, these tiny glass tubes could only be used once and were then thrown away. Ilya Kolb, a former graduate student in Forest’s lab, questioned this and set out to find a cleaning method, now patent pending, that could adequately sterilize the pipettes.
“Traditionally, a researcher could do five to 10 recordings a day, and that’s if they’re really good,” Forest says. “Our idea was to clean the pipette automatically after each recording, so we could tell the robot to go back to cells over and over. You don’t even have to be in the room, just set it up and leave, and when you come back to the lab, you’ve recorded about 100 cells.”
Now, a researcher in a biology lab doesn’t have to be an expert in pipette pulling or patch clamping, says Forest, who has talked about the technology “democratizing this area of research,” and sees the potential of patch clamping becoming as commonplace as PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a common biology technique to make many copies of DNA.
Sensapex already has a customer – the first patcherBot will be delivered in April 2019 to Janelia Research Campus, one of the world’s leading neuroscience research centers, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And Forest’s former grad student, Kolb, is now a researcher at Janelia, which has been on a 10-year optogenetic mission to develop fluorescent molecules – optogenetics uses light to control neurons that have been genetically modified to express light-sensitive ion channels.
At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in October, where 30,000 neuro-researchers will gather in Chicago, Sensapex will have the patcherBot on display.
]]>The NFL announced the eight judges and finalists for the 1st and Future competition on Friday.
Georgia Tech is hosting the Feb. 2 event on campus. Although admission is by invitation only, NFL Network will livestream the full competition on http://www.nfl.com/1standfuture/live. More than 100 Georgia Tech faculty, along with student winners from the recent Georgia Tech Sports Innovation Challengehackathon, were among those invited.
During the program, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Atlanta Falcons President and CEO and NFL Competition Committee Chairman Rich McKay will participate in a panel discussion on leveraging the latest technology to modernize the game moderated by Scott Hanson of NFL Network and host of NFL RedZone. Hanson will also emcee the pitch competition.
Finalists will compete in two categories — the NFL Punt Analytics Competition, featuring data-driven proposals for rule changes designed to reduce player injury during punt plays, and the Innovations to Advance Athlete Health and Safety Competition, highlighting innovative product concepts that aim to improve player health and safety. All finalists will present in front of a panel of judges.
Four finalists from the NFL Punt Analytics Competition will be awarded $20,000 and will compete to win Super Bowl LIII tickets. Five finalists from the Innovations to Advance Athlete Health and Safety competition will compete for a grand prize of $50,000 and two tickets to Super Bowl LIII. The second-place winner will receive $20,000 and two tickets to Super Bowl LIII.
Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) managed the submissions for the athlete health and safety competition. ATDC is also serving as a home base for the competing finalists during the week prior to the competition, which is presented by Arrow Electronics.
One of the health and safety finalists, TendoNova, was founded by four Georgia Tech graduates.
Research institutions such as Georgia Tech are already key players in efforts to prevent athletic injuries and shorten recovery time once an injury does occur, President G.P. “Bud” Peterson said in a message about the competition.
Lessons learned from research also have application in other fields, such as pediatric medicine and our military’s efforts to keep service members safe and healthy, he said.
“Yellow Jacket fans love our sports teams, and the opportunity to partner with the NFL to advance collaborative innovation in athletics, particularly around safety and performance, is one we wholeheartedly endorse,” Peterson said. “1st and Future’s innovative spirit dovetails with the energy that propels Georgia Tech’s robust startup culture and spurs the entrepreneurial drive for which the Institute is well known.”
]]>“It’s a well-studied cognitive phenomenon – we anticipate a certain color or a certain feature in a particular region of the visual scene,” says Bilal Haider, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech. “Attention allows your brain to focus and extract information from the scene very quickly.”
Haider and his team are investigating, at a very detailed level, the circuits and mechanisms involved in visual spatial attention, and they recently received a BRAIN Award through the NIH to support their research.
President Barack Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) in 2013, an international public-private research collaborative supporting the development and application of innovative technologies in an effort to produce a new dynamic picture of the brain that will show how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in time and space.
The goal is to fill the gaps in our current knowledge and provide opportunities to investigate how the brain allows the human body to record, process, utilize, store, and retrieve massive amounts of information at the speed of thought. And Haider’s $2.1 million, five-year award, administered through the NIH NINDS, is the latest BRAIN Award granted to Georgia Tech researchers every year since the program’s launch.
Haider’s project is entitled, “Circuit and synaptic mechanisms of visual spatial attention.” Haider and his team, “are basically going to investigate in a very detailed way the circuits and mechanisms involved in visual spatial attention,” he says.
The role of attention in sensory perception is an important question in neuroscience, especially when trying to understand and create better treatments for disorders like schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, and attention deficit disorders. Haider and his team will utilize transgenic mice and combine high-density local field potential and neural activity recordings in the visual cortex, patch-clamp recordings from cortical and thalamic synaptic connections, cell-type specific optogenetics, and a well-characterized spatial attention task to elucidate the neural mechanisms of attention at multiple levels: specific cells, synapses, and circuits.
Haider’s BRAIN Award, which launched officially in the fall, will run for five years, through July 2023, and is valued at $2.1 million.
“We want to understand how circuits rapidly move attention this way or that way, turn it on and turn it off,” says Haider. “Once we can get a handle on that, we can really start to understand how we might be able to enhance normal attention and remedy attention deficits.”
This is just the latest NIH BRAIN Award for BME researchers. Haider’s department colleagues Garrett Stanley and Lena Ting are currently engaged in active BRAIN Initiative projects. Stanley’s third BRAIN Initiative project, entitled “Thalamocortical state control of tactile sensing: Mechanisms, Models, and Behavior,” was launched in January 2018 and runs through 2022. Ting’s project, “CRCNS: Multi-scale models of proprioceptive encoding for sensorimotor control,” began in 2016 and runs through May 2021.
]]>Long-acting contraceptives now available provide the highest level of effectiveness, but usually require a health care professional to inject a drug or implant a device. Short-acting techniques, on the other hand, require frequent compliance by users and therefore are often not as effective. In animal testing, an experimental microneedle contraceptive patch provided a therapeutic level of contraceptive hormone for more than a month with a single application to the skin.
When the patch is applied for several seconds, the microscopic needles break off and remain under the surface of the skin, where biodegradable polymers slowly release the contraceptive drug levonorgestrel over time. Originally designed for use in areas of the world with limited access to health care, the microneedle contraceptive could potentially provide a new family planning alternative to a broader population.
The research was reported January 14 in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering and was supported by Family Health International (FHI 360), funded under a contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“There is a lot of interest in providing more options for long-acting contraceptives,” said Mark Prausnitz, a Regents Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the paper’s corresponding author. “Our goal is for women to be able to self-administer long-acting contraceptives with the microneedle patch that would be applied to the skin for five seconds just once a month.”
Long-acting contraceptives are now available in formats such as patches that must be worn continuously, intrauterine devices (IUDs) that must be placed by trained health care professionals, and drugs injected with hypodermic needles. If the microneedle contraceptive patch is ultimately approved for use, it could become the first self-administered, long-acting contraceptive that does not involve a conventional needle injection. Like other long-acting contraceptive techniques, the microneedle contraceptive patch would disrupt the menstrual cycles of women using it.
Because the tiny needles must remain in the skin for the time-release of the hormone, researchers led by Georgia Tech postdoctoral research scholar Wei Li developed a mechanical technique that would allow the drug-containing microneedles to break free from the patch’s backing material. To accomplish that, the researchers molded tiny air bubbles into the top of the microneedles, creating a structural weakness. The resulting microneedles are strong enough to be pressed into the skin, but when the patch is then shifted to one side, the shear force breaks off the tiny structures in the skin. The patch backing can then be discarded.
Experimental patches designed to deliver a sufficient amount of the hormone for humans have been developed, but not yet tested, noted Prausnitz, who holds the J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. Researchers are also studying whether a single patch could carry enough hormone to provide contraception for as long as six months.
“The microneedle patch delivery platform being developed by Mark Prausnitz and his colleagues for contraception is an exciting advancement in women’s health,” said Gregory S. Kopf, director of R&D Contraceptive Technology Innovation at FHI 360. “This self-administered long-acting contraceptive will afford women discreet and convenient control over their fertility, leading to a positive impact on public health by reducing both unwanted and unintended pregnancies.”
The microneedles are molded from a blend of a biodegradable polymers, poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) and poly(lactic acid), commonly used in resorbable sutures, said Steven Schwendeman, the Ara Paul Professor and chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Michigan and a collaborator on this project. Lactic and glycolic acids are present naturally in the body, contributing to the biocompatibility of the polymer material, he said.
“We select polymer materials to meet specific design objectives such as microneedle strength, biocompatibility, biodegradation and drug release time, and formulation stability,” Schwendeman explained. “Our team then processes the polymer into microneedles by dissolving the polymer and drug in an organic solvent, molding the shape, and then drying off the solvent to create the microneedles. The polymer matrix when formed in this way can slowly and safely release contraceptive hormone for weeks or months when placed in the body.”
Testing with rats evaluated only the blood levels of the hormone and did not attempt to determine whether it could prevent pregnancy. “The goal was to show that we could enable the concentration of the levonorgestrel to stay above levels that are known to cause contraception in humans,” Prausnitz explained.
In developing the experimental contraceptive microneedle patch, the researchers leveraged earlier work on dissolving microneedle patches designed to carry vaccines into the body. A Phase I clinical trial of influenza vaccination using rapidly dissolving microneedles has been conducted in collaboration with Emory University.
That study suggested that the microneedle patches could be safely used to administer the vaccine. Because the microneedles are so small, they enter only the upper layers of the skin and were not perceived as painful by study participants.
“We do not yet know how the contraceptive microneedle patches would work in humans,” Prausnitz said. “Because we are using a well-established contraceptive hormone, we are optimistic that the patch will be an effective contraceptive. We also expect that possible skin irritation at the site of patch application will be minimal, but these expectations need to be verified in clinical trials.”
The contraceptive patches tested on the animals contained 100 microneedles. To deliver an adequate dose of levonorgestrel to a human will require a larger patch, which has been fabricated but not yet tested. The researchers would like to develop a patch that could be applied once every six months.
“There is a lot of interest in minimizing the number of health care interventions that are needed,” Prausnitz said. “Therefore, a contraceptive patch lasting more than one month is desirable, particularly in countries where women have limited access to health care. But because microneedles are by definition small, there are limits to how much drug can be incorporated into a microneedle patch.”
The research team also included Richard N. Terry from Georgia Tech, and Jie Tang and Meihua R. Feng from the University of Michigan.
This publication was prepared under a subcontract funded by Family Health International (FHI 360) under Cooperative Agreement No. AID-OAA-15-00045 funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views, analysis or policies of FHI 360 or USAID, nor does any mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by FHI 360 or USAID.
Mark Prausnitz is an inventor of patents licensed to companies developing microneedle-based products, is a paid advisor to companies developing microneedle-based products, and is a founder/shareholder of companies developing microneedle-based products (Micron Biomedical). This potential conflict of interest has been disclosed and is managed by Georgia Tech and Emory University.
CITATION: Wei Li, et al., “Rapidly separable microneedle patch for the sustained release of a contraceptive,” (Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2019). https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41551-018-0337-4
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]]>The Gordon Prize ceremony will be held at the Academy of Medicine at Georgia Tech in Atlanta on Tuesday, May 14, 2019.
"I am honored to recognize these educators who have created a remarkably innovative biomedical engineering program to create future leaders in the field," said NAE President C. D. Mote, Jr. "The Gordon Prize will help advance their program's global impact on one of society's great challenges - developing engineering leaders in service of human health and well-being."
The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering is housed at both Georgia Tech and Emory. With the help of scientists who specialize in learning and engineering educators, the program is designed to foster the next generation of leaders in biomedical engineering who will play an integral role in improving health and well-being worldwide. This groundbreaking program pioneered bringing best practices in education and learning to engineering. As part of the curriculum, students experience problem-driven learning (PDL), which replicates in class the industry environment that graduates will face as future industry leaders.
Wendy Newstetter is assistant dean for educational research and innovation in the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech. She was a founding faculty member in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, where she was a cognitive and learning scientist (2000-2012). During this time, she worked with faculty to build an innovative curriculum both based on the principles of problem-based learning (PBL) and informed by the ethnographic studies she and her research team conducted in biomedical engineering research laboratories. The objective was to enhance fidelity between the authentic, unscripted learning environment of a research lab and the synthetic or designed environment of a classroom. What started as a single PBL class has grown to a suite of carefully designed engineering learning environments collectively referred to as PDL. This unique collection of classroom environments was recognized in 2013 with the Georgia Regents' Teaching Excellence Award.
Joseph Le Doux is associate chair for undergraduate learning and experience and an associate professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. He joined the department in 1999 as an assistant professor because he was inspired by the vision of the department's founding chair, Don Giddens, to educate engineers who were integrative thinkers who could operate seamlessly between the engineering and life sciences. As part of his contribution to the department's efforts to realize this vision, Le Doux invented the problem-solving studio approach for teaching engineering, which he implemented in 2008 in a sophomore-level introductory course. He has since worked with faculty and learning-science colleagues to refine and adapt the approach for use in multiple courses in biomedical and other engineering disciplines.
Paul Benkeser is a professor and senior associate chair in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. A member of the Georgia Tech faculty since 1985, he was one of the founding faculty of the Coulter Department in 1998 and served as its first associate chair for undergraduate studies. His early research interests were in therapeutic and diagnostic applications of ultrasound. After joining the department, he redirected his energies toward enhancing undergraduate biomedical engineering education, with particular interests in integrating problem-driven learning and global experiential learning opportunities in the curriculum. His research and education endeavors have been funded by grants from NIH, NSF, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Whitaker Foundation.
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The Gordon Prize was established in 2001 as a biennial prize acknowledging new modalities and experiments in education that develop effective engineering leaders. Recognizing the potential to spur a revolution in engineering education, NAE announced in 2003 that the prize would be awarded annually.
The mission of the NAE is to advance the well-being of the nation by promoting a vibrant engineering profession and by marshalling the expertise and insights of eminent engineers to provide independent advice to the federal government on matters involving engineering and technology. The NAE is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, an independent, nonprofit organization chartered by Congress to provide objective analysis and advice to the nation on matters of science, technology, and health.
Contacts:
Walter Rich
404-385-2416
wrich@gatech.edu
Holly Korschun
404-727-3990
hkorsch@emory.edu
Brandon Green
Communications/Media Specialist
202-334-2226
email BGreen@nae.edu
Deborah M. Young
Program Officer
202-334-1266
e-mail DYoung@nae.edu
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
]]>“The opportunity to serve as president of Georgia Tech the past 10 years has been one of the highlights of my career,” Peterson said. “Georgia Tech is a great institution and great institutions are built on great people, great faculty, great staff and great students. Since our very first visit to Georgia Tech in the fall of 2008, Val and I have continued to be impressed with the quality of the people of Georgia Tech and the dedication and commitment to making Georgia Tech the nationally recognized institution that it is today.”
“President Peterson’s extraordinary contributions to Georgia Tech, a top-10 public research university, are unmatched,” said Chancellor Steve Wrigley. “Under Bud’s leadership, Georgia Tech became the first institution in a decade to receive an invitation to join the prestigious Association of American Universities. His focus on research led to an increase in total awards from $445 million to $851 million. At the same time, he grew student enrollment, including the number of women enrolled in first-year classes and transformed the landscape of midtown Atlanta. Whether in academic distinction, student growth or reputation for research, Georgia Tech has flourished under Bud’s tenure. His vision and achievements will continue to leave their mark on the university and its graduates for years to come. I’m grateful for his service to our students and the University System of Georgia, and wish him well as he embarks on his next chapter.”
Other accomplishments during Peterson’s presidency include:
Significantly expanded Georgia Tech’s presence in Tech Square along with individual “corporate innovation centers.” Since 2013, 30 corporations have established innovation centers in and around Tech Square, and several corporations have moved their world headquarters to Atlanta in part because of access to talent and technologies being developed Georgia Tech.
Developed the collaborative relationship that has resulted in the construction of Coda in Tech Square. Slated to open in spring 2019, Coda is a $375 million, 750,000 square-foot facility that includes Tech’s high-performance computing, startups and corporations.
Exceeded the $1.5 billion goal for Campaign Georgia Tech by 20 percent, raising over $1.8 billion in support of Georgia Tech.
As part of its commitment to affordability and access for Georgia’s top students, in fall 2014 Georgia Tech began offering automatic acceptance and four-year in-state tuition scholarships to all Atlanta Public School valedictorians and salutatorians. The Georgia Scholars program was implemented in 2017, offering automatic acceptance for all valedictorians and salutatorians in accredited Georgia high schools.
Initiated several online MS programs, increasing overall graduate student enrollment by 100 percent. Collaborations with AT&T resulted in the launch of the Online Master of Science in Computer Science. OMS CS now has 7,500 students. There have been more than 1,000 graduates, 8 percent of the MS degrees in Computer Science in the US. Two other programs have launched: Online MS degree in Data Analytics; Online MS in Cybersecurity that launched January 2019.
Enhanced the campus with the addition of the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, Roger A. and Helen B. Krone Engineered Biosystems Building. Projects under construction include Coda high performance computing building, library buildings, Campus Safety building, Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, Dalney building project, Georgia Tech Cobb Research Center, Campus Center and ACC Network Production Center.
Increased Georgia Tech enrollment by 69 percent (24 percent for undergraduates and 159 percent for graduate students.) At the same time, undergraduate enrollment applications have more than tripled over the past decade, and graduate applications have doubled. The number of women in the first-year class has increased from 32 to 40 percent.
The University System of Georgia will organize a national search for Peterson’s replacement in the coming days.
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The SOM Imagine, Innovate, and Impact (I3) Awards accentuate the theme of innovation, complementing the existing Emory University Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC) supported Synergy awards. The I3 Awards fall into two categories: (1) those focused on transformational research ideas (the I3 WOW Research awards), and (2) those focused on novel ideas in medical education (the I3 Education awards).
Serpooshan’s research project is entitled “Patient-Specific Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine Using 3D Bioprinting and Photon-Counting Computed Tomography.”
3D bioprinted tissue constructs have demonstrated tremendous potentials as medical patch devices in repairing damaged or diseased hearts. However, clinical applications of cardiac patch systems have been restricted by the poor integration of the patch with the recipient heart and difficulties in monitoring its function in the body.
By employing 3D bioprinting and photon-counting computed (PCCT) tomography technologies, his project aims at developing a new approach for bioengineering of patient-specific vascular patch devices and their tracking in vivo. His lab will bioprint personalized cardiac patches to repair minipig heart tissue following a heart attack. PCCT enables using multiple contrast agents to visualize the damaged and viable heart muscle/vasculature, and to assess patch integration, its release of therapeutics, and blood perfusion at an unprecedented resolution. Prior to the animal studies, the proposed method will be validated by conducting the analysis on hybrid organ phantoms representing the reference patient’s heart. Establishing this novel, high-fidelity, theranostic platform with remarkably high precision, tunability, and reproducibility would be paradigm changing and open new prospects for a broad range of tissue engineering applications.
The Co-PI on this project is Dr. Amir Pourmorteza from Emory Radiology and Imaging Sciences.
CONTACT:
Walter Rich
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
She had chosen Georgia Tech after touring the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and meeting professors who instantly seemed accessible. “I felt invited to ask big questions, and assured that there would be an expert willing to engage with me.”
So, Bush packed up her belongings and traveled across the country to “get to work.” Though it was a tough adjustment at first, she eventually found her place here.
During the course of her undergraduate career, Bush has held two research and development-related internships; studied abroad in New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji; gained medical robotics research experience; and become the founder and CEO of a startup company.
“I know that there's something magic in the water here that converts intentions into reality,” she says. “It is an epicenter of technical expertise — and I have a well-rounded engineering toolkit as a result.”
Bush, who also has a minor in industrial design, put those tools to work when she joined CREATE-X, Tech’s pioneering entrepreneurship initiative. In her words, the experience “paved the road from class project to marketable technology, and undergraduate student to CEO.”
During the past two and a half years, she and her team have been developing TINA (Tampon Insertion Aid) Healthcare. TINA is a universal and ergonomic tool that helps women with limited dexterity, as well as new users, insert tampons. They participated in three campus entrepreneurship programs: InVenture Prize, Idea 2 Prototype, and Startup Launch.
“This exposure put us in front of venture capitalists, angel investors, senior executives, and the U.S. Secretary of Education,” Bush says. It also landed them on Atlanta Inno’s 25 Under 25 list of rising entrepreneurs and technologists. “We were provided with resources and a network of mentors just because we were hardworking students with an idea.” And that, she says, is what sets Tech apart.
One of the biggest takeaways from her undergraduate experience is “being comfortable with ambiguity. Half of the battle in solving a big problem is defining it and breaking it into approachable pieces. At Georgia Tech, I’ve been repeatedly exposed to this methodology, and I’m ready to apply it to each challenge to come.”
Another lesson was more surprising for Bush, who arrived on campus focused on the academic side of college. But she eventually, and happily, discovered “groups of artists, entrepreneurs, feminists, spiritualists, and friends who opened my eyes to the power of collaboration and a diverse community.”
After graduation, Bush plans to continue working on TINA and applying to bioengineering Ph.D. programs. She wants to put her technical and problem-solving skills to work in applying engineering solutions to health care challenges.
As the big day approaches, above all else Bush is grateful — for having not given up, and for finding so many ways to thrive at Tech, which “crafted me into the woman and engineer I am today.”
]]>Institute Communications
]]>But even though his background was grounded in operations research, administration, and industrial engineering, Thomas became something of a pioneer in the development of biomedical engineering education in the U.S., playing a leading role in the creation of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
“When this department was first being discussed, they needed a provost with vision to see how good this could be for Georgia Tech,” said Ajit Yoganathan, a founding member of the Coulter Department, now Regents’ professor, distinguished faculty chair, and associate chair for research in the department, one of the highest ranked BME schools or departments in the nation.
“Mike Thomas had that vision,” added Yoganathan, also a founding member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech, who knew and/or worked with Mike and his wife Pat Thomas for almost 40 years. “ I don’t think this department could have developed as it did without his leadership at Tech. And Pat also played a critical role in the department’s development.”
When Mike Johns left his post as dean of Johns Hopkins’ School of Medicine to become executive vice president of health affairs at Emory in 1996, he called his friend Don Giddens (former Georgia Tech bioengineering researcher and at the time dean of engineering at Hopkins) to ask what he thought about the potential for a biomedical engineering department in Atlanta.
Johns envisioned a partnership between Emory’s clinicians and engineers at Georgia Tech, and Thomas’ name kept coming up.
“There was no biomedical engineering program here, so I asked Don his thoughts and he said, ‘you’ll want to talk to the provost. His name is Mike Thomas,’” Johns recalled. “Then, not long after that, I was at an NIH council meeting with Bob Nerem, [executive director of the Petit Institute at the time at Georgia Tech]. I’ll never forget, we flew back to Atlanta together from D.C., and on the escalator to the baggage claim I suggested we try to get a biomedical engineering program going between our two universities. When he saw that I was serious, he said, ‘we need to talk to Mike Thomas.’”
Not long after that, Nerem and Thomas visited Johns and dean of Emory’s School of Medicine, Tom Lawley, and everyone agreed to move forward with a plan to develop a unique new academic program that would award graduates a degree from both public Georgia Tech and private Emory.
“We all agreed that we had to recruit someone to lead the effort,” Johns said. “Mike pauses a second than says, ‘um, we already have someone in mind.’ I was immediately concerned and thought, oh boy, who are they going to try cramming down my throat. Then they said, ‘Don Giddens.’”
Everybody was on the same page. After five years as dean at Hopkins, Giddens was ready to come back to Atlanta and liked the opportunity waiting for him as founding chair of a new academic department of biomedical engineering.
“The opportunity to work with Mike Thomas and Mike Johns and build this thing from scratch was very appealing,” said Giddens. “After we agreed on everything – number of faculty, our location and so forth, I had two additional requirements of Mike Thomas: I asked to regain my Georgia Tech season basketball tickets, but more important, I asked that his wife, Pat Thomas, become my administrative assistant when the department was formed.”
That’s exactly what happened. Giddens got his basketball tickets, and the first three full-time employees in the new department were Giddens, Yoganathan, and Pat Thomas.
Several years later, Giddens had to leave the Coulter Department -- he'd been hired as dean of Tech’s College of Engineering. During a time of consistent growth, the department needed someone to serve as chair in the interim and Giddens knew who to ask.
“Mike couldn’t say no – he loved the department of biomedical engineering,” Giddens said. “He knew the people at Georgia Tech and Emory, and had a steady, calming style. He was the perfect guy to lead it.”
]]>The results were published Tuesday, Dec. 4 by Nature Communications.
“All other ‘point-of-care’ anemia detection tools require external equipment, and represent trade-offs between invasiveness, cost, and accuracy,” says principal investigator Wilbur Lam, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, and assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.
“This is a standalone app that can look at hemoglobin levels without the need to draw blood,” adds Lam, a clinical hematologist at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta who is also on the faculty at the Emory University School of Medicine.
The app is part of the PhD work of former biomedical engineering graduate student Rob Mannino, who was motivated to conduct the research by his own experience living with beta-thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder caused by a mutation in the beta-globin gene.
“Treatment for my disease requires monthly blood transfusions,” says Mannino, who was a Petit Scholar as an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech. “My doctors would test my hemoglobin levels more if they could, but it’s a hassle for me to get to the hospital in between transfusions to receive this blood test. Instead, my doctors currently have to just estimate when I’m going to need a transfusion, based on my hemoglobin level trends.”
“This whole project couldn’t have been done by anyone but Rob,” Lam says. “He took pictures of himself before and after transfusions as his hemoglobin levels were changing, which enabled him to constantly refine and tweak his technology on himself in a very efficient manner. So essentially, he was his own perfect initial test subject with each iteration of the app.”
Mannino and Lam say that their app could facilitate self-management by patients with chronic anemia, allowing them to monitor their disease and to identify the times when they need to adjust their therapies or receive transfusions, possibly reducing side effects or complications of having transfusions too early or too late.
The researchers say that the app should be used for screening, not clinical diagnosis. The technology could be used by anyone at any time, and could be especially appropriate for pregnant women, women with abnormal menstrual bleeding, or runners/athletes. Its simplicity means it could be useful in developing countries. Clinical diagnostic tools have strict accuracy requirements, but Mannino and Lam think that with additional research, they can eventually achieve the accuracy needed to replace blood-based anemia testing for clinical diagnosis.
Anemia is a blood condition that affects two billion people worldwide and can lead to fatigue, paleness and cardiac distress if left untreated. The current gold standard for anemia diagnosis is known as a complete blood count (CBC).
The researchers studied fingernail photos and correlated the color of the fingernail beds with hemoglobin levels measured by CBC in 337 people: some healthy, and others with a variety of anemia diagnoses. The algorithm for converting fingernail color to blood hemoglobin level was developed with 237 of these subjects and then tested on 100.
The researchers were able to show that a single smartphone image, without personalized calibration, can measure hemoglobin level with an accuracy of 2.4 grams/deciliter with a sensitivity of up to 97 percent. Personalized calibration, tested on four patients over the course of several weeks, can improve the accuracy to 0.92 grams/deciliter, a degree of accuracy on par with point-of-care blood-based hemoglobin tests. Normal values are 13.5-17.5 grams/deciliter for males and 12.0-15.5 grams/deciliter for females.
In the app, the use of fingernail beds, which do not contain melanin, means the test can be valid for people with a variety of skin tones. The accuracy is consistent for dark or light skin tones, Mannino says. The app uses image metadata to correct for background brightness, and can be adapted to phones from multiple manufacturers.
Mannino and Lam say they are working with a variety of doctors at Children’s and Emory – geriatric, internal medicine, neonatologists, transfusion medicine, global health – to obtain additional data and better calibrate their system.
“This is just a snap shot of the accuracy right now,” Lam says. “The algorithm gets smarter with every patient enrolled.”
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (Graduate Research Fellowship DGE-1650044 and Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor 1542174), the 2017 Massachusetts General Hospital Primary Care Technology Prize, and National Institutes of Health (R21 EB025646).
The smartphone anemia app is projected to be available commercially for public download as soon as Spring of 2019. A patent application has been filed for the anemia app, and Wilbur Lam and Rob Mannino have a financial interest in the success of this product.
This year’s Best Overall Project winner at the Capstone Design Expo was team Supleurative, a biomedical engineering team that created a device that makes lung draining procedures possible and efficient in hospitals. The team members are James Wroe, Yige Huang, Hannah Choi, and Tara Ramachandran.
The team’s lung drain project aims to provide a simple, reusable, and cost-effective solution to the lack of suction problem in under-resourced hospitals of developing nations. The majority of previous solutions have involved electrical components, which are rendered useless in these settings with unreliable electricity. The team designed the EZ Drain Adapter System which creates an airtight seal with the current fluid collection jars used in the hospitals of developing nations. These jars are then manually depressurized without requiring any external power supply and can be either immediately used or stored for future use.
Supleurative is one of two BME Capstone teams working on medical devices inspired by health care needs in Ethiopia. The other team is called Libi Medical.
Winner of the Best Biomedical Engineering Project at the Expo was team aMAYOnnaising. This team, sponsored by the Mayo Clinic, designed a device that aids in reconnecting the bladder to the urethra after a prostatectomy. The team members are Nicholas Quan, Bailey Klee, Madeline Smerchansky, and Rachel Mann. There are approximately 90,000 prostatectomies performed each year in the United States. After the removal of the prostate, the bladder and urethra must be reconnected in order to restore urinary function to the patient.
Partnering with physicians at Mayo Clinic, the team found that this reconnection is the hardest and most time consuming part of the prostatectomy to perform and is directly linked to the patient’s post-operative quality of life. If the bladder and urethra are not connected properly, infection due to urine leakage can occur, along with prolonged catheterization and a complete loss of urinary function. Recognizing these problems, the team created SecURO, a device to automatically stitch the bladder and urethra back together during a prostatectomy. SecURO precisely places 12 stitches a set distance from each orifice, standardizing the procedure and improving patient outcomes.
Winner of the Best Interdisciplinary Project was team PPEeps. This team, sponsored by Halyard Health, aims to increase workplace safety by decreasing the number of failures in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) including gowns, face shields, shoe covers, gloves, masks and bouffant caps in the central sterile processing unit (CSPU). The team members are Maylyn Parsons (BME), Kendra Simpson (BME), Jordan Lo Coco (ME) and Jim Peterson (ME).
The CSPU is an area within most hospitals and medical centers that sterilizes reusable medical equipment and devices. Current PPE equipment is not specifically designed to withstand the range of hazards faced by personnel in the CSPU. A cross-functional team of mechanical and biomedical engineers redesigned a new single-use gown coated in a new laminate which mitigates friction and permeability and helps ensure the protection of the technicians from biohazards.
At this year’s Capstone Design Expo, 153 teams of graduating students got the chance to display prototypes of their ideas, which are representative of their years of engineering and design learning done while at Georgia Tech. They were judged by more than 150 experts and professionals from around the world, who scored each project and named a winner in each category.
“Our product is going to help raise the standard of care for lung drains in Ethiopia to match standards in the USA for less than $10 a patient,” said James Wroe, a member of team Supleurative. The team’s members hope to test their product in a small clinical trial in Ethiopia this summer.
Fall 2018 Capstone Design Expo Category Winners- Complete List
Overall Best Project: Supleurative
An efficient, reusable, and low-cost lung drain device that is fit for use in developing nations and can replace the current gravity drainage used at Ethiopian hospitals.
James Wroe, Atlanta, Georgia
Yige Huang, China
Hannah Choi, Atlanta, Georgia
Tara Ramachandran, Scarsdale, New York
Biomedical Engineering: aMAYOnnaising
A device that aids in reconnecting the bladder to the urethra after a prostatectomy.
Nicholas Quan, Richmond Hill, Georgia
Bailey Klee, Alpharetta, Georgia
Madeline Smerchansky, Arlington, Virginia
Rachel Mann, Homer Glen, Illinois
Interdisciplinary: PPEeps
This project aims to increase workplace safety by decreasing the number of failures in the PPE required in Central Sterile Processing Units.
Jordan Lo Coco, Mechanical Engineering, Pasadena
Jim Peterson, Mechanical Engineering, Atlanta, Georgia
Maylyn Parsons, Biomedical Engineering, Greenville, South Carolina
Kendra Simpson, Biomedical Engineering, Cumming, Georgia
Aerospace Engineering: The Squirrel Works
An unmanned long-range strike aerial vehicle to serve as a replacement for the F-111, F-117, and as a supplement to the B-2. Characteristics of the aircraft include low-observability, ability to access Anti-Access Area Denial airspace, radical maneuver capabilities, as well as being lighter, smaller, and less expensive than current piloted aircraft.
Emily Paxton, Bangkok, Thailand
Jared Mehnert, Lebanon, Ohio
Wesley Gillman, Rogers, Arkansas
Kyle Neville, Lawrenceville, Georgia
Fahraan Badruddin, Duluth, Georgia
Erica Hulette, Acworth, Georgia
Civil and Environmental Engineering: BAMM Engineering
A project to widen a section of I-20 in Carroll County was temporarily shut down due to the negative safety impacts of the construction staging and traffic re-routing methods.
Michael Nieman, Woodstock, Georgia
Andrew White, Decatur, Georgia
Matthew Gruba, Augusta, Georgia
Bailey Little, Flowery Branch, Georgia
Electrical and Computer Engineering: PulseScan
An electrocardiogram (ECG) wearable that will track a user’s ECG signals and monitor them from one’s phone or laptop, warning of short-term and long-term heart risk while also providing information on physical fitness.
Joseph Lennon, Fayetteville, Georgia
Derin Ozturk, California
Justin Cheung, Duluth, Georgia
Sehej Ahluwalia, Plano, Texas
Victor Barr, Berkeley Lake, Georgia
Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering: Chopa
Design a collection of toys that use insights about compensating behaviors of accessibility-limited children to create a more comprehensive, well-rounded experience for all children.
Jae Hyuk Kim, Industrial Design, Seoul, Korea
Max Cohen, Industrial Design, Miami, Florida
Elliot Manassa , Mechanical Engineering, Riverwoods, Illinois
Matias Girardi, Mechanical Engineering, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Kristin Andreassen, Industrial Design, Atlanta
Industrial and Systems Engineering: Cox Automotive
Our team is evaluating Cox Automotive's current process and providing recommendations on controllable decisions, such as vehicle relocating, reconditioning, and holding to reduce loss per vehicle.
Margaret Jennings, Kennesaw, Georgia
Will Olsson, Åhus, Sweden
Meghan Rathie, Johns Creek, Georgia
Siddhartha Meka, Snellville, Georgia
Alan Johnson, Marietta, Georgia
Ashley Paek, Johns Creek, Georgia
Kelly Kronenberger, Suwanee, Georgia
Sarah Stein, Carmel, Indiana
Mechanical Engineering (tie): W(hole) lotta trouble
Analyzing the shape and dimension of laser drilled holes in suture needles for quality control.
Mónica López, Dorado, Puerto Rico
Justin Tai, San Jose, California
Yujung Ryu, Suwanee, Georgia
Adam Garlow, Decatur, Georgia
Zhigen Zhao, Hangzhou, China
Mechanical Engineering (tie): Send It!
TEAR is a system that controls the air spring characteristics in high performance mountain bike suspension forks.
Nicholas Henderson, Flowery Branch, Georgia
Admir Berisha, Bronx, New York
Matei Dan, Atlanta, Georgia
Hunter Brown, Bullard, Texas
CONTACT:
Walter Rich
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
“She would go hiking and my grandfather would stay home,” said Wan, a graduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, who works in the lab of Hang Lu, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
“It’s something you don’t always think about, but the fact is, aging is the single largest risk factor for chronic disease in humans,” he added. “Your risk of heart disease, cancer – it all goes up as you age.”
As Wan moved further and further away from childhood and started meeting more and more “old” people, his interest grew, and he noticed that there isn’t a whole lot of research being done to understand the processes of aging.
“We might know that aging can affect a neuron’s health or your brain’s health, but we can’t really say why that’s happening,” said Wan, who received a $5,000 award from the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), to study aging through gene expression.
Aging can be difficult to study or accurately describe because it’s not like there is a single factor or phenotype to look for. Improved therapeutics and healthier behaviors have doubled human lifespans over the past 200 years, “so a lot of people are spending a larger portion of their lives in aging-related poor health,” Wan said. “But people experience aging differently.”
He’s looking at studying gene expression as a way to more accurately measure aging.
“If you study the patterns of gene expression, you might be able to see genetic networks and specific tissues that play roles in age-related degradation, and I’m looking at this in the context of the whole organism,” Wan said.
So, for the next few months, Wan is trying to develop a platform using microfluidics to optimize smFISH (single molecule fluorescent in situ hybridization), used to detect, localize, and count individual mRNA molecules to measure gene expression.
“There are certain limitations with the technology,” Wan said. “But microfluidics can overcome these shortcomings.”
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With an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects, researchers from the Schools of Interactive Computing and Biomedical Engineering are teaming with Thrust Interactive, Inc., to create digital games that can help these kids that tend to miss a lot of school due to their illnesses.
Associate Professor Betsy DiSalvo (IC) and Associate Professor Wilbur Lam (BME) are leading the project, which will span two years under the current terms of the grant. Their goal is to take advantage of the time chronically-ill children spend in waiting rooms, having transfusions, or other times spent outside of the classroom.
The digital games are based on physical tabletop games created by members of Lam’s lab. Led by Dr. Elaissa Hardy (Emory), a team of BME undergraduate students originally created the tabletop games to help kids in the hospital with sickle cell disease engage with STEM subjects.
Lam’s lab has worked with DiSalvo and Thrust for the past two years to pilot test digital versions of these games. The new NIH grant will be used to develop findings from the pilot testing so the research team can better understand how to create a scalable model that can be used in hospitals across the country.
Another challenge the team wants to address is the difficulty children face in discussing their diseases with others. Common illnesses such as diabetes and asthma, as well as those less common like sickle cell and cystic fibrosis, can be challenging topics for children, particularly in their early teen years.
“The middle schoolers we interviewed told us it was awkward to talk about their disease,” DiSalvo said. “Sometimes, they got bullied or had issues finding ways to discuss it with their peers. Previous research has shown that if you can have kids play a game around their disease, they’ll engage about it more in conversation with peers and families.
“It can diminish the stigma, and it also positions them as experts. When children feel like they have expertise, they are usually willing to dive deeper and learn more to maintain their expert position.”
A better understanding of their disease at this age is critical for young people beginning to take charge of managing their own care, according to the researchers.
“These adolescents are beginning to transition into adulthood, so managing their illness is beginning to become their responsibility,” DiSalvo said. “Those transitions are difficult because, in doctor visits, parents tend to dominate the conversation while kids sit in the background, not really asking questions or engaging. It’s important to change that dynamic at this age.”
The researchers are investigating three different approaches to the digital games to determine the best learning experience outcomes. They will test content using:
Follow-up comprehension tests after will help determine which approach leads to the best results. Those tests will take up the first year of the project, with the second year focused on testing the application in live hospital settings.
“We want it to be so fun and engaging that they don’t think of it as an educational game,” said Sarah Boyd, a Thrust Interactive team member who will work on design.
“It’s fun, and they’re learning. There are existing approaches relating to education of disease, but they aren’t as engaging. We want a fun and engaging game first, but then they’re going to be learning about their health as they engage.”
Thrust Interactive has elicited help from Paul Jenkins, a comic book writer and video game creator who has been involved with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a number of Marvel Comics titles, and video games like God of War and The Darkness.
]]>Communications Officer
]]>The 17 new scholars comprise the 20th class in the program’s history, with seven females and 10 males, nine students from the College of Science and eight from the College of Engineering (including five from the Wallace Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering), 11 from Georgia Tech and six students from other Atlanta area universities, all of them supported by eight different sponsors.
“I am very excited about this year’s class of Petit Scholars, a diverse group of students that span many majors at Georgia Tech as well as other Atlanta area schools,” said Raquel Lieberman, the Petit Scholar faculty advisor, an associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a Petit Institute researcher. “They will have the unique opportunity to spend a whole year deep-diving into an exciting research project, contribute substantially to manuscripts that will be published, and present their work at conferences.”
Meet the 2019 class of Petit Scholars (listed here with their university, major, and their scholarship sponsor info):
• Jeffrey Butler, Morehouse College, Applied Physics and Mechanical Engineering, Petit Endowed Scholarship
• Kendreze Holland, Georgia State University, Chemistry & Biochemistry, CMaT Scholar
• Tsuraya Iswanto, Georgia State, Neuroscience, UCB Scholar
• Kaitlin Jacobson, Georgia Tech, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, CCE Scholar
• Nuzhat Kabir, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering, Dasher Scholar
• Mark Keenum, Georgia Tech, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Dasher Scholar
• Lilian King, Georgia Tech, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Beckman Coulter Scholar
• Patrycja Kotowska, Georgia Tech, Physics, Beckman Coulter Scholar
• Han Li, Emory University, Biology, UCB Scholar
• Chrisangela Martin, Georgia State, Chemistry & Biochemistry, CMaT Scholar
• Bailey McLain, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering, Prewitt Scholar
• Matthew Ritch, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering, REM Scholar
• Joseph Shaver, Georgia Tech, Chemistry & Biochemistry, Dasher Scholar
• Lee-Kai Sun, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering
• Luke Tomasovic, Georgia Tech, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, UCB Scholar
• Kent Yamamoto, Georgia Tech, Biomedical Engineering, UCB Scholar
• Jacqueline Zhu, Emory, Physics, UCB Scholar
The Petit Undergraduate Research Scholarship program, launched in 2000, has funded 300 students so far, with approximately 80 percent of them going on to pursue advanced degrees. The program exists to develop the next generation of leading bio-researchers by providing a comprehensive research experience for a full year.
Open to all Atlanta area university students, the program provides undergraduates with the opportunity to conduct independent research in state-of-the-art Petit Institute labs, and other bio-related labs at Georgia Tech.
The 2019 scholars who aren’t already affiliated with a lab, are in the process now of matching up with mentors and labs.
Meanwhile, the 2018 class of scholars is nearing the end of its year, having received positive feedback from principal investigators and mentors – many in this class have presented their research at national and international conferences and plan to continue their work. The 2018 class recently celebrated its year of research at an end-of-the-year poster session and reception. Every scholar had an opportunity to share their work with the gathered bio-community. All of them are now in the process of applying and interviewing for graduate school.
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Lam's research interests involve developing and applying novel technologies using micro/nanotechnology, microfluidics, and cell mechanics to research, diagnose, and treat hematologic and oncologic processes. Lam earned his Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkley, and received his M.D. from the Baylor College of Medicine.
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The WHEA Teaching Fellowship is a 12-month program for health science educators who want to advance their teaching skills and offer quality instruction to their learners. The fellowship includes monthly two-hour skills development workshops and monthly online intersession discussion groups. All sessions are organized around three domains: designing and planning learning, teaching and facilitating learning, and assessment of learning. Upon completion, fellows will be awarded a certificate of distinction in teaching. Graduates will also have the opportunity to teach workshops to future fellowship cohorts. The cohort begins March, 2019.
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The researchers, based in the lab of biomedical engineering professor Shuichi Takayama, published the results of their study in the journal ChemBioChem which covers chemical biology, synthetic biology, and bio-nanotechnology.
While we are all familiar with cells in the body, scientists are more deeply exploring membraneless oragnelles such as nucleoli, Cajal bodies, P-bodies, and stress granules, which can form dynamic liquid domains inside of cells. Researchers want to gain more knowledge about how various aqueous solutions demix inside the human body along with gaining a better understanding of the biochemical processes occurring in the organelles. The discovery of better, faster techniques such as microscale droplet manipulation by EWOD will aid researchers in this area of study.
Scientists need to know the condition(s) at which two distinct phases may coexist in liquid-liquid environments and these plots are known as binodal curves in aqueous two-phase systems (ATPSs). Plots of concentrations and temperatures are typically depicted in this diagram.
A binodal curve divides a region of component concentrations that will form two immiscible aqueous phases (i.e., above and at the curve) from those that will form one phase (i.e., below the curve). Coordinates for all “potential” systems will lie on a tie-line; the tie-line connects two nodes on the binodal, which represent the final concentration of phase components in the top and bottom phases.
For scientists new to the field of ATPS technology, it’s advisable to start with the construction of a binodal diagram so that an organized choice of systems can be used for initial partitioning experiments.
Lead author and postdoctoral fellow, Taisuke Kojima, stated, “the driving of flat droplets between glass plates by electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) allows us to clearly watch the liquid-liquid interactions in a merged droplet having multiple ingredients at adjustable concentrations. Our apparatus is an easy tool that is like a "smart microscope slide" where specimens can be precisely moved and agitated for observation to quickly gain new insights, such as the study of molecular crowding and its effect on liquid-liquid phase separation.”
Coauthors on the study were: Taisuke Kojima and Shuichi Takayama at Georgia Tech; Chu-Chi Lin and Shih-Kang Fan from National Taiwan University. The research was funded by NIH (GM123517and AI116482) and partially supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan) under grant 106-2918-I-002 -048. Any findings, opinions or recommendations are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies.
CONTACT:
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
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As the recipient of the Society For Biomaterials 2019 Mid-Career Award, Botchwey will receive a $1,000 award from the Society For Biomaterials, and travel expense reimbursement to the Society’s 2019 annual meeting in Seattle, WA.
“I am deeply honored to receive the Mid-Career Award [from the Society for Biomaterials], said Botchwey. “The Society has experienced tremendous growth and success in recent years and was the first scientific organization to which I belonged. I am proud to be involved with the Society. I also want to say thank you to my nominators and biomaterials colleagues here in the Coulter BME Department and the Petit Institute for their support.”
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Her paper’s research topic is centered around glaucoma. Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness in the world. Disease progression is associated with cell death at the trabecular meshwork (TM), a fluid drainage tissue in the anterior eye. Novel treatments aim to deliver stem cells to the TM to regenerate the tissue and restore function. To aid development of this therapy and expedite clinical translation, in vivo stem cell tracking is needed. This work focuses on development of an ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging platform to track stem cells in the anterior eye and facilitate image-guided therapy by providing real-time feedback to assess and improve stem cell delivery.
“One of the unique aspects of this project is the span across biology and the imaging sciences,” said Kubelick. “This work is done in conjunction with professor Ross Ethier and one of his recent lab alums, Eric Snider. The highly collaborative nature of this project has expanded the research to many exciting, unexpected directions, and it has been wonderful to work with great group of researchers on this project.”
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She presented her thesis work that involves using therapeutic nanoparticles to treat inflammatory diseases. In autoimmune disease, the immune cells of the body can no longer tell the difference between self and foreign. An example of this is ulcerative colitis, where the immune cells mistake the large intestine as foreign, and attack it. Patients experience pain, inflammation, weight loss, and can even get cancer.
Unfortunately, the incidence of autoimmune diseases is on the rise and current drugs are not adequately solving the problem. The drugs have two problems: many of them are given by injection which may discourage patients from getting a painful shot. The second problem with the drugs is that their strategy is to put the entire immune system to sleep which reduces the problem of inflammation, but leaves patients susceptible to infection and can make them sicker than they were to begin with.
She aims to solve both problems and is developing a nanoparticle-based therapy that is delivered orally and is targeted to be released inside the inflamed environment of the large intestine where the immune cells eat them up.
The coolest part of this technology is that each nanoparticle is coated with tiny strands of DNA. These special DNA strands attach to and break down the inflammatory signals that are damaging the intestine.
She recently tested these particles in a mouse model of colitis and was amazed to see their colitis symptoms got much better, and they regained weight to the levels of normal, healthy mice. Because her research is solving the administration problem and specifically targeting the cells causing disease, this technology will drastically improve the health of patients with colitis, and other autoimmune diseases, allowing them to live happier and healthier lives.
Complete list of results:
PhD Winners
1st place Nusaiba Baker (Biomedical Engineering) - “Oral Delivery of DNA-enzyme Nanoparticles Ameliorates Inflammation in a Murine Model of Ulcerative Colitis”
$2,000 research travel grant
* Winner in the PhD category to compete in the next level at CSGS 3MT Competition.
Runner-Up Francisco Quintero (Material Science & Engineering)- “Solid Lithium Batteries and How To Deal With A Diva”
$1,500 research travel grant
Third Place Sourabh Jha (Mechanical Engineering) - “Enhancement of Cooling in Data Centers through Flags”
$1,000 research travel grant
MS Winners
1st place Eugene Mangortey (Aerospace Engineering)- “Predicting the Duration and Coincidence of Ground Delay Programs and Ground Stops”
$1,000 research travel grant
Runner-Up Tejas Rode (Music) - “Robotic improvisation of Indian classical music on marimba”
$750 research travel grant
Third Place Keshav Bimbraw (Music) - “Imparting Expressivity and Dynamics to percussive musical robot Shimon”
$500 research travel grant
People’s Choice:
Megan Tomko (Mechanical Engineering) - “Academic Makerspaces: Sites of Learning for Women Students”
$500 research travel grant
Although the mechanisms are intertwined with biochemical processes, they also work mechanically, grasping, tugging and clamping, say researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who, for a new study in the journal Nature Immunology, measured responses to physical force acting upon these elimination mechanisms.
The mechanisms’ purpose is to make dangerously aggressive developing immune cells called thymocytes destroy themselves to keep them from attacking the body, while sparing healthy thymocytes as they mature into T cells. Understanding these selection mechanisms, which ensure T cells aggressively pursue hordes of infectors and cancers but not damage healthy human tissue, could someday lead to new immune-regulating therapies.
Usually, researchers pursue such mechanisms using chemistry experiments, but Georgia Tech’s Cheng Zhu, who led the study, makes atypical discoveries via physical experiments to observe effects of forces between key proteins in living cells.
“Experiments where the proteins are isolated and used in chemical reactions in vitro miss this force dynamic,” said Zhu, a Regents Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Before our work, force was not considered as a factor in thymocyte selection and now it is.”
In this study, they discovered a loop of physical signals resembling a double-handed handshake that encourages cell apoptosis. It is described in more detail below.
The medical significance of this field of research was highlighted by the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine, which was awarded to other researchers at other institutions, James Allison of MD Anderson Cancer Center and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University. Allison and Honjo received the prize for their cancer therapies exploiting T cell regulating mechanisms intertwined with those that the Georgia Tech researchers study.
Georgia Tech's Zhu and first authors Jinsung Hong and Chenghao Ge published their new research paper on November 12, 2018. The research was funded by the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The agencies are part of the National Institutes of Health.
Like blood cells, human thymocytes are born in bone marrow, but they travel to the thymus, a small organ just below the neck, where they run a gauntlet of selection tests. Failing any one selection means cell self-destruction; passing all selections promotes thymocytes to T cells that depart the thymus to battle our bodies’ foes.
One selection checks T cell receptors (TCR), which are on the thymocyte’s membrane, to ensure they are properly formed then to see if they recognize self-antigens, i.e. molecules that identify the body’s own cells. Then another selection, called negative selection, tests TCRs to make sure they don’t react too aggressively to self-antigens.
Cells that pass these checks then have TCRs that tolerate self- yet react to enemy antigens.
“You don’t want the cells with strongly grabbing receptor sites to turn against the body itself,” said Zhu, whose study focused on negative selection.
In negative selection, other cells extend self-antigens on their membrane to interact with the thymocytes’ T cell receptors. Those interactions seal the thymocytes’ fate: advance or die.
Studying forces in those interactions revealed a new signaling loop with mechanical properties analogous to a two-handed grip and tug by the thymocyte.
The first hand would be the T cell receptor itself, and the other cell presenting the self-antigen would be like someone else’s hand holding a special ball out to the T cell’s first hand. The handshake begins as the self-antigen gives a signal to the T cell receptor.
If the TCR reacts too strongly to the self-antigen, the thymocyte adds the second, assisting hand, which comes in from the side to make a two-handed handshake. The additional hand is a lever called CD8 (cluster of differentiation 8), which connects to key mechanisms inside the thymocyte and is considered part of the TCR site.
For about two weeks in the thymus, multiple T cell receptor sites engage in one- or two-handed handshakes, which send signals into the thymocyte that make it either mature into a T cell or begin the process of programmed cell death.
The researchers found that the two-handedness markedly resisted the force applied to break the grip between the T cell receptor and the self-antigen, thus prolonging the duration of the handshake. A long grip sent signals for the thymocyte to die.
“That’s the study’s elegant finding,” Zhu said. “That the force is significant for the selection to work.”
The researchers also made the novel discovery that CD8’s handshake participation constitutes a signal coming from inside the thymocyte back out to the self-antigen in answer to its initial signal.
“The inside-out return signal had not yet been reported for this T cell receptor,” Zhu said.
Together, the outside-in and inside-out signals create a feedback loop that perpetuates the handshake:
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Also READ: Remote-Control Shoots Laser at Nano-Gold to Turn on Cancer-Killing T Cells
Coauthors on the study were: Prithiviraj Jothikumar, Zhou Yuan, Baoyu Liu, Ke Bai, Kaitao Li, William Rittase, all of Georgia Tech at the time of the research; Miho Shinzawa and Alfred Singer of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health; Brian Evavold, Khalid Salaita and Yun Zhang of Emory University; Amy Palin and Paul Love of the NIH Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development; and Xinhua Yu of University of Memphis. The research was funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) (grant CA214354), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (grants AI124680, AI096879), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) (grant NS071518). The funders belong to the National Institutes of Health. Hong and Bai now research at NIAID; Liu and Evavold now research at the University of Utah. Zhu is also in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and in Georgia Tech’s Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Any findings, opinions or recommendations are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies
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]]>The odds for women and orphan children in Ethiopia have improved through the work of a non-profit organization created by the Gleasons (called Because of Kennedy), and through research and development of diagnostic tools from Rudy’s lab and, potentially, from a group of Georgia Tech biomedical engineering undergraduate students working on their Capstone project.
Gleason, an associate professor in both the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University, has focused much of his research on HIV patients in Ethiopia, who have high incidents of co-morbidities, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.
But his latest development is a safe, low-cost, easy-to-use 3D camera technology to assess the risk of obstructed labor, which has a high mortality rate in Ethiopia. Gleason, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, recently published his team’s research in the journal PLOS One.
“My wife is a small woman, and when she was pregnant with our first child, her doctor said we’d have to keep an eye on her because if you have a normal size baby, there’s a chance you’ll need a C-section. And that’s exactly what happened,” Rudy said. “Take that same scenario to rural Ethiopia, and both the mother and the baby die. But if we can refer at-risk mothers to hospitals where C-section is an option, in a timely fashion, we could reduce maternal mortality in the developing world.”
Now, Gleason has more help from home in addressing healthcare challenges in Ethiopia. Just before the fall semester began, a team of BME undergraduate students returned to Georgia Tech after a week in Ethiopia as part of their senior Capstone project, visiting hospital OB/GYN wards, interviewing clinicians, midwives, and patients.
“They came back blown away by how many significant challenges there are, and how theoretically easy it would be to have an impact if we can develop useful tools,” said James Stubbs, professor of practice in the Coulter Department, where he coaches Capstone teams. Stubbs made a few trips to Africa over the summer, with Gleason and later with the students, to strengthen the relationship between the BME Capstone program and the clinicians and researchers in Ethiopia.
Last year, a BME Capstone team worked on an efficient, reusable, low-cost lung drain device to replace the current gravity drainage system used in Ethiopian hospitals. Another BME team, Supleurartive, continued that work this academic year and won first place as the Best Overall Project in the 2018 Fall Capstone Design Expo.
But so far, only one team, calling itself Libi Medical, has traveled to Africa. The four students who visited Addis Ababa and surrounding communities in Ethiopia – Yahia Ali, Hannah Geil, Elizabeth Kappler, and Elianna Paljug – are working on a fetal heart monitor. ‘Libi’ is derived from ‘Lib,’ the word for ‘heart’ in Amharic, Ethiopia’s official language.
Georgia Tech has a history of trying to improve the human condition in developing countries across the globe. It’s right there as part of the university’s mission statement: “We will be leaders in improving the human condition in Georgia, the United States, and around the globe.” And it’s in Georgia Tech’s strategic plan: “Expand our global footprint and influence to ensure that we are graduating good global citizens.”
Accordingly, a number of bioengineering and bioscience people within the Petit Institute community have taken these goals seriously – for example, projects like those directed by Manu Platt (associate professor in the Coulter Department) in Africa, and King Jordan (associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the BioInformatics program) in Colombia and Africa.
Mission statements and strategic plans put the goals in writing, but it was personal loss that really drove Rudy Gleason. It was because of Kennedy.
“Katie and I wanted to adopt a child, and since she was adopted internationally, that’s something we’ve wanted to do,” Gleason said. “And it’s been pretty remarkable to see the impact Kennedy has had, in our lives and the lives of others.”
The Gleasons did their research, saw a great need among orphans in Ethiopia, completed all of the paperwork and interviews and were matched with Kennedy in January 2009. She was four months old and severely malnourished, weighing just five pounds.
They received their first pictures of Kennedy in March and fell in love. But Kennedy soon became very sick with diarrhea and then pneumonia. After she died, the Gleasons found strength in their faith, launching Because of Kennedy, devoting themselves as on-the-ground advocates for the orphaned and vulnerable in Ethiopia. The non-profit, faith-based organization is building a school, as well as operating food and women’s empowerment programs, among other things.
“Our daughter passed away before we could bring her home,” said Gleason. “She died of diarrhea. I remember thinking, ‘people are actually dying from diarrhea – how can this be?’ The thought stirred something in me and I wondered how I could use my work at Georgia Tech to be part of the solution. The first thing we did was continue trying to adopt in Ethiopia.”
Soon, their family grew with the adoption of daughters Isabella and Brooklyn. The Gleasons already had two biological children, sons Lawson and Eli.
In the years since, Rudy has received two Fulbright Scholarships to conduct research in Ethiopia, and his family spends part of every summer there. His research projects also have been supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development, National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, and American Heart Association.
His latest research and publication, “A safe, low-cost, easy-to-use 3D camera platform to assess risk of obstructed labor due to cephalopelvic disproportion,” was supported largely through a grant from Grand Challenges Canada as part of the global Saving Lives at Birth partnership.
In Ethiopia, up to 22 percent of maternal deaths can be attributed to cephalopelvic disproportion (CPD) related obstructed labor. Furthermore, maternal morbidity from CPD is widespread in Ethiopia and carries the additional weight of stigma and social exclusion.
So Gleason went to work on a simple solution with his fellow authors of the study, including four collaborators from the University of Addis Ababa (Mahlet Yigeremu, Tequam Debebe, Sisay Teklu, and Daniel Zewdeneh); fellow Petit Institute researcher and mechanical engineering associate professor Brandon Dixon (co-founder of healthcare tech company LymphaTech, which focuses on innovative 3D measurement solutions); current and former Georgia Tech students Lorenzo Tolentino (now pursuing his Master’s in Public and Global Health at the University of Washington), Mike Weiler and Nathan Frank (LympaTech executives), Shehab Attia, and Catherine Kwon; Georgia Tech research engineer Anastassia Pokutta-Paskaleva; and Katie Gleason, a former university educator who manages the day-to-day operation of Because of Kennedy.
Together, this team developed a low cost, safe, easy-to-use portable platform, utilizing an X-Box video game system with a Microsoft Kinect 3D camera. The device has been shown to have very good predictive capabilities and performed better than all previously published metrics.
“We’ve probably scanned a thousand women and it’s working really well,” said Gleason, who is pursuing support from NIH to carry out a validation study, and expects the device will eventually be deployed for use by clinicians in Ethiopia. He has the same high hopes for Libi Medical, still in the early stages of its product development in the Capstone program. “There’s this great energy in the BME students about using their gifts and skills to make a difference in the developing world.”
James Stubbs met Rudy Gleason the summer of 2017 when they were about 3,800 miles away from the Georgia Tech campus, in Ireland. Gleason and his globetrotting family were visiting the country and Stubbs was teaching a class in medical device development – most of his career has been spent starting medical device companies, running through the product development/commercialization gauntlet.
Gleason had initially asked Stubbs about creating a monitor for preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that is about 300 times more prevalent in the developing world. That conversation led Gleason to inviting Stubbs to join him in Africa, which he did last June.
“We met with Rudy’s collaborators and they gave us a laundry list of issues they’re dealing with,” said Stubbs, who returned to Ethiopia two months later with the four BME seniors comprising Libi Medical.
Stubbs had already pitched the idea of a Capstone team visiting Ethiopia, or another developing country, during a spring semester session about senior design. The plan was for a full-year Capstone schedule (typically, teams take the course for just one semester). Yahia Ali was at the meeting, and he told Stubbs he was interested. At first it was difficult to find students because the two-semester, full academic year approach didn’t fit with a lot of schedules.
But soon, Elianna Paljug was recruited. She and Ali recruited the other two members of the team, Hannah Geil and Elizabeth Kappler. The team met throughout the summer, before leaving for Ethiopia in mid August. “We’re very passionate about our project and believe we have the skills that can help,” said Paljug.
While in Addis Ababa, they visited Black Lion Hospital, a major medical center, and several other smaller facilities, “a broad range of different healthcare delivery systems,” said Kappler.
“It was strange to see modern high-rise buildings and then next to that, people living in homes made of tarp,” said Geil. “It was important to see that with our own eyes. It was also amazing to see how brilliant and resourceful the clinicians are, with what they have to work with.”
After spending five days visiting different clinics and hospitals and comparing notes about the needs local clinicians had expressed, “we narrowed it down to fetal heart monitoring,” Paljug said.
There’s a pressing need for tools to enhance healthcare in a country where the pediatric mortality rate is very high -- children under five account for 30 percent of all annual deaths in Ethiopia.
The team is in the prototyping phase of their project this semester, emphasizing, said Kappler, “design inputs that would allow this device to be used effectively and efficiently in Ethiopia.”
Then they’ll return to Ethiopia during spring semester with a prototype, so clinicians there can make their assessments, and the team can further develop the tool for manufacturing.
“A lot of high-tech solutions have been donated to clinics there before,” Paljug noted. “But then they break and there are no spare parts and there's no way to fix them, and nobody who knows how. We want to create something that enables a better standard of care, ideally something that can be manufactured and repaired in Ethiopia.”
She paused a moment, then added, “Our goal is to create a sustainable solution.”
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It was a natural outgrowth of research in his lab, said Philip Santangelo, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. That research focused on using RNA to deliver therapeutic antibodies, as well as with the basic virology of RSV. Combining the two was “a logical choice,” said Santangelo.
One of the medications used to treat or prevent RSV, the monoclonal antibody palivizumab, is given monthly via intramuscular (IM) injection. Only a small amount of the antibody gets into the airways. “RSV tends to infect airway epithelial cells, as does flu,” said Santangelo. “We really didn’t see palivizumab there in large quantities. So we thought that was an opportunity.”
In a study published October 1 in Nature Communications, Santangelo’s team reported using synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA) to deliver antibodies directly to the lungs of mice via aerosol, which the study showed protected them from RSV infection. Two forms of palivizumab were used, the whole secreted form (sPali) and one that was engineered with a glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) membrane anchor or linker (aPali), which should allow it to stay on the epithelial surface longer.
Another group of mice were treated with a different antibody – a VHH camelid antibody, also in secreted and anchored forms – that was previously shown to be more potent than palivizumab but is not currently used to treat RSV.
“With palivizumab, that may or may not be as critical – we noticed that even with the secreted version we were able to block the virus reasonably well,” said Santangelo. “But single-chain antibodies, which are very small, have short half-lives. You have to give them frequently, which doesn’t seem practical. When we put this linker on the smaller antibody, we were able to see it on the epithelial cells 28 days later. That was really exciting to us.”
In fact, Santangelo suspects that using the linker could cause smaller antibodies to persist for a few months, reducing the need for frequent treatments. “You could see administering this right after a child is born, when they are most vulnerable,” he said.
Using mRNA is an effective and safe delivery option, especially crucial in a pediatric population. “Using a transient, nucleic acid-based method that doesn’t end up in the cell nucleus is really important,” said Santangelo, whose study was funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “We do want this to be transient, so if it lasted even a month that would protect newborns in the hospital where they may be exposed to RSV. And if you could protect kids for a few months at a time, that’s really all you would need to do.”
The study found that most of the mRNA-expressed antibodies did not change baseline levels of cytokines, indicating that the approach was minimally inflammatory and suggesting that repeat dosing could be considered.
It’s also possible that the antibodies used in this study could potentially neutralize the virus in cells, so even if a child was infected the severity of symptoms might be lessened. And RSV isn’t the only potential virus this method could target – Santangelo is currently working on a project that targets flu via dry powder delivery of mRNA. That project is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
With the promising results from the RSV study, Santangelo hopes to move from a mouse model to additional testing. “There’s more work to be done,” he said. “The use of antibodies for preventing infection is a huge deal right now. But even if you found this potent antibody, if you can’t deliver it where it needs to go then the efficacy may not be where you want it to be. At least with the lung, we know where we want to go, and IV or IM administration isn’t really ideal for the cell types that are most critical for RSV.”
The study was co-authored by these researchers: Pooja Munnilal Tiwari, Daryll Vanover, Kevin E. Lindsay, Swapnil Subhash Bawage, Jonathan L. Kirschman, Sushma Bhosle, Aaron W. Lifland, Chiara Zurla and Philip J. Santangelo. The research was funded by DARPA grant W911NF-15-0609. The views, opinions, and/or findings expressed are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
CITATION: Pooja Munnilal Tiwari, et al., “Engineered mRNA-expressed antibodies prevent respiratory syncytial virus infection,” (Nature Communications 9, 2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06508-3
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Two university presidents joined the Coulter community in the iconic two-headed Atlanta skyscraper to honor the unique biomedical engineering department, the largest in the country, shared by public and private institutions, and ranked among the best in the world.
The event coincided with the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES 2018), which is recognizing its 50th anniversary this year during a record-setting event at the Georgia World Congress Center, just around the corner from the Coulter event, which was entitled, “20 Years of Innovation, Inclusion & Impact.”
Though the department was actually approved in 1997, plans were finalized in 1998, in preparation for the first group of students in 2000. Explaining the birthday discrepancy, Coulter Department Chair Susan Margulies, who presided over Thursday night’s event, enchanted the room with a story about her grandmother.
“When she immigrated from Russia to Canada, she lied about her age,” said Margulies, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering at Tech, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics. “She gave us three different dates, so we never knew exactly how old she was. It’s kind of like this department – we’ll celebrate our 20th birthday for as long as we’d like.”
Margulies also introduced the gathering to the two presidents in the room – Claire Sterk of Emory University and Georgia Tech’s Bud Peterson.
Sterk thought back to the Coulter Department’s prehistory, when Georgia Tech Provost Mike Thomas and Emory’s Dean of Medicine, Tom Lawley, “decided they should explore something we can share between the two institutions, something in the biomedical engineering space. I was a young faculty member at the time, thinking, ‘how can this work?’ I could only see barriers. But, what people in this department have demonstrated over time is, we can take down barriers and take advantage of the strength of each institution.”
Peterson lauded the department’s record of inclusion. "BME is the first engineering program at Georgia Tech to be majority female, which is something we’re tremendously proud of," he said. "The thing I find most impressive is how transparent this boundary between our two institutions is. We complement each other in so many ways.”
He also quipped that, as president of Georgia Tech, the BME collaboration with Emory means he’s been “fortunate to have all the benefits of a medical school with none of the challenges.”
Throughout the evening, Coulter Department well-wishers – faculty, staff, alumni, and so forth – popped in and out to catch up, enjoy the view, tell stories. Many of them were going back and forth from BMES2018 at the World Congress Center.
This was a record meeting for BMES, and the Coulter Department, the diamond sponsor, had a booth at a busy intersection of the convention floor. This year’s event drew record numbers of abstracts (3,672), exhibitors (143), in addition to 963 oral presentations and 2,265 research posters.
“It was an awesome experience and it was great to showcase the work I have put in over the last year and finally be able to present the big picture of my findings,” said Ryan Rudy, an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Coulter Department Associate Professor Ed Botchwey. Rudy’s research is entitled, “Identifying the Active Sphingoloid Metabolic Pathways in Healthy and Sickle Red Blood Cells.”
“I talked with some really intelligent people who gave me constructive feedback and new possible channels to explore,” Rudy said. “Outside of my presentation, I went to a lot of the sessions about cardiovascular engineering and modeling, as well as tissue engineering. Seeing the innovative studies going on at other research institutions was eye-opening.”
Kristin Gao, an undergraduate researcher in Coulter Department Professor Ross Ethier’s lab, said the conference offered insight, “for those who wish to pursue graduate studies. It was rewarding to not only share my research, but also to learn about other areas of research from my peers. I really enjoyed getting to connect with alumni and professors.”
The BMES meeting will not be forgotten by anytime soon by Manu Platt, a Coulter Department associate professor and Petit Institute researcher. His lab saw to that, throwing him a surprise party for his 10-year anniversary.
“It was great to see so many Georgia Tech alumni, from my lab and others, for the BMES 50th anniversary, and more importantly to share their amazing work,” added Platt, whose former students are completing PhDs at places like Stanford and Michigan, or presenting postdoctoral work, or starting faculty jobs. “It really highlights the impact the Coulter Department has on the field.”
This year’s meeting also featured the first BMES High School Research Expo and nine students from Project ENGAGES, based in the Petit Institute and co-directed by Platt, participated. Two of them won awards. ENGAGES is a science education program serving minority students in six Atlanta high schools. “
“They will remember this forever,” said Platt, who also counted Paula Hammond's honest and inspirational speech at the Celebration of Minorities in BME luncheon as a highlight of the BMES meeting. Hammond, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke frankly about finding strength through adversity and navigating difficult situations.
A few blocks away, at the Coulter Department birthday party, Margulies praised the work of students, faculty, and staff, giving special recognition to the department’s three previous chairs – Don Giddens, Larry McIntire, and Ravi Bellamkonda, who all served during critical moments in the department’s evolution, but could not be present.
“Don chaired during our infancy, and Larry nurtured our exuberant youthful growth, and Ravi was chair during the tumultuous teen years,” she said. “And I have the pleasure of leading our department into young adulthood. I expect that we’ll do many great things going forward.”
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Pharmaceutical companies use cell-based assays, a combination of living cells and sensor electronics, to measure physiological changes in the cells. That data is used for high-throughput screening (HTS) during drug discovery. In this early phase of drug development, the goal is to identify target pathways and promising chemical compounds that could be developed further – and to eliminate those that are ineffective or toxic – by measuring the physiological responses of the cells to each compound.
Phenotypic testing of thousands of candidate compounds, with the majority “failing early,” allows only the most promising ones to be further developed into drugs and maybe eventually to undergo clinical trials, where drug failure is much more costly. But most existing cell-based assays use electronic sensors that can only measure one physiological property at a time and cannot obtain holistic cellular responses.
That’s where the new cellular sensing platform comes in. “The innovation of our technology is that we are able to leverage the advance of nano-electronic technologies to create cellular interfacing platforms with massively parallel pixels,” said Wang. “And within each pixel we can detect multiple physiological parameters from the same group of cells at the same time.” The experimental quad-modality chip features extracellular or intracellular potential recording, optical detection, cellular impedance measurement, and biphasic current stimulation.
Wang said the new technology offers four advantages over existing platforms:
Multimodal sensing: The chip’s ability to record multiple parameters on the same cellular sample gives researchers the ability to comprehensively monitor complex cellular responses, uncover the correlations among those parameters and investigate how they may respond together when exposed to drugs. “Living cells are small but highly complex systems. Drug administration often results in multiple physiological changes, but this cannot be detected using conventional single-modal sensing,” said Wang.
Large field of view: The platform allows researchers to examine the behavior of cells in a large aggregate to see how they respond collectively at the tissue level.
Small spatial resolution: Not only can researchers look at cells at the tissue level, they could also examine them at single-cell or even sub-cellular resolution.
Low-cost platform: The new array platform is built on standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies, which is also used to build computer chips, and can be easily scaled up for mass production.
Wang’s team worked closely with Hee Cheol Cho, associate professor and the Urowsky-Sahr Scholar in Pediatric Bioengineering, whose Heart Regeneration lab is part of the Wallace Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. They used neonatal rat ventricular myocytes and cardiac fibroblasts to illustrate the multi-parametric cell profiling ability of the array for drug screening. The recent results were published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Lab on a Chip on August 31, 2018.
Monitoring cellular responses in multi-physical domains and holistic multi-parametric cellular profiling should also prove beneficial in screening out chemical compounds that could have harmful effects on certain organs, said Jong Seok Park, a post-doctoral fellow in Wang’s lab and a leading author of the study. Many drugs have been withdrawn from the market after discoveries that they had toxic effects on the heart or liver, for example. This platform should enable researchers to comprehensively test for organ toxicity and other side effects at the initial phases of drug discovery.
The experimental chip may be useful for other applications, including personalized medicine – for example, testing cancer cells from a particular patient. “Patient to patient variation is huge, even with the same type of drug,” said Wang. The cellular interface array could be used to see which combination of existing drugs would give the best response and to find the optimum dose that is most effective with minimum toxicity to healthy cells.
The chip is capable of actuation as well as sensing. In the future, Wang said that cellular data from the chip could be uploaded and processed, and based on that, commands for new actuation or data acquisition could be sent to the chip automatically and wirelessly. He envisions rooms and rooms containing culture chambers with millions of such chips in fully automated facilities, “just automatically doing new drug selection for us,” he said.
Beyond these applications, Wang noted the scientific value of the research itself. Integrated circuits and nanoelectronics are some of the most sophisticated technology platforms created by humans. Living cells, on the other hand, are complex products produced through billions of years of natural selection and evolution.
“The central theme of our research is how we can leverage the best platform created by nature with the best platform created by humans,” he said. “Can we let them work together to create hybrid systems that achieve capabilities beyond biology only or electronics only systems? The fundamental scientific question we are addressing is how we can let inorganic electronics better interface with organic living cells.”
These researchers also participated in the related studies: Doohwan Jung, Adam Wang, Taiyun Chi, Sensen Li and Moez K. Aziz from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech; and Sandra I. Grijalva and Michael N. Sayegh from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and ECCS CCSS Program, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship grant numbers DGE-1148903 and DGE-1650044, Office of Naval Research, and Semiconductor Research Corporation SSB roadmap consortium. 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 funding agencies.
CITATION: Jong Seok Park, et al., “Multi-parametric cell profiling with a CMOS quad-modality cellular interfacing array for label-free fully automated drug screening,” (Lab Chip 2018). DOI: 10.1039/c8lc00156a
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]]>Alexander Bills, Dev Mandavia, Lucas Muller, and Cassidy Wang make up the Neuraline team that will participate as undergraduate finalists in the event on Friday, Nov. 16.
The group’s technology can improve the accuracy of epidural delivery by helping physicians identify a promising injection site using electrical properties and composition of the body. According to Neuraline — now known as Ethos Medical — about 3 million women annually in the U.S. receive anesthesia in the spine, known as an epidural, during labor; about one in eight cases result in complications because of incorrect injection placement.
The Ethos Medical team — which is also part of CREATE-X — previously presented its work to representatives at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, and took third place at the Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) Challenge earlier this year.
The team is also up for the Collegiate Inventors Competition's People's Choice award — voting closes Friday, Nov. 16.
Finalists will present to judges from the National Inventors Hall of Fame and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. See a full list of undergraduate and graduate finalists.
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]]>“The goal is to ultimately translate cell-based therapies through new engineering tools and better manufacturing practices,” said principal investigator Krishnendu Roy, director of the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing (MC3M) at Georgia Tech, which will lead the three-year effort. “This will be a multi-faceted project requiring the expertise of some great collaborators.”
Working with clinicians at Duke University, Roy and his Marcus Center team are partnering with robotics experts at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and researchers in Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) on the three-year effort.
Duke is home to one of the nation’s oldest cord blood banks as well as a Marcus Center (the Marcus Center for Cellular Cures, or MC3), both directed by Roy’s co-principal investigator on the FDA grant, Joanne Kurtzberg, whose team already is engaged in several clinical trials utilizing cord blood and cord-tissue derived therapeutic cells.
But rather than therapeutic development, the FDA grant is focused mainly on advanced manufacturing, with emphasis on “identifying critical attributes of cells relevant to their function, then figuring out ways to use bioreactors for larger scale production, then automating some of the processes and developing sensors to monitor cell quality and culture over time,” said Roy, the Robert A. Milton Chaired Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech.
Researchers at GTRI will work on developing automation platforms while ISyE personnel are developing flexible electronics sensors to interface with bioreactors, he added, “and the Marcus Center at Georgia Tech, is combining everything into an integrated scalable production platform with functionally-relevant cell quality control.”
The FDA grant bolsters Georgia Tech’s existing cell manufacturing ecosystem, which includes the NSF Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT) Center as well as the Marcus Center, both under Roy’s direction, both trying to meet a critical need to develop new engineering tools for effectively scaling up production of innovative cell therapies while ensuring reproducibility and high quality.
That led to a logical partnership with MC3M and Georgia Tech’s engineering expertise.
“Advanced manufacturing technologies hold great promise for improvements in the reliability, flexibility, and cost effectiveness of manufacturing for biological products,” said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb. “These platforms may be critical to unlocking the full potential of novel technologies like cell and gene therapies, and new vaccines.”
The FDA awarded five grants to foster innovations in advanced manufacturing technology. The recipients were Harvard University, Carnegie-Mellon University, Rutgers University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Georgia Tech-Duke partnership.
“This is an exciting opportunity,” said Carolyn Yeago, associate director of research for Georgia Tech’s Marcus Center, who will be directing the different moving parts of the FDA-supported project. “We’re exposing our engineers at Tech directly to the clinical side. The whole impetus for this grant came from Dr. Kurtzberg’s need to generate a lot of cells, reliably and efficiently.”
For the Marcus Center, it’s an opportunity to have an impact on the cell therapy industry, and cell therapies used in clinical practice and trials, said Roy.
“The aim is to make these therapies available not just to a few patients, but thousands of patients,” he added. “We really need new, scalable manufacturing tools and platform technologies to make that happen, and this support from the FDA will help us figure some of that out. This is a way for us to leverage the resources that we have been developing at the Marcus Center and at CMaT as well through investment from the State of Georgia.”
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The Capstone program is the culmination of years of design learning undergone by every Georgia Tech College of Engineering student. Student teams are challenged to find a problem, then work to solve it through the engineering skills they have spent their college careers developing.
The first step to this process according to Rains, also a faculty member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, is making sure that the students are actually looking at the right problem. Read the story from the College of Engineering right here.
]]>By providing new information about the role of communication among cells, the research could lead to a better understanding of how multicellular organoids form from colonies of independent cells. The information could lead to new methods for controlling how multicellular constructs develop, and that could have applications in regenerative medicine, pharmaceutical testing and other research areas.
The research resulted from collaboration between the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Gladstone Institutes, and was reported October 5 in the journal Nature Communications. The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems Science and Technology Center (EBICS) supported the research.
“The goal is to control a system of cells like this to direct tissues to take on different phenotypes, to develop into different complex mixtures, and to self-assemble and emerge into very complicated structures,” said Melissa Kemp, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “For developing tissues that could be used as surrogates for screening drugs or as eventual implants for therapeutic purposes, we need to how to control and direct them properly.”
Scientists believe that the patterning of stem cell differentiation affects what kinds of cells will ultimately emerge from the differentiation process.
Despite the importance of local cell-to-cell interactions in evolving multicellular systems, little has been known about how the overall system regulates its morphological processes. To learn more about this, the paper’s first author, Chad Glen, studied how communication between adjacent mouse cells informs the fate of those cells. Beyond understanding this communication, Glen discovered a potential mechanism for “braking” the rate of differentiation without affecting the overall patterning of the resulting multicellular tissue.
“The amount of coordination among cells that are tightly coupled gives us an idea about how they work as a group,” said Todd McDevitt, senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and a professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. “This reflects the behavior of a team versus individuals. They really do coordinate activity in a rapid way. This study shows how quickly some important cell behaviors are mediated by gap junction communication.”
Glen, a recent Ph.D. graduate of Georgia Tech, began the project by studying communication between pairs of adjacent cells, which have pores that allow small molecules to enter. By introducing a signaling molecule into a colony containing hundreds of these homogeneous mouse stem cells, the researchers observed that differentiation began with a change in a single cell. That cell triggered a pattern of differentiation that flowed through the cells and eventually led to changes in the entire colony.
On a larger scale and in three dimensions, such changes lead to development of bodily organs. Understanding how that happens – and how it could be controlled – could be key to directing this transition from individual cells.
Based on experimental observations, Glen developed a model of the process, which allowed the researchers to study the impact of a series of interrelated variables that would have been impossible to study experimentally. The modeling of several hundred individual cells led to specific predictions that the researchers then tested experimentally.
To understand and measure the cell communication process, the researchers used a fluorescent dye to show when signaling molecules had moved from one cell to its neighbors. They then used a laser to bleach the dye from a single cell. Measuring how long it took for the dye to be replaced showed the permeability of the cell membrane – and how well the cell was communicating with its neighbors.
“If you zap a cell and it immediately returns to green, you know there is a lot of fluidity and cross-talk between the cell membranes,” Kemp explained. “If you zap a cell and it stays dark, the cell is effectively isolated and has no communication with its neighbors.”
By partially blocking communication between cells and otherwise perturbing the communications, the researchers slowed the differentiation process – but didn’t change its pattern. “We were able to shift the way the cells were behaving to slow things down – effectively ‘braking’ the process – while preserving the spatial information,” said Kemp. “Cells that were at 48 hours in the process could look like 24-hour cells.”
The combination of computational modeling and experiment allowed the research team to arrive at answers that neither technique by itself could have provided, McDevitt noted.
“With modeling, you can study a much larger set of conditions and parameters than we could experimentally,” he said. “The model could make predictions that we could go back and study experimentally to see how those conditions actually affected the behaviors. The behaviors we measured experimentally matched what the computer predicted, and validated that we had a robust model.”
McDevitt and Kemp have been studying this system of embryonic stem cells for several years, and the new study moves them closer to a more complete understanding of the complex system.
“We have demonstrated in a series of papers over the past six years that this system’s complexity can be modeled,” he said. “This paper represents a further step toward the greater goal of integrating information about this system. With each of these steps, we are much closer to taking a bigger leap into potentially controlling these systems.”
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems Science and Technology Center (CBET 0939511). 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.
CITATION: Chad M. Glen, Todd C. McDevitt, Melissa L. Kemp, “Dynamic intercellular transport modulates the spatial patterning of differentiation during early neural commitment, (Nature Communications 9, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06693-1
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]]>He received the Bernard and Joan Marshall Distinguished Investigator Award from the British Society of Cardiovascular Research at the annual BSCR Symposium in Sheffield England, where he also delivered the Marshall Lecture. Jo also gave a keynote speech at the annual UK Biomedical Engineering Society Meeting in London.
Each year the BSCR selects a researcher who made a significant contribution in the field of cardiovascular biology and disease. In Jo’s case, the organization recognized his work in the area of cardiovascular mechanobiology.
“I was deeply honored because the leaders in the UK who are my peers and competitors specifically recognized the significance of my team’s work over the years on flow-sensitive genes in endothelial biology and their role in atherosclerosis and aortic valve disease,” said Jo, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and associate chair of BME at Emory.
At the engineering society meeting he gave a presentation on mechanobiology in aortic valve disease. He discussed the dynamic hemodynamic environment of the aortic valve, how different flow conditions regular gene expression in the valve endothelium and how some of these flow-sensitive genes regulate valve biology and pathophysiology, and how the flow-sensitive genes can be used to develop novel therapeutics to reduce aortic valve disease.
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-MilliPub Club Inductees:
The MilliPub Club honors and recognizes current Emory faculty who have published one or more individual papers throughout their careers that have each garnered more than 1000 citations. Such a paper is commonly considered a “citation classic” and represents high impact scholarship.
Erik Dreaden, Ph.D. (Biomedical Engineering)
Don Giddens, Ph.D. (Biomedical Engineering)
-Mentoring Award
This award recognizes faculty who have demonstrated outstanding mentoring in the domains of education, service, and/or research to trainees or early career faculty during the past year.
Lena Ting, Ph.D. (Biomedical Engineering) WINNER of the award among the finalists
-External Awards
[Awards given outside of Emory University]
Hanjoong Jo, Ph.D. (Biomedical Engineering)
Shella Keilholz, Ph.D. (Biomedical Engineering)
Lena Ting, Ph.D. (Biomedical Engineering)
-Hidden Gem Award
These faculty members have been nominated by their departments in recognition of their outstanding, but often unnoticed or unrecognized, contributions to Emory or beyond.
Shella Keilholz, Ph.D. (Biomedical Engineering)
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“We were building on a great legacy and wanted to keep the momentum going,” said event organizer Brenda Morris, corporate relations manager of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Morris and her co-director, Ashley James (also a BME corporate relations manager), took on the career fair for the first time and they wanted to make an impact, so they moved the event, which used to be called the Biotechnology Career Fair. After years in the Molecular Science and Engineering (MoSE) Building, they moved it to the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, with its dramatic atrium hall, lined on one side by yellow-tinted clean rooms, which made for an interesting backdrop.
“Recruiters loved the space,” Morris said. “But they loved the quality of our students even more. Several told me that they had some difficult decisions to make, having to choose between so many quality applicants.”
Twenty biotech companies were represented at the fair: Abbott, Avanos/Halyard, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Biosense Webster, Boston Scientific, BW Design Group, Cryolife, Ecolab, Edwards Life Sciences, EPIC, Keck Graduate Institute, Medtronic, Metasystems, Micro C Imaging, Outset Medical, Owens and Minor, Qgenda, Stryker, and Varian.
“Great location this year,” noted Kimberly Cox, a recruiter with BW Design Group. “We enjoyed being on one level with such a neat backdrop, and we met many quality students that we selected to interview on campus the following day.”
A number of recruiters stayed on campus the following days to interview students for open positions.
Sandeep Jangiti of Medtronic added, “I was impressed with the set-up and the way it was organized. I was also impressed with the quality of students and their resumes.”
BME student William Kao said he met with at least six companies, “starting off with some that I thought I wouldn't like, but I found that some of those companies were a lot cooler than I’d expected."
Meanwhile, his BME classmate Sara Keesee noted the relative ease of navigating this year’s fair. “Usually career fairs are overwhelming and exhausting, but this was far from it. With a wide range of companies present, it was easy to get excited about the opportunity to chat with an old Georgia Tech student, a current employee, or even a CEO.”
Most of the students who attended were from the Coulter Department, but Morris noted that mechanical engineering, bioinformatics, biological sciences, and chemical engineering were also well represented. And there was a surprise appearance by Georgia Tech mascot Buzz, which may have delighted the recruiters more than the students.
“Many of the recruiters are Georgia Tech alums,” Morris said. “I think there might have been some nostalgia at play.”
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Ed Botchwey and Todd Sulchek, both associate professors in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, are collaborating with clinical researchers at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
“This unique funding opportunity brings together engineers and biologists to tackle major challenges associated with childhood cancer and blood disorders,” notes Chris Porter, Emory University School of Medicine associate professor and a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at the Aflac Center, who led the pilot grant review committee. “The innovative approaches have the potential to have a big impact in improving care for children.”
Botchwey is partnering with Hyacinth Hyacinth, physician and assistant professor in the Emory School of Medicine, on a project called “Mechanism of stress-induced cognitive deficit in sickle cell disease.” Sulchek and his research partner, Sunil Raikar, also an assistant professor in Emory’s School of Medicine, submitted a successful proposal called, “Microfluidic platform to deliver mRNA knockout reagents for T-cell malignancy directed CAR T-cell manufacturing.”
Each team will receive $50,000 as part of an effort under the APG umbrella designed specifically to support new research collaborations between the Coulter Department and the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center.
Meanwhile, three other pilot grants of $50,000 each were awarded to researchers within the Aflac Center: Kelly Goldsmith, associate professor, Emory School of Medicine; Curtis Henry, assistant professor, Emory School of Medicine; and Yongzhi Qiu, research associate, Emory School of Medicine.
The Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center developed the pilot grant program to promote the development of research initiatives that may potentially lead to new methods for diagnosing, preventing, and treating cancer and blood disorders. The purpose of the Aflac Pilot Grant is to fund the acquisition of new pilot data with a high likelihood of leading to NIH or other external, national peer-reviewed funding for Aflac investigators.
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Using microfluidic technology to advance the preparation of samples from the chemically complex bioreactor environment, the researchers have harnessed electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) to provide online monitoring that they believe will provide for therapeutic cell production the kind of precision quality control that has revolutionized other manufacturing processes.
“The way that the production of cell therapeutics is done today is very much an art,” said Andrei Fedorov, Woodruff Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Process control must evolve very quickly to support the therapeutic applications that are emerging from bench science today. We think this technology will help us reach the goal of making these exciting cell-based therapies widely available.”
By measuring very low concentrations of specific compounds secreted or excreted by cells, the technique could also help identify which biomolecules – of widely varying sizes – should be monitored to guide the control of cell health. Ultimately, the researchers hope to integrate their label-free monitoring directly into high-volume bioreactors that will produce cells in quantities large enough to make the new therapies available at a reasonable cost and consistent quality.
Development of the Dynamic Mass Spectrometry Probe (DMSP) was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), which is headquartered at Georgia Tech. The work was reported September 10 in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering.
Traditional ESI-MS techniques have revolutionized analytical chemistry by allowing precise identification of complex biological compounds. Because of complex sample preparation requirements, existing approaches to ESI-MS require too much time to be useful for continuous monitoring of cell growth in bioreactors, where maintaining narrow parameters for specific indicators of cellular health is critical. Biological samples also contain salts, which must be removed before introduction into the ESI-MS system.
To accelerate the analytical process, Fedorov and a team that included graduate research assistant Mason Chilmonczyk and research engineer Peter Kottke used microfluidic technology to help separate compounds of interest from the salts. Salt removal uses a monolithic device in which a size-selective membrane with nanoscale pores is placed between two fluid flows, one the chemically complex sample drawn from the bioreactors and the other salt-free water with conditioning compounds.
The smaller salt molecules readily diffuse out of the sampled bioreactor flow through the nanopores, while the larger biomolecules mostly remain for the subsequent ESI-MS analysis. Meanwhile, chemical additives are at the same time introduced into the sample mixture through the same membrane nanopores to enhance ionization of the target biomolecules in the sampled mixture for improved ESI-MS analysis.
“We have used advanced microfabrication techniques to create a microfluidic device that will be able to treat samples in less than a minute,” said Chilmonczyk. “Traditional sample preparation can require hours to days.”
The process can currently remove as much as 99 percent of the salt, while retaining 80 percent of the biomolecules. Introduction of the conditioning chemicals allows the molecules to accept a greater charge, improving the capability of the mass spectrometer to detect low concentration biomolecules, and to measure large molecules.
“We can detect really high molecular weight molecules that the mass spectrometer normally wouldn’t be able to detect,” Fedorov said. “The size difference in the molecules of interest can be dramatic, so the improvement in the limit of detection across a broad range of analyte molecular weights will allow this technique to be more useful in cell manufacturing.”
Because they use state of the art microfabrication techniques, the DMSP devices can be mass produced, allowing sampling to be scaled up to include multiple bioreactors at low cost. The small size of the device channels – which are just five microns tall – allows the system to produce results with samples as small as 20 nanoliters – with the potential for reducing that to as little as a single nanoliter.
“We need to monitor small concentrations of large biomolecules in this messy environment in a production line in such a way that we can check at any point how the cells are doing,” Fedorov said. “This system could continuously monitor whether certain molecules are excreted or secreted at a reduced or increased rate. By correlating these measurements with cell health and potency, we could improve the manufacturing process.”
Before the analytical techniques can be applied to quality control, the researchers must first identify biomolecules that indicate health of the growing cells. By sampling the bioreactor content locally in the immediate vicinity of cells and allowing identification of very small quantities of biochemicals, the DMSP technology can help researchers identify changes in molecular concentrations – which range from pico-molar to micro-molar – that may indicate the state of cells in the bioreactors. This would prompt adjustment of conditions in a bioreactor just in time to return to the state of healthy cell growth.
“In this situation, we often can’t see the trees for the forest,” said Fedorov. “There is a lot of material available, but we are looking for just a handful of individual trees that indicate the health of the cells. Because the forest is overgrown, the few selected trees we need to examine are hard to find. This is a grand challenge technologically.”
The research team also included Research Scientist Hazel Stevens and Professor Robert Guldberg, who is now at the University of Oregon.
CITATION: Mason A. Chilmonczyk, Peter A. Kottke, Hazel Y. Stevens, Robert E. Guldberg and Andrei G. Fedorov, “Dynamic Mass Spectrometry Probe (DMSP) for ESI?MS Monitoring of Bioreactors for Therapeutic Cell Manufacturing,” (Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 2018). https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bit.26832
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]]>Dyer, who is an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, was awarded through NSF’s CRII program – the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiative. Sometimes referred to as the “Mini CAREER Award,” the program encourages research independence early in a faculty member’s career.
The aim of her project, entitled “Using Large-Scale Neuroanatomy Datasets to Quantify the Mesoscale Architecture of the Brain,” is to develop new computational approaches for modeling the connectivity of the mouse brain, in order to reveal principles of wiring and information routing.
As Dyer explains, “Methods for revealing the global connections of the brain typically start by tracing a small number of neurons at a time. It is through performing many experiments, in different brain areas and across many brains, that information can be aggregated and consolidated to produce detailed maps of the brain’s global networks and architecture.”
Her project will leverage whole-brain imaging datasets from the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Each dataset provides a small piece of the puzzle. But, when combined, they can yield a picture of whole-brain connectivity.
“The outcomes of this research will be new maps of the global connectivity of the mouse brain, and a framework for studying the impact of disease and aging on whole-brain networks,” Dyer says.
]]>Based on work known as “DNA barcoding,” the technique inserts unique snippets of DNA into as many as 150 different nanoparticles for simultaneous testing. The nanoparticles are then injected into animal models and allowed to travel to organs such as the liver, spleen or lungs. Genetic sequencing techniques then identify which DNA-labeled nanoparticles have reached specific organs.
In a paper published October 1 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team describes taking the process a step farther to verify that the nanoparticles have entered the cells of the specific organs. In addition to the DNA barcode, the researchers inserted into each nanoparticle a snippet of mRNA that is turned into a protein known as “Cre.” The Cre protein generates a red glow, identifying cells that the nanoparticles have entered and successfully delivered the mRNA drug, allowing the researchers to identify which nanoparticles can deliver RNA drugs to the cells of the specific organs.
“This technique, known as Fast Indication of Nanoparticle Discovery (FIND), will allow us to identify the right carrier far more quickly and less expensively than we have been able to do in the past,” said James E. Dahlman, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “As a result, the odds that we will be able to find carriers for specific tissues should increase dramatically.”
The FIND technique would replace in vitro screening, which has limited success at identifying nanoparticle carriers for the genetic therapies. The research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health, and from the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation, the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation and the Bayer Hemophilia Awards Program.
Therapies based on RNA and DNA could address a broad range of genetically based diseases, including atherosclerosis, where such therapies may be able to reverse the buildup of plaque in arteries. Nanoparticles used to deliver RNA and DNA into cells are made from several ingredients whose levels can be varied, creating the potential for tens of thousands of different nanoparticles. Finding the right combination of these ingredients to target specific cells has required extensive trial-and-error discovery processes that have limited the use of RNA and DNA therapies.
Use of the DNA barcoding process allows hundreds of possible nanoparticle combinations to be tested simultaneously in a single animal, but until now, researchers could only tell that the combination had reached specific organs. By examining which cells within the organs have the red glow, they can now verify that the nanoparticles carried the barcodes and delivered functional mRNA drugs into the cells.
In the paper, the researchers report discovering two nanoparticles that efficiently delivered siRNA, sgRNA and mRNA to endothelial cells in the spleen. The researchers believe their technique can deliver therapeutic RNA and DNA to a wide variety of endothelial cell types, and perhaps also to immune system and other cell types.
“The field has been able to functionally deliver genetic drugs to the liver, and we are now trying to use our technology to deliver to different organs and cell types to enable therapies to treat all of the cell types that are in the liver,” said Cory Sago, the paper’s first author and a Ph.D. candidate in Dahlman’s lab. “Now that we have a system that allows us to probe these questions at a very specific level of resolution, we now want to go after other cell types in a more efficient manner.”
Dahlman expects to put the new technology to use quickly.
“We hope to take projects that would ordinarily require years and complete several of them within the next 12 months,” he said. “FIND could be used to carry all sorts of nucleic acid drugs into cells. That could include small RNAs, large RNAs, small DNAs and large DNAs – many different types of genetic drugs that are now being developed in research labs.”
Technical challenges ahead include demonstrating that identifying an affinity for mouse organs predicts which particles will work in the human body, and that the approach works for different classes of genetic therapies.
Experimentally, Dahlman’s lab produces the nanoparticles at three formulation stations that require about 90 seconds to produce each of the 250 or so samples used. The resulting nanoparticles are then examined for proper size range – 40 to 80 nanometers in diameter – before being purified and sterilized for injection into the animals.
After three days, the researchers separate cells that are glowing red and sequence the DNA snippets in them to identify which chemical compositions were most successful at entering cells of specific organs. The most promising chemical compositions are used to develop of a new batch of candidate nanoparticles for a new round of screening, which takes about a week to complete.
“We want to evolve the best particles that we can,” Sago said. “Every single one of the components matters, and we work to get each component right for the cell type that we are interested in. There is a lot of optimization required.”
In addition to those already mentioned, the paper’s co-authors include Melissa P. Lokugamage, Kalina Paunovska, Daryll A. Vanover, Marielena Gamboa Castro, Shannon E. Anderson, Tobi G. Rudoltz, Gwyneth N. Lando, Pooja Tiwari, Jonathan L. Kirschman and Philip J. Santangelo, all of the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; Chris M. Monaco, Young Jang and Nirav N. Shah of the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences; Nick Willett of Emory University and the Atlanta Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center, and Anton V. Bryksin of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
The research was supported by the NIH/NIGMS-sponsored Immunoengineering Training Program (T32EB021962), the Georgia Research Assistantship (Grant 3201330), the NIH/NIGMS-sponsored Cell and Tissue Engineering (CTEng) Biotechnology Training Program (T32GM008433), the National Institutes of Health GT BioMAT Training Grant (5T32EB006343), the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation (DAHLMA15XX0), the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation (PDF-JFA-1860), and the Bayer Hemophilia Awards Program (AGE DTD). This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsors.
CITATION: Cory D. Sago, et al., “A high throughput in vivo screen of functional mRNA delivery identifies nanoparticles for endothelial cell gene editing,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018) www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1811276115
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]]>The researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology made the chemical medley in the lab to closely mimic membraneless organelles, mini-organs in cells that are not contained in a membrane but exist as pools of watery solutions, or puddles. And their model demonstrated how, with just a few ingredients, the organelles could carry out fine-tuned biological processes.
The researchers published the results of their study in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces for the September 26, 2018 issue. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Science and by the National Science Foundation.
A quick look at membraneless organelles should aid in understanding the research’s significance.
Organelles that are pools of watery solutions and not objects with membranes are a fairly recent discovery. A prime example is the nucleolus. It resides inside of the cell’s nucleus, which is an organelle that does have a membrane.
In the past, researchers thought the nucleolus disappeared during cell division and reappeared later. In the meantime, researchers have realized that the nucleolus has no membrane and that during cell division it gets diffused the way water bubbles do in vinaigrette dressing that has been shaken up.
“After cell division, the nucleolus comes back together as a single compartment of fluid,” said Shuichi Takayama, the study’s principal investigator and a professor in the Wallace E. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Membraneless organelles can be made up of a few different aqueous solutions, each with different solutes like proteins or sugar or RNA or salt. Differences in the thermodynamics of the solutions, that is, how their molecules bounce around, keep them from merging into a single solution.
Instead, they phase separate the way oil and water do, even after intermingling. But there’s no oil in this case.
“They’re all waters,” Takayama said. “They just don’t mix with each other because they have different solutes.”
During intermingling, important things happen. The nucleolus, for example, is vital to DNA transcription. But the synthetic set-up, a collection of watery solutions made by the study’s first author, Taisuke Kojima, carried out a simpler series of reactions that demonstrated how membraneless organelles could process sugar.
“We had three phases of solutions that each held different reactants,” Kojima said. “It was like a ball with three layers: an outer solution, an intermediate solution, and a core solution. Glucose was in the outer layer; an enzyme, glucose oxidase, was in the second layer, and horseradish peroxidase was in the core along with a colorimetric substrate that gave us a visible signal when the last reaction we were looking for occurred.”
The glucose in the outer layer interfaced with the glucose oxidase in the second layer, which catalyzed the glucose to hydrogen peroxide. It landed in the second layer and interfaced with the horseradish peroxidase in the core layer, which catalyzed the hydrogen peroxide along with the compound that turns colors, which changed the color of the core layer.
“This type of cascading reaction is what one would expect to see membraneless organelles perform,” Takayama said.
The cascade even transported each reaction product from one compartment to the next, something very typical in biological processes, like organs digesting food or an organelle processing molecules.
Part of the reaction took the researchers by surprise, and it resulted in a novel discovery.
“When researchers think about membraneless organelles, we often think that the reactions inside them are more efficient when their enzymes and substrates are in the same compartment,” Takayama said. “But in our experiments, that actually slowed the reaction down. We said, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’”
“When the substrate is in the same place where the product of the reaction also builds up, the enzyme sometimes gets confused, and that can impede the reaction,” said Kojima, who is a postdoctoral researcher in Takayama’s lab. “I was pretty surprised to see it.”
Kojima put the enzymes and substrate into separate solutions, which interfaced but did not merge to a single solution, and the reaction in his synthetic organelle worked efficiently. This showed how unexpected subtleties may be fine-tuning organelle chemistry.
“It was a Goldilocks regime, not too much contact between substrate and enzyme, not too little, just right,” Takayama said.
“Sometimes, in a cell, a substrate is not abundant and may need to be concentrated in its own little compartment and then brought into contact with the enzyme,” Takayama said. “By contrast, some substrates can be very abundant in the nucleus, and it might be important to partition them off from enzymes to get just enough contact for the right kind of reaction.”
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The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Science (grant R01 GM12351) and by the National Science Foundation (grant CBET 0939511). Findings, opinions, and conclusions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the NIH.
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Singer, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, received a R01 grant from the NIH for her a grant proposal entitled, “Non-Invasive Methods to Drive Neural Activity with Millisecond Precision and to Recruit the Brain’s Immune Cells,” which will draw almost $2 million over five years from the NIH.
“This is really gratifying and it validates the work we’re doing,” says Singer, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech. “The NIH doesn’t take big risks, so it shows that they believe we can execute on this project, and the grant lasts long enough for us to really make some headway.”
Singer’s lab recently discovered that flickering sound or a combination of lights and sound at gamma frequency drives neural activity in the deep brain structures, while also rallying microglia (the main form of immune defense in the central nervous system) to engulf pathogenic proteins in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.
The goal of the group’s R01 project is to develop sensory flicker as a non-invasive sensory tool that will translate to humans and spur new research with wide-ranging impact and therapies for multiple neurological diseases.
“This is important because current stimulation methods are invasive and usually don’t reach deep brain structures,” Singer says. “There’s been some work in this area, but there aren’t a lot of options – they’re not very fast, they don’t have millisecond precision. This novel approach would spur new possible therapeutic approaches to Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases and galvanize new basic science research with wide-ranging impact.”
]]>Jia and his collaborators from George Washington University and Massachusetts General Hospital are recipients of a $2 million, four-year award from the NSF’s Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI), for Chromatin and Epigenetic Engineering.
The research team will develop a new framework and technology for linking epigenetic modulation to phenotype (epigenetics is the study of the biological mechanisms that switch genes on and off). The team is proposing development of new integrated imaging system for super-resolution imaging.
“Documenting the sequence of events triggered by the epigenetic master-regulators of cell function has a broader impact for the fundamental understanding of biological function,” Jia says, “No such technology has been developed to date to link genome re-arrangement to phenotypic signatures in live cells upon an opto-epigenetic trigger.”
The team expects its approach to provide a powerful way to probe chromatin-mediated control of transcription in real time, and generate fundamentally new information currently not available through chromatin mapping.
The Jia lab has made its reputation working on super-resolution optical microscopy, developing and applying advanced biophotonic tools to study complex, dynamic biological systems at the nanometer scale. The team’s research aims to invent a host of methods that enable the extraction of structural, molecular and functional information from intact tissues and organisms.
The EFRI program provides support of fundamental discovery at the frontiers of engineering research and education, investing in transformative opportunities potentially leading to new areas for fundamental or applied research; new industries or capabilities that result in a leadership position for the country; and/or significant progress on a recognized national need or grand challenge.
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Throughout last year, the Santangelo lab has been working on a safe, RNA-based gene therapy for preventing HIV infections in women. In two large animal models, his research has demonstrated broadly neutralizing antibody production for over 28 days with a single administration, and protection of biopsies from HIV challenge—encouraging results in the area of HIV prevention.
Santangelo is noted as a “thought-leader” in both the areas of HIV imaging and the characterization of infections at the single cell level. Santangelo’s imaging of CD4+ cells in vivo has been noted by Francis Collins, the director of NIH, on his blog.
Accomplishments by Phil Santangelo include:
• A new assembly mechanism for respiratory syncytial virus particles was discovered.
• The first PET/CT contrast agent to image SIV and SHIV infected cells within live animals was demonstrated.
• The first PET/CT contrast agent for imaging immune cells in macaques was demonstrated, and was used to validate the efficacy of a new treatment for HIV.
• The first RNA-based therapeutic for the prevention of RSV was demonstrated in rodents, with flu experiments underway.
• The first RNA-based therapeutic for the prevention of HIV was demonstrated in sheep and macaques.
His research has demonstrated that through the application of engineering principles to infectious diseases and other pathologies, significant impact can be achieved regarding both our fundamental understanding of pathogenesis, but also how these pathologies can be both prevented and treated.
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The Atlanta Center for Microsystems Engineered POC Technologies (ACME POCT) will be funded by a $7 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health. The ACME POCT will be part of the national NIH Point-of-Care Technologies Research Network. The Atlanta center will assist and enable inventors of POC technologies for cardiac, pulmonary, hematologic, and sleep applications to translate them to improve patient care.
Principal investigators for the ACME POCT are Oliver Brand, Ph.D., a microsystems engineer, professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN); Wilbur Lam, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics at Emory School of Medicine and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and a clinical hematologist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta; and Greg Martin, M.D., M.Sc., professor of medicine at Emory School of Medicine, clinical pulmonologist and intensivist, and head of the clinical research network in the NIH-funded Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance (Georgia CTSA).
“In the last several decades, the introduction of POC diagnostic capabilities has enabled rapid and timely clinical evaluation in the physician’s office, ambulances, homes, in the field, or in hospitals, and has the potential to significantly impact health care delivery,” says Martin. “In cardiology, pulmonology/critical care and hematology, POC testing can play an especially significant role, as the heart and lungs are among the most vital organs, and real-time diagnosis and rapid management during critical illnesses is key to avoiding progression to the difficult challenges of systemic and critical illness.”
One focus of the new research center will be microsystems-engineered technologies, a promising new class of microchip-enabled POC devices ranging from microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based sensors, to microfluidics, to smartphone-based systems. Examples include CardioMEMs’ heart failure sensor and Medtronic’s Carelink system for cardiac patients. “The ACME POCT will be able to leverage the extensive open-access micro- and nanofabrication facilities at Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology to refine microchip-based point-of-care technologies,” states Brand. Because of their small size and low power requirements, microchip-based systems provide excellent portability for POC testing. In addition, the ability of microsystems to convert for example sound and movement into electrical signals makes them ideal for sensing changes in the lungs and heart and diagnosing and monitoring pulmonary and cardiac disorders.
“The field of microfluidics is also finding increasing applications for blood-based diagnostics, but their clinical use and success has been less than expected, due primarily to clinician concerns about accuracy, usability, cost and reimbursement, as well as regulatory hurdles,” notes Lam. “We think the timing is ripe for a POC center dedicated to developing microsystem-engineered POC technologies that address these barriers to clinical adoption at an early stage, before the technology goes to market.”
The ACME POCT will assist inventors of microsystems-based POC technologies to define their specific clinical needs, conduct clinical validation, and refine their technology, directly addressing barriers with the objective of accelerating the path to clinical adoption. Atlanta’s highly ranked clinical programs in Emory Healthcare and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, as well as the internationally acclaimed microsystems engineering expertise at Georgia Tech, including the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) are expected to create a supportive and collaborative environment for the POCT center.
Holly Korschun
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hkorsch@emory.edu
Walter Rich
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But while both projects share a common umbrella, they are independent of each other and fulfill completely different needs.
With “Ultraviolet Hyperspectral Interferometric Microscopy” in the Nature journal, Scientific Reports, Robles and his collaborators introduce ultraviolet hyperspectral interferometric (UHI) microscopy, an affordable system for molecular imaging that overcomes the challenges typically associated with UV spectroscopy.
In “Dual-wavelength oblique back-illumination microscopy for the non-invasive imaging and quantification of blood in collection and storage bags,” in Biomedical Optics Express, the research team developed a system to quantitatively assess the suitability of cord blood for stem cell therapy applications, while saving time and dramatically cutting costs for blood banking.
UHI is a novel tool developed by Robles, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech. It’s a microscopy technique that probes unique endogenous absorptive and scattering properties of cells and tissues in the deep ultraviolet (deep-UV) region of the spectrum.
“The use of deep-UV light for microscopy offers many potential advantages over traditional methods,” the research team noted in Scientific Reports. “Unfortunately, there have been a number of challenges that have hampered progress in this area, including less than optimal cameras and light sources, phototoxicity, strong fluorescent background, and severe chromatic aberration.”
But as the team points out in the paper, UHI microscopy leverages recent advances in technology and research to overcome these challenges.
“We have developed a versatile instrument that, to our knowledge, is the first to achieve hyperspectral imaging in the deep-UV, with access to attenuation and dispersion properties, and quantitative phase,” the researchers wrote. “The capabilities afforded by UHI microscopy overcome significant limitations that have plagued deep-UV microscopy, and offer new opportunities for highly-sensitive, label-free imaging.”
Typically, label-free molecular imaging has been accomplished through fluorescence microscopy or non-linear microscopy, which have a limited number of molecular targets or requiring expensive systems. Robles expects the information provided by the more cost-effective UHI microscopy to yield unprecedented insight into a wide range of molecules and phenotypes. “We’re talking about fewer dollar signs,” he said. “And the approach can potentially be used to improve prognosis of all cancers.”
The work was supported largely by a 2017 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, for early career faculty researchers, won by Robles, principal investigator of the Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy (OIS) Lab at Georgia Tech and Emory.
In addition to Robles, other authors of the paper were Wilbur Lam (associate professor in the Coulter Department and a Petit Institute researcher); Ashkan Ojaghi (lead author and a graduate student in the Robles lab); and Meredith Fay (graduate student in Lam’s lab).
The research outlined in Biomedical Optics Express (the journal of the Optics Society) addresses a different kind of expensive process. Traditionally, there hasn’t been a low-cost method to quantitatively assess the contents of a blood bag without breaching the bag and potentially damaging the sample. So the Robles team adapted a technique called oblique back-illumination microscopy (OBM) to rapidly, inexpensively, and non-invasively screen blood bags for red blood cell morphology and white blood cell count.
“The goal here is to get really high contrast of cells, which are actually transparent, so that we can identify certain types of cells in blood,” said Robles. “What we’re really after are mononuclear cells in umbilical cord blood.”
Mononuclear cells (MNCs) are important components of the body’s immune system, and often used in research and clinical applications (including microbiology, virology, oncology, vaccine development, transplant and regenerative biology, and toxicology). For this paper, the Robles lab collaborated with Joanne Kurtzberg, a renowned researcher at Duke University, where she runs the Carolinas Cord Bank, one of the largest public cord banks in the world.
When cord bankers collect blood from a donor (a non-invasive, no-risk procedure), they want to isolate these valuable MNCs, but it hasn’t been an efficient process, and about 75 percent of the blood bags wind up being discarded.
“Cord blood banking is about 10 times more expensive than other sources of blood for stem cell therapy, and that should not be the case,” said Robles.
His team employed OBM, a recently developed imaging technique that provides tomographic differential phase contrast, to image and quantify the contents of a blood bag, “a simple, low-cost operation, without touching the blood or rupturing the bag, without wasting any blood whatsoever,” Robles said.
It takes about a minute to get an accurate estimate of the useful cells in a batch of blood right there in the hospital when it is collected.
Co-authors of the paper, in addition to Robles and Kurtzberg, were lead author Patrick Ledwig (a graduate student in the Robles lab) and Moses Sghayyer (a former undergraduate researcher in the Robles lab). The research was supported by, among others, the North Carolina-based Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization (MC3M) at Georgia Tech.
“Our images have been so fantastic that we’re expanding the technology to look at other types of environments,” Robles said.
For example, another use of the technology could determine the viability of blood stored for transfusions. This blood is usually stored for 42 days, then thrown away, “an arbitrary cutoff,” Robles said.
“It may be that the blood is no longer useful, and it may be useful beyond that point. We can quickly diagnose it with this system,” Robles said. “And we can start studying diseases like sickle cell disease and leukemia. There are many different avenues. We can look at thousands and thousands of cells very quickly to get a better understanding of disease.”
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TReNDS will be a tri-institutional effort supported by Georgia State, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, with a focus on increasing cooperation among Atlanta brain imaging researchers.
Calhoun will be professor of psychology at Georgia State, with secondary appointments in the departments of Computer Science and Physics and in the Neuroscience Institute. In addition, he will have appointments at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He will have additional appointments at Emory in the departments of Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Radiology and Imaging Sciences. Calhoun is joining the university as a Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar in Brain Health and Image Analysis, becoming the first eminent scholar with appointments at three institutions.
Calhoun was recruited from the Mind Research Network, where he was president, and the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where he was a distinguished university professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His focus is on improving approaches for imaging and understanding the human brain and identifying biomarkers of health and disease. He seeks to make better use of complex brain imaging data through improved analysis. Calhoun has developed algorithms that have strengthened understanding of brain function, structure and genomics, and how each is affected during various tasks or by mental or neurological illness. He also works to develop neuroinformatics tools that enable experts to use larger data sets and improve efficiency in data capture, management, analysis and sharing.
“Georgia State is excited to welcome Dr. Calhoun as the founding director of the university’s new Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science,” said James Weyhenmeyer, vice president for research and economic development at Georgia State. “We believe his arrival will be transformative in building collaboration among brain scientists at Georgia State, Georgia Tech and Emory, of which the result can only be significant progress in understanding and treating brain disorders.”
“I am very impressed with the commitment Georgia State has to growing brain imaging and data science efforts,” Calhoun said. “I’m also impressed by the desire to build a larger community focused on moving the needle in understanding the healthy and diseased human brain.”
For more than 25 years, the GRA has partnered with Georgia’s research universities to recruit world-class scientific talent to Georgia. The organization also invests in advanced laboratory equipment and fosters collaboration among universities, business and government.
“GRA is delighted to welcome Dr. Calhoun and his deep expertise in brain imaging and mapping to Georgia,” said Susan Shows, senior vice president of the Georgia Research Alliance. “His joint appointment marks the first of its kind for GRA, and we believe he will be an outstanding leader in our university-based brain health community.”
Calhoun is the principal investigator on two National Science Foundation grants and nine National Institutes of Health grants. One of those funded studies is being conducted in collaboration with Jessica Turner, associate professor of psychology at Georgia State, and aims to determine genetic effects on brain structure in psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia.
“Brain health disorders represent an enormous health burden,” said Allan Levey, professor and chair of the Department of Neurology at Emory University's School of Medicine. “Dr. Calhoun's pioneering research in brain imaging of neuropsychiatric disorders has significant public health implications, and we are excited to see him contribute to a new interinstitutional collaborative approach with Emory, Georgia State and Georgia Tech.”
“Dr. Calhoun is a brilliant and creative engineer who has devised critical new ways of leveraging data-science to improve our understanding of the brain,” said Magnus Egerstedt, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and head of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. “We are delighted to welcome him to our university and the broader Atlanta research community.”
“We welcome Dr. Calhoun to Georgia. Vince will be a prominent member of the brain research initiatives at both Emory and Georgia Tech, and the Georgia Concussion Research Consortium,” said Susan Margulies, the Wallace H. Coulter Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics and chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Calhoun has received extensive recognition for his work. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Biomedical and Medical Engineers, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. In 2017, Calhoun was selected as the University of New Mexico’s 62nd annual Research Lecture Honoree, one of the highest honors bestowed upon a faculty member in recognition of research activity.
A prolific scientist, Calhoun is the author of more than 650 peer-reviewed journal articles as well as 750 technical reports, abstracts and conference proceedings. He is chair of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping and specialty chief editor for the journal Frontiers in Brain Imaging Methods.
Calhoun received his master’s degree in biomedical engineering and master’s degree in information systems from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
It’s the latest breakthrough in a saga that began several years ago in the Pathology Dynamics Lab that Mitchell runs as an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
“We work in the realm of predictive medicine, in which we use data to try and predict what we call the three big C’s – causes, cures, and care,” says Mitchell, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. “We wanted to research Alzheimer’s disease, so I asked my students to go into the published literature and examine the most prevalent data that was out there.”
She was shocked by what they ultimately came back with. Their findings showed a minor correlation between amyloid-beta and Alzheimer’s disease. Mitchell says she nearly panicked. “I thought we were going to have so many eggs thrown at us for going against the dogma in the field.”
So they followed that up with further data analysis of the cumulative evidence, which showed that plaque from amyloid-beta protein may be an accomplice, but the chief offender is another bad protein, phosphorylated tau (p-tau). Mitchell’s team published their study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), last November in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
“In that study we found out, with a more advanced mouse model this time, that amyloid-beta plaque has only a minimal impact in cognitive decline – it’s more like a side effect of the disease,” Mitchell says. “By the time the plaque forms, cognitive decline is already happening, so targeting the plaque happens too late in the disease process. In that same paper, we were able to show that p-tau, on the other hand, was more strongly tied to cognitive decline. So, long story short, you’re probably not going to have a solo target in Alzheimer’s.”
And that’s what led Mitchell to submitting an application with the Alzheimer’s Association International Research Grant Program for her research, entitled, “Quilting Disparate Data Patches to Elucidate Alzheimer’s Disease.”
“I figured, we’re data scientists, why don’t we just take in all of the data? Instead of just going after one target, we should rank all of the potential contributing factors and their different interactions,” Mitchell says.
The challenge is, rather than trying to mine data from mere hundreds or a few thousand Alzheimer’s research papers, this time the Mitchell team is sifting through a much bigger data set – the more than 130,000 Alzheimer’s papers in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database. Her lab is creating algorithms to sift through and aggregate the data, “like putting together a puzzle,” Mitchell says.
“This award is testament to the innovation and creativity in the project – the best of the best Alzheimer’s researchers apply for these grants, so we’re honored,” she adds. “The hope is that there will be spinoff projects and NIH R01 grants to follow. But there is a lot of work to be done. We can’t just throw standard data mining techniques at this. It’s going to take some ingenuity.”
]]>Under the agreement, Celltrion will share its accumulated biologics development expertise with the Emory University School of Medicine and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech, and provide research costs and manufacturing materials of new drug candidates for atherosclerosis. Celltrion will have a preferential right to acquire a license for inventions resulting from the agreement.
Atherosclerosis is a vascular disease, in which the blood vessels are narrowed or clogged due to plaque made up of fat, cholesterol, immune cells and vascular wall cells in the blood vessel. This results in ischemic heart diseases, such as myocardial infarction and angina, as well as stroke or peripheral arterial disease. Ischemic heart disease and stroke are the world’s leading causes of death, accounting for a combined 15.2 million deaths worldwide in 2016.
Statins that lower cholesterol and lipid levels in blood are widely used to alleviate the onset and progression of atherosclerosis. Despite the success of lipid lowering drugs, atherosclerotic diseases continue to be a major cause of death worldwide. This highlights the need to develop new drugs that can complement the lipid lowering drugs by targeting new mechanisms of action to prevent and reduce the risk of atherosclerotic diseases, Celltrion said.
“We are delighted to cooperate with the internationally renowned research team at Emory University led by Dr. Hanjoong Jo, John and Jan Portman, Endowed Professor and associate chair in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Division of Cardiology, who is a leader in the area of mechanically regulated genes in atherosclerosis research,” said Celltrion.
Media Contact:
Walter Rich
Communications Manager
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
"We are so fortunate to work with a leading engineering school like Georgia Tech to find innovative, potentially life-saving treatment options for our patients,” said Donna Hyland, president and CEO, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “This is a great example of how aligning Children’s clinical expertise with the missions of our research collaborators can improve patient outcomes. Research that can be translated into more effective care at the bedside is why our collaboration with Georgia Tech is so important for the future of pediatric care in Georgia.”
The patient who received the groundbreaking surgery is a 7-month-old boy battling both congenital heart disease and tracheo-bronchomalacia, a condition that causes severe life-threatening airway obstruction. During his six-month inpatient stay in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Children’s, he experienced frequent episodes of airway collapse that could not be corrected by typical surgery protocols. The clinical team proposed surgically inserting an experimental 3D-printed tracheal splint, which is a novel device still in development, to open his airways and expand the trachea and bronchus.
Scott Hollister, Ph.D., who holds the Patsy and Alan Dorris Endowed Chair in Pediatric Technology, a joint initiative supported by Georgia Tech and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, developed the process for creating the tracheal splint using 3D printing technology at University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital prior to joining Georgia Tech. The Children’s procedure was the 15th time a 3D-printed tracheal splint was placed in a pediatric patient.
“The possibility of using 3D printing technology to save the life of a child is our motivation in the lab every day,” said Hollister, who is also the director of the Center for 3D Medical Fabrication at Georgia Tech and a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We’re determined to develop innovative solutions that meet the needs of Georgia’s most complex pediatric patients.”
The splints were created using reconstructions of the patient’s airways from CT scans. Hollister and his team of biomedical engineers collaborated with the Global Center for Medical Innovation (GCMI) so that GCMI could create multiple versions of the splint, of varying sizes, to ensure the perfect fit was available for the surgical team to select and place around the patient’s airways during surgery. GCMI will also support the ongoing development and commercialization of the technology.
In a complex 10-hour surgery, Children’s cross-functional team of surgeons successfully placed three 3D-printed splints around the patient’s trachea on the morning of August 17, 2018. The splints will eventually be absorbed into the body, allowing for expansion of the trachea and bronchus.
The Children’s tracheal splint team included Steve Goudy, M.D., and April Landry, M.D., (ENT), pediatric otolaryngologists; Subhadra Shashidharan, M.D., pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon; and Kevin Maher, M.D., pediatric cardiologist.
As the tracheal procedure concluded, the child was placed on a heart lung machine for surgical repair of his cardiac defect. Postoperative care took place in the Cardiac ICU and the Pediatric ICU at Children’s.
“It’s the close relationships we have with our research collaborators that make this kind of groundbreaking procedure possible,” said Dr. Goudy. “A large number of additional physicians, support staff and outside collaborators worked together on this innovative procedure.”
The 3D-printed tracheal splint is a new device still under development, as safety and effectiveness have not yet been determined and is therefore not available for clinical use. The Children’s team sought emergency clearance from the FDA to move forward with the procedure under expanded access guidelines.
In 2015, Georgia Tech and Children’s formed The Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Technology Center on Georgia Tech's campus to further advance pediatric research.
Media Contacts: Chrissie Gallentine, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (404-785-7614) or John Toon, Georgia Institute of Technology (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).
Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has been 100 percent dedicated to kids for more than 100 years. A not- for-profit organization, Children’s is dedicated to making kids better today and healthier tomorrow. Our specialized care helps children get better faster and live healthier lives. Managing more than a million patient visits annually at three hospitals, Marcus Autism Center, and 27 neighborhood locations, Children’s is the largest healthcare provider for children in Georgia and one of the largest pediatric clinical care providers in the country. Children’s offers access to more than 60 pediatric specialties and programs and is ranked among the top children’s hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report. With generous philanthropic and volunteer support since 1915, Children’s has impacted the lives of children in Georgia, the United States and throughout the world. Visit www.choa.org for more information.
]]>
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]]>The new research is published online in the journal Nature Methods.
In this study, the researchers leveraged advances from the field of “deep learning”-- powerful new artificial intelligence-based approaches that have revolutionized many technology industries in the last few years. The new computing approaches, which use artificial neural networks, let researchers uncover patterns in complex data sets that have been previously overlooked, says lead author Chethan Pandarinath, Ph.D.
Pandarinath and colleagues developed an approach to allow their artificial neural networks to mimic the biological networks that make our everyday movements possible. In doing so, the researchers gained a much better understanding of what the biological networks were doing. Eventually, these techniques could help paralyzed people move their limbs, or improve the treatment of people with Parkinson’s, says Pandarinath, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech. Pandarinath leads the Emory and Georgia Tech Systems Engineering Lab.
For someone who has a spinal cord injury, the new technology could power “brain-machine interfaces” that discern the intent behind the brain’s signals and directly stimulate someone’s muscles.
“In the past, brain-machine interfaces have mostly worked by trying to decode very high-level commands, such as ‘I want to move my arm to the right, or left’,” Pandarinath says. “With these new innovations, we believe we'll actually be able to decode subtle signals related to the control of muscles, and make brain-machine interfaces that behave much more like a person’s own limbs.”
Network behavior ‘emergent’ from individual neurons
Previous research on how neurons control movement have revealed that it’s difficult to discern individual neurons’ roles, in a way that we might think of in a basic machine. Individual neurons’ behaviors don’t correspond to variables like arm speed, movement distance or angle. Rather, the rhythms of the entire network are more important than any individual neuron’s activity.
Pandarinath likens his team’s approach to ornithologists studying the flocking behavior of birds. To understand how the group holds together, one has to know how one bird responds to its neighbors, and to the flock’s movements as a whole. Flocking behavior is “emergent” from the interactions of the birds with each other, he says. Such emergent behaviors are challenging to characterize with standard methods, but are precisely the way artificial neural networks function.
Pandarinath started investigating this approach, called LFADS (Latent Factor Analysis via Dynamical Systems), while working with electrical engineer Krishna Shenoy, PhD, and neurosurgeon Jaimie Henderson, MD, who co-direct the Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab at Stanford University.
In the Nature Methods paper, the researchers analyzed data from both rhesus macaques and humans, who had electrodes implanted in the motor cortex. In some experiments, monkeys were trained to move their arms to follow an on-screen “maze,” and the researchers tested their ability to “decode” the monkeys’ arm movement trajectories based solely on the signals recorded from the implanted electrodes. Using their artificial neural network approach, the researchers were able to precisely uncover faint patterns that represented the brain rhythms in the motor cortex. They also observed similar patterns in human patients who were paralyzed – one because of motor neuron degeneration (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and another with spinal cord injury.
In addition to the motor cortex, Pandarinath believes the new approach could be used to analyze the activity of networks in other brain regions involved in spatial navigation or decision making.
Future plans for clinical applications include pairing the new technology with functional electrical stimulation of muscles for paralyzed patients, and also the refinement of deep brain stimulation technology in Parkinson’s disease. In addition, Pandarinath and colleagues have begun using these techniques to start to understand the activity of neurons at fundamentally different scales than were previously possible. This future work is supported by a recent grant from the National Science Foundation.
The team’s research was supported by National Institutes of Health grants T-R01NS076460, MH093338, T-R01MH09964703, R01DC014034, R01DC009899, 8DP1HD075623, as well as funding from the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation for Spinal Cord Injury Research.
Walter Rich
Communications Mgr.
wrich@gatech.edu
“I am in love with the work that I’m doing,” she said. “We are looking at extending the lifespan and improving the quality of life. Being in the lab and working with diseases that are affecting people around the world is what I want to do with my life.”
Hernández, an industrial biotechnology major at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, spent 10 weeks this summer in the laboratory of Andrés García, the Rae and Frank H. Neely Chair in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the executive director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. The opportunity came through the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, which supported her work through the NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), also headquartered at Georgia Tech.
As one of 14 students working in cell therapy and manufacturing labs at the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Georgia Tech during the summer, Hernández received hands-on experience with cutting-edge research, and said she hopes to be part of the health care revolution that CMaT is helping to create.
“Cell therapy is an emerging field and CMaT’s goal is to make it scalable, high quality and affordable,” she explained. “Working in a project that aims to make this type of treatment available is very important to me.”
Workforce Development a Key Part of CMaT
Students have traditionally not received much research-based experience until they enter graduate school. The NSF’s REU effort is helping to change that by giving undergraduates an opportunity to work in advanced research labs alongside top graduate students and pioneering researchers in a broad range of fields. By giving them an idea of what it’s like to participate in the development of cutting-edge therapies and new technologies, the program is helping develop the next generation of research leaders.
“Educational programs at all levels are critical, of course, and the REU program bringing undergraduates into CMaT labs is important for introducing these students to the excitement of new cell therapies and cell manufacturing,” said Aaron Levine, CMaT’s co-director for workforce development and a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy. “Developing the future workforce has been identified as a critical issue for cell manufacturing to succeed. The CMaT workforce programs are critical to our success — and for the industry to reach its full potential.”
The students applied for the REU at CMaT and were assigned both a university principal investigator and a mentor for the summer. Beyond the lab experiences, the students learn collaboration, networking and other key skills.
“This is a unique and impactful REU program focused on cell manufacturing research that has successfully engaged an impressive cohort of students, many from underrepresented groups in STEM," said Mary Poats, REU program manager in NSF’s Division of Engineering Education and Centers. “The students are engaged early on in state-of-the-art ERC research and innovation activities that are directed toward a goal of curing disease and illnesses throughout the world. It is rewarding to hear these students passionately describe how being a part of CMaT’s summer REU program has so positively impacted their desire to further pursue related engineering and science academic studies, along with careers in the health care industry.”
After a summer working in the laboratory of Hang Lu, the Love Family Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Tailynn McCarty, says she’d like to get some experience in industry before going on to graduate school. A chemical engineering major from the University of Rhode Island, she hopes her experience with optimizing culture procedures for cellular aggregates — large groups of cells measured in three dimensions instead of just two — might open a corporate door.
“CMaT is providing an opportunity to save lives,” she said. “I’ve wanted to help people for a very long time, and I didn’t know exactly how I would do that. The work that CMaT is doing will allow me and other people to develop cures for illnesses to reduce the large impact of disease.”
NSF REU Gives Students Early Experience in Research
A key goal of the REU program is to give students a taste of what they’ll experience working in a research lab, whether that’s in a traditional academic setting or in industry. That goal appealed to Eva Gatune, who is working on dual degrees in biology and biomedical engineering at Xavier University of Louisiana.
“As undergraduates, we’re looking to the future and to graduate school — what we’ll do next,” she said. “This is the perfect preview to tell us if this is something we want to do or not.”
During the summer REU, Gatune worked in the laboratory of Georgia Tech Biomedical Engineering Professor Manu Platt studying cathepsins, enzymes that degrade proteins in the body. Specifically, she worked on how cathepsins and their protein networks affect breast cancer — and found that experience inspiring.
“Not a lot of young people would get an opportunity like this,” she said. “It’s heartwarming and fascinating to be part of something that is bigger than you. In the next 10 years, who knows how far this is going to go?”
For Yasmine Stewart, a biology major from Savannah State University, the REU program provided an opportunity to participate in one of the most exciting areas of life sciences research today: cell therapies. She worked with graduate students in the laboratory of Lohitash Karumbaiah, assistant professor in the College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences at the University of Georgia, learning cell culture techniques.
“We all have loved ones who suffer from diseases, so I’m especially passionate about doing my part to help them,” she said. “I’ve learned a lot of things in the lab, as far as cell culturing, but I’ve also learned patience, how to read research articles and to study more. I’ve learned how to work with others in the lab.”
Stewart had been considering an M.D.- Ph.D. path, but her experience using microfluidics technology to study potential cell treatments made the research track more intriguing. “The CMaT program is important because it is going to improve health care,” she said.
Getting in on the Ground Floor of an Exciting Technology
Kailyn Cleaves saw the summer REU as an opportunity to “get outside my comfort zone and do things I had never done before.” A biochemistry and pre-med major from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, she enjoyed the lab experience and, like other students, found involvement in the early stages of cell manufacturing to be both exciting and rewarding.
“I felt intimidated at first because I had never worked in a lab before,” she said. But she quickly found that graduate students in the laboratory of Steven Stice, director of the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center, enjoyed helping her and providing mentoring.
For David Frey, a Georgia Tech second-year student majoring in biomedical engineering, working in the lab of Krishnendu Roy, CMaT executive director and Robert A. Milton Chair, unlocked a “dream come true.” Frey worked on a microfluidics project that could lead to improvements in the way cells are cultured. The technology could also help match therapies to a patient’s specific disease characteristics.
“It’s truly been a dream come true,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to be in the lab all day. But being in school, I could never do that. This program definitely helps you immerse yourself in the research you are doing.”
As with others in the program, Frey was excited about being part of the cell manufacturing initiative in its early stages.
“It’s exciting being a pioneer with this specific technology,” he said. “Every day you want to see what the final product will look like. You want to see that the technology is being used for medical purposes. This could potentially help thousands of people someday.”
Making Cell Therapies Widely Available and Affordable
The companies that will bring cell therapies to the clinic will create a broad range of new jobs, everything from Ph.D. researchers developing new technologies to production staff and quality control specialists responsible for manufacturing cells of consistent quality and efficacy. Developing a new workforce to handle those divergent tasks is a key element of the CMaT initiative.
“Many of the REU students will go into industry, and they will come out of this lab experience with a better understanding of what industry needs and what sorts of skills are important for both industry and academic researchers,” Levine explained. “We deliberately structure our projects to have faculty and students from multiple institutions, often with industry partners. This is really how the real world works today — assembling the best teams to advance knowledge.”
Therapies based on living cells are different from traditional drug-based treatments, having great promise but also significant challenges.
“Most of the medical treatments we have now are much simpler, relying on small molecules or biologics,” Levine said. “The idea behind cell therapies is that cells can be much more powerful to treat conditions that are currently not treatable. Many of the conditions that we struggle with have to do with cellular dysfunction. The hope is that cell therapy can emerge as a way to replace or repair those cells.”
However, living cells can be affected by small changes in their environment and as they are transported to the clinics where they will be used. Ensuring consistency is another of the major challenges ahead, one for which Georgia Tech is applying its expertise in manufacturing and process control.
Only a small number of cellular therapies have been approved for use in the United States, and many more are in the research pipeline. But these therapies are often expensive — sometimes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient. Making these affordable for use by ordinary patients is yet another challenge that CMaT is taking on.
“By developing better technologies to manufacture cells more reliably, more safely and more inexpensively, we hope to lower the cost of these therapies and make cell therapy more widely accessible,” Levine explained. “The students participating in this program will be thrust into a field where the opportunities are growing dramatically. Preparing them to understand what the potential is and what the trends are like in this field is what we believe we’ve accomplished this summer.”
The NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies was established to create new integrated manufacturing innovations and advanced bioprocessing technologies to enable robust, scalable, low-cost bio-manufacturing of high-quality therapeutic cells. CMaT has established cellular testbeds in three areas: (1) Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to repair, regenerate and restore diseased tissues and organs, (2) Engineered T cells to treat some forms of cancer, and (3) Induced pluripotent stem cell (IPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes to treat heart disease.
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]]>Project ENGAGES (Engaging New Generations at Georgia Tech through Engineering & Science) is a high school science education program developed at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech in partnership with Coretta Scott King Young Women's Leadership Academy, B.E.S.T Academy, KIPP Atlanta Collegiate, Benjamin E. Mays High School, Charles R. Drew Charter High School and South Atlanta High School, six minority-serving public high schools in the City of Atlanta.
ENGAGES is co-directed by Manu Platt, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and Bob Nerem, professor emeritus of bioengineering and the founding director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
Jones, a senior at Mays High School who works in the lab of Petit Institute Executive Director Andrés García through the ENGAGES program, was interviewed as part of WABE's coverage of the Google global science fair at King Plow Arts Center on Friday. You can read and listen to the story here.
]]>The team, now called Ethos Medical (formerly known as Neuraline), were among five innovative teams whose projects, all focused on improving global health, won DEBUT awards. DEBUT is a biomedical engineering design challenge for undergraduate students, managed by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and VentureWell, a non-profit that cultivates revolutionary ideas and promising inventions.
The NIBIB prizes were awarded based on four criteria: the significance of the problem being addressed; the impact of the proposed solution on potential users and clinical care; the innovation of the design; and the existence of a working prototype. In selecting its prizes, VentureWell considered two additional criteria: market potential and patentability. The $65,000 in prizes will be awarded during a ceremony at the annual Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) in Atlanta this October.
“This was a great experience for us as our project continues to evolve,” said Ethos Medical’s Cassidy Wang, who graduated from the Coulter Department this past spring and whose team took third place, winning $10,000. Their patent-pending handheld tool is designed to improve placement for lumbar punctures (the process of taking fluid from the spine in the lower back with a hollow needle, typically for diagnostic purposes).
When the team competed in the Capstone Design program last spring, and in the DEBUT challenge, it was called Neuraline, and its focus was on epidural anesthesia placement, which allowed physicians to identify optimum entry into specific anatomical spaces using bioelectrical impedance analysis. The idea is still basically the same – optimum needle placement. But Wang says the team has gone back to its initial focus, lumbar punctures, after further research.
“Oddly enough, lumbar puncture was where our project originally started. The market opportunity there is high,” Wang explained. .”We found that hospitals lose about $450 million a year because of failures in lumbar punctures. There is a real need.”
In addition to Wang, Ethos Medical’s current team members include Coulter Department senior Dev Mandavia, and recent grad from the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME) at Tech, Lucas Muller. Alec Bills (now in grad school at Carnegie Mellon University) and Marci Medford (now working at medical tech company BD) were previously part of Neuraline.
While the team is now taking a slightly different path with its device, the core problem remains basically the same. Different tissue types exhibit different electrical impedances that are measured by the device’s electronics module, which enables real-time tissue identification.
“When lumbar procedures fail, 28 to 35 percent of the time, they have to be rescheduled. That’s the hospital’s cost,” Wang said. “Improving the procedure with a better tool is presents a huge financial incentive for hospitals.”
There were 36 eligible entries received from 25 institutions in 15 different states.
Ethos Medical, which also recently competed for the James Dyson Award and completed the Create X summer program at Georgia Tech, will now focus on perfecting prototypes of its device.
]]>2018 REM Seed Grant Awardees:
Project Title: “Bactericidal Hydrogels to Treat Bone Infection in a Large Animal Fracture Model"
Principal Investigators: Andrés García (Georgia Tech) and John Peroni (University of Georgia)
Synopsis: The objective of this project is to examine the ability of synthetic materials (hydrogels) that deliver the potent bactericidal enzyme lysostaphin to eradicate bacteria infection in a sheep model of bone defect infection. Our hypothesis is that hydrogels with controlled delivery of lysostaphin will eliminate Staphylococcal infections thus preserving defect fixation. The establishment of these approaches using local antimicrobial engineering expertise developed at GT with the large animal modeling expertise available at UGA will generate critical data to establish the translational potential of this anti-infective material.
Project Title: “Comparing the effects of MSCs derived from pluripotent stem cells originating from normal and diseased joint chondrocytes on the progression of osteoarthritis"
Principal Investigators: Luke Mortensen (University of Georgia) and Hicham Drissi (Emory University)
Synopsis: Osteoarthritis is a degenerative disease of the cartilage with a significant societal burden both economically and emotionally. To date there is no cure for osteoarthritis. This proposal will specifically focus on post-traumatic osteoarthritis. Because patient specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are increasingly considered as a source of stem cells for cartilage regeneration, a question remains as to whether the cell source and disease state of IPSCs could influence their regenerative capacity. Specifically, epigenetic changes that occur during OA progression and perhaps are only partially reversed during cell reprogramming can dramatically impact the regenerative capacity of these cells. The project aims to: 1) Evaluate the epigenetic memory of inflammation in chondrogenic iPS-derived cells from healthy and arthritic clinical patients & 2) Trace the survival and differentiation of healthy and arthritic chondrogenic iPS-derived cells in vivo using multiphoton intravital imaging in a medial meniscus destabilization model. This will be a first step in elucidating some of the critical pathways required for iPSC-derived regenerative capacity for tissue cartilage regeneration.
Project Title: “Polycaprolactone Scaffold And Forearm Free Tissue Viability In Yucutan Pigs"
Principal Investigators: Scott Hollister (Georgia Tech) and Craig Villari (Emory University)
Synopsis: This REM seed grant proposes to develop and test a tracheal scaffold as the basis for a tracheal free flap in a Yucatan swine model. This tracheal flap is actually being developed for a current patient of Dr. Villari who has a long segmental tracheal defect. The scaffold design will be generated directly from this patient’s image data. The resulting scaffold will be 3D printed for testing. The goals of this project will be: 1) to determine the mechanical viability via finite element simulation and mechanical testing for a range of porous patient specific scaffold designs in comparison to published human tracheal mechanical properties and tested swine tracheal mechanical properties and 2) to test the four tracheal scaffolds in a Yucatan free tissue flaps with and without growth factors to enable vascularity. The resulting flaps will be mechanically tested, scanned using micro-computed tomography in the animal, and sectioned for histology to determine mechanical properties, resulting geometry and tissue ingrowth.
]]>The NSF has awarded a team of researchers $1 million over three years to understand how networks of neurons work together to perceive the world and to generate the control signals needed to produce coordinated movement. Their project is titled “Discovering dynamics in massive-scale neural datasets using machine learning.”
The team includes Chethan Pandarinath, PhD, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; Lee Miller, PhD at Northwestern; and Matthew Kaufman, PhD at the University of Chicago.
Conventional neuroscientific experiments monitor the activity of just a small fraction of the neurons in any given brain area, and for just a few hours. Here the scientists anticipate being able to create massive datasets using new brain-interfacing technologies. In one set of studies, they aim to monitor much larger numbers of neurons -- up to 10,000 neurons at a time -- using two-photon imaging techniques. In another, the team will monitor for much longer time periods -- over the course of many weeks to months -- as animals go about normal, natural behaviors.
However, collecting the data is just half the challenge. Being able to analyze and interpret such massive datasets requires innovative new algorithms, which build on "deep learning"-based techniques recently developed in Pandarinath's lab. Analyzing the data will guide engineers in developing technologies that could help paralyzed people move their limbs, or improve the treatment of people with Parkinson’s and other diseases via deep brain stimulation, Pandarinath says.
“We anticipate that this project will provide windows into the brain's control of motor behavior that have never before been possible,” says Pandarinath, principal investigator of the Systems Neural Engineering Lab. “The framework developed here can be extended from motor behaviors to higher level problems of error processing, decision making, and learning.”
The award is one of 18 NSF-supported grants announced this week, which are part of the federal government’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative.
]]>
Hainline, who took on his current role in 2013, discovered early on that addressing mental health issues was the top priority of the NCAA student-athlete advisory committee. Today, the NCAA offers a seven-hour mental health best practices course for NCAA member institutions such as Georgia Tech.
Approximately one in five adults experience mental illness in a given year, and this rate tends to be highest among young adults (including college students). Hainline, who noted that mental health disorders affect two percent of athletes, believes that collegiate athletics can serve as a subculture for the correct handling of mental health issues on campuses.
A key leader at the roundtable was Angelo Galante, a physician with Georgia Tech’s Stamps Health Services division, who stressed the need for better access to mental health counseling. Students can be reluctant to seek help and are even more reluctant to involve their parents, according to Galante and Kristen Turner, case manager at Stamps Health Services.
In addition to their many amenities, Stamps Health Services also provides general psychiatric services to undergraduate and graduate students and their spouses. The clinic’s board-certified psychiatrists and care coordinators also collaborate with the Georgia Tech counseling center, part of the Georgia Tech Division of Student Life, to ensure students receive comprehensive care. Galante wants students that feel they need help, as quickly as they can, to set up an appointment with Stamps Health Services.
Leah Thomas, a director in Georgia Tech’s athletic department, supervises Tech’s Total Person program and raised awareness about their successful program during the roundtable. The program is based on the belief that excellence is a result of a balanced life that encompasses academic excellence, athletic achievement, and personal well-being. Tech’s program focuses on leadership development, professional development, personal growth and wellness, and community service. The program maintains a contractual clinical and sports psychologist that can assist student-athletes. Due to the existence of the Total Person concept, Georgia Tech was involved in the development of the NCAA CHAMPS/Life Skills program.
In addition to the Total Person program, Georgia Tech Athletics Director Todd Stansbury requested that a “care team” for athletes be created upon first arriving at Tech. Today, many people on the care team have close or frequent contact with athletes. This proactive approach helps to more quickly identify and assist those who may need support.
Susan Margulies, chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, identified some of the major findings at the roundtable:
* Changing perceptions and changing the culture about mental health is a need
* Access to mental health services is a persistent problem
* There is the challenge of insurance, not everyone is adequately covered to receive help
* There is a lack of transparency about the role and services provided by Georgia Tech
* There is a greater need for partnerships with mental health groups outside of Georgia Tech
Hainline commented that he was impressed by Georgia Tech’s campus-wide effort to convene such a very large and diverse group of students, faculty, and professional health care providers to address the very important topic of student mental health.
Representatives at the roundtable included John Stein, dean of students, members of the athletics department and Stamps Health Services, counselors, faculty, student-athletes, and physicians from Emory, Shepherd Center, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
]]>“The blood-brain barrier is a challenge in the treatment of brain malignancies,” said Costas Arvanitis, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “Even when a drug reaches the brain’s circulation, abnormal blood vessels in and around tumors lead to non-uniform drug delivery with low concentrations in some areas of the tumor.”
If a drug does make it through the distorted blood vessels, then dense tumorous tissue often blocks the drug’s path to the malignant cells. Arvanitis co-led the new study with Dr. Vasileios Askoxylakis at Massachusetts General Hospital to explore the effectiveness of ultrasound that is focused on affected brain areas to buzz the drugs through these barriers and into the cancer.
Already, the method had proven effective enough in fighting tumors to make it to phase I clinical trials, but until now, it was not well observed how it actually worked.
Beaming tumors
Arvanitis, also an assistant professor in the Wallace E. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and his collaborators sought to determine tissue-level mechanisms behind the new ultrasound treatment’s improved drug delivery throughout brain tumors. The findings will help researchers and clinicians fine-tune this potential treatment against cancers in the brain.
The team, which included researchers from the University of Edinburgh, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, published its findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 27, 2018. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the German Research Foundation, the Solidar-Immun Foundation, the Harvard Ludwig Cancer Center, and the National Foundation for Cancer Research.
The therapy is minimally invasive, focusing multiple beams of ultrasound energy onto a cancerous spot, where microbubbles, tiny lipid bubbles in the bloodstream that vibrate in response to ultrasound signals, can temporarily breach the blood-brain barrier at the target site. That creates an opening for drugs to get through. The microbubbles are injected intravenously before ultrasound is applied.
The team studied the new method on mice with metastasized breast cancer cells in the brain. In lab experiments, the researchers observed improved delivery of two cancer therapies, the common chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, and the targeted drug T-DM1.
“We established that we were able to get more of both drugs across blood vessel walls,” said Yutong Guo, a graduate student in Arvanitis’s lab and coauthor of the study. “The doxorubicin molecule is small, and it got the bigger boost, but altogether, the therapy distributed more of both drugs to more tumor tissue.”
Also, the fluid that surrounds cells, interstitial fluid, which can serve as a conduit for drugs, was seen flowing more freely between cells of a tumor in high-resolution images taken following ultrasound treatment. The drugs appeared to make it through significant barriers to reach tumors.
“Evidence of increased cellular transmembrane transport and uptake of doxorubicin by focused ultrasound was largely unknown until now,” Askoxylakis said.
The improved delivery dissipated five days after treatment, suggesting that the higher T-DM1 accumulation indeed had resulted from the ultrasound method better permeating blood vessels and tumor tissue.
The researchers quantified the changes in tissues and in cellular drug transport properties using mathematical modeling and used this to devise parameters for optimal drug delivery, which may prove useful in the design of new rounds of clinical trials.
“By explaining and underscoring the potential of combining focused ultrasound with different drugs for the treatment of brain metastases, our findings provide important scientific principles for the optimal clinical use of the technology,” said Rakesh Jain, who collaborated on the study and is a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School.
The study may also stimulate a broader discussion on how some cancer drugs should be administered, perhaps in some cases as a slow infusion rather than a quicker injection. The researchers would like to explore tuning the new method to optimize delivery of varying drugs or engineered immune cells to fight an array of tumors occurring in the brain.
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Also READ: Punching Cancer with RNA Knuckles
These researchers co-authored the study: Meenal Datta, Jonas Kloepper, Gino Ferraro, and Dai Fukumura of Steele Labs, Mass Gen Radiation Oncology; Miguel Bernabeu of the University of Edinburgh; and Nathan McDannold of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (grant R00 EB016971) and the National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute (F31 HL126449), the German Research Foundation (grant AS 422-2/1) and grants from the Solidar-Immun Foundation, the Harvard Ludwig Cancer Center, and the National Foundation for Cancer Research. Findings, opinions, and conclusions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies.
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For the first time in school history, all of Georgia Tech's undergraduate engineering programs are ranked in the top five of their respective disciplines by U.S. News and World Report, with the College of Engineering tied for 4th overall among engineering schools.
The rankings, which were released on September 10, 2018, included improved standings for chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer engineering, which all rose one spot, and materials science and engineering, which climbed two spots to third. With those changes the College of Engineering has seven undergraduate programs ranked third or higher, including industrial and systems engineering which has been in the top spot for 24 straight years.
Program scores are based on surveys of deans and faculty members at other universities. The U.S. News rankings are one indicator of the quality of an institution and can influence undergraduates, professors, prospective students, peer institutions and the media. Prospective students should also consider other factors such as overall cost, ROI, opportunities for research and studying abroad, internship and co-op options, the size and location of a school, and campus culture.
This is the sixth time the College of Engineering has placed fourth in the U.S. News rankings, and it is once again tied with the California Institute of Technology's engineering program. Among public universities, Georgia Tech's engineering program ranks second behind the University of California, Berkeley.
Engineering Programs
#1 Industrial/Manufacturing
#2 Aerospace
#2 Chemical
#2 Civil
#2 Mechanical
#3 Biomedical
#3 Materials
#4 Environmental
#4 Electrical
#5 Computer Engineering
]]>The research will take place in the labs of Wilbur Lam, M.D., Ph.D., and Melissa Kemp, Ph.D., both associate professors in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and researchers in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and at the University of Minnesota lab of David Wood, Ph.D. Lam is also part of the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
The NIH-funded project is entitled “Redefining clinical viscosity in sickle cell disease by leveraging microfluidic technologies.”
Sickle cell disease is a life-threatening genetic blood disorder in which red blood cells become physically altered and misshapen. Viscosity, or resistance to flow, is a complex biophysical property of blood that changes in various parts of the circulation in the body and is rendered even more complex by sickle cell disease.
“While blood viscosity in sickle cell disease is poorly understood,” explains Lam, “it remains important clinically, because physicians are instructed to use blood transfusions judiciously to avoid ‘hyperviscosity,’ but are also hampered by clinical transfusion guidelines that are not scientifically sound or evidence-based.”
The researchers propose to use new microfluidic and computational modeling techniques to model the different blood vessels and to more precisely define what “viscosity” means in different parts of the circulation within a sickle cell disease patient. They also will study how viscosity changes in the context of blood transfusions, which will lead to more patient-specific transfusion guidelines.
“We are grateful for this funding, and confident that the grant will allow us to make a significant contribution to redefining and improving guidelines for blood transfusions in sickle cell disease,” says Kemp. “This could make a significant difference in the quality of life and long-term health of these patients.”
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Walter Rich
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Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
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In announcement Thursday, Sept. 6, at the University of Alberta, Canada’s Minister of Science and Sport, Kirsty Duncan, presented 167 new Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships and 70 Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships, a total investment of $34.85 million, to a group of Canada’s brightest doctoral and postdoctoral students who are working to make discoveries in the health sciences, natural sciences and engineering, as well as the social sciences and humanities.
“Our greatest hope lies with the ambitions of the next generation of Canada’s researchers,” said Duncan, who was representing Minister of Health Ginette Petitpas Taylor at Thursday’s announcement. “Their curiosity and desire to collaborate will lead to new medical treatments, health care programs, and social innovations. Our government is proud to support them as they gain the skills and experienced needed for the jobs of tomorrow.”
Horslen, a Canadian citizen who earned his PhD from the University of British Columbia, is co-advised by Tim Cope, also a professor in the Coulter Department and, like Ting, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
“This is the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowship awarded by Canadian funding agencies, and I’m extremely honored that my application was accepted,” said Horslen, whose fellowship title is “How current movement shapes future sensory feedback: A multiscale investigation of how changing muscle mechanics affects muscle spindle sensor feedback and control of standing balance.”
The fellowship will allow Horslen to pursue novel research in the Coulter Department.
“It has the potential to have huge impact on my field of sensorimotor control of movement,” said Horslen, who joined the Coulter Department in February 2017. “We are re-evaluating our understanding of how muscle spindles sense of body movement and how we use this information to keep ourselves upright and avoid falling down.”
It’s the kind of work that could require a rewriting of neurosciences textbooks, according to Horslen, and affect how engineers approach the problem of building prosthetics that actually “feel.”
Collaboration between Coulter Department labs will continue to be a cornerstone of Horslen’s postdoctoral training – he works closely with Ting and Cope to anchor a research program integrating human balance behavior and central nervous system electrophysiology.
Additionally, Horslen’s work incorporates the expertise of neuromechanics and movement sciences experts in Emory’s Rehabilitation Medicine and Neuroscience programs, as well as Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences and Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
“I hope to lay the groundwork here at BME to becoming a knowledge leader in sensorimotor research,” said Horslen, who added, “the strong research environment in BME, as well as the superb postdoc training resources at both Emory and Georgia Tech were important factors in my application’s success.”
The scholarship and fellowship programs are administered by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and funded by three different Canadian agencies: CIHR, NSERC, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
In a statement following Thursday’s event, CIHR chief Taylor added, “We are giving researchers, students, and fellows the foundation they need to achieve their dreams and come up with the innovations that will drive the economy and solve the challenges of our time.”
]]>Arvanitis (also an assistant professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering) and his fellow researchers received a grant designed to support research that addresses demanding, urgent, and consequential challenges for advancing America’s prosperity, health and infrastructure.
For more information on the team’s work and the grant, read the story here.
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The book follows the dreams of 15 children currently battling illness such as cystic fibrosis, heart transplants, and pediatric cancer, and five survivors who followed their dreams.
Hasen was inspired to write the book following a life-changing conversation she had five years ago with a nine-year-old boy who had stage three brain cancer.
Read Hasen’s story right here.
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Hainline oversees the NCAA Sport Science Institute (SSI)—a national center of excellence that functions as a resource to provide safety, health and medical expertise, and research for physicians, athletic trainers and all stakeholders across collegiate sports. Through a partnership with leading medical and sports medicine organizations, student-athletes, NCAA membership and key sport stakeholders, the Sport Science Institute focuses on nine strategic priorities. Two of those strategic priorities - concussion and mental health - were the primary topics of discussions during Hainline’s visit.
“Being devoted to doing everything possible to promote and develop the health, safety and well-being of all student-athletes” is the purpose of his role, according to Hainline.
Bud Peterson, president of Georgia Tech and the NCAA’s board of governors, and Susan Margulies, chair of the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, hosted a series of research-focused meetings with leadership, faculty, students and staff from Georgia Tech, Emory School of Medicine, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and the Shepherd Center.
Todd Stansbury, Georgia Tech’s athletics director, Steven McLaughlin, dean of the College of Engineering, and Michelle LaPlaca, associate professor of biomedical engineering, joined Peterson and Margulies to provide an overview of translational concussion research being conducted across Tech and opportunities for student-athletes interested in STEM careers, along with collaborations with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University.
Afterwards, Hainline attended a second, larger meeting of neuroscientists, neuroengineers, and clinicians from all four invited institutions to review a selection of brain-related research being performed by each. The paucity of effective diagnosis and treatment strategies for many brain diseases, including concussion, is an important area of emphasis for many—including the NCAA.
Donna Hyland, CEO and president of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, hosted Hainline at their new integrated outpatient facility adjacent to the interstate 85 corridor. During a short tour, the design and concept of the facility was shared with Hainline, as well as plans to build a pediatric hospital on the 70-acre green-space campus.
Children’s is not only one of the nation’s leading pediatric care hospitals but also triages and treats concussion patients across metro Atlanta and through Georgia. Clinicians and researchers at Children’s are also performing pediatric concussion research along with Emory and Georgia Tech. Children’s is actively engaged with Atlanta-area organized sports and medical care providers to better educate the community about detection and treatment of concussion.
“Collectively, our Atlanta-area healthcare, engineering and brain research communities offer unique strengths that we wanted to share with the NCAA,” said Margulies. She is the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics and is one of the world’s top researchers on traumatic brain injury in children. The methods she’s developed for diagnosing and assessing these injuries are helping children receive earlier and more effective treatment, and understand the influence of repeated head injuries on the developing brain.
“The Coulter Department is a top ranked biomedical engineering program, embedded within an outstanding medical school, and the nation’s largest engineering college,” said Margulies. “We were very pleased that Dr. Hainline was interested in learning more about our collaborative research that align with the NCAA priorities in health and wellness.”
On the Emory campus, David Stephens, vice president for research for the Woodruff Health Sciences Center and chair of the Department of Medicine, along with Allan Levey, chairman of the Department of Neurology at Emory University, and director of the Emory Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center shared important research activities and possible collaboration areas with Dr. Hainline.
Later that day, the research topic shifted specifically to concussion research, one of the key reasons for Hainline’s visit. Several presentations were made by members of the Georgia Concussion Research Consortium. The consortium brings together more than 50 world-class investigators from some of Georgia’s top research institutions. The lab of Erin Buckley, an assistant professor within the Coulter Department, is searching for an objective biomarker indicative of brain health. Her work seeks noninvasive ways to make a better diagnosis. Investigators from Georgia Tech, Emory School of Medicine, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and the Shepherd Center each discussed activities in the area of concussion research, assessment, and diagnosis.
“Improving athlete health in the area of concussions is a shared research topic across the state,” said LaPlaca, one of the principal organizers for Hainline’s visit. Her lab has developed a virtual reality platform to objectively detect symptoms of traumatic brain injuries across different neurological domains, like balance and memory.
“Each concussion is different and the factors that influence the degree of injury and recovery course are not well understood,” said LaPlaca. “The research being done in my lab and by other investigators across Georgia could be of great benefit to both athletes and non-athletes. We are honored to host Dr. Hainline and were so glad he devoted nearly two days to gain a better understanding of the cutting-edge, neuro-related research being done in our region.”
Wrapping up the visit was a round table discussion and dinner, hosted by Peterson, inviting candid discussion surrounding the topic of athlete mental health.
]]>Warstler, who is from in Cincinnati and has also lived in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Switzerland, got a crash course in the ups and downs of Georgia Tech last year. He wanted to share what he learned with prospective and incoming students so they don’t overlook Tech’s wealth of opportunities or invaluable support system.
Read his story here.
“This was a great turnout,” said Michelle LaPlaca, who heads the consortium planning committee and presided over the event in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building.
“Since concussion is such a broad topic and affects so many individuals, not just athletes, it tends to attract a lot of researchers and clinicians,” added LaPlaca, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Tech.
Actually, there aren’t many researchers in Atlanta studying traumatic brain injury and concussion at any one location, she noted, “but put them together and the group could rival any of the large centers around the U.S. in expertise, innovation, and impact.”
The experts came from all over: Georgia Tech, Emory, the University of Georgia, the Shepherd Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Morehouse School of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Gwinnett Medical Center, the Atlanta VA Medical Center.
“Atlanta has a large clinical population and is ripe for clinical research,” LaPlaca said. “Because of Georgia Tech and Emory’s strength in translational research, I think that the timing is right to catalyze new activity in concussion research. It was also great to see people coming from Athens and other Atlanta universities. We hope that this is the start of new collaborations and innovative solutions to concussion diagnosis, care, and outcomes research.”
]]>“I’m delighted to represent the Coulter Department in this capacity on the study section,” said Kemp, associate professor with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.
“We review proposals that are highly relevant to biomedical engineering, such as the advancement of modeling methods, the investigation of human health challenges through systems biology, and applications of engineering principles – like synthetic biology design – to the therapeutic development and studying of diseases,” added Kemp, a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
Study section members are selected based on their demonstrated competence and achievement in their scientific disciplines, as evidenced by the quality of their research accomplishments and publications in scientific journals, among other things. Kemp, a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar, focuses her research on understanding how metabolism influences the decisions that cells make.
The CSR utilizes peer review groups, or study sections, to evaluate 75 percent of the research grant applications sent to NIH. These groups make recommendations to the appropriate NIH national advisory council or board, and survey the status of research in their fields of science, critical functions in the area of medical and allied research in the U.S.
“This appointment represents a true coming-of-age for an investigator,” noted Susan Margulies, Coulter Department chair and Petit Institute researcher. “Dr. Kemp’s section membership brings important visibility to our department.”
Kemp’s term began in July and will run through June 30, 2022.
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The National Neurotrauma Society seeks to accelerate research that will provide answers for clinicians and ultimately improve the treatments available to patients. The society promotes excellence in the field by providing opportunities for scientists, establishing standards in both basic and clinical research, encouraging and supporting research, and promoting liaisons with other organizations that influence the care and cure of neurotrauma victims.
LaPlaca earned a Ph.D. in bioengineering (1996) and completed her postdoctoral training in neurosurgery while at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests surround translational research in traumatic brain injury (TBI) and concussion. Her research goals are to better understand acute injury mechanisms and mechanotransduction, identify novel TBI biomarkers, and develop multimodal concussion assessment tools. She has won numerous awards for her research and currently serves as vice chair of the Brain Injury Association of Georgia.
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The Coulter program fund provides annual awards to Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology research teams who create products with commercial potential that address an unmet clinical need. Funding and project management provided by the Coulter program team is used to bridge the gap in development between early stage university research and its commercialization.
Out of 54 applications in this year’s funding cycle, the below innovative projects were selected by a committee comprised of venture capitalists, industry, entrepreneurs, doctors, biomedical engineers and technology transfer experts from both universities.
1. Antiviral Peptide: a broad-spectrum antiviral drug used for the treatment of the Influenza virus. The therapeutic discovery platform has identified therapeutic peptides with broad-spectrum antiviral activity.
Principal Investigator: Joshy Jacobs, Emory University
2. Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnostic: a mass spectrometry-based immunoassay that can detect and track biomarkers to determine progression of neurodegenerative disease earlier and more reliably that clinical manifestation of symptoms.
Principal Investigators: Allan Levey, Emory University; Duc Duong, Emory University; and Nick Seyfried, Emory University
3. Nanoparticle Screening for Gene Therapies: a high throughput DNA barcoding platform that identifies lipid nanoparticles that can deliver gene therapies to targeted tissues and organs with high specificity.
Principal Investigator: James Dahlman, Georgia Tech
4. Steerable Guidewire: a robotically steerable guidewire tip to enable greater maneuverability and navigation in vascular spaces.
Principal Investigators: Jaydev Desai, Georgia Tech and Zach Bercu, Emory University
5. TUMAAS Breast Pump: a wearable, portable breast pump that can draw milk with minimal noise.
Principal Investigator: Andrea Joyner, Emory University
6. Wheelchair In-seat Activity Tracker (WiSAT)*: an in-seat activity tracker to encourage weight shifts and reduce pressure ulcer formation.
Principal Investigators: Sharon Sonenblum, Georgia Tech, and Stephen Sprigle, Georgia Tech
*Support for this project is in partnership with the Rick Hansen Institute.
“There is a rich pipeline of commercializable patient-impacting technologies at Georgia Tech and Emory University. This year’s applicant pool was exceedingly competitive” says Shawna Khouri, managing director of the Coulter Translational Program. “The projects selected to be a part of this cohort have a strong potential for commercialization and we’re eager to work with our PIs to grow these opportunities and advance them aggressively toward the market.”
To learn more about the Coulter Translational Program and its funding and partnership opportunities, visit www.coulter.gatech.edu.
The Coulter Translational Program is a partnership with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University to fund and support the translation of technologies that address an unmet clinical need and will lead to a commercial product. The primary goal of the program is to improve patient care through collaborations between clinicians and engineers to commercialize biomedical technologies.
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]]>The sensor, which uses capacitance changes to measure blood flow, could reduce the need for testing to monitor the flow through the diverter. Researchers, led by Georgia Tech, have shown that the sensor accurately measures fluid flow in animal blood vessels in vitro, and are working on the next challenge: wireless operation that could allow in vivo testing.
The research was reported July 18 in the journal ACS Nano and was supported by multiple grants from Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, the University of Pittsburgh and the Korea Institute of Materials Science.
“The nanostructured sensor system could provide advantages for patients, including a less invasive aneurysm treatment and an active monitoring capability,” said Woon-Hong Yeo, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “The integrated system could provide active monitoring of hemodynamics after surgery, allowing the doctor to follow up with quantitative measurement of how well the flow diverter is working in the treatment.”
Cerebral aneurysms occur in up to five percent of the population, with each aneurysm carrying a one percent risk per year of rupturing, noted Youngjae Chun, an associate professor in the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Aneurysm rupture will cause death in up to half of affected patients.
Endovascular therapy using platinum coils to fill the aneurysm sac has become the standard of care for most aneurysms, but recently a new endovascular approach – a flow diverter – has been developed to treat cerebral aneurysms. Flow diversion involves placing a porous stent across the neck of an aneurysm to redirect flow away from the sac, generating local blood clots within the sac.
“We have developed a highly stretchable, hyper-elastic flow diverter using a highly-porous thin film nitinol,” Chun explained. “None of the existing flow diverters, however, provide quantitative, real-time monitoring of hemodynamics within the sac of cerebral aneurysm. Through the collaboration with Dr. Yeo's group at Georgia Tech, we have developed a smart flow-diverter system that can actively monitor the flow alterations during and after surgery.”
Repairing the damaged artery takes months or even years, during which the flow diverter must be monitored using MRI and angiogram technology, which is costly and involves injection of a magnetic dye into the blood stream. Yeo and his colleagues hope their sensor could provide simpler monitoring in a doctor’s office using a wireless inductive coil to send electromagnetic energy through the sensor. By measuring how the energy’s resonant frequency changes as it passes through the sensor, the system could measure blood flow changes into the sac.
“We are trying to develop a batteryless, wireless device that is extremely stretchable and flexible that can be miniaturized enough to be routed through the tiny and complex blood vessels of the brain and then deployed without damage,” said Yeo. “It’s a very challenging to insert such electronic system into the brain’s narrow and contoured blood vessels.”
The sensor uses a micro-membrane made of two metal layers surrounding a dielectric material, and wraps around the flow diverter. The device is just a few hundred nanometers thick, and is produced using nanofabrication and material transfer printing techniques, encapsulated in a soft elastomeric material.
“The membrane is deflected by the flow through the diverter, and depending on the strength of the flow, the velocity difference, the amount of deflection changes,” Yeo explained. “We measure the amount of deflection based on the capacitance change, because the capacitance is inversely proportional to the distance between two metal layers.”
Because the brain’s blood vessels are so small, the flow diverters can be no more than five to ten millimeters long and a few millimeters in diameter. That rules out the use of conventional sensors with rigid and bulky electronic circuits.
“Putting functional materials and circuits into something that size is pretty much impossible right now,” Yeo said. “What we are doing is very challenging based on conventional materials and design strategies.”
The researchers tested three materials for their sensors: gold, magnesium and the nickel-titanium alloy known as nitinol. All can be safely used in the body, but magnesium offers the potential to be dissolved into the bloodstream after it is no longer needed.
The proof-of-principle sensor was connected to a guide wire in the in vitro testing, but Yeo and his colleagues are now working on a wireless version that could be implanted in a living animal model. While implantable sensors are being used clinically to monitor abdominal blood vessels, application in the brain creates significant challenges.
“The sensor has to be completely compressed for placement, so it must be capable of stretching 300 or 400 percent,” said Yeo. “The sensor structure has to be able to endure that kind of handling while being conformable and bending to fit inside the blood vessel.”
The research included multiple contributors from different institutions, including Connor Howe from Virginia Commonwealth University; Saswat Mishra and Yun-Soung Kim from Georgia Tech, Youngjae Chun, Yanfei Chen, Sang-Ho Ye and William Wagner from the University of Pittsburgh; Jae-Woong Jeong from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Hun-Soo Byun from Chonnam National University; and Jong-Hoon Kim from Washington State University.
CITATION: Connor Howe, et. al., “Stretchable, Implantable, Nanostructured Flow-Diverter System for Quantification of Intra-aneurysmal Hemodynamics” (ACS Nano, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.8b04689
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]]>Moments later, the freshly minted grads, relieved of their academic burdens, took in some words of wisdom from guest speaker Howard Baker, vice president of quality and regulatory affairs for Facet Technologies, LLC.
“You may not realize it, but the easy part of your life is over,” said Baker, who has hired numerous graduates of the MBID program since it was launched in 2013. “This program was the easy part. Now the most fun part of your life, the most rewarding part of your life is about to start.”
The year-long MBID program was created by the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory to fill a market need for multi-talented, innovative professionals with detailed cross-training in biomedical device engineering, healthcare, and business development.
But according to program director Sathya Gourisankar, the idea isn’t to just create new workers for an evolving industry.
“Our diverse, project-based curriculum is producing graduates capable of working across a variety of roles,” said Gourisankar, who designed the program and has more than 30 years of pre-clinical and clinical biomaterials research and product development experience. “The long-term impact of the program will be the development of future industry leaders.”
The curriculum and training, which emphasizes real-world exposure and start-up industry experience, has developed 123 graduates in five years, many of them moving on to positions with industry leaders like Abbott, Baxter, Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Bard, Facett, and many others.
As with every year, this class was broken up into project teams (five of them, ranging in size). Before graduating, the teams are called upon to present and explain their bench-to-bedside medical device development efforts. Gourisankar presided over the three-hour event. Here are the five teams and their project summaries (if provided):
Team: ArthroOrtho; Members: Temiloluwa Adeniyi, Agnes Arrinda, Anshuj Deva, Jackie Kim, Ignacio Montoya, Prity Singh; Clinical Mentor: Dheera Ananthakrishnan, M.D. Description: The team designed a device to improve shoulder range of motion in adults with adhesive capsulitis that provides passive, cost-efficient, at-home, controlled (position, speed, and duration) therapy. Competitors lack the proper controls, which clinicians consider to be a desirable feature in shoulder therapy devices. This device, Armate, features a belt-driven pulley system controlled by two motors. Currently, the team plans to sell directly to both hospitals and patients as a rentable and reusable device.
Team: StoneDivus; Members: Tushar Agarwal, Shadi Ashtarolnakhai, Mattie Farris, Adam Majka, Kanchi Patel, Stuti Sagar, Hartie Spence III; Clinical Mentors: Spencer Kozinn, M.D., Jaime Wong, M.D., Raymond Pak, M.D. Description: Tackling the issue of recurring kidney stones, the team developed a device called Stasis, an at-home, point of care, active monitoring device that measures a patient's urine concentration and pH. The device is handheld, much like an electronic toothbrush, and detects urine analytes similarly to a pregnancy test. It incorporates wireless technology to record, store, and transmit actionable data to a patient’s smartphone, allowing for more direct control of care. Stasis aims to help patients discover their path to prevention.
Team: DextERmed; Members: Haris Shekhani M.D., Liuyi Meng, Ananya Gupta, Nadia Alam, Amrita Bhowmick, Prathamesh Prabhudesai, M.D., Florin Tirdea; Clinical Mentors: Lekshmi Kumar. M.D. Description: The team addressed the problem of improper ventilation, a common occurrence in and out of the hospital for patients using the bag valve mask. So they developed ZephER, a universal add-on device that fits between the bag and mask, ensuring that every time a bag is squeezed, the pressure delivered is less than lower esophageal sphincter opening pressure. Thus, there will be minimal air entry into the stomach and little to no subsequent complications.
Team: Enhanced; Members: Michael Chen, Christianna Imken, Jyuthika Sen, Sanjana Singh, Amulya Ananda Kumar, Jiaqi Qian, Jeremiah Mobley; Clinical Mentors: Robert Kelly, D.O. Description: Noting the dramatic increase of post-operative surgical site infections in obese patients requiring Cesarean sections, the team designed VenTrac Panniculus Manager, a single-use medical device intended to be used intra-operatively and post-operatively to help prevent infections.
Team: CirculaTech; Members: Rachel Aigen, Nicholas Bello, Kathleen Gonzalez, Stephen McClain, Jake Pistiner, Carson Schaff, Amirah Suleiman; Clinical Mentor: Gautam Kumar, M.D.
When the presentations were completed, the students fielded a barrage of tough questions from the audience, including industry veterans. It was the kind of potential pressure cooker that these grads will have to face in their careers, and they seem to have appreciated the experience, and the deep involvement of the business community in the program.
“The most effective element of the MBID program is the fact that we had industry professionals teaching us,” noted Jyuthika Sen. “It not only gave us insight into the industry practices, but also helped us understand the academic material in a more practical setting.”
As in past years, following each presentation and round of questioning, Gourisankar announced the team had fulfilled its graduation requirement. But this year represented a milestone for the MBID program – a designated 100th graduate. That honor went to Ignacio Montoya, who was on track to become a U.S. Air Force pilot when a road accident in December 2012 resulted in multiple injuries, including severe spinal cord damage that left him in a wheelchair. He plans to open a gait training center in the Atlanta area and serve as its executive director.
“None of that would be possible if it wasn’t for the staff of this program, Sathya and all of the faculty, everyone that has supported me,” Montoya said after final project presentations on Thursday, July 26. He also recognized departing executive director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, Bob Guldberg, for taking up his cause and bringing him to the attention of MBID leadership.
During the rigorous program, health issues occasionally posed a hurdle for Montoya. His dedicated ArthoOrtho teammates stepped up so the team could successfully complete their project.
“Every one of you has been there for me,” he told his audience last Thursday. “I’m here today, finishing this program, because of you.”
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The brain processes sensory information very rapidly during behavior. Impairments in sensory processing characterize many debilitating neurological conditions such as schizophrenia, dementia, and autism, and there is a lack effective treatments for such disorders because scientists do not fully understand the principles of neuronal communication. Discovering these principles is a fundamental step towards lessening deficits common to many neurological disorders.
Haider’s lab will provide innovative measurements and analysis of the relationship between single neurons, synaptic activity, and large-scale neural networks in visual cortex during controlled perceptual behaviors in mice.
A major need exists to identify how synaptic and network mechanisms coordinate rapid electrical signaling in the cortex, and how these lead to normal and impaired sensory perception and behavior. A prevailing model of cortical function postulates that excitatory and inhibitory processes maintain an optimal balance that becomes disrupted during sensory impairments and neurodevelopmental diseases. Currently, there is little knowledge regarding how these excitatory and inhibitory signals are organized during sensory perception. These basic studies are needed to begin understanding how to repair the function of brain circuits in many neurological diseases.
“So much still remains unknown about the basic mechanisms of electrical communication in the cortex during normal sensory experience and sensory impairments,” said Haider. “Our goal with this work is to start performing detailed study of excitatory and inhibitory signaling in neural networks during visual perception, and we hope to understand what goes wrong in the cortex during moments of visual impairment. This project is a big vote of confidence not only for our approach, but for the greater importance of basic research into brain circuits from a neural circuits and engineering perspective.”
This project will fulfill a need to understand these processes in individual neurons, networks, and synaptic inputs during behavior, so that we may better comprehend how to rectify sensory processing deficits characteristic of many neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders.
]]>Dahlman is a bioengineer working at the interface of nanotechnology, gene editing, and genomics. His lab develops novel ‘big data’ technologies and applies them to the study of nanomedicine. One such application is the use of DNA barcodes to track thousands of nanoparticles directly in vivo; typically, labs will study a few nanoparticles in vivo.
His lab also has pioneered the use of DNA barcoded nanoparticles, and is using this powerful new technology to design nanoparticles that deliver genetic drugs to target tissues. He has designed nanoparticles that deliver RNA drugs to blood vessels; these nanoparticles have worked in more than 20 labs and are under consideration for clinical development. At the age of 31, he already has published in Nature Nanotechnology (twice), Nature Biotechnology, Cell, Nature Cell Biology, Science Translational Medicine, PNAS (twice), JACS, and other prestigious journals.
In addition to the Technology Review honor, Dahlman has won many national and international awards, and since 2014, has given dozens of invited talks at leading universities around the world on drug delivery and DNA barcoding.
For more than a decade, Technology Review has recognized exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to transform the world. Previous Innovators Under 35 include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google, Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook, Helen Greiner, the cofounder of iRobot, and Jonathan Ive, the chief designer of Apple.
Gideon Lichfield, editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review, said: “MIT Technology Review inherently focuses on technology first - the breakthroughs and their potential to disrupt our lives. Our annual Innovators Under 35 list is a chance for us to honor the outstanding people behind those technologies. We hope these profiles offer a glimpse into what the face of technology looks like today as well as in the future.”
Learn more about this year’s honorees on the MIT Technology Review website here and in the July/August print magazine, which will hit newsstands worldwide on July 3. The honorees are also invited to appear in person at the upcoming EmTech MIT conference, MIT Technology Review’s flagship event exploring future trends and technologies that will impact the global economy, happening September 11-14, 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
About MIT Technology Review
Founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899, MIT Technology Review is a world-renowned, independent media company whose insight, analysis, reviews, interviews and live events explain the commercial, social and political impact of new technologies. MIT Technology Review derives its authority from the world's foremost technology institution and from its editors' deep technical knowledge, capacity to see technologies in their broadest context, and unequaled access to leading innovators and researchers. MIT Technology Review’s mission is to bring about better-informed and more conscious decisions about technology through authoritative, influential and trustworthy journalism.
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The new Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) like ISO 8 and ISO 7 compliant facility is part of the existing Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing (MC3M). The center was established in 2016 and made possible by a $15.75 million gift from philanthropist Bernie Marcus, with a $7.25 million investment from Georgia Tech and another $1 million from the Georgia Research Alliance.
MC3M is already helping researchers from Georgia Tech and partner organizations develop ways to provide therapeutic living cells of consistent quality in quantities large enough to meet the growing demands for the cutting-edge treatments. The center and this new facility also provide the infrastructural foundation for the Georgia Tech-led National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT), which was announced in September 2017.
The Marcus Foundation’s gift along with the NSF’s expected funding over ten years in CMaT, together with potential private-sector contributions and the state of Georgia’s investment in infrastructure related bio manufacturing, could result in a combined statewide investment of more than $70 million in cell manufacturing. Beyond developing technologies to help make these life-saving cell therapies broadly available and affordable, the initiative will also help train the specialized workforce needed to manufacture these therapies at large scale.
“This initiative has the potential to change the way we think about medical treatments, to change the way we think about medicine, and the way we approach cures for different diseases,” said Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson, who opened the dedication event. “Here, we will develop the tools and technologies to produce these cells at lower cost, more rapidly and for more people.”
MC3M is already supporting 23 research projects aimed at all components of the challenge, from understanding cell quality and developing scalable processes, to chip-based disease models for safety and efficacy testing and new models for supply-chain optimization and logistics. The center collaborates with several other institutions, supporting the work of 29 faculty members, and helping train 27 students and fellows for the emerging cell manufacturing industry.
The new facility dedicated on June 6 is a unique “sandbox” for collaboration among engineers, clinicians, and industry to develop and validate new scalable manufacturing processes for cell therapies under GMP conditions necessary to eventually obtain regulatory approvals. It will serve as the translational arm of the Marcus Center and CMaT to help researchers throughout the state of Georgia translate emerging cell therapies to clinical practice. This facility – designed to enable real time quality monitoring and control of cell products during manufacturing – is a one-of-a-kind space that will be instrumental in bringing affordable cell therapies to patients faster.
The new cell-based therapies being approved for use in humans can have dramatic impact. But the therapies are costly, as much as a $500,000 per patient. The MC3M will help develop new technologies and processes to make these treatments consistent in quality and available to the average person.
“The center is about providing access for patients and enabling patients to benefit from these incredible therapies that could change their lives,” said Krishnendu Roy, who directs both MC3M and CMaT. “We need to scale these therapies up to treat hundreds of thousands of patients. This is the vision of Mr. Marcus – to make this available to everyone regardless of their socio-economic status.”
Marcus, who recalled working as a pharmacist before co-founding home improvement retailer The Home Depot, noted that common drugs such as aspirin are chemically consistent around the world, regardless of where they are sold. The consistency of living cell therapies can’t be similarly counted on because their properties may depend on the specific skills and facilities of the research center producing them.
“Patients receiving these cells need to know that they are getting the right things,” Marcus said. “This is a very practical question for which we have no answer now.” Beyond consistency, the cells also need to be affordable, he said.
The new cell manufacturing facility will connect cell-based therapies being developed in research facilities with the appropriate tools and technologies that ensure consistency in manufacturing and product quality while enabling scalability. “There is a gap right now between what we do in the research lab and what we need to do to get these therapies to a hundred thousand or even millions of patients,” Roy noted.
Beyond developing quality control and analytical techniques to ensure consistency, the center will also develop novel feedback-controlled automation systems to lower the cost, Roy said.
Peterson noted the potential economic impact of building a cell manufacturing industry in Georgia. “Working with our partner universities, the Technical College System of Georgia and the private sector, we will be able to attract new industries, create new jobs and help build the economy of the state of Georgia.”
The initiative began, he noted, with the development of a national cell manufacturing roadmap, an effort supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The Marcus gift built on that foundation, and in turn, made it possible for Georgia Tech to lead a team including the University of Wisconsin, University of Georgia, University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, and other partners, to win the NSF Engineering Research Center award last fall.
Other collaborators in Georgia include Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
The NSF ERC could provide up to $40 million over ten years, and attract private and local investment that could boost that amount much higher.
“We have incredible momentum,” Roy said. “We are bonded together by a single goal: getting these therapies to many patients at a lower cost to really help them.”
Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon
]]>Research News
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]]>Joining the community of multidisciplinary principal investigators at the Petit Institute are: Kyle Allison, Joseph Brown, Anthony Clavo, Colleen Coulter, Stephen Diggle, Eva Dyer, Neha Garg, Seth Hutchinson, Brent Keeling, Rebecca Levit, Cassie Mitchell, Thomas Orlando, John Peroni, Jerry Qi, James Rains, Lewis Wheaton, Marvin Whiteley, C.P. Wong, Xing Xie, and Peter Yunker.
These 20 researchers come from a broad range of backgrounds, from Georgia Tech, Emory, the University of Georgia, and elsewhere, increasing the depth and breadth of research expertise at the institute, now with nearly 230 researchers.
Meet the new group:
• Kyle Allison, assistant professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. A former Forbes 30-under-30 selection, Allison is interested in the response of bacteria to antibiotics in order to develop new methods for eradicating persistent bacteria, which contribute to chronic infections and are a major medical problem.
• Joseph Brown, assistant professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. Brown’s research and teaching interests straddle the intersection of environmental engineering and public health, including water infrastructure sustainability, detection methods for pathogens and pathogen indicators in the environment, water treatment technology characterization and innovation, and human health effects of exposure to waterborne pathogens.
• Anthony Clavo, Spine Center Atlanta. Clavo is an M.D. and a registered pharmacist who has been providing care to patients in the metro Atlanta area for almost 20 years. He’s interested in providing interventional therapies for patients, including stem cell therapy, neuro-augmentation/spinal cord stimulation, radio-frequency ablation/rhizotomies, epidural steroid injections, diagnostic and therapeutic nerve blocks, and joint and soft tissue injections.
• Colleen Coulter, a physical therapist, is adjunct assistant professor of rehabilitation medicine at Emory and a team leader in the limb deficiency program at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. She focuses on how torticollis (“twisted neck”) on the skull, posture, and movement. She also serves as the physical therapist in the cranial remolding and scoliosis programs at Children’s.
• Steve Diggle, associate professor, School of Biological Sciences. Diggle runs a lab that investigates the evolution of microbial cooperative behaviors and signaling systems, and the implications for the evolution of virulence and antibiotic resistance during infection, with an emphasis on chronic infections such as those found in cystic fibrosis lungs, diabetic ulcers and non-healing wounds.
• Eva Dyer, assistant professor, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dyer is principal investigator of the NerDS Lab (Neural Data Science Lab) at Georgia Tech, where researchers are developing computational approaches to make sense of large-scale neural data sets. They’re partnering with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory to develop data analysis pipelines for mapping brains with X-ray microCT and nanoCT.
• Neha Garg, assistant professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Garg’s lab uses a combination of tools (including bioinformatics, clinical microbiology, mass spectrometry, DNA sequencing, and mass spectrometry-based 2D and 3D spatial imaging) to better understand the molecular interactions between a eukaryotic host and its microbiome, with the hope of developing new therapeutics.
• Seth Hutchinson, professor, School of Interactive Computing. Hutchinson, the KUKA Chair for Robotics at Georgia Tech and associate director for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, is renowned robotics expert, keenly interested in vision-based control, motion planning, planning under uncertainty, pursuit-evasion, localization and mapping, locomotion, and bio-inspired robotics.
• Brent Keeling, assistant professor of cardiothoracic surgery, Emory University School of Medicine. Keeling, the chief of cardiothoracic surgery service at Grady Memorial Hospital, is interested in investigating novel pulmonary embolism therapies to provide a better understanding of the role of novel technologies in the treatment of high-risk cases.
• Rebecca Levit, MD, assistant professor, Emory School of Medicine. Levit’s lab is dedicated to developing new therapies to help cardiac patients by identifying, testing, and moving new therapies towards clinical use. This includes studying stem cell therapies to prevent heart damage and promote repair, and the use of biomaterials to increase cell retention, increase efficacy, and target activity.
• Cassie Mitchell, assistant professor, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. She is 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.
• Thomas Orlando, professor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Orlando runs the Electron- and Photon-Induced Chemistry on Surfaces Lab (EPICS), a primary surface chemistry and physics group focusing on the use of high-powered pulsed lasers, low-energy electron scattering, micro-plasmas, mass spectrometry, and ultrahigh vacuum surface science techniques.
• John Peroni, associate professor, University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine. Peroni’s lab explores the use of regenerative therapies, ranging from cellular to blood derived products, to treat musculoskeletal injuries, with a concentration on minimally-invasive surgery, such as laparoscopy, thoracoscopy and arthroscopy.
• Jerry Qi, professor, School of Mechanical Engineering. Qi directs the Laboratory for Mechanics of Soft Active Materials and 3D Printing. The team has so far developed a wide spectrum of 3D printing capabilities, allowing the development of new printing materials to meet evolving requirements. They are also pioneering work in 4D printing, in which soft active materials are integrated with 3D printing to enable shape change.
• James Rains, professor of practice, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. As director of the BME Capstone program, Rains facilitates one of the most active and translatable capstone groups on the Georgia Tech campus. With a particular interest in design, medical device development, and entrepreneurship, Rains brings clinicians and industry together with talented students to develop solutions for unmet clinical needs.
• Lewis Wheaton, associate professor, School of Biological Sciences. Wheaton directs the Cognitive Motor Control Laboratory, where the focus is on understanding neural systems that can suffer injury or dysfunction related to deficits in skillful motor control, and how to utilize surrogate neural circuits in restorative motor therapies in stroke and upper limb amputation.
• Marvin Whiteley, professor, School of Biological Sciences. The Whiteley lab is interested in the social lives of bacteria, using new technologies combined with classical genetic techniques to address questions about microbial physiology, ecology, virulence, and evolution. Located at Georgia Tech, the lab is also affiliated with the Emory-Children’s Cystic Fibrosis Center.
• C.P. Wong, professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering. Wong, who served a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with Nobel Laureate Henry Taube at Stanford University, is the Charles Smithgall Institute Endowed Chair and Regents Professor, whose wide-ranging research interests have led to more than 65 U.S. patents and numerous international patents.
• Xing Xie, assistant professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Xie’s research is focused on the applications of innovative materials and processes for sustainable and reliable water and energy. Essentially, he’s combining his background in environmental microbiology with his knowledge of materials for three main goals: killing bad microbes, using new materials to grow good microbes to clean waste water, and creating new processes to monitor microbes.
• Peter Yunker, assistant professor, School of Physics. Yunker’s research team is all about the “Soft Matter of Life and Death” – they research the soft matter physics underlying squishy materials and living creatures, disparate systems united by a focus on nonequilibrium systems (like human beings). They are investigating the unique and potentially “universal” physics of densely-packed living matter, such as bacterial biofilms and multicellular yeast clusters.
“We could not be more excited about this honor for Brani,” said ISyE H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn. “His being selected as director for the statistics program in NSF's DMS reflects his numerous accomplishments in a wide variety of statistical fields – including Bayesian, biostatistics, and statistics in medicine and the environment. We look forward to seeing how, in this appointment, Brani will help advance the DMS mission.”
“This appointment is important for ISyE and BME, as well as more widely for Georgia Tech,” said Vidakovic. “Through it, we will participate in shaping the national research agenda when it comes to engineering and bioengineering data analysis.”
DMS supports research in mathematics and statistics, training through research involvement of the next generation of mathematical scientists, conferences and workshops, and a portfolio of national mathematical sciences research institutes.
Vidakovic’s year-long appointment will begin in September 2018, with the option for him to serve in the position for a subsequent year.
About Professor Vidakovic
In addition to various statistical areas, Vidakovic’s research interests include wavelets and statistical signal and image processing. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has authored or co-authored several books and numerous journal articles.
Vidakovic has served as the former or current associate editor of Journal of the American Statistical Association, Communications in Statistics, Annals of Applied Statistics, Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, São Paulo Journal of Mathematical Sciences, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, and Bayesian Statistics.
He holds a Ph.D. in statistics from Purdue University.
]]>Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
404.385.4745
]]>The program routinely pairs two researchers in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology, one based in the College of Engineering, one based in the College of Sciences.
The funding period for each of these grants starts July 1, 2018, and the duration will be up to two years, $50,000 for each year, contingent on submission of an NIH R21/R01 grant proposal, or an equivalent collaborative grant proposal, within 12 to 24 months of the year-one start date.
The teams and their projects are:
• John McDonald (professor, School of Biological Sciences) and Fatih Sarioglu (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering). Their project is entitled, “Microchip-Based Isolation and Molecular Profiling of Highly Metastatic Tumor Cell Clusters in Ovarian Cancer.” Ovarian is the deadliest gynecological cancer because it progresses quietly, asymptomatically, leading to later stage detection. The researchers aim to provide insight into ovarian cancer metastasis while also offering a way to monitor ovarian cancer response with minimally-invasive liquid biopsies for personalized prediction of optimal drug therapies.
• Shuyi Nie (assistant professor, School of Biological Sciences) and Denis Tsygankov (assistant professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering). Their project is entitled, “Unveiling the Mechanisms of Collective Cell Migration through an Integrative Multiscale Study.” Collective cell migration plays a key role in embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer invasion, but it remains a poorly understood phenomenon. Basically, the researchers intend to develop a better tool – they want to provide researchers with a broadly applicable simulation platform that enables a mechanistic understanding of coordinated cell processes like collective cell migration.
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CMaT’s vision is to enable robust, scalable, low-cost biomanufacturing of high-quality therapeutic cells to bring affordable, curative therapies against incurable chronic diseases to everyone. Eleven institutions are supporting the efforts of this NSF engineering center along with six industry partners.
Dr. Temenoff’s current research focuses on fabricating novel biomaterials to improve the quality of adult stem cells for repair of orthopaedic injuries. In addition, her laboratory develops injectable materials to modulate the local tissue environment and reduce joint degeneration after rotator cuff tears.
In 2016, Temenoff was the recipient of the Educational Award presented by the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society. In 2014, she was named co-director of the statewide Regenerative Engineering and Medicine Center (REM), which is a joint partnership between investigators at Georgia Tech, Emory University, and University of Georgia.
Temenoff completed her Ph.D. from Rice University after graduating from Case Western Reserve University in with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and a B.A. in French. Her thesis work was completed under the guidance of Dr. A. G. Mikos in the area of cartilage and bone tissue engineering.
She co-authored an undergraduate biomaterials textbook with Mikos while at Rice University. The result, Biomaterials: The Intersection of Biology and Materials Science, published in 2008 by Pearson-Prentice Hall, has been adopted by over 40 universities in the U.S. and has been published in two international editions. The book was awarded the Meriam- Wiley Award for Best New Engineering Textbook by the American Society for Engineering Education in 2010.
Temenoff joined the faculty of the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University in 2005.
]]>Of course, it took decades of research, a lot of trial and error at the molecular level. The concept, transplanting normal or healthy genes into cells in place of missing or defective genes in order to treat diseases and disorders, has been under development since the Reagan administration.
“The idea of gene therapy’s been around since I was a kid,” says Wilbur Lam, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology and researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech. “In the 1990s, gene therapy trials mostly failed and often caused deadly side effects like cancer. But the entire field has moved forward, and the field of gene therapy has now learned how to actually cure people.”
As it turns out, miracles are not only complex and elusive, they’re also expensive, to the point of being infeasible for large scale clinical translation. But with support from a new R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Lam’s lab is working to make gene therapies more efficient, and more economically accessible.
Kymriah, for example, has a price tag of $475,000 (or about $20,000 less than the value of Lam’s new four-year NIH grant).
“That price tag is largely a result of the difficulty and cost associated with viral vector manufacturing, which is, unfortunately, the key to these novel therapies,” says Reginald Tran, a postdoctoral researcher in Lam’s lab who is using microfluidic technology that he developed to incorporate basic mass transfer and fluid mechanics principles to increase gene therapy efficiency.
In gene therapy modified viruses often are used as vectors, or vehicles, to carry the good-guy genes into a human cell. It’s been proven to work, but it’s not a very efficient process, according to Lam. For one thing, “it takes about a billion cells to treat an adult for something like sickle cell disease,” he says.
Also, Lam notes that these engineered viral vectors have a half-life, “and they’ll deactivate if they don’t find their target cell in time. They will die. Excess virus is given to cells to ensure that enough cells get genetically modified, but this results in added costs and significant waste of the precious key reagent. ”
Tran, who earned his Ph.D. in the Lam lab, says he was amazed to learn about the capabilities of microfluidics, and how leveraging the differences in physics at the micro scale could unlock new possibilities for diagnostics and therapeutics.
“This project was really ideal for me since I could combine my backgrounds in mechanical engineering and microfluidics toward gene and cell therapy,” Tran adds. “I quickly found that microfluidics were the perfect platform to efficiently bring cells and viral vectors together to maximize gene transfer.”
Performing the critical gene transfer step in microfluidics dramatically reduces processing time and resources (up to five times less viral vector can be used). While many researchers continue to work on developing more potent genes or increasing viral vector manufacturing potential, the Lam group is focused on using less virus.
“At a time when virus shortages present a huge bottleneck in gene and cell therapy commercialization, we believe that our technology can help make these treatments more accessible and affordable for patients,” Tran says. “I feel extremely lucky to work on a problem that has the potential to make a meaningful impact on what could very well be the next frontier in modern medicine.”
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At the end of the semester, Porada headed off to a medical internship at Wake Forest Innovations, a medical center where he collaborated with doctors to come up with technologies to improve the clinic. That’s where he met Charles Lankau, a biomedical engineering student from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, and Brandon Hall, a biochemistry student from UNCW, who were also in the internship program. Porado mentioned his energy drink idea, and together they had enough experience with biology and neuroscience to create Synapse, an energy drink that optimizes brain function through high-performance nutrient ingredients.
First, Porada , Lankau and Hall worked on the drink’s blend, composed of nootropics – supplements that improve cognitive function, particularly executive functions, memory, creativity or motivation. Also known as “smart drugs,” the nootropics are then mixed with other natural ingredients to create a great taste, without the caffeine.
“The differentiating factor between us and other nootropics companies is that none of our ingredients, including the nootropics and flavors, are synthetic,” said Porada. “We wanted to create a health-conscious option for people who do not want to sacrifice their health for performance.”
Nootropics and other ingredients in the drink are grown in the ground, giving them a strong bitter taste, so the team leveraged novel manufacturing to ensure it tasted good as well.
“Synapse is technically a supplement, which doesn’t have to be approved by the FDA,” explained Lankau. “We use GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) facilities that are FDA licensed with GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) ingredients. The ingredients in our blend are naturally part of the human diet; they just exist in our product in greater proportions than they do in food.”
After the idea and drink blend for Synapse became a reality, the co-founders realized they needed a way to take this product to market. Lankau had heard of the CREATE-X program at Georgia Tech that would enable them to turn their idea into a real, viable company. It would also provide $20,000 in startup funds and industry mentors to coach the team. Columbia and UNCW didn’t have program that would allow students to launch their startup, so CREATE-X was the perfect answer. He applied to the program, and the team was accepted.
With CREATE-X, the team was able to gain valuable guidance from industry veterans with experience running successful companies. They also received startup capital and legal advice.
“Without CREATE-X, we wouldn’t have been able to get our company off the ground,” said Porada. “Especially for a physical consumer good like ours, there has to be a certain amount of capital invested up front. The legal resources from CREATE-X were also critical, as we navigated regulations on product blend.”
Today, Synapse is doing well and focusing on their next round of funding. Their next production roll-out will include 60,000 cans with their new co-packing partner, AZ Pack. The co-founders are focusing on scalability for the product as they look to drive their online sales.
“A few months ago, we began selling Synapse on Amazon Prime,” said Porada. “We’ve successfully converted our website over to Fulfillment by Amazon, greatly reducing shipping costs to our consumers and improving the scalability of our eCommerce.”
Retailers around Atlanta are selling the drink as well. Savi Provision in Inman park, a premium Atlanta grocer, has a standing order with the startup. In addition to selling on campus at Georgia Tech, the co-founders are in talks with other universities across the state to market products to students who need to focus while studying. There are other natural energy drinks out there, so Synapse really has to differentiate itself through their target market.
“Our biggest target audience is students,” said Lankau. “Another thing CREATE-X helped us do in the beginning was customer discovery. We figured out what our target consumers wanted in an energy drink and how to reach that core demographic in an effective way.”
The Synapse team has been able to navigate challenges in both scalability and distribution. So next up is marketing and sales proliferation. An upcoming retail test will take place at 15 NewsLink locations across four major U.S. airports. The team thinks targeting the tired traveler will be a big hit. The co-founders also demoed Synapse to a focus group of Delta pilots, which was met with positive reviews.
“We are really hoping to revolutionize the energy drink industry,” said Lankau. “Millennials and younger generations are looking for healthier options instead of caffeine. And what we can give them is natural energy with a great taste.”
With Synapse’s next round of funding, the company plans to focus their efforts on their advertising and operational budgets. They already have more than one third of the funds committed and would like to close the rest as soon as possible, so they can get to work on the exciting next phase of the business.
]]>Georgia Institute of Technology
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Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA
This year, ENGAGES leadership outdid itself, bringing two of the nation’s most influential leaders in their respective fields to the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience in the past month.
First, Myrtle Potter, named one of Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women in Business three times, shared the story of her rise to becoming one of the nation’s foremost healthcare leaders and innovators at a special event in April. Then, at the annual ENGAGES Senior Celebration on May 7, Raphael Lee, a pioneering and entrepreneurial surgeon, researcher, and biomedical engineer gave the keynote address.
“The success of this program is critically important for all of us,” Lee told a packed atrium in the Petit Institute. “You’re setting a trend for many of institutions around the country.”
ENGAGES (Engaging New Generations at Georgia Tech through Engineering & Science) is a high school science education program that was developed at Georgia Tech, partnering 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, Benjamin E. Mays High School, Charles R. Drew Charter High School, and South Atlanta High School).
The program is co-directed by Bob Nerem (founding director of the Petit Institute) and Manu Platt (associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering), and managed by Lakeita Servance, who said Project ENGAGES, has reached more than 100 students. “Each year seems to get better than the one before and I’m so happy to see our students flourish beyond what they imagined,” she said. “We’re excited to celebrate our newest graduates from the Class of 2018 and their acceptance into top universities.”
This year’s group of 17 departing high school seniors have been accepted into 10 different universities, where they’ll pursue a wide range of academic interests:
• Gabriel Brown, Georgia State University (GSU), majoring in public health
• Diamond Clark, University of Georgia (UGA), biology
• Jasmine Coley, New York University, computer engineering
• Nzinga Hammonds-Wyatt, Georgia Tech, computer science
• Zaria Hardnett, Georgia Tech, neuroscience
• D’Angelo Howard, GSU, mechanical engineering
• Amanda Jeter, UGA, mechanical engineering
• Jasmine May, University of Pennsylvania, psychology/pre-med
• Marsha McCray, Depauw University, engineering
• Kaiya Mitchell, Georgia Tech, biomedical engineering
• Ty Price, GSU, engineering
• Tatiyanna Singleton, Vanderbilt University, engineering
• Clinton Smith, Georgia Tech, biomedical engineering
• Natasha Stallings, George Washington University, biomedical engineering/pre-med
• Percie Thompson, Agnes Scott College, international relations
• Sanyu Watson, Georgia Tech, mathematics
• Akeen Williams, Georgia Tech, engineering
Looking at the graduates and their families, Lee thought back to more than 50 years ago, when he was graduating high school in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the first students to participate in federally mandated desegregation. And he thought of the poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, a life path that Lee says he is familiar with.
“You’ve also chosen a road not often taken, and that’s a very important decision,” Lee told his audience, though he was speaking directly to the graduates and their families. “You are smart people, so you probably suspect that the road is less traveled because it is steeper, maybe more slippery, more dangerous. But you’re up to the challenge. You eat pressure and stress for breakfast, and ultimately, you want to make a difference, and for that I want to congratulate and encourage you. The success of this program is critically important for all of us. You’re setting a trend for many institutions around the country.”
Potter’s presentation, almost two weeks earlier, was less poetic than Lee’s but no less inspiring. Raised in New Mexico, she turned an early interest in science into a biotech career, helping to guide the launch of breakthrough, billion-dollar products for corporate giants like Genentech, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Merck and Company.
“What you are doing and studying is incredibly important,” Potter told her audience in the Suddath Room. “You’re working on the cutting edge of science. What you’re doing will impact the people who come after you.”
And she offered encouragement for those students considering a career in industry, whether on the research side or the business side, especially in light of reports that there are more Ph.D. scientists than there are academic career opportunities.
“On the business side, we are desperate for Ph.D. scientists, and black Ph.D. scientists are at a premium, I can assure you,” said Potter, now CEO of Myrtle Potter & Company, the global life science advisory firm she started in 2005.
Throughout her presentation, Potter tried to impress on her audience how immersed she is in not just the life science industry, but in the continuing diversification of the industry.
“I’m passionate about opportunities for people of color, for women,” she said. “The industry is too big, the opportunities are too huge, the needs are too great for me to just hear your stories and not get worked up to the point where I feel a little sweaty on my forehead. I care about patients, the science, the people – that’s what you see coming through.”
Her message came across, according to Servance.
“The students raved about the lecture,” she said. “Myrtle’s talk accomplished exactly what I hoped for. It uplifted our students, especially the young ladies, and made them feel empowered to strive for excellence.”
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Lena Ting explores the unanswered questions in her quest to use engineering principles to understand how people move. Her approach integrates research and education in the fields of neuroscience, biomechanics, engineering, rehabilitation, robotics, neurology and physiology, to ultimately benefit those suffering from movement disorders.
“I love that I get to probe interesting and unanswered questions and work at the intersection of a lot of fields,” she said.
Ting says she is not building the better device or machine to advance mobility; she is finding the answers to help others build new technologies to impact people and how they move.
She is changing the way engineers develop technologies for rehabilitation and health care and helping develop autonomous cooperative robots to enhance, assist and improve impairments in gait and balance.
Ting, a professor and educator at the the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech, is the 2018 Health Care Hero Award winner in the Allied Health Professional category [by the Atlanta Business Chronicle].
Ting brings a unique blend of science, engineering and robotics to improve rehabilitation for individuals with movement disorders and those who have experienced stroke, spinal cord injury or lower limb loss. Her research focuses on the brain and body interactions that impact walking, standing and balance.
“The way I think about how people move is how I learned about how machines work,” she said. “When a machine breaks down, you find the root cause. You can describe what is happening but you can’t identify the key part that is loose and if I could just tweak it, the symptoms would go away and be resolved. With movement disorders, we have to figure out what causes it.”
“Lena’s research is a perfect example of how biomedical engineering links medicine and engineering to benefit patients,” said Susan Margulies, chair of the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “She has made critical discoveries about the connections between signals in the brain and the way our bodies coordinate movement and balance. When injury or disease interrupts these signals, peoples’ lives are impacted very negatively. Technology and engineering can influence these circuits in a positive way.”
Ting has won multiple teaching awards.
“If my research is not fun, I can’t do it well,” she said. “I like to look at problems that are intellectually challenging and come up with new, out-of-the-box ideas — that is exciting to me.”
In one such study, Ting and a Georgia Tech colleague discovered an energy-saving mechanism that helps flamingos balance on one leg while asleep, and that could one day be used to develop novel prosthetic devices. In another, she and her colleagues found that a program called “adapted tango” improved balance-correcting muscle activity that is impaired in people with Parkinson’s disease.
Tonya Layman
Contributing Writer
Atlanta Business Chronicle
“Predictive healthcare is just an extra, objective tool that can help the physician and patient make better decisions,” said Mitchell, assistant professor in biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech. “The analytics assist by calculating odds of diagnostic and treatment success. By ‘picking winners’ among thousands of possibilities, predictive healthcare expedites biomedical research and clinical trials, so patients get the care or cure they need, sooner.”
Mitchell’s lab is best known for taking disparate data and stitching it together “into a quilt,” she says, to identify disease patterns. Having access to millions of different measurements and data points allows her to conduct research on multifactorial diseases, or conditions caused by many contributing factors, such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and some cancers. Rather than isolating one factor of a disease, Mitchell’s predictive healthcare work holistically examines disease factors to predict an effective course of treatment.
Mitchell’s lab is working on a few predictive healthcare projects right now.
1
Alzheimer’s
Researchers do not know the exact cause of Alzheimer’s, though, they suspect it has to do with amyloid beta plaque buildup. Mitchell’s lab analyzed data integrated from the entire Alzheimer’s field and found that the correlation between cognition and beta plaque to be very weak. In reality, the cognitive dysfunction seen in Alzheimer’s patients is more closely related to overproduction of phosphorylated tau (p-tau), a protein that makes up the backbones of neurons. Mitchell’s data-driven research suggests that p-tau may be a better treatment target than the classic amyloid beta plaques that have been the primary focus of researchers for decades.
2
ALS
Mitchell also works on ALS, a rare neurological disease. Most ALS patients will eventually experience difficulty breathing, requiring a Bi-PAP (bi-level positive air pressure) to help the breathing muscles to do their job. The Bi-PAP is only used (and covered by insurance) when the ALS patient’s breathing capacity falls below 50 percent of normal. But Mitchell and others recognize that a patient has already succumbed to the disease at that point. There are a variety of characteristics that indicate an ALS patient is ready for Bi-PAP, and Mitchell’s lab recently showed that survival rates double if patients are put on a Bi-PAP sooner. Applying predictive healthcare to the insurance world allows patients earlier access to key interventions like Bi-PAP, and they can make better decisions about their care.
3
Leukemia
Depending on a patient’s unique disease characteristics, medical history and lifestyle, doctors can use predictive healthcare models to create a personalized medicine plan that is tailored to the patient. Cancer was one of the first fields to use personalized medicine to customize chemotherapy based on genetic-mutation profiling to maximize cancer cell killing power. However, killing cancer cells is only part of the equation. Most treatments have negative side effects, and many patients, such as those with chronic myeloid leukemia, are currently given the recommendation to stay on treatment for life.
With patients now living much longer, predicting the long-term toxicity and side effects of chemotherapy drugs is important. Mitchell is developing clinical-decision models to better predict side-effect profiles years in advance. The information can also be used to better customize a patient’s treatment options at diagnosis, during progression, or even during remission, making predictive medicine an important tool for enhancing patients’ overall quality of life.
By Georgia Parmelee
]]>In the process, BME chair Susan Margulies called out a few individuals who received awards during the first BME Spring Celebration of Community.
The GLUE Award recognizes staff members who motivate or influence co-workers to achieve professional and departmental goals, inspire change or productivity in the workplace, and have a positive impact or influence at the office. The winners were Leita Young (administrative assistant) from Emory and Emily Foster (academic programs coordinator) from Georgia Tech.
Young was praised for, “her willingness to assist in BME’s Emory-based events, helping all members of the department, “always with a ready smile,” Margulies said.
Foster was recognized for creating new links between BME’s undergraduate and graduate programs, developing an integrated plan for teaching assistants. “In just over a year, because of her positive attitude and fantastic work ethic, we have come to rely on her for many of the functions of the department,” Margulies said.
The BME Mission Award is intended to recognize faculty members who significantly impact health care and embodies the mission of education and leadership, inspire productivity and innovative thinking in students and colleagues, and extend their effort and leadership across multiple departments.
The winners were Wilbur Lam (Emory) and Julie Babensee (Georgia Tech), who also are researchers in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
Lam, who also is a pediatric oncologist, impacts patient health both in the near- and long-term, “serving as a terrific liaison between BME and pediatrics,” Margulies said.
“He contributes to the BME educational mission through traditional teaching as well as his BME HealthReach initiative, and undergraduate research mentoring. His research has real-world impact,” Margulies added, referring to recent FDA approval of a medical diagnostic – a disposable, color-based screening test for anemia.
Babensee, meanwhile, has consistently demonstrated the type of leadership, “that exemplifies the spirit of this award,” Margulies said. “Her strong record of scholarship and leadership in immunoengineering, biomaterials, and biomedical engineering has advanced the department in significant domains.”
Babensee has made pivotal contributions in developing BME curriculum, “including designing our BioID program and shepherding it through its approval,” Margulies said. “Her leadership and grassroots efforts have resulted in seed initiatives that benefit many members of the faculty in BME and other units.”
Also recognized for his years of service and commitment was longtime faculty member Robert Lee, an associate professor who is retiring.
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To help address this need, a robot at the Georgia Institute of Technology is successfully sliding hospital gowns on people’s arms. The machine doesn’t use its eyes as it pulls the cloth. Instead, it relies on the forces it feels as it guides the garment onto a person’s hand, around the elbow and onto the shoulder.
The machine, a PR2, taught itself in one day, by analyzing nearly 11,000 simulated examples of a robot putting a gown onto a human arm. Some of those attempts were flawless. Others were spectacular failures — the simulated robot applied dangerous forces to the arm when the cloth would catch on the person’s hand or elbow.
From these examples, the PR2’s neural network learned to estimate the forces applied to the human. In a sense, the simulations allowed the robot to learn what it feels like to be the human receiving assistance.
“People learn new skills using trial and error. We gave the PR2 the same opportunity,” said Zackory Erickson, the lead Georgia Tech Ph.D. student on the research team. “Doing thousands of trials on a human would have been dangerous, let alone impossibly tedious. But in just one day, using simulations, the robot learned what a person may physically feel while getting dressed.”
The robot also learned to predict the consequences of moving the gown in different ways. Some motions made the gown taut, pulling hard against the person’s body. Other movements slid the gown smoothly along the person’s arm. The robot uses these predictions to select motions that comfortably dress the arm.
After success in simulation, the PR2 attempted to dress people. Participants sat in front of the robot and watched as it held a gown and slid it onto their arms. Rather than vision, the robot used its sense of touch to perform the task based on what it learned about forces during the simulations.
“The key is that the robot is always thinking ahead,” said Charlie Kemp, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and the lead faculty member. “It asks itself, ‘if I pull the gown this way, will it cause more or less force on the person’s arm? What would happen if I go that way instead?’”
The researchers varied the robot’s timing and allowed it to think as much as a fifth of a second into the future while strategizing about its next move. Less than that caused the robot to fail more often.
“The more robots can understand about us, the more they’ll be able to help us,” Kemp said. “By predicting the physical implications of their actions, robots can provide assistance that is safer, more comfortable and more effective.”
The robot is currently putting the gown on one arm. The entire process takes about 10 seconds. The team says fully dressing a person is something that is many steps away from this work.
Ph.D. student Henry Clever and Professors Karen Liu and Greg Turk also contributed to the research. Their paper, Deep Haptic Model Predictive Control for Robot-Assisted Dressing, will be presented May 21-25 in Australia during the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). The work is part of a larger effort on robot-assisted dressing funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by Liu.
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This work was supported in part by NSF award IIS-1514258, AWS Cloud Credits for Research, and the NSF NRT Traineeship DGE-1545287. 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 sponsors.
Kemp is a cofounder, a board member, an equity holder, and the CTO of Hello Robot Inc., which is developing products related to this research. This research could affect his personal financial status. The terms of this arrangement have been reviewed and approved by Georgia Tech in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.
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Davis’ lab focuses on pediatric heart failure and general defects. Mostly, he’s dealing with patients who have congenital issues, including hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) and left ventricular cardiomyopathy. Being local to Atlanta, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) offers Davis and his team of researchers access to a large volume of young cardiac patients who need the help of his new and developing therapies.
“With pediatrics, clinicians are very open to collaborating and trying new procedures and therapies,” said Davis. “In the pediatric world, there are fewer options for these kids, and the parents and clinicians are hungry for new therapies to try.”
Designing Targeted Stem Cell Therapies
A few years ago, Davis noticed that during bypass surgery, small amounts of tissue were being removed to run the bypass tubing into the heart, and surgeons were throwing it away after removal. As the new director of HeRO at the time, he asked and was granted permission to use the tissue in his research lab for stem cell studies. Davis began extracting and quantifying the stem cells, eventually finding that the young cells had more reparative qualities, and when injected into damaged tissue, released healing proteins.
Davis’ first clinical trial with the stem cells (Autologous Cardiac Stem Cell Injection in Patients with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome (ACT-HLHS) Trial) is happening in the next few months and has already been cleared by the FDA. Clinicians will inject the stem cells into the hearts of babies with CHD to boost the function of the heart.
“For a baby with HLHS, we are not going to re-grow the left ventricle, but rather try to strengthen and prevent deterioration of the existing right ventricle,” said Davis. “It sets the baby up for a successful repair surgery down the road.”
In his lab, Davis observes the cells and gathers quantitative data on their behavior. The research is conducted for cord blood, bone marrow and cardiac stem cells, which is where Davis’ work is revolutionizing his field. Davis and Manu Platt, diversity director of STC on Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems (EBICS) at Georgia Tech, have written a grant in the hopes of combining all the cellular data from patients in three different clinical trials to create a large data repository of cell signals. By studying the signals, otherwise known as protein secretions of the cell, Davis and Platt can determine how effective certain cells are in treating diseases.
“These cells could be acting a number of ways, and we want to collect all the information we can, including their genome and what they release,” said Davis. “We essentially want to make equations to determine how cells will respond. We want to put the data together to create a treatment prediction.”
With this information, they will be able to build a mathematical model that identifies the cell genome in order to predict what the cell will do in the clinic. The goal is to identify the best characteristics of these cells and determine which diseases they can target to begin the reparative process.
“If we can study the cells and isolate their response, we will be able to provide personalized approaches to stem cell therapy – that’s really what the field is currently lacking,” said Davis. “A patient could come in, and we could sequence their cells and know immediately what cells to inject for the best outcome. Different cells are going to have differing effects on each individual.”
Innovations in 3D Printing
The 3D printing in Davis’ lab is used to create valves, leaflets and patches. Aline Nachlas, a fourth-year PhD biomedical engineering candidate, has earned a fellowship for tissue engineering, with the goal of creating valve cells. She has also found a material that will support the printing of these cells. The valves are made using skin cells from the patient, so essentially, they are growing their own cells, minimizing the risk of organ rejection. And ideally, the valve will continue to grow with the patient, never needing to be replaced.
“We hope these cells will be able to print valves, or at least the leaflets that make up valves,” said Davis. “Currently, children are undergoing animal valve replacements, which are sometimes too big, and they don’t grow with the child. This means more surgeries down the road to replace the valve, as well as high doses of immunosuppressants. We want to create a living valve that grows with the child.”
Davis’ lab is also working on a printable patch that contains stem cells. The patch functions to keep all the stem cells in one place, so the cells can repair the surrounding tissue. Davis’ student is hoping to print the patch scaffold with a decellularized pig material matrix.
“Very few people are trying to heal with 3D printed patches,” said Davis. “My lab is on the forefront of that research. We are trying to make a positive contribution in a sensible way.”
Next up for Davis is a summer trip to Galway, an international biotechnology hub, where he will teach tissue engineering to Georgia Tech biomedical engineering students. In the next five to 10 years, he hopes to be more focused on 3D printing and really pushing the envelope on printing small tissues. Davis wants to bring more regenerative therapies to the greatest number of children possible.
“My research may not always move at the speed I want, so I try to remember there is a bigger picture,” said Davis. “We are already helping many kids with CHD become healthier and stronger. But, I am always asking myself ‘what can we do better?’”
To learn more about Michael Davis’ research and lab, visit https://www.facebook.com/Childrensheartresearch/.
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The Fulbright Program, which is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. Government, was created by Congress in 1946. This nationally competitive and prestigious scholarship offers opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching worldwide.
Daliet was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, then moved to Newnan, Georgia after Hurricane Katrina. He returned to Louisiana to attend the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts for his last two years of high school.
“Receiving such a prestigious award is truly humbling,” said Daliet. “Throughout the entire application process and even now, I find myself thinking back on my journey to get to this point. I'm just grateful to everyone who helped me get here, especially my parents, whose tireless work ethic and passion is something I try to emulate every day. Without them, I wouldn't be in this position.”
Under the Fulbright program, he will be working with a large scale, prospective study at the University of Iceland under the guidance of Kristín Briem, professor and chairman of the Research Centre of Movement Science. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effectiveness of preventative training against non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in young athletes.
ACL ruptures are one of the most serious injuries in sports and require reconstructive surgery followed by months of rehabilitation. Although risk factors associated with ACL injuries have been previously researched, the mechanism of injury prevention as a result of training is largely uninvestigated. A large prospective study on the effectiveness of preventative training for ACL ruptures during the pubertal years of young athletes has not previously been conducted, and therein lies the novelty of the project. The results of this study will not only provide novel information about the development of male and female athletes through puberty, but also improve the knowledge of preventative exercises and guide future interventions on reducing the risk of ACL injuries in this population.
In addition to being named a Fulbright scholar, Daliet received Georgia Tech’s Presidential Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) in Fall 2016 and won two Tower Awards in 2016 and 2017.
]]>Since graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in industrial management in 1973, he’s been an entrepreneur, helping to create billion-dollar companies. He’s been a race car driver, competing in the NASCAR Rolex Grand-Am Sports Car series. A former member of the Georgia Tech Foundation Board of Trustees, he’s been a philanthropist, endowing the Lawrence P. Huang Chair in Engineering Entrepreneurship (currently held by David Ku, researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
Recently, Huang has taken on a new role: matchmaker. Through a series of events that he encapsulates as “a really serendipitous situation,” Huang linked Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, with a team of interdisciplinary Capstone Design students at Georgia Tech, forging a new collaboration in the evolving relationship between Mayo and Tech’s bio-community.
“It’s the classic win-win scenario,” says Huang, who is a patient at Mayo, where his reputation preceded him – Huang’s generosity had previously nourished Mayo Clinic Ventures, and he’s been trying to jumpstart technology infrastructure in Jacksonville since moving to the area 18 years ago, “with limited success,” he says.
But the southern stars are aligning as Mayo Clinic is in the midst of a massive $330 million expansion on its Florida campus, “to enhance research and innovation,” according to Gianrico Farrugia (physician and CEO of Mayo Clinic’s Florida campus) and Tushar Patel (physician scientist and Mayo’s Dean for Research in Florida), in a newspaper editorial they co-wrote last year.
“Mayo has a tremendous amount of intellectual property, and they’re building an incubator to commercialize that, they want to develop a start-up hub for the Southeast. But it became obvious to me right away that there is a missing piece,” says Huang, who met with Charles Bruce, M.D., the Mayo physician leading the effort. “You can have all the intellectual property, the clinicians, the technical and scientific knowledge, but in order to build a product or a service, you need engineers and a business plan.”
Since Huang had graduated, a thriving bioengineering and biomedical engineering community had emerged at Georgia Tech, so he knew exactly where to turn. Huang brought Mayo’s planners together with leadership at Georgia Tech, including Petit Institute Executive Director Bob Guldberg, Scheller College of Business Dean Maryam Alavi, and James Rains, who directs the Capstone program for the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
“So we started looking for Capstone teams with a real entrepreneurial interest, and a lot of people applied,” says Rains. Ultimately, they selected an interdisciplinary team of five biomedical and mechanical engineering students that called itself – of course – Cinco de Mayo.
The team has three BME students: Dev Mandavia, Marci Medford, Cassidy Wang; and two from the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering: Alex Bills and Lucas Muller. If there was an ace in the hole, it was probably Mandavia, who has valuable experience when it comes to competitive entrepreneurial endeavors. He helped lead the BME team (CauteryGuard) that won last year’s Georgia Tech and Atlantic Coast Conference InVenture Prizes.
Cinco de Mayo actually got a head-start on its spring semester Capstone project, making trips to Jacksonville before the semester to meet with clinicians. According to Medford, they conducted about 200 interviews with personnel at Mayo, as well as the Piedmont and Grady health systems in Atlanta.
“We decided to focus on epidurals, because we realized there are so many complications related to the procedure, and we felt that we could make an impact,” says Medford.
The team considered about 10 different problems supplied by Mayo clinicians, asking itself, “what is going to have the biggest impact and be the easiest to implement, that last part being pretty important,” says Mandavia. “Having gone through the process of developing a medical device last year with CauteryGuard, I knew that you can create the best thing in the world, but if nobody’s interested in using it, you can’t really impact change.”
They focused on the delivery of neuraxial anesthesia (like an epidural), used extensively in the obstetric setting to alleviate pain during childbirth. With an epidural, a needle is inserted into the back to deliver drugs into the space around the spinal cord. Currently, these procedures are conducted without imaging or precise feedback that could alert the physician where and how deep to insert the needle.
“The clinical issue is getting guidance or feedback when gaining access to the epidural and intrathecal space,” says cardiologist/cardiac electrophysiologist K.L. Venkatachalam, M.D., one of the clinicians that worked with the Capstone team. “This is presently done with a special needle and most procedures are done simply based on anatomic considerations, with very little feedback about optimal position and angle of the needle.”
So, physicians are virtually blind, depending on tactile feedback and “loss of resistance” upon entry into the epidural space. Proficiency is gained and maintained only through continuous practice. Meanwhile, multiple attempts are usually made to place the needle, increasing pain and the risk of complications.
“This is a standard practice in labor and delivery,” Mandavia says. “These procedures are done millions of times a year. You can’t use fluoroscopy or X-rays, because you expose the baby to harmful radiation.”
The current version of the ‘NeuraLine’ device they developed uses bioelectric impedance analysis and/or force sensing, allowing physicians to identify entry into specific anatomical spaces. Other modalities may also be explored. The Cinco de Mayo team will have a better sense of its next steps following a May 4th meeting at Mayo, an opportunity to show and tell for an audience of clinicians and experts.
First, they unveiled the product at the spring semester Capstone Design Expo (April 24), a competition won by a BME team called Kit Cath. Then they spent the next week and a half preparing for the meeting at Mayo, which Mandavia described as, “a culmination of everything we’ve done, the steps we took to get here, the prototyping, the iterations, the user interviews, everything that went into it, and also a look into the future. We really think this is something that could impact a lot of people.”
Their device aims to improve clinical confidence, minimize complication rates, and eliminate the steep learning curve of the current practice. Accounting for all neuroaxial procedures in the U.S., the team estimates the total addressable market to be $5 billion. The team plans to devote itself to further development of the device this summer.
And going forward, professor of the practice James Rains envisions an ongoing relationship between the Mayo Clinic and BME Capstone teams, “in which we connect these outstanding young engineers with leading physicians to solve clinical problems.”
Mayo already is collaborating with Georgia Tech’s bio-community in a meaningful way as an organizing partner and gold sponsor of the annual Regenerative Medicine Workshop, launched by Tech more than two decades ago and brought together each year by a team that also includes the University of Wisconsin, University of Pittsburgh, and the Regenerative Engineering and Medicine Center (a partnership of Emory, Georgia Tech, and the University of Georgia).
This kind of cross pollination between disciplines, between engineering students and clinicians, “is crucial in coming up with solutions to this problem,” says Venkatachalam. “This was a great example of working together to come up with a viable, inexpensive solution.”
The students and Mayo clinicians kept in touch throughout the process with weekly video conferences, looking at various approaches, as well as several face-to-face meetings, which allowed the physicians to show the engineering students the clinical arena and the challenges health care providers face during the procedure.
“I thought the students were bright, enthusiastic, and motivated to succeed,” Venkatachalam says. “I was pleased to see them step back to get a good understanding of the big picture, including the clinical need and the potential market.”
For Larry Huang, the value of partnering with Capstone students is something he became well acquainted with last year, when he tapped a team of mechanical engineering (ME) students to redesign the intake system for the air box on one of his race cars.
But this latest experience with the interdisciplinary team of BME and ME students gets closer to the core of what has driven him for more than 40 years.
“I’ve been interested in the commercialization of technology for a long time,” Huang says. “It’s because I’ve always thought that this is a way to really make people’s lives better while also creating value.”
View Team Neuraline's presentation to the Mayo Clinic here.
]]>The students sat there in the Gold Room of the Georgia Tech Student Center, poised between the completion of difficult degree course work and the exhilaration of college graduation (which was happening the following morning), and Margulies thought about the collective, limitless potential in the room.
“I like to think of you as pluripotent, like stem cells," Margulies said, eliciting nods and laughter from the audience of proud parents and students.
This was the fifth annual reception designed to highlight and honor the accomplishments of BME undergraduates, and first Margulies, who is completing her first academic year as department chair, wanted to leave the students three pieces of advice.
“First, we want you to engage with your community, and I don’t mean social media,” she said. “I mean face-to-face, in real time, connect with your local and global community. Second, find your purpose. What are you good at? What gives you satisfaction? Those are not necessarily the same things. The third thing is, have an impact – on your field, in your children’s lives, in your world.”
Then she thought of a fourth thing: “Also, keep in touch with us. We’re your Tech family and our greatest joy is when you reach back out to us for advice, or to tell us what you’re doing.”
Joe Le Doux, associate chair for undergraduate learning and student experience in the Coulter Department, and Essy Behravesh, director of undergraduate studies, then took turns introducing each winner and candidate, thanking the undergraduate awards committee, which includes Behravesh, as well as Balakrishna Pai (director of instructional laboratories), Bilal Haider (assistant professor), Paul Fincannon (academic advising manager), Brenda Morris (corporate relations manager), Emily Foster (academic programs coordinator), John Lau (design instructor), and two undergraduate students: Julia Woodall and Fariah Majid.
But the focus quickly shifted to the BME students (and one faculty member) being recognized. “The purpose of this ceremony is to celebrate you,” Le Doux told them. “It’s your day. Congratulations – as of tomorrow, you will be graduates of Georgia Tech. We strive to foster leadership skills at BME, and I really like the definition of leadership that’s all about creating an alternative future.”
Here are the architects of whatever future awaits, this year’s BME honorees:
National, Institute, and College of Engineering Awards
• Fulbright Fellowship: Oliver Daliet
Daliet is traveling to Iceland to help conduct sports medicine research at the University of Iceland on the effectiveness of preventative training against non-contact knee injuries in young athletes. This fellowship allows for individually designed research projects that take place during one academic year in a country outside the U.S., typically with advisers at foreign universities or other institutes of higher learning.
• Whitaker International Program Fellowship: Blake Lash
Lash wasn’t present to be recognized because he is currently at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute in Melbourne, working in the field of immunoengineering. This award is given to young biomedical engineers who are sent to places outside the U.S. or Canada to conduct scientific research, pursue additional coursework at an academic institution, or participate in an internship at a policy institute, or in an industrial or non-profit setting.
• Alvin M. Ferst Leadership and Entrepreneur Award: Mahdi Al Husseini
Husseini is a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. In addition to his work in community service, his degrees in biomedical engineering and public policy, Husseini will attend Airborne School and train as a medical evacuation pilot. This award goes to a junior or senior who demonstrated extraordinary leadership and/or entrepreneurial skills while at Georgia Tech.
• Tau Beta Pi Award: Morgan Stephens (candidate)
The Tau Beta Pi Award is the College of Engineering’s highest award for graduating seniors. It is based on academic excellence, leadership, and service. Candidates must have a minimum GPA of 3.95.
• College of Engineering Honors Day Award: Sierra Copner (winner)
The College of Engineering Honors Day Award goes to the top third-year student in the College of Engineering at the end of their third year. Candidates must have a 4.0 GPA.
• Helen Grenga Outstanding Women Engineer Award: Lauren Aycock (candidate), Nancy Deaton (candidate), Morgan Stephens (candidate).
The Helen Grenga Award is the College of Engineering’s highest award for graduating female engineers. The criteria are scholarship, leadership, and service, and the recipient must have a minimum GPA of 3.6.
• Love Family Foundation Scholarship: Mi Hyun Choi (candidate)
The Love Family Foundation Scholarship is Georgia Tech’s highest award for graduating seniors. The scholarship is awarded to the student with the most outstanding scholastic record in the graduating class. Candidates must have a 4.0 GPA.
• Undergraduate Teaching Assistant of the Year: Michael Brown (winner)
Brown, who graduated in December, is currently an R&D biomedical engineer at Halyard Health working on the next generation of pain management equipment.
This award recognizes outstanding undergraduate teaching assistants for their contributions and the important part they play in the undergraduate educational experience at Georgia Tech. Each academic unit recognizes one of their own students, which then makes them eligible for the campus-wide title.
BME Leadership Awards: Academic Year 2017-2018
• Outstanding Academic Achievement Award: Mi Hyun Choi (winner).
Other candidates were Emma Blume, Anirudh Joshi, Alison Knight, and Christian Sorenson.
With a dual degree in neuroscience from Emory and biomedical engineering from Tech, Choi plans to attend graduate school. A former Petit Undergraduate Research Scholar, she showed, “great self-motivation and dedication throughout her time in my lab. Her commitment to a one-year research program, on top of an already-challenging course load, is indicative of her passion for scholarly research in itself, but she also showed the depth of her devotion by spending long hours in the lab,” said Frank Hammond, assistant professor of BME and a Petit Institute researcher.
• Outstanding Academic Service Award: Blake Lash (winner).
Other candidates were Emma Blume, Michael Brown, Cecille Canary, Raeedah Choudhury, Alison Kight, Armel Nsiangani, Christian Sorensen, Cassidy Wang, and Sidi Zhao.
Lash, a former Petit Undergraduate Research Scholar, “is extremely smart, works hard, is an upbeat and energetic leader, a gifted young researcher and is always looking for ways to give back to his community,” said Le Doux.
• Outstanding Community Service Award: Tyler Wan (winner).
Other candidates were Mahdi Al Husseini, Lauren Aycock, Haley Eskew, Francesca Lidback, and Kelly Nardone.
“Simply put, Tyler Wan truly cares about Georgia Tech, Atlanta, and the people who reside within. He is a testament to community service,” said Len Phillips, Kiwanis advisor to Georgia Tech Circle K.
• Outstanding Entrepreneur Award: Garrett Wallace (winner).
The other candidate was Olivia Lodise.
“With an InVenture prize win, an Institutional Review Board approved study, and a pending patent, Garrett is a prototypical entrepreneur,” said Le Doux. “He was a Fellow for NeuroLaunch, an accelerator program for neuroscience startups, and has a minor is technology and management. He’ll be starting at Emory School of Medicine in July to pursue an M.D, and I hope that he will continue his entrepreneurial spirit with us.”
• Outstanding Industrial Experience Award: Julie Bu (winner).
Other candidates were Asana Adams, Alyssa Jackson, Anirudh Joshi, Blake Mailhes, Bridget Nabb, Kathryn Nolan, Cristina Quintero, Alexa Schlein, and Elizabeth Stayduhar.
Bu, who is currently working R&D in Medtronic’s peripheral vascular division, “epitomizes Georgia Tech’s motto, “progress and service,” constantly striving to improve herself and the lives of others,” said Angela Mitchell, senior engineer and student contractor coordinator for Halyard Health.
• Mr. S.K. Jain Outstanding Research Award: Ananyaveena Anilkumar (winner).
Other candidates were Olivia Lodise, Kaley Parchinski, Elizabeth Stayduhar, Joselyne Umubyeyi.
A contributor and member of Susan Thomas’s lab since she was in high school, Anilkumar has been first author on two scientific publications. Her most striking characteristic is, “her remarkable drive and unmatched focus. Veena wants nothing more than to succeed as a biomedical scientist,” said Thomas, associate professor of mechanical engineering and a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
• Dr. G. D. Jain Outstanding Senior Award: Morgan Stephens (winner).
Other candidates were Mahdi Al Husseini, Lauren Aycock, Emma Blume, Michael Brown, Anirudh Joshi, Argyro Kosmakos, Armel Nsiangani, and Cassidy Wang.
As a volunteer, Stephens works with sickle cell disease patients at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta-Hughes-Spalding Hospital, where she also tutors a high school student. Stephens, who will soon start work as an analyst with Insight Sourcing Group, “was, hands down, the best intern I have ever worked with,” according to Jim Cunningham, project engineer with Medtronic. “She is years ahead of her experience level.”
BME Department Excellence in Teaching Award
James Dahlman, assistant professor of BME and researcher in Petit Institute (presented by Anokhi Patel, chair of the BME Student Advisory Board)
The Excellence in Teaching award is given annually by the BME Student Advisory Board. The faculty recipient of this award is announced during the undergraduate leadership reception.
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Biomedical engineers have established a model system for studying these problems, which has potential for use in other cardiovascular diseases as well. The system builds a network of artificial blood vessels, based on familiar “hydrogel” materials that dissolve with heat: gelatin and agarose, a sugar derived from seaweed.
The results were recently published by Nature Biomedical Engineering.
“The key technological innovation here is that our hydrogel can keep these vessels growing for weeks to months, which is much longer than standard approaches,” says senior author Wilbur Lam, M.D., Ph.D. “With this system, we can study not only how vessels respond to aspects of disease but also how well the vessels will heal over time once those insults are removed.”
Lam is assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Working with Lam, instructor Yongzhi Qiu, Ph.D. and colleagues constructed a hydrogel-based microfluidic device, with branching vessels roughly 20 micrometers across. The device can then be coated by endothelial cells, which line blood vessels, and connected to a pump. An advantage of using hydrogels, the authors write, is that hydrogels are not as stiff as solid polymers, and thus respond in a more physiological relevant manner to changes in fluid flow.
Once fully assembled, the endothelial cells weaken their barriers in response to inflammatory molecules such as TNF-alpha and then heal afterwards.
The researchers also tested responses to heme, a component of hemoglobin formed when red blood cells break open, and they tested the effects of occlusion-prone red blood cells from sickle cell disease patients and red blood cells infected by Plasmodium parasites.
The model system could be used to further dissect the effects of red blood cells vs other cells and inflammatory molecules, and to screen for drugs that could prevent damage to blood vessels, the researchers say.
Co-authors include malaria researcher Tracey Lamb, Ph.D., formerly at Emory and now at University of Utah, sickle-cell researcher Solomon Ofori-Acquah, Ph.D., formerly in Emory’s Department of Pediatrics, now at University of Pittsburg, and Clint Joiner, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pediatrics and director of hematology at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
The research was supported by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (U01HL117721, U54HL112309, R01HL121264) and the National Science Foundation (CAREER Award 1150235, National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure grant ECCS-1542174).
Quinn Eastman
404-727-7829
qeastma@emory.edu
The Outstanding Fundamental/Basic Research Award went to Eric Snider. This award honors a graduate student who has performed exceptional fundamental research, leading to high impact publications in non-translational-focused journals and presentations at national/international conferences. Snider’s thesis research is focused on developing stem cell therapies for glaucoma patients.
“Eric is one of the hardest-working graduate students I have advised. However, his abilities go beyond simply hard work: he is also an excellent “big picture” strategist. Specifically, he is always thinking about the overall project scope, next steps, and potential problems so that each project aspect moves forward quickly and efficiently,” said Ross Ethier, the Lawrence L. Gellerstedt, Jr., Chair in Bioengineering, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Biomechanics and Mechanobiology, and professor of biomedical engineering.
The Outstanding Teaching/Mentorship Award went to Travis Meyer. This award honors a graduate student who has demonstrated excellence in teaching or mentorship in the classroom, the lab, or elsewhere in the community. A week earlier, Meyer was named Graduate Teaching Assistant of the Year (2018) by Georgia Tech's Center for Teaching and Learning.
“Travis Meyer is passionate about teaching as demonstrated by being a teaching assistant for five semesters, three more than the requirement in BME. In addition, he has been an enthusiastic fellow in the Preparing Future Faculty program,” said Machelle Pardue, professor of biomedical engineering.
The Outstanding Community Service Award went to Katie Young. This award honors a graduate student who has provided significant education, outreach, or community service to the larger community.
Katie served as a summer science camp instructor and developer for BioIgnite, an area nonprofit organization, where she taught weekly summer camp modules on topics ranging from biomedical imaging to cancer biology. Katie also serves as a Young Life volunteer, serving as a mentor and team lead for middle school students, and she is an active participant in BBUGS, performing science demonstrations for students ranging from elementary to high school.
Katy Lassahn, executive director of BioIgnite, says “Katie Young stands out as one of our best teachers and volunteers. She was the best person to start teaching “early in the morning” because her high energy woke the students up and got them excited about the topic of the day. I cannot tell you how difficult this can sometimes be with middle schoolers and is a testament to her drive to make an impact on the students she teaches.”
The Outstanding Translational Research Award went to Andreś Caballero. This award honors a graduate student who has demonstrated excellence in translational research (e.g., publications in translation-focused journals, patents, clinical testing, achieving FDA clearance).
Andreś research involves using computational models to better understand blood flow through the heart. Specifically, he studies the interaction between blood flow through the heart and its impact on the mitral valve and heart wall. Caballero collaborates with surgeons, cardiologists, echocardiography professionals, computer scientists, applied mathematicians, and engineers. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and currently has nine co-authored, peer-reviewed publications, five of which are first author publications.
Raymond McKay, director of interventional cardiology research and cardiovascular data management, states, “I am particularly excited about the significance and translational impact of Andreś biomechanical computational research. From a clinical perspective, such computational capability is an invaluable tool to better understand each patient’s unique cardiac anatomy and blood flow…thus eventually speeding the process of personalizing the treatment decisions.”
The Outstanding Entrepreneurship Award went to Robert Mannino. This award honors a graduate student who has demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit, turning their innovative ideas into reality, demonstrated through definable metrics (e.g., winning business plan competitions, securing funding for start-up activities, starting a company based on their research).
Mannino’s research is centered around the development of a smartphone app that can quickly and easily diagnose anemia by simply taking an image of a patient’s fingernail beds. He has garnered a national reputation, most recently receiving a $100,000 prize from Massachusetts General Hospital in which he won first place in their national 2017 Student Technology Prize for Primary Healthcare. As a member of the TI:GER program (Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results), Rob and his TI:GER team recently won Cisco’s $100,000 Global Problem Solver Prize at the Rice Business Plan Competition.
“I was impressed by his motivation, intelligence, and maturity and welcomed him to join my bioengineering hematology laboratory at Georgia Tech and Emory University,” said Wilbur Lam, associate professor of biomedical engineering and Mannino’s advisor. “It turns out that that was one of the best decisions I have made for our lab. I can say without a doubt that during his career, he will develop novel medical technologies that will change the lives of hematology patients across the world and for generations to come.”
The Outstanding Departmental Service Award went to Aline Nachlas. This award honors a graduate student who has demonstrated leadership or has provided academic support within the Department.
Nachlas serves as one of two student representatives on our BME graduate program committee, where she provides a student voice to stakeholders, and she lobbies for continual improvement to our program structure and function. She was instrumental in recent changes to qualifying exams and student stipends. Nachlas has served as a student representative on the BME Department Diversity and Inclusion Committee, where she was involved in a community-wide climate study and contributed to the formation of a diversity and inclusion statement, and she recently founded the Alliance for Diversity in Science and Engineering (ADSE) Chapter.
Kyle Cowdrick, M.S.E., Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering, says “Aline is a woman of action who delivers results that benefit our graduate community. Her passion for promoting a positive culture of change is exemplified by her dedication in listening to the concerns of our graduate student body, and translating those concerns into actionable steps that make BME a more inclusive and supportive environment.”
CONTACT:
Walter Rich
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
226 teams from a dozen schools in three colleges showcased their projects at the 2018 Spring Capstone Design Expo, and while they all hoped to take home an award, the fact that they made it that far was an accomplishment in itself. Senior Design is a required course for many majors, and Capstone represents the culmination of months of work for the seniors who participated. For some students the projects could turn into stepping stones for launching startups. Several teams were presented with golden tickets, granting them entry into Georgia Tech's CREATE-X startup program. Others students used their projects to wow sponsors, earning them jobs, continued funding to follow up on their work, or in the very least, an important industry collaboration to put on their resume.
For all teams, the night was a reminder of what Georgia Tech students can accomplish when they put their minds to something.
For example, the winning ISyE team worked with FedEx to optimize their linehaul truck fleet. By the team's calculations, adopting their plan will save FedEx more than $200,000 per week. The award-winning civil engineering team discovered that by changing the lane striping at the I-285 and I-20 junction on the west side of Atlanta, bottlenecks can be eliminated and flow improved for miles in every direction, shaving up to 10 minutes off of commute times. Team pHAM, from materials science and engineering, developed a filter that reduces the acidity of coffee, thereby negating some of the negative effects of drinking it, such as acid reflux and enamel damage. The un-sponsored squad took home the People's Choice Award at this year's InVenture Prize competition and is working on commercializing their product.
BME team Kit Cath took home Capstone's best overall project award and are hoping it opens some doors for them as they approach graduation and look for jobs. The team is made up of biomedical engineering majors Kathleen Jordan, Lemou Tieyam, Diana Yunda, and Alexa Schlein developed an adaptable catheter for their sponsors in the Interventional Radiology Department at Emory University Hospital Midtown. Inspired by a Slinky, the catheter tip can bend and adjust to the curves in a patient's vascular system, resulting in a snug fit and greatly reducing the amount of time radiologists have to spend adjusting catheters. It will also reduce the number of catheter exchanges, wasted product, procedure lengths, costs, and patient discomfort. Everyone on the team is interested in pursing careers in the medical device field.
The winning team in the BME category was NICUties for their neonatal nasogastric tube holder. The team members are Erika Plogstedt, Kylee McLain, Cecille Canary, and Cristina Quintero.
The winning team in the interdisciplinary category, Senor Design, has two BME team members, Ashley Fleck and Robert Griffith, among the six members.
Looking back on their experience, team member Alexa Schlein commented that there were plenty of ups and owns in the process, but overall they enjoyed it.
"Prototyping is so much fun," said Schlein. "You get to build stuff that doesn't work and then figure out how to fix it. We were constantly fixing things. We had some terrible designs for the handle and it broke a lot. That was the biggest challenge."
Schlein also offered a lesson to next year's Capstone participants, and Georgia Tech students in general- "Never underestimate the amount of effort you're going to need to put into something. We scrambled right up until the end, and even though we were happy with the outcome we know we could have come up with a better prototype if we put in more effort earlier on."
Check the results below to see who was able to turn their effort into awards.
Kit Cath- Adaptive Catheter
FRIZA (Fire Rescue Intel Zoned Aircraft)- Design of a fixed-wing UAV
Masters of Light- Stage of the Art
NICUties- FixedFeed: Neonatal Nasogastric Tube Holder
CHBE Team 13- CSP Technologies Polymer Recycling
Atlanta Cypress Engineering- I-285/I-20 Westside Interchange Improvements
NAHOM- Non-Contact Analysis of Health-Informatics via Observable Metrics
Brace Yourself!- Design of interactive scoliosis brace monitoring system
ISyE Senior Design Team 19- FedEx Linehaul Engineering Optimal Fleet Mix
Space Cadets- CARGOS
The 6 MEgos- Smart Oil Level Sensor
pHAM- pHAM
RadLaDs- Autonomous Radiation Characterization (ARC)
Aquatic Connectivity Team- Liberating a Dammed & Culverted Georgia
Señor Design- AKIVA Repellent Delivery/Application Innovation
(Click here to launch Flickr Photo gallery)
]]>For example, researchers’ capacity to analyze and isolate cells based on the expression of specific surface markers has increased the overall understanding of cell biology, and led to numerous applications for biomedicine. The challenge, though, with established cell-sorting platforms, such as flow cytometry, is that they rely on colored labels which are limited in number.
“The short story is that existing cell sorting platforms only allow us to analyze a small handful of cells at a time,” says Gabe Kwong, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, whose lab is tightly focused on creating new and more effective tools to analyze the body’s immune system.
So Kwong, assistant professor Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, and his research team have tried to improve the situation by developing a new multiplexed cell-sorting platform called DNA-gated sorting (DGS) that capture, release, and recover target cells from complex biological specimens.
Kwong and his colleagues explain it all in a research paper published recently in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), entitled, “Individually addressable and dynamic DNA gates for multiplexed cell sorting.”
“Biological specimens, such as whole blood, contain main different types of cells that have important applications for monitoring health, including tracking vaccine efficacy and HIV progression, and for treating complex diseases, like cancer,” the researchers write.
Take T-cells, for example. There are hundreds of millions of subtypes. Current cell-sorting technologies, requiring expensive and large pieces of equipment, can only isolate a few types of cells at one time, “only three to five T-cells at a time,” says Kwong. “So it’s a huge limitation. The reason for that is, these platforms use color to sort and label the cells. So basically, you might label one red, another green, and so forth. Before long, you run out of colors, so you can’t label that many different cells.”
Kwong and his team developed something different. They designed a cell-sorting platform by engineering dynamic DNA devices (DNA gates) that can label, sort, and recover different cell populations at high purity, en masse. Their DNA-based nanotechnology efficiently gathers more than one set of data from the same sample, and can potentially be expanded to exceed the capacity of current methods for sorting multiple cell types, improve biomedical diagnostics, and provide new insights into cell biology.
“The long-term goal of this project and platform is to build a piece of technology that allows us to look at T cells that could not be looked at before,” says Kwong, whose lab focused on two primary application areas – infectious diseases and cancer.
The research team worked with the lab of Rafi Ahmed, a professor at Emory, where he is director of the Emory Vaccine Center.
“We’re asking fundamental questions,” Kwong says. “Like, when someone is infected with a virus, how many different T-cell clones respond to that virus? How do these T cells expand over time in response to these antigens? This platform will allow us to start counting the frequencies and different types of cells involved in viral responses. We also want to improve T-cell therapies for cancer.”
T-cells can be engineered to recognize tumor antigens, then attack and kill tumor cells, or shrink tumors.
“The limitation there is, we actually don’t know what kind of tumor antigens the tumor cells express,” Kwong says.
Tumor antigens contain proteins that T-cells recognize, but there are many different types of potential tumor antigens, Kwong explains, and many different types of T cells that could potentially recognize them.
“The value of this platform as we envision it is, we can take a tumor sample and biopsy core from a patient, run it through our DNA gate system, and identify the T cells that can recognize tumor antigens,” Kwong says. “The goal is to be able to analyze cells downstream to make better immunotherapies. That’s something we’re very excited about.”
* * *
This research was funded by an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the NIH. In addition to Kwong, the research team included first author Shreyas Dahotre (BME graduate student); Yun Min Chang (a graduate student in BME as well as microbiology and immunology at Georgia Tech and Emory), Andreas Wieland (postdoctoral researcher at Emory), and BME undergraduate student Samantha Stammen.
Related Links
Kwong lab installs heat-sensitive switch to activate T-cells
FDA approves T-cell therapies for cancer
]]>Bioengineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have installed a heat-sensitive switch into T-cells that can activate the T-cells when heat turns the switch on. The method, tested in mice and published in a new study, is locally targeted and could someday help turn immunotherapy into a precision instrument in the fight against cancer.
Immunotherapy has made headlines with startling high-profile successes like saving former U.S. President Jimmy Carter from brain cancer. But the treatment, which activates the body’s own immune system against cancer and other diseases, has also, unfortunately, proved to be hit-or-miss.
“In patients where radiation and traditional chemotherapies have failed, this is where T-cell therapies have shined, but the therapy is still new,” said principal investigator Gabe Kwong. “This study is a step toward making it even more effective.”
Cancer is notoriously wily, and when T-cells crawl into a tumor, the tumor tends to switch off the T-cells’ cancer-killing abilities. Researchers have been working to switch them back on.
Kwong’s remote control has done this in the lab, while also boosting T-cell activity.
In the study, Kwong’s team successfully put their remote-control method through initial tests in mice with implanted tumors (so-called tumor phantoms, specially designed for certain experiments). The remote works via three basic components.
First, the researchers modified T-cells, a type of white blood cell, to include a genetic switch that, when switched on, increased the cells’ expression of specific proteins by more than 200 times. That ability could be used to guide T-cells’ cancer-fighting activities.
The T-cells, with the switch off, were introduced into the tumor phantom which was placed into the mice. The tumor phantom also included gold nanorods, just dozens of atoms in size. The researchers shone pulses of a gentle laser in the near-infrared (NIR) range from outside the mouse’s body onto the spot where the tumor was located.
The nanorods receiving the light waves turned them into useful, localized mild heat, allowing the researchers to precisely warm the tumor. The elevated heat turned on the T-cells’ engineered switch.
This study honed the method and confirmed that its components worked in living animals. It was not the intention of the study to treat cancer yet, although undertaking that is the next step, which is already on its way.
“In upcoming experiments, we are implementing this approach to treat aggressive tumors and establish cancer-fighting effectiveness,” said Kwong, who is an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
The researchers published their results in the current edition of the journal ACS Synthetic Biology. The study’s first author was graduate research assistant Ian Miller. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation.
Bioengineers have been able to do a lot with T-cells already when they’re outside of the body.
“Right now, we’re adept at harvesting a patient’s own T-cells, modifying to target cancer, growing them outside the body until there are hundreds of millions of them,” Kwong said. “But as soon as we inject them back into a patient, we lose control over the T-cells’ activity inside the body.”
The on-switch changes that.
Having an off-switch is also important. If T-cells were engineered to be always-on and hyper-activated, as they moved through the body, they could damage healthy tissue.
“There would be off-target toxicities, so you really want to pinpoint their activation,” Kwong said. “Our long-term goal for them is to activate site-specifically, so T-cells can overcome immunosuppression by the tumor and become better killers there.”
When the heat remote is turned off, so are Kwong’s engineered T-cells, because customary body temperatures are not high enough to activate their switch.
The switch is a natural safety mechanism in human cells that has evolved to protect against heat shock and turns on when tissue temperatures rise above the body’s normal operating range, which centers on 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 F). But the researchers re-fitted T-cells with the switch to make it turn on other functions, and it could be used to hyper-activate the cells.
The Georgia Tech bioengineers found that the switch worked in a range of 40 to 42 degrees Celsius (104 - 107.6 F), high enough to not react to the majority of high fevers and low enough to not damage healthy tissue nor the engineered T-cells.
“When the local temperature is raised to 45 degrees (113 F), some cells in our body don’t like it,” Kwong said. “But if heating is precisely controlled in a 40 to 42 degrees window with short pulses of the NIR light, then it turns on the T-cells’ switch, and body cells are still very comfortable.”
The researchers want to combine the switch with some additional cancer-fighting weapons they envision engineering into T-cells.
For example, secreted molecules called cytokines can boost immune cells’ ability to kill cancer, but cytokines, unfortunately, can also be toxic. “Our long-term goal is to engineer T-cells to make and release powerful immune system stimulants like cytokines on command locally and sparingly,” Kwong said.
In other studies, gently heated gold nanorods have been shown to kill tumors or hinder metastasis. But T-cell treatments could be even more thorough and, in addition, hopefully, one day give patients treated with them a long-lasting memory immune response to any recurrence of their cancer.
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[Note: This experimental method is in laboratory stages in mice and is not available as a treatment of any type for human patients.]
The study was co-authored by Marielena Castro, Joe Maenza and Jason Weis of Coulter BME at Georgia Tech. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award (grant #DP2HD091793), the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (grant #UL1TR000454), the NIH GT BioMAT Training Grant (#5T32EB006343), the National Science Foundation (grant # DGE-1451512), the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Any findings or opinions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies.
Gabe Kwong is also a member of the following research departments at Georgia Tech: The Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience, and the Integrated Cancer Research Center. Kwong is also part of the Georgia Immunoengineering Consortium at Georgia Tech and Emory.
]]>Georgia Institute of Technology
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Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA
Mannino, a biomedical engineering Ph.D. student and co-inventor, teamed with Mittal, an MBA student in the Scheller College of Business, joining forces in the business school’s Ti:GER program. TI:GER teams work together in the classroom and research lab to learn how to advance early-stage research into real business opportunities.
“This competition was almost overwhelming—it was massive and intense. Our team, Lunula Health, gave four separate pitches to investors, venture capitalists and scientists,” said Mannnio. “We were so excited and surprised when we learned that we had won the Cisco prize. We felt that our invention was truly a global product with the potential to help many people around the world.”
Wilbur Lam, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, is Mannino’s thesis advisor, co-inventor for the smartphone app, and faculty advisor for the Ti:GER team. Erika Tyburski, chief operating officer for Sanguina, also served as a mentor to the team.
Mannino was diagnosed with anemia at six months of age, and he still needs blood transfusions every three to four weeks. His Ph.D. project focused on perfecting a diagnostic tool that works with a smartphone camera. Fast forwarding to the present, he has invented a non-invasive, low-cost, home test for anemia. Globally, anemia affects 1.6 billion people.
“Anemia is a symptom of many diseases, of malnourishment, of vitamin deficiency. A lot of different people are affected or potentially could be,” Mannino says. “And a lot of those people have more access to a smartphone than they do to a physician’s office.”
Note: Earlier this year, Robert Mannino also won the 2017 Student Technology Prize for Primary Healthcare which also earned him a $100,000 prize.
About the Cisco Global Problem Solver Prize
Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. The $100,000 Cisco Global Problem Solver prize aims to recognize entrepreneurs that promote and accelerate the adoption of breakthrough technologies, products and services that capture the value of technological innovation to benefit society. Cisco seeks to empower a generation of global problem-solvers especially in the areas of connectivity, health care, the environment, critical human needs, education, and connected/smart solutions (for example, smart home, smart city, smart energy, connected transportation and wearables). Special consideration will be given to businesses that capture this value while simultaneously benefiting society and/or the environment.
CONTACT:
Walter Rich
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
CZI announced today new funding for 85 projects (from an advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation), including Qiu’s, to support the Human Cell Atlas, a global effort to map every type of cell in the healthy human body as a resource for studies of health and disease. The grants total $15 million over one year.
Projects are focused on developing open computational tools, algorithms, visualizations, and benchmark datasets to enable researchers around the globe to work with the large variety of molecular and imaging data being generated by scientists working on the Human Cell Atlas. The grantees will also collaborate with each other, and with CZI’s scientists and software engineers, to maximize the impact of the new tools and technologies.
Qiu’s main research interests are in bioinformatics and computational biology, focusing on machine learning big data, genomics, and single-cell analytics.
“I am thrilled to welcome this distinguished group of grantees to the CZI family, and I am excited about how they will support the ambitious Human Cell Atlas effort,” said Priscilla Chan MD, co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “Working together and with our team of scientists and engineers, these partners will create new ways for scientists to use information about healthy and diseased cells. Their efforts will help to accelerate progress toward our goal of curing, preventing, or managing all diseases by the end of the century.”
There are 85 collaborative projects being recommended for funding in response to an open Request for Applications issued by CZI in July 2017. Funding is being awarded to 83 principal investigators at 53 institutions, and in nine countries spanning four continents. Detailed information on each project is available at this link: https://www.chanzuckerberg.com/human-cell-atlas/comp-tools
“We are excited to begin working on these promising projects with new partners from across the globe,” said Cori Bargmann, Head of Science for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “These grantees include experts in experimental biology, engineering, and computational biology. Enabling them to collaborate and bring their diverse perspectives to the work is the core of our approach to advancing biomedical science.”
Over the course of the next year, the grantees will work together and share progress to coordinate efforts and maximize the usability of these tools. Working with CZI’s science and software engineering teams, they will work to bring these tools to the broader scientific community and where appropriate, link them to the Human Cell Atlas Data Coordination Platform.
This new funding round marks the third set of projects CZI is funding in support of the Human Cell Atlas. Last year, CZI announced funding and engineering support to build a Data Coordination Platform, and funding for 38 pilot projects to help new technologies, best practices, and data analysis techniques.
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About the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was launched in December 2015 by Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, and Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician and founder and CEO of The Primary School in East Palo Alto. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a new kind of philanthropy that seeks to engineer change at scale. By pairing world-class engineering with grant-making, impact investing, policy, and advocacy work, CZI hopes to build a future for everyone. Initial areas of focus include supporting science through basic biomedical research and education through personalized learning. CZI is also exploring ways to address barriers to justice and opportunity - from criminal justice reform, to expanded access, to economic opportunity and affordable housing.
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The symposium attracted more than 120 experts from around the world at a two-day event which alternates each year between Europe and the United States.
“This year’s symposium discusses the role of biomechanics in vascular biology and cardiovascular disease and includes in-depth research regarding arthrosclerosis, aortic valve disease and aneurisms,” said Hanjoong Jo, professor in the Coulter Department at Emory and Georgia Tech, John and Jan Portman Professor at Emory, and one of this year’s symposium organizers.
“Cardiovascular disease is associated with one of every four deaths in the United States and is the leading cause of death in both men and women,” he added. “We feel this is a very important area of study and several early collaborations between Emory and Georgia Tech pioneered critical connections between the biomechanics and cardiovascular diseases. Teams of clinicians, scientists, and engineers at both Emory and Georgia Tech have been leaders in this field for many years.”
Keynote speakers for the event included Robert Taylor from Emory, Roger Kamm from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Elisa Konofagou from Columbia University.
More than 30 years ago, the three initial leaders in this field at Georgia Tech were Don Giddens, Robert Nerem, and Ajit Yoganathan, who were engineers working with cardiologist Wayne Alexander and other physicians at the Emory School of Medicine, studying the role of biomechanics in cardiovascular disease. These research partnerships ignited this new field of study and the tradition continued with Hanjoong Jo; John Oshinski, Larry McIntire, former chair of the Coulter Department; Robert Taylor, directory of cardiology at Emory’s School of Medicine; and Habib Samady, cardiologist at Emory.
Yoganathan’s lab has pioneered the use of biomedical devices related to the development of aortic valves. The Jo lab is a leader in identifying novel therapies based on genes that are regulated by flow.
The hiring of more research scientists such as Rudy Gleason, Alessandro Veneziani, and Amir Rezvan between Georgia Tech and Emory followed, as the universities added physicians and engineers specifically focused on the field of biomechanics in cardiovascular disease. And a next generation of biomedical engineers is following in their footsteps, taking the research further.
One recent example resulting from this focused effort is BME doctoral student Rob Mannino from the Wilbur Lam lab at Emory. Lam, assistant professor in the Coulter Department, is dedicated to applying and developing nanotechnologies to study, diagnose, and treat blood disorders, cancer, and childhood diseases in his lab.
This past year, Mannino’s dissertation project with Dr. Lam has won two major competitions raising $200,000 for his project to support a painless, smart phone app that tests for anemia—eliminating the need for expensive and painful blood draws.
Today, as world leaders in this area, there are dozens of researchers exploring the biomechanics of vascular disease across Georgia Tech and Emory.
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The awards are distinctive because they come from the students themselves. Every year, female undergraduate engineering students are invited to nominate a faculty member who has had a positive impact on their lives.
The 2018 Faculty Award Winners are James Dahlman, Ph.D., from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Engineering and Linda Wills, Ph.D., from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
]]>“Participating in the Legislative Advocacy Days event sponsored by the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) gave me an opportunity to give a voice to issues like graduate health insurance, which are often overlooked,” said the first year Ph.D. student in Aerospace Engineering. “The conversations that we had with other graduate students, as well as Georgia’s representatives and senators, provided me with experience that will be invaluable over the next year serving as president.”
The groundwork for this opportunity was laid last fall when Cox, current Grad SGA Executive Vice President Vineet Tiruvadi, and other students worked with NAGPS to advocate against the bill that would have taxed tuition waivers. Cox and Tiruvadi kept in touch with the organization, and were invited to attend the March event.
The four-day trip was filled with opportunities to network with other students, and learn about legislation and other advocacy topics. Also, the two visited seven different congressional offices to share their stories and advocate for or against different policies, such as the Higher Education Act Reauthorization (PROSPER Act).
“Learning about the PROSPER Act was a highlight of the trip for me, even if there is a lot in there that I thoroughly disagree with such as the elimination of loan forgiveness for public service,” said Tiruvadi, a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering who is also pursuing a doctor of medicine at Emory University. “Meeting with staffers who really listened to our concerns and gave us some insight into where PROSPER was in the congressional pipeline was also great. Also, I really enjoyed sitting in the Library of Congress working on my dissertation draft. That was a great experience!”
For more information about how you can get involved with Grad SGA, visit sga.gatech.edu/g.
]]>The month began with the first ever International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR), a three-day gathering of some of the world’s thought leaders in the field, who shared their latest research at the Historic Academy of Medicine at Georgia Tech. And not long after that, Jaydev Desai, director of the Georgia Center of Medical Robotics (GCMR) at Georgia Tech, received a $3 million NIH Research Project Grant (R01).
“We are one of the very few places in the U.S., if not the world, doing top notch work in robotics,” said Desai, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and a researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
Desai, who also is associate director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech, organized and chaired the symposium, which brought more than 100 experts from across the U.S., and six different countries, to Atlanta.
“The response was terrific,” Desai said. “Attendees enjoyed the breadth and depth of the symposium. They liked the fact that the focus was medical robotics, not just surgical robotics. There was broad appeal.”
Speakers from universities and institutions in the U.S., Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom presented a wide range of research topics, including, among many other things: “Computer-Assisted Technologies for Laser Microsurgery” (Leonardo De Mattos, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia); “Medical Microbrobotics: Wireless Control of Miniaturized Agents” (Sarthak Misra, University of Twente, Netherlands); “Soft Wearable Robots for the Community and the Home” (Conor Walsh, Harvard); and “Mobile Manipulators for Intelligent Physical Assistance,” (Charlie Kemp, Georgia Tech).
Additionally, there were keynote speeches from experts, such as, Jonathan Lewin (president and CEO of Emory Healthcare) and Steven Wolf (Emory School of Medicine).
“So basically, we covered a lot of ground in a lot of different areas,” said Desai, who is already considering how he might grow the symposium next year to also include what he’s calling, “a Spring School on Medical Robotics, based on the summer schools for medical robotics that have been held in the U.S. in the past.”
The last one was held in 2014, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Desai wants to revive the program and include it with the symposium, creating a week-long event. It’s all part of an initiative he’s been pursuing to grow medical robotics at Georgia Tech since arriving here from the University of Maryland in August 2016.
News Contact Info:
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
In addition to Desai, who is the contact-PI, the team includes Muralidhar Padala, an assistant professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Emory, and a Coulter Department faculty member; and Baowei Fei, formerly of Emory, now at the University of Texas-Dallas.
The title of their project supported by the $3-million, four-year grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of NIH is, “Image-guided Intravascular Robotic System for Mitral Valve Repair and Implants.” Desai’s role in the research, essentially, is to develop an articulated intravascular steerable robotic system which will safely deliver an implant (developed at Emory) to the mitral valve leaflets under image-guidance, to repair mitral regurgitation.
“This work involves several pieces,” Desai said. “There is the design of the implant, intravascular robotics, and the imaging piece, which helps the clinician to guide the robot and understand where and how to move and where to place the implant. So, this is a true collaborative effort.”
News Contact Info:
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
Kim, who is an assistant professor in both the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, will use the two-year, $424,000 grant to leverage his team’s research, which is focused on mitigating Alzheimer’s disease.
“Our study outcomes will serve as a foundation for translating the basic research and technology to the clinics, accelerating advanced central nervous system delivery of therapeutic and diagnostic agents,” says Kim, who is collaborating with Srikant Rangaraju, a physician-scientist who is an assistant professor in the Emory School of Medicine’s Department of neurology.
Rangaraju, a board-certified neurologist, is a trainee of Alan Levey, director of Emory’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, who will serve as consultant and advisor on the grant.
Currently, the disease-modifying effects of therapeutics on Alzheimer’s disease is hindered by poor central nervous system penetration across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). But Kim and his fellow researchers believe they can overcome that obstacle with a better system of delivering precious therapeutic payloads.
“The goal is to leverage our engineered nano-carrier, enabling sufficient penetration of a small molecule inhibiting microglial Kv1.3, thus attenuating neuro-inflammation for Alzheimer’s disease treatment,” Kim says.
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This year, more than 200 engineers, scientists, clinicians, and industry partners from across the planet gathered for the first time at Wild Dunes on Isle of Palms, just north of Charleston. And this year, Bob Guldberg presided over the workshop for the last time, at least for the foreseeable future.
Guldberg, executive director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology (the organizing body that launched the workshop in 1997), will begin a new post as vice president and the inaugural director of the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact at the University of Oregon in August.
“Each year I wonder how we can possibly top the previous year’s workshop,” says Guldberg. “But this one was special. I’ve been coming to the Regenerative Medicine Workshop since it started. So this has not only been a place to showcase cutting edge research in regenerative medicine through the years. It’s been a community for me and my family. But I’m excited for the future of the workshop in a new location, and look forward to coming back as a participant in coming years.”
In fact, while other hands will guide the event next year, Guldberg is still expected to participate. So says Bob Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute, who recruited Guldberg to Georgia Tech more than 20 years ago.
“Bob, let me assure you that even though you’re leaving Georgia Tech, and even though you’re not affiliated with the organizing partners of this workshop – you’re way out there in Oregon – we still expect to get work out of you,” Nerem quipped to a jovial crowded room during the conference dinner Friday night. Then he added, “so, Bob, from your friends, thank you for all you’ve done, and for your leadership in moving this workshop forward.”
This year’s workshop, branded ‘Synergizing Science, Engineering, and Clinical Translation,’ drew representatives and researchers (principal investigators, postdocs, and students) from more than two dozen universities and other institutions, including the organizing partners: the Regenerative Engineering and Medicine (REM) research center (a partnership of Georgia Tech, Emory University, and the University of Georgia), the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Regenerative Medicine as well as its Rehabilitation Medicine Research Center, and the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.
Other partners/sponsors included the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI), Biofabusa, MiMedx, WiCell, Biological Industries USA, ACell, and BioSpherix, Ltd.
Beginning on Wednesday (March 21) with a series of late afternoon presentations, the Sweetgrass Pavilion Conference Center at Wild Dunes was packed hour after hour over the next several days for keynote presentations, as well as other research, including rapid fire sessions for students and other trainees. The highlight on Thursday was a poster session and competition for trainees, won by Georgia Tech postdoc Woojin Han (who is co-advised by Petit Institute researchers Andrés J. García and Young Jang).
An annual highlight of the workshop has always been the Nerem Lecture, an hour long presentation by one of the world’s thought leaders in a particular field. This year it was delivered by Viola Vogel, professor and chair of the Department of Health Science and Technology and principal investigator of the Laboratory of Applied Mechanobiology at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland.
Her presentation was entitled, “Unraveling the Secrets of How the Mechanobiology of Extracellular Matrix Regulates Cell and Tissue Functions,” but she devoted a portion of her talk broadly to the origins of the field of bioengineering itself. Coming from a background in physics, Vogel leapt into bioengineering in 1990 at the University of Washington, where she became founding director of the Center for Nanotechnology before moving to Switzerland in 2004.
Alluding to something Nerem said years ago, Vogel stressed, “how important it is for people to move from different disciplines into this field of bioengineering.”
Early on, as bioengineering was maturing from its infancy, she noted that engineers had a difficult time understanding, “the biology, the physiology, so they didn’t always pick the right questions to pursue. But I think what we’re seeing now is a younger generation that was educated with two backgrounds, the science and the engineering, and you’re seeing it in the presentations, in how they pick which problems to address, in how they package what they are doing, and that is absolutely crucial for this field to advance.”
There were 50 research presentations over the four-day workshop, including a wide range shared by this new generation of biomedical researchers. The talks covered such timely topics as immunotherapies, cell manufacturing, engineered hydrogels, DNA barcoding, and organoid model systems and many others.
So once again, it was a lot of deep diving along the Atlantic coast, into regenerative strategies to improve the human condition. And Guldberg, for one, came from the workshop encouraged and energized.
“The field of regenerative medicine is moving so rapidly both in terms of the science and progress towards therapies that are having a remarkable impact on patients with cancer, degenerative conditions, and traumatic injuries,” Guldberg says. “I love this workshop and look forward to continuing to come each year, because it is the premier meeting to hear the latest progress in regenerative medicine.”
]]>Taking the top honor was Hee Cheol Cho, whose Messenger RNA-based Biopacemaker won the Innovation of the Year Award. for a project. He collaborated with fellow Coulter Department/Petit Institute researcher Phil Santangelo. Also honored was Wilbur Lam, who was recognized along with his collaborator, Erika Tyburski, for Significant Event of the Year.
Here’s a complete list of the award winners (who were recognized by Emory’s Office of Technology Transfer) and profiles of their projects:
Innovation of the Year: Messenger RNA-based Biopacemaker
Hee Cheol Cho, PhD (pediatrics)
Millions of people experience arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats) due to heart disease, aging or congenital defects. The only medical intervention is implantation of an electronic cardiac pacemaker, which includes electrical wires fixed to the heart muscle and an electronic generator implanted under the chest skin, delivering electrical currents to stimulate the heart. Although they work well, the devices can get infected, cannot adjust the pacing rate on-demand, need battery changes, and are too big for pediatric patients.
Cho and his colleagues have envisioned hardware-free “biological pacemakers” that mimic the natural pacemaker in the heart and solve problems associated with device pacing. They have developed a gene therapy, successfully converting ordinary heart muscle into a biological pacemaker in vivo. Cho teamed up with Santangelo at Georgia Tech to deliver the gene as a messenger RNA, which sidesteps the problems associated with viral gene therapy vectors. They are anticipating a clinical trial in which the biological pacemakers will serve as adjuncts to electronic devices for patients with temporary pacing needs. If successful, the initial trial could open the door to a $5 billion (and growing) global pacemaker industry.
Deal of the Year: Meissa Vaccines Inc. – RSV Vaccine
Martin Moore, PhD (pediatrics)
In 2017, Emory University entered into a license agreement with Meissa Vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines. RSV is a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms, with most adults recovering in a week or two. RSV can be serious, even deadly, however, especially for infants and older adults with compromised immune systems. Each year in the United States, more than 57,000 children younger than 5 years old are hospitalized due to RSV infection. Additionally, about 177,000 older adults are hospitalized annually in the U.S. with an RSV infection, resulting in approximately 14,000 deaths.
Moore and his colleagues developed a live attenuated RSV vaccine using synthetic biology and reverse genetics to recode non-essential RSV genes and improve stability. This vaccine is the lead product being developed by the licensee, Meissa Vaccines. The company has been awarded a Fast Track SBIR grant by the National Institutes of Health entitled "Development of live attenuated respiratory syncytial virus vaccines with novel thermal stable fusion protein." In addition to the $1.56 million NIH grant, Meissa also received a seed investment from FundRx, an innovative healthcare and life sciences venture capital platform based in New York City. This investment is intended to help finance the company as it moves toward an investigational new drug (IND) filing for the vaccine.
Start-up of the Year: EMRGE, LLC
Felmont Eaves, III, MD (surgery)
Felmont F. Eaves III, is medical director of the Emory Aesthetic Center. He is the founder of Emory startup EMRGE, LLC, a medical device company developing simple, cost-effective solutions for wound care, wound closure and scar treatment. The company’s three-part platform consists of force-modulating tissue bridges, variable resistance backings and bidirectional linear fixators. Together, these technologies offer a few key needs in wound care: approaches that don’t require anesthesia, don’t need active removal, minimize risk of infection and reduce scarring. EMRGE plans to market products by the end of 2018.
Eaves is a previous president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery and serves as director of the American Board of Plastic Surgery, the board that certifies plastic surgeons nationally. Eaves has received numerous awards and honors including being recognized as one of the Best Doctors in America continuously for more than a decade.
Significant Event of the Year: Sanguina – AnemoCheck 510(k) FDA Approval
Wilbur Lam, MD, PhD (pediatrics)
Erika Tyburski, Chief Operating Officer, Sanguina
Anemia is a condition in which an individual’s blood has a lower-than-normal amount of red blood cells or hemoglobin, resulting in the body not receiving enough oxygen-rich blood. Currently, anemia is monitored via a traditional complete blood count (CBC) test done at the doctor’s office. This type of testing is both invasive and is not appropriate for home testing or self-monitoring purposes.
Lam and Tyburski, along with colleagues, developed a disposable color-based screening test for anemia. This test is used for the determination of hemoglobin level and estimation of hematocrit percentage in whole blood. Each test requires less than half a drop of blood from a finger stick, making it considerably more practical for home use. Blood is collected from the finger stick into a small round device containing a proprietary mix of reagents that react with hemoglobin present in the sample, eliciting a color change. After mixing and waiting for two minutes, the resulting color correlates to the patient’s hemoglobin level. In 2017, Sanguina, Emory’s licensee, received 510(k) market clearance from the FDA, and in 2018 plans to launch the product for consumer sale.
CONTACT
Efrem Hill: efrem.hill@emory.edu, 404-727-8431
]]>Researchers at Emory and Northwestern Universities recently developed artificial intelligence (AI) software that can predict the survival of patients diagnosed with glioma by examining data from tissue biopsies. The approach, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is more accurate than the predictions of doctors who undergo years of highly-specialized training for the same purpose.
Doctors currently use a combination of genomic tests and microscopic examination of tissues to predict how a patient’s disease will behave clinically or respond to therapy. While genomic testing is reliable, these tests do not completely explain patient outcomes, and so microscopic examination is used to further refine prognosis. Microscopic examination, however, is very subjective, with different pathologists often providing different interpretations of the same case. These interpretations can impact critical decisions like whether a patient enrolls in an experimental clinical trial or receives radiation therapy as part of their treatment.
“Genomics have significantly improved how we diagnose and treat gliomas, but microscopic examination remains subjective. There are large opportunities for more systematic and clinically meaningful data extraction using computational approaches,” says Daniel J. Brat, M.D., Ph.D., the lead neuropathologist on the study, who began developing the software while at Emory University and the Winship Cancer Institute. Brat currently is chair of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
The researchers used an approach called deep-learning to train the software to learn visual patterns associated with patient survival using microscopic images of brain tumor tissue samples. The breakthrough resulted from combining this advanced technology with more conventional methods that statisticians use to analyze patient outcomes. When the software was trained using both images and genomic data, its predictions of how long patients survive beyond diagnosis were more accurate than those of human pathologists. The study used public data produced by the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genome Atlas project to develop and evaluate the algorithm.
“The eventual goal is to use this software to provide doctors with more accurate and consistent information. We want to identify patients where treatment can extend life,” says Lee A.D. Cooper, Ph.D., the study’s lead author, an assistant professor in both the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech, and and Department of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University School of Medicine. He is also a member of the Winship Cancer Institute. “What the pathologists do with a microscope is amazing. That an algorithm can learn a complex skill like this was an unexpected result. This is more evidence that AI will have a profound impact in medicine, and we may experience this sooner than expected.”
The researchers also demonstrated that the software learns to recognize many of the same structures and patterns in the tissues that pathologists use when performing their examinations. “Validation remains a barrier to using these algorithms in patient care. Being able to explain why an algorithm works is an important step towards clinical implementation.”
The researchers are looking forward to future studies to evaluate whether the software can be used to improve outcomes for newly diagnosed patients.
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The biological differences between male and female cells may influence their uptake of nanoparticles, which have been much discussed as specific delivery vehicles for medicines.
Vahid Serpooshan, a new faculty member of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, has a recent paper published in ACS Nano making this point. He and his colleagues from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Stanford/McGill/UC Berkeley tested amniotic stem cells, derived from placental tissue. They found that female amniotic cells had significantly higher uptake of nanoparticles (quantum dots) than male cells. The effect of cell sex on nanoparticle uptake was reversed in fibroblasts. The researchers also found out that female versus male amniotic stem cells exhibited different responses to reprogramming into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).
“We believe this is a substantial discovery and a game changer in the field of nanomedicine, in taking safer and more effective and accurate steps towards successful clinical applications,” says Serpooshan, who is also part of the Department of Pediatrics at Emory.
Serpooshan’s interests lie in the realm of pediatric cardiology. His K99 grant indicates that he is planning to develop techniques for recruiting and activating cardiomyoblasts, via “a bioengineered cardiac patch delivery of small molecules.”
Based at Emory, he joins labs with overlapping interests, such as Nawazish Naqvi’s, as well as Mike Davis and Hee Cheol Cho, who are both researchers with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience in addition to being Coulter Department faculty members.
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“Our ranking reflects the continued expansion of our world-class faculty at both Emory and Georgia Tech, dramatic growth in research funding, and enhanced training opportunities for our graduate students,” said Susan Margulies, chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.
For the seventh consecutive year, all 11 of Georgia Tech’s graduate engineering programs are ranked in the top 10 in their fields in the 2019 U.S. News & World Report graduate rankings.
Overall the Georgia Tech College of Engineering’s graduate programs are ranked eighth in the country and third among public colleges.
On a program level, the College of Engineering’s industrial and systems engineering program is ranked first in the country for the 28th consecutive year. Biomedical engineering and environmental engineering each rose two spots from last year’s rankings to second and fifth place respectively, while computer engineering, electrical engineering, materials science and engineering, and mechanical engineering all rose one spot with computer engineering receiving a fourth overall ranking—its best ever.
"The faculty, staff and graduate students should be proud of the reputation and accomplishments of our eight engineering schools and the College as a whole," said Steve McLaughlin, dean of the College of Engineering. "With all Georgia Tech graduate engineering programs placed in the top ten nationally, it is through their hard work that we continue to be recognized as one of the premier engineering colleges in the Nation. We are gratified that our peers recognize the efforts we make toward providing an exemplary graduate school environment and exceptional levels of research productivity.”
CONTACT:
Walter Rich
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Gabe Kwong, assistant professor, will receive the Center for Teaching and Learning/BP America Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award.
Balakrishna Pai, director of instructional laboratories, will receive the Georgia Tech’s Undergraduate Educator Award.
Kwong investigates cancer nanotechnology, engineering immunity, biomedical nanosystems, and high-throughput biotechnologies. Here is some of the feedback received from students regarding Kwong’s teaching:
When Pai is not teaching undergraduate biomedical engineering laboratory courses, his lab research time is used to further drug discovery and development, investigate cancer therapeutics, engineered biomaterials and other cellular/molecular mechanisms related to normal and disease physiology. Here is some of the feedback received from students regarding Pai’s teaching:
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Their blade packaging was designed to protect health care workers from accidental injuries that can occur when handling exposed scalpel blades.
Now their invention, Scal-Pal, is one of six competing for Georgia Tech’s InVenture Prize, an annual innovation competition. The winner will be chosen March 14.
Currently doctors and nurses must handle the blade with their fingers to remove it or attach a new one to the scalpel handle. The foil packaging around a fresh blade is opened like an adhesive bandage. One person opens the packaging, while a second person grabs the exposed blade with needle holders and inserts it into the scalpel handle.
“It’s easy for accidents to happen because the packaging forces the blade to be exposed,” said Alpharetta native Bailey Klee. “I was job shadowing in an operating room and I saw a nurse take off the blade and cut herself. We found a way to prevent that from happening again.”
Scal-Pal works much the same way as switching out razor blades. The blade is stored inside a single-use box made from pre-recycled polyethylene, akin to the plastic used in milk jugs. The scalpel handle is inserted into the box and the blade is attached. To remove the used blade, the scalpel is inserted back into the box and the blade is released from the handle and trapped inside. The entire box is then thrown away.
The team 3D printed the pink and black box in the BME Machine Shop.
“Our design works because the blade is never exposed,” said Sydney Platt, who is from Lake Jackson, Texas. “No one has to touch it directly.”
“There is a market and a need for what we developed,” added Nicholas Quan from Richmond Hill, Ga.
Hospitals spend more than $116 million a year on scalpel related injuries, reported Rachel Mann, a native of Homer Glen, Ill. Those same hospitals use more than 1 million scalpel blades a day.
“We need to gain exposure with medical device manufacturers,” Mann said. “We’re hopeful the InVenture Prize will help make that happen.”
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]]>Zhou will be among the 600 young scientists (undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers) from across the world sharing the unique atmosphere of the annual event, which brings together more than 40 Nobel Laureates to meet and inspire this next generation of researchers.
“Basically, it’s a chance for us to share our excitement in science,” says Zhou, whose home school is the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “I’m pretty overwhelmed and beyond excited about this. I mean, I’ve never met a Nobel Laureate before, so it truly is the opportunity of a lifetime.”
In the lab of Petit Institute researcher Andrés García, Zhou’s research focuses on cell adhesion. Specifically, his studies explore how cells generate forces as they adhere to their environment, “and how these forces are transfused in the signaling pathways within the cell,” he says.
“It’s very basic cell biology, but since adhesion is such an essential process, we hope our results may be applicable in the clinic one day,” Zhou adds. “For example, adhesion is implicated in the disease processes of diseases like cancer and atherosclerosis.”
While the notion of rubbing shoulders with past winners of the Nobel Prize is overwhelming to Zhou, he hasn’t really had time to catch his breath – he’s been busy with research.
“It’ll really sink in over the next few months,” he says. “But Georgia Tech has such a strong history of sending people to this meeting, so I’m going to talk to some of the previous attendees from Tech and learn from their experience.”
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A subcategory of artificial intelligence, machine learning deals with the construction of algorithms that enable computers to learn from and react to data rather than following explicitly programmed instructions. “Machine-learning algorithms build a model based on inputs and then use that model to make other hypotheses, predictions, or decisions,” explained Irfan Essa, professor and associate dean in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing who also directs the Institute’s Center for Machine Learning.
Established in June 2016, the Center for Machine Learning is comprised of researchers from six colleges and 13 schools at Georgia Tech — a number that keeps growing. “Among our goals is to better coordinate research efforts across campus, serve as a home for machine learning leaders, and train the next generation of leaders,” Essa said, referring to Georgia Tech’s new Ph.D. program in machine learning.
Within the center, researchers are striving to advance both basic and applied science. “For example, one foundational goal is to really understand deep learning at its core,” Essa said. “We want to develop new theories and innovative algorithms, rather than just using deep learning as a black box for inputs and outputs.” And on the applied research front, the center has seven focal areas: health care, education, logistics, social networks, the financial sector, information security, and robotics.
See the complete article from Research Horizons magazine.
]]>Research News
(404) 894-6986
]]>"The Clark Scholars Program will have a huge impact on our ability to attract the best and brightest young minds to the College of Engineering and will further cultivate an inclusive and diverse student body,” said Steve McLaughlin, dean and Southern Company chair of the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech. “The entrepreneurial spirit, community-minded values, and continuous strive to achieve excellence that is encouraged by the A. James Clark Scholars Program aligns perfectly with the mission of the College."
Ten students per year will be selected as Clark Scholars based on their financial need, academic accomplishments, engagement in engineering and leadership skills. By fall 2021, the Clark Scholars Program is expected to have 40 students enrolled. Throughout their four years in the program, the Clark Scholars will pursue a rigorous engineering education, enroll in business classes, participate in intensive summer programs, and work on semester-long community service projects.
“We hope to enable motivated and promising students to focus their efforts on academic excellence and a passion for engineering,” said David Torello, faculty mentor of the Georgia Tech Clark Scholars Program. “We expect the program to develop a group of gifted graduates ready to tackle the challenges facing today’s world and establish themselves as leaders in the field of engineering.”
The program honors the legacy of the late A. James Clark, a noted engineer, businessman and philanthropist who never forgot that his business successes began with an engineering scholarship. That is why the Clark family has long supported extending engineering education to talented students from underrepresented backgrounds, including first-generation college students. Mr. Clark was the president and CEO of Clark Construction, a Maryland-based firm with a national reach.
“We are honored to have the opportunity to establish the A. James Clark Scholars Program at Georgia Tech,” said Joe Del Guercio, president and CEO of the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation. “With a focus on underrepresented students, the core curriculum includes a rigorous engineering and business course of study, as well as leadership and community service activities – which reflects Mr. Clark’s values as a businessman and philanthropist.”
“The generous endowment from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation will provide the financial support needed for hundreds of promising students to achieve their dreams,” said G.P. “Bud” Peterson, president of Georgia Tech. “It will impact not only the lives of these students, but the lives of students for generations to come. At Tech, we are creating the next generation of engineers and ensuring that students with the passion and mindset to do great things have a seat at the table.”
]]>It’s a relationship with roots in the 2015 meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society in Tampa, Florida. Joe Le Doux, associate chair for undergraduate learning and experience in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University, was attending the event, where he met Doug Melton, KEEN program director.
“I mentioned that I was mentoring a student group whose vision was to be ‘intrapreneurs’ in our department,” says Le Doux.
Melton knew exactly what Le Doux was talking about – an intrepreneur is someone who behaves like an entrepreneur within a larger organization, integrating risk-taking and innovation to solve problems. That initial conversation in Florida led to future interactions, including a campus visit.
“Basically, the BME department and KEEN got to know each other better and realized our goals were well-aligned,” Le Doux says.
And that led to the Coulter Department and Georgia Tech joining the network, and membership has its privileges. KEEN institutions can apply for funding to develop programs that build an entrepreneurial mindset.
Toward that end, the Coulter Department found out recently that it was successful in its pitch to develop student portfolios, acquiring a KEEN Award valued at $1.5 million over three years, beginning February 2018. The project is being spearheaded by a team of BME faculty and staff that includes co-principal investigators Paul Benkeser and James Stubbs, and project manager Kim Paige.
“KEEN’s investment will help the department pursue a goal we’ve had for some time,” says Le Doux. “We want to develop a portfolio program that will help students capture, reflect on, and tell stories of their entrepreneurial achievements, how they created value for themselves and others through their educational work as students at Georgia Tech. We believe KEEN can help elevate our efforts to foster an entrepreneurial mindset within our students.”
Le Doux describes the portfolios that BME students will develop as “more than a pitch, less than a novel, a professional narrative where students learn to tell their stories, of their failures and accomplishments, stories that share the multiple perspectives of the people who were involved, and in a way that listeners can learn how to be, and become more motivated to be, an entrepreneurial person who creates value for others.”
According to KEEN’s leadership, an entrepreneurial mindset consists of three key elements: curiosity, connections, and creating value: Entrepreneurially minded people are curious about the changing world (and employ a contrarian view of accepted solutions); habitually connect information from multiple sources to gain insight and manage risk; and create value for others from unexpected opportunities while persisting through (and learning from) failure.
The idea is, if a graduating BME student, having collected his/her experiences and artifacts along the way, can bridge the gap between “knowing how” and “knowing why,” their chances of developing that entrepreneurial mindset will only increase. This is bigger than just landing the right job or career, Le Doux says: “The goal is for students to have a greater understanding of who they are, what they’ve accomplished, and where they are going, and what they are going to accomplish along the way.”
That said, such wide-ranging skills can only help when it comes to finding good work, and Le Doux has anecdotal proof of the concept.
“I gave a workshop at a conference and a guy who describe himself as a serial entrepreneur, who had been in the business of hiring people for 20 years, said that he typically looked for a job prospect’s ability to tell their own story more than a bullet list of skills,” Le Doux says. “The person who can articulate their powerful vision is who he wanted to bring to the team.”
Le Doux envisions a prototype program in the Coulter Department that can eventually be scaled up across campus and across the country.
“Our students obviously need those technical skills, but when they graduate, they can’t rely on skillsets alone,” Le Doux says. “Stories make meaning of our prior experiences. If we do this right, our students are going to graduate with professional and interpersonal competencies that will help them understand and explain what they learned, and why its relevant.”
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To highlight the important role engineers will play in the industry, the National Science Foundation (NSF) last fall awarded [Georgia Tech] nearly $20 million to support a new engineering research center to facilitate mass production.
The grant was awarded around the same time the Food and Drug Administration approved the first two gene therapy treatments, Novartis’s Kymriah and Kite’s Yescarta, which were followed by the approval of Spark Therapeutics’ Luxturna in December. More than 300 biotech and pharmaceutical companies are currently working on cell and gene therapy products.
The skills needed to meet the manufacturing complexities, scale and quality assurance in the production of those therapies is creating a demand for engineering expertise
“Its time has come because these products are now coming onto market without any clear path on how people can manufacture them for a broader base,” says Krishnendu Roy, director of the recently established NSF Engineering Research Center for Cell Manufacturing Technologies (CMaT) and Marcus Center for Cell Manufacturing at Georgia Institute of Technology. The Atlanta-based university leads a consortium that includes other universities in the U.S. and abroad, industry, and U.S. national laboratories.
“We started thinking in this area about three or four years ago,” Roy says.
One of the first major steps in creating the consortium was developing a 60-page, 10-year roadmap that laid out challenges and barriers, as well as a technological wish list for the next 10 years. More than 25 companies and 15 academic institutions collaborated to produce the roadmap.
See the complete article from the Alliance of Advanced BioMedical Engineering (AABME) website.
]]>The areas in which Butera will present lectures include bioelectric medicine, electrophysiology, nerve stimulation, computational neuroscience, and the maker movement and problem-based learning.
A member of the Georgia Tech faculty since 1999, Butera is the associate dean for Research and Innovation in the College of Engineering. He is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and holds a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Prior to joining the Dean’s Office, Butera led the Neural Engineering Center from 2014-2016 and served as founding faculty director of the Grand Challenges Living Learning Community from 2012-2015. He is a member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and is a faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program; he served as the program’s director from 2005-2008.
Butera is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he is the vice president for publications for IEEE EMBS.
]]>School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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]]>The new study demonstrated the advantages of an in vivo DNA barcoding technique, which attaches small snippets of DNA to different lipid-based nanoparticles that are then injected into living animals; more than a hundred nanoparticles can be tested in a single animal. DNA sequencing techniques are then used to identify which nanoparticles enter the cells of specific organs, making the particles candidates for transporting gene therapies to treat such killers as heart disease, cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
The traditional technique for identifying promising nanoparticles examines how the particles enter living cells kept in lab dishes. To compare the new and old screening techniques, the researchers added barcoded nanoparticles to living cells in lab dishes, and injected identical barcoded nanoparticles into living animal models. They found almost no correlation between the nanoparticles identified as promising in the lab dish tests and those that actually performed well in the mice.
“DNA barcoding has the potential to advance the science of selecting nanoparticles for delivering gene therapies,” said James Dahlman, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and the study’s principal investigator. “Using this technique, companies and academic labs could pick out promising nanoparticles much more efficiently. That could accelerate the rate at which nanoparticle-based therapies move into the clinic, while reducing the amount of animal testing required.”
The research, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Cancer Research Institute, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, was reported February 28 in the journal ACS Nano Letters. The research was conducted by scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University.
Genetic therapies, such as those made from DNA or RNA, face challenges because of the difficulty in delivering the nucleic acid to the right cells. For the past two decades, 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 development of nanoparticle carriers has been slowed by the challenges of testing them, first in cell culture to identify promising nanoparticles, and later in animals. With millions of possible combinations, identifying the optimal nanoparticles to target each organ has been overwhelming.
Using DNA strands just 58 nucleotides long to uniquely identify each particle allows researchers to skip the cell culture screening altogether – and test a hundred or more different types of nanoparticles simultaneously in just a handful of animals.
“If you wanted to test 200 nanoparticles in the traditional way, you would need 600 mice – three for each type of nanoparticle,” said Dahlman. “Using the DNA barcoding technique, which we call Joint Rapid DNA Analysis of Nanoparticles (JORDAN), we are able to do the testing in just three animals.”
The study examined nanoparticle entry into endothelial cells and macrophages for the in vitro study, and the same type of cells from the lung, heart and bone marrow for the in vivo component. The two cell types are important to a broad range of organ systems in the body and play active roles in diseases that could be targets for nucleic acid therapies. The study compared how the same 281 lipid nanoparticles delivered the barcodes in lab dishes and living animals.
“There was no predictive capability between the lab dish tests and the animal tests,” Dahlman said. “If the in vitro tests had been good predictors, then particles that did well in the dish would also have done well in the animals, and particles that did poorly in the dish would also have done poorly in the animals. We did not see that at all.”
The research team, led by co-first authors Kalina Paunovska and Cory D. Sago, also studied how nanoparticle delivery changes with the microenvironment of specific tissue types. For that, they quantified how 85 nanoparticles delivered DNA barcodes to eight cell populations in the spleen, and found that cell types derived from myeloid progenitors tended to be targeted by similar nanoparticles.
Researchers are interested not only in which nanoparticles deliver the therapeutics most effectively, but also which can deliver them selectively to specific organs. Therapeutics targeted to tumors, for example, should be delivered only to the tumor and not to surrounding tissues. Therapeutics for heart disease likewise should selectively accumulate in the heart.
The single-strand DNA barcode sequences use in the technique are about the same size as antisense oligonucleotides, microRNA and siRNA being developed for possible therapeutic uses. Other gene-based therapeutics are larger, and additional research would be needed to determine if the technique could be used with them.
Once the promising nanoparticles are identified with the screening, they would be subjected to additional testing to verify their ability to deliver therapeutics. To avoid the possibility of nanoparticles merging, only structures that are stable in aqueous environments can be tested with this technique. Only nontoxic nanoparticles can be screened, and researchers must control for potential inflammation generated by the inserted DNA.
“Nucleic acid therapies hold considerable promise for treating a range of serious diseases,” said Dahlman. “We hope this technique will be used widely in the field, and that it will ultimately bring more clarity to how these drugs affect cells – and how we can get them to the right locations in the body.”
In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Christopher M. Monaco, Marielena Gamboa Castro, Tobi G. Rudoltz, Sujay Kalathoor, Daryll A. Vanover and Professor Philip J. Santangelo of the Coulter Department; William H. Hudson and Rafi Ahmed of the Emory Vaccine Center and Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory University, and Anton V. Bryksin of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
This research was supported the NIH/NIGMS-sponsored Cell and Tissue Engineering (CTEng) Biotechnology Training Program (T32GM08433), the NIH/NIGMS-sponsored Immunoengineering Training Program (T32EB021962), the Cancer Research Institute Irvington Fellow program supported by the Cancer Research Institute, the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation, the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, and the Bayer Hemophilia Awards Program. This study was also supported with funding from the National Institutes of Health GT BioMAT Training Grant under Award Number (5T32EB006343). This work was performed in part at the Georgia Tech Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant ECCS-1542174). The content of this news release is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring organizations.
CITATION: Kalina Paunovska and Cory D. Sago, et al., “A direct comparison of in vitro and in vivo nucleic acid delivery mediated by hundreds of nanoparticles reveals a weak correlation,” (Nano Letters 2018). https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b00432
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]]>In this project, Inan will investigate wearable sensing systems and modern data analytics tools for estimating blood volume status for the Warfighter in austere environments. Reduced blood volume is experienced by the modern Warfighter in a variety of circumstances ranging from exsanguination to exertional heat stress, and can ultimately lead to shock or collapse. This project can benefit the health and performance of the Warfighter by enabling proactive measures to be taken in the field to reduce preventable deaths and improve performance. The technologies developed in this work can ultimately have broad use in civilian applications as well, ranging from trauma care to predicting cardiovascular collapse in persons working in warm environments with protective clothing.
Inan has been an assistant professor at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 2013, where he also holds an adjunct faculty appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Inan and his research team design clinically relevant medical devices and systems, and then translate them from the lab to patient care applications. They also develop new technologies for monitoring chronic diseases at home, such as heart failure.
Inan is a member of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and a program faculty member for the Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program. His most recent honors include the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award (2017) and the Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award in (2016); he is also a senior member of IEEE.
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]]>On the one hand, the patient faces dire results if the tumor isn’t completely resected. On the other, if the surgeon removes normal tissue, it can significantly impair the patients’ motor, sensory, visual, language, and cognitive function. Compounding this complex task is a lack of adequate tools.
“The main limitations of the current technologies that are available for visualizing tumor margins are that they are expensive, and they’re not accurate or fast enough,” says Francisco Robles, researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
So Robles, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, aims to improve the odds for patients and surgeons by developing a better tool.
“The goal of our work is to lay the foundation for a novel intraoperative tool, based on label-free optical imaging,” explains Robles, whose research recently received an important boost in the form of a three-year, $600,000 R21 grant through the Innovative Molecular Analysis Technologies (IMAT) program, part of the NIH’s National Cancer Institute.
The ideal tool for guiding neurosurgery should clearly differentiate between normal and diseased brain tissue with high subcellular resolution, be fast enough to cover the tumor margin in reasonable time, be cost effective, and be easily integrated into the surgical workflow, providing real-time feedback on a patient who doesn’t have to be moved. Emerging methods have shown promise, but none fill all of these needs.
“Some technologies have difficulty seeing diffusive cells that escape the larger bulk tumor, and so we need higher sensitivity for this,” Robles says. “So our goal is to develop a single tool that allows specificity for individual cells that are cancerous, while having the speed to see large volumes in reasonable time.”
His proposed method is based on new optical technology that leverages two complimentary, label-free molecular imaging methods: stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) and spectroscopic optical coherence tomography (SOCT). SRS provides rich molecular information with high subcellular, or spatial, resolution, but it is unable to cover large areas at high speeds. Meanwhile, SOCT can multiplex both the special and spectral information to achieve high-speed, tomographic molecular imaging (but has limited molecular sensitivity).
“We want to merge both of those worlds,” says Robles, whose multidisciplinary, collaborative SRS-SOCT approach addresses limitations of each individual method, exhibiting additional capabilities that improve the ability to identify brain tumors.
Robles plans to develop an improved SRS-SOCT system through a partnership with Harald Giessen at the University of Suttgart, then test the technology in collaboration with Emory neurosurgeon Jeffrey Olson, and finally, validate SRS-SOCT for identifying brain tumors in humans using specimens obtained through the Human Tissue Procurement Service at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute.
“This work will pave the way for a novel intraoperative tool that has the potential to increase the success rate of neurosurgery,” says Robles, “and prolong survival for patients with malignant brain tumors.”
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Heaps of plaque formed from amyloid-beta that accumulate in afflicted brains are what stick out under the microscope in tissue samples from Alzheimer’s sufferers, and that eye-catching junk has long seemed an obvious culprit in the disease. But data analysis of the cumulative evidence doesn’t support giving so much attention to that usual suspect, according to a new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Though the bad amyloid-beta protein does appear to be an accomplice in the disease, the study has pointed to a seemingly more likely red-handed offender, another protein-gone-bad called phosphorylated tau (p-tau). What’s more, the Georgia Tech data analysis of multiple studies done on mice also turned up signs that multiple biochemical actors work together in Alzheimer’s to tear down neurons, the cells that the brain uses to do its work.
And the corrupted amyloid-beta that appeared more directly in cahoots with p-tau in the sabotage of brain function was not tied up in that plaque. In the line-up of the biochemical suspects examined, principal investigator Cassie Mitchell, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, said the data pointed to a pecking order of culpability.
“The most important one would be the level of phosphorylated tau present. It had the strongest connection with cognitive decline,” Mitchell said. “The correlation with amyloid plaque was there but very weak; not nearly as strong as the correlation between p-tau and cognitive decline.”
Mitchell, a biomedical informaticist, and first author Colin Huber statistically analyzed data gleaned from 51 existing lab studies in mice genetically augmented with a human form of Alzheimer’s. They published their analysis in the current edition of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
One look at an image of an Alzheimer’s afflicted brain is unflinching testimony to the disease’s cruelty: It destroys of up to 30 percent of a brain’s mass, carving out ravines and depositing piles of molecular junk, most visibly amyloid plaque.
The plaque builds up outside of neurons, while inside neurons, p-tau forms similar junk known as neurofibrillary tangles that many researchers believe push the cells to their demise. But many biochemical machinations behind Alzheimer’s are still unknown, and the fight to uncover them has vexed researchers for decades.
Since the first patient was diagnosed by Dr. Aloysius Alzheimer between 1901 and 1906, little medical progress has been made. Though some available medications may mitigate symptoms somewhat, none significantly slow disease progression, let alone stop it.
Alzheimer’s mostly strikes late in life. Longer lifespans in industrialized countries have ballooned the caseload, advancing the disease to a major cause of death.
Even though p-tau showed the strongest correlation with cognitive decline, and amyloid-beta only a slight correlation, that doesn’t mean that p-tau is committing the crime inside cells all by itself while amyloid loiters in spaces outside of cells in large gangs, creating a distraction. Mitchell’s data analysis has pointed to dynamics more enmeshed than that.
“Though the study had clear trends, it also had a good bit of variance that would indicate multiple factors influencing outcomes,” Mitchell said. And a particular manifestation of amyloid-beta has piqued the researchers’ ire.
Little pieces are water soluble, that is, not tied up in clumps of plaque. The data has shown that these tiny amyloids may be up to no good. After p-tau levels, the study revealed that those of soluble amyloid-beta had the second-strongest correlation with cognitive decline.
“Lumpy amyloid-beta, the stuff we see, ironically doesn’t correlate as well with cognitive decline as the soluble amyloid,” Mitchell said. “The amyloid you don’t see is like the sugar in your tea that dissolves and hits your taste buds versus the insoluble amyloid, which is more like the sugar that doesn’t dissolve and stays at the bottom of the cup.”
Some Alzheimer’s researchers have cited evidence indicating that free-floating amyloid helps produce the corrupted p-tau via a chain of reactions that centers around GSK3 (Glycogen synthase kinase 3), an enzyme that arms tau with phosphorous, turning it into a potential biochemical assassin.
Incidentally, Mitchell’s study also looked at un-phosphorylated tau and found its levels do not correlate with cognitive decline. “That makes sense,” Mitchell said. “Regular tau is the backbone of our neurons, so it has to be there.”
Also, p-tau is a normal part of healthy cells, but in Alzheimer’s it is wildly overproduced.
One advantage of data mining 51 existing studies versus doing one new lab experiment, is that the cumulative analysis adds the sample sizes of so many studies together for a whopping grand total. Mitchell’s analysis encompassed results from past experiments carried out on, all totaled, 528 Alzheimer’s mice.
A previous study Mitchell led had already indicated that amyloid-beta plaque levels may not be the most productive target for drug development. Separate reports by other researchers on failed human trials of drugs that fought plaque would seem to corroborate this.
Mitchell’s prior analysis examined lab studies that used an Alzheimer’s lab mouse model that did not allow for the study of p-tau. Mitchell’s current analysis covered studies involving a different mouse model that did allow for the observation of p-tau.
Mitchell’s latest findings have corroborated the prior study’s findings on amyloid, and also added p-tau as a key suspect in cognitive decline.
To arrive at the 51 studies with data suitable for inclusion in their analysis, Mitchell’s research team sifted through hundreds of Alzheimer’s research papers, and over time, Mitchell has examined a few thousand herself. She has gained some impressions of how biomedical research may need to tackle the disease’s slippery biochemical labyrinth.
“When we see multifactorial diseases, we tend to think we’ll need multifactorial treatments,” Mitchell said. “That seems to be working well with cancer, where they combine chemotherapy with things like immunotherapy.”
Also, Alzheimer’s diagnosticians might be wise to their adopt cancer colleagues’ early detection stance, she said, as Alzheimer’s disease appears to start long before amyloid-beta plaque appears and cognitive decline sets in.
Above all, basic research should cast a broader net.
“I think p-tau is going to have to be a big part,” she said. “And it may be time to not latch onto amyloid-beta plaque so much like the field has for a few decades.”
Did you know? Cassie Mitchell is also an Olympic medalist! Watch her video here.
Also READ: Our feature on Alzheimer’s research – Killing the Mind First
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Georgia Tech’s Connor Yee, Taylor May, and Apoorva Dhanala coauthored the study. Funding was provided by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health (grants NS069616, NS098228, and NS081426). Any findings or conclusions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the sponsor.
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So, in 2013 President Barack Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), an international public-private research collaborative that proactively supports researchers who are accelerating the development and application of innovative technologies – researchers like Garrett Stanley at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Stanley, who is the Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, recently won his third BRAIN award in three years from the NIH (National Institutes of Health).
“This puts us in a good place nationally and internationally,” says Stanley, a neuroengineer in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “On a very practical level, these awards are being given to scientists in the top neuroscience programs at top universities in the country, so it says a lot about what’s happening here to Georgia and Emory.”
The grant, which builds upon the work of previous BRAIN grants, invests $1.9 million over five years for a project called “Thalmocortical state control of tactile sensing: Mechanisms, Models, and Behavior”. Stanley is the principal investigator on the project, along with the co-investigator Bilal Haider, an assistant professor in the Coulter Department.
In 2014, Stanley and fellow Petit Institute researcher Craig Forest, associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, won a BRAIN Award from NIH for a project entitled, “In-vivo circuit activity measurement at single cell, sub-threshold resolution.” In 2015, Stanley and Emory neuroscientist Dieter Jaeger won a BRAIN grant for a project called, “Multiscale Analysis of Sensory-Motor Cortical Gating in Behaving Mice.”
Early projects in the sprawling BRAIN Initiative were focused heavily on the development of new technology, but the mission is shifting a little, according to Stanley.
“The first phase was all about developing the tools,” Stanley says. “Now we’re focused more on doing science with those tools, which are enabling us to target different areas of the brain like we’ve never done before.”
In the project with Forest’s lab, the idea was to use an in vivo robotic patch clamping system (developed by Forest with collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to measure changes in electrical activity from individual neurons, with the goal of recording intracellular neural communication, to better understand how long-distance neural connections change when our brains go into different states, such as sleeping and waking.
In the project with Jaeger, the aim was to use genetically expressed voltage sensors to optically image brain activity during sensory-motor tasks – to capture the flow of information as the human brain senses and perceives the outside world, and to better understand that information.
This time, Stanley’s team plans to use an array of electrophysiological tools to determine the role of the thalamus in dynamically gating information flow to the rest of the brain during changes in states of arousal. And they’re targeting the thalamus, which is basically the central relay station for incoming and outgoing messages between the brain to the body.
“It controls what information makes it into the brain, what you can feel and perceive,” says Stanley. “There are things we often take for granted, like sitting there and falling asleep. What does that mean when your brain disconnects from the rest of the world, or reconnects.”
The funding mechanism being utilized for Stanley’s BRAIN project comes through the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) specifically targets brain circuitry, which fits neatly within Georgia Tech’s wheelhouse.
“The brain is made up of circuits, and who better to work on circuits than a bunch of engineers,” says Stanley. “Most disorders in the brain are not just the mutation of a gene, and they’re not always associated with cell death. They’re diseases of the circuits.”
It turns out that circuit dysfunction is common to most neurological and psychiatric disorders, so understanding how the circuitry works is a key step on the way to developing a new age of therapeutics.
“We’re getting better at pulling the switches and levers of the brain,” Stanley says. “I think that what we’re going to find is, the ability to probe and manipulate in specific ways at the circuit level is one of the keys to treating neurological disorders that currently have no cure.”
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The fellowships, awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955, honor early-career scholars who, “represent the very best science has to offer,” says Sloan President Adam Falk. “The brightest minds, tackling the hardest problems, and succeeding brilliantly—Fellows are quite literally the future of twenty-first century science.”
He is one of three Georgia Tech researchers so honored. The others are Vinayak Agarwal, assistant professor in the School of Chemistry, and Lutz Warnke, assistant professor in the School of Mathematics.
Haider’s research goal is to identify cellular and circuit mechanisms that modulate neural responsiveness in the cerebral cortex, using a variety of advanced electrical and optical techniques to record, stimulate, and the interpret the activity of specific neuronal sub-types.
But the two-year, $65,000 Sloan award doesn’t support a specific research project effort, according to Haider. It supports the individual.
“It’s very exciting because it’s different from a traditional kind of grant. This is more about the research direction you have envisioned as a young investigator,” says Haider, who is a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “This is about funding the person. It’s a real vote of confidence.”
Available to tenure track faculty in eight scientific fields, the Fellowships are awarded at a key moment in a researcher’s career. Past Sloan Research Fellows include towering figures in the history of science, including physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, and game theorist John Nash. Forty-five fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective field, 16 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, 69 have received the National Medal of Science, and 17 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.
Drawn this year from 53 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, the 2018 Sloan Research Fellows represent a diverse array of institutions and backgrounds. This year’s Fellows include:
Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields—chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics—the Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in close coordination with the scientific community. Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists and winning fellows are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars in their field on the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become a leader in his or her field.
Additional 2018 Winners at Georgia Tech: Agarwal, Warnke Named 2018 Sloan Research Fellows
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The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in New York City. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-President and Chief Executive Officer of the General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics.
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This year marks the 10th competition for the prize, which recognizes student inventors for their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
More than 40 teams registered for this year’s contest. Winners will be selected March 14.
Here are the finalists:
Memeois. This team designed an all-meme platform. It crawls the internet for memes and uses machine learning to curate a personalized feed of memes.
Inventors: Two computer science majors: Anushk Mittal and Joshua Wang
PedalCreator. Their device, Disruption, is an affordable guitar effects pedal that gives musicians the freedom to create distortion sounds. It is fully analog and customizable.
Inventors: Dallas Condra, mechanical engineering major; Jeremy Leff, mechanical engineering major; and Vanya Padmanabhan, industrial design major.
pHAM. These students designed a filter to reduce coffee’s acidity. They incorporated a mineral blend into the structure of the filter paper, which reduces the acidity of the brewed coffee without negatively affecting the taste.
Inventors: Four materials science and engineering majors: Michele Lauto, Tyler Quill, Aaron Stansell and Lucas Votaw.
Scal-Pal. The team redesigned current blade packaging to make scalpel assembly safer and more efficient. Inventors said this design eliminates the threats posed by exposed blades, which can put health care workers at risk for blood-borne diseases and connective tissue damage.
Inventors: Four biomedical engineering majors: Bailey Klee, Rachel Mann, Nicholas Quan and Sydney Platt.
Tensionr. These students created an easy, safe and effective strap tensioning tool for any shaped load. It allows for the elimination of razor-sharp steel bands, which frequently cut workers on the hands, arms and face.
Inventors: Five mechanical engineering majors: Michael Bailey, Austin Forgey, Hannah Larson, Lauren Perrine and Brandon Will.
UltraView. This student invented StarLight, an aiming device for competitive archery. Unlike current scopes and light kits on the market, he said this one is easier to set up and use.
Inventor: Kolby Hanley, materials science engineering major.
The winning team will take home $20,000 and will represent Georgia Tech in the annual ACC InVenture Prize, taking place on campus April 6.
The second-place team earns $10,000.
Both first- and second-place finishers will receive free U.S. patent filings by Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing and a spot in Georgia Tech’s startup accelerator program, Flashpoint.
A $5,000 People’s Choice Award will go to the fans’ favorite invention. Voting will be held online and by text messaging during the finale.
The finale will take place March 14 at the Ferst Center for the Arts. Tickets are free and can be requested here.
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]]>A description of the system, and representative movies, are scheduled for publication in Nature Communications.
Lead author Wilbur Lam, M.D., Ph.D. says that blood clotting involves the damaged blood vessel, platelets, blood clotting proteins that form a net-like mesh, and the flow of the blood itself.
“Current methods to study blood clotting require isolation of each of these components, which prevents us from seeing the big picture of what’s going with the patient’s blood clotting system,” says Lam, assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
The model is the result of a collaboration between Lam’s group at Emory and Georgia Tech and Shawn Jobe, M.D., Ph.D. at the Blood Center of Wisconsin. The co-first authors of the paper are research specialist Yumiko Sakurai, instructor Elaissa Hardy, Ph.D. and senior engineer Byungwook Ahn, Ph..D, now at LG Electronics.
The system is the first to reproduce all the aspects of blood vessel injury seen in the microvasculature: blood loss due to trauma, clot formation by whole blood and repair of the blood vessel lining. Previous models might only simulate clot formation, for example. The model does not include smooth muscle and does not reproduce aspects of larger blood vessels, however.
The system consists of a layer of human endothelial cells, which line blood vessels, cultured on top of a pneumatic valve. The “wound” is created by activating a pneumatic valve, opening what Lam calls a trap door. Donated human blood flows through the wound, which is about 130 micrometers across.
In the accompanying movie, most of the blood cells are seen as grey: erythrocytes are round grey donuts, while platelets are smaller specks. The red-stained cells are actually white blood cells. A green extracellular “glue” can be seen at the top of the wound; this is fibrin, which holds the clot together.
In real time, it takes about 8 minutes for blood flow into the wound to stop. Without the endothelial cells, the blood flow does not stop.
The system responds to manipulation by drugs and other alterations that reproduce clotting disorders. Blood from hemophilia A patients form abnormal clots and shows extended bleeding time in the model.
In the Nature Communications paper, the authors also describe insights into how the drug eptifibatide affects the interactions of platelets and other cells in the 3-D space of a wound.
The research was supported by the National Health Lung and Blood Institute (HL121264, HL130918, HL112309) and the National Science Foundation (CAREER award 1150235, National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure 1542174).
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Cytometry is the measurement of the characteristics of cells. One use of cytometry is in cell biology research and in medical diagnostics to characterize cells in a wide range of applications associated with diseases such as cancer.
Qiu’s research interests lie in the area of bioinformatics and computational biology. One of his main focuses is computational algorithms for analyzing single-cell characterizations, measured by flow cytometry, CyTOF, single-cell RNAseq, image-based profiling, microfluidics, and other single-cell technologies. ISAC is a great community and valuable resource for him to advance his research and develop collaborations.
CONTACT:
Walter Rich
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Padala is director of the Structural Heart Research and Innovation Laboratory in the Carlyle Fraser Heart Center at Emory University Hospital Midtown and is a program faculty member in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He oversees an interdisciplinary team of engineers, biologists and surgeons focused on research problems in heart surgery.
In announcing the award, the awards committee noted that Padala’s scientific contributions to the field of cardiothoracic surgery are truly timely and significant in the development of a research program focused on bioengineering approaches to cardiovascular intervention.
Padala will receive the award and a $1,000 honorarium at the John F. Morgan Distinguished Faculty Lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 6 from 4-6 p.m. in the Cox Ballroom of Cox Hall. Emory history professor Carol Anderson will deliver this year’s Distinguished Faculty Lecture.
Padala’s cross-disciplinary research laboratory applies bioengineering principles to improve and optimize cardiovascular interventions, both surgical and interventional, to improve the durability of the surgery and the patient outcomes. Interventions in the cardiovascular system are complex, as the surgical reconstruction or implanted material/device used for reconstruction must withstand the hemodynamic forces in each heartbeat for the rest of the patient’s life.
Since joining Emory in 2010, Padala’s research has focused on the biomechanical optimization of heart valve surgical techniques, delineating the shortcomings of current techniques and developing new ones. One such technique to repair the mitral valve that emerged from his research is currently being investigated in human clinical trials by his mentor, Robert A. Guyton, MD, funded by an NIH R01 grant to Padala.
Padala’s research has also resulted in a new interventional device and catheter to repair leaky mitral valves. This is achieved in a beating heart with a small catheter, without the need for traditional open-chest, arrested-heart surgery. This technology is currently in the pre-clinical testing phase, through grants from the Coulter Foundation and an NIH R01 grant. Padala’s most recent research has focused on understanding the impact of valve disease on heart failure and developing devices that can reduce myocardial wall stress, aided by grants from the American Heart Association.
Prior to joining Emory, Padala completed his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Georgia Tech, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering with a thesis on flow modeling in supersonic combustion engines from Osmania University in India.
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Joan Fernandez Esmerats won in the Ph.D. candidate category. His talk covered, “miR-483 silences UBE2C and prevents aortic valve calcification.”
Seung Yup Lee won in the postdoctoral category. His talk covered, “Non-invasive quantification of brain oxygenation and blood volume in mice and rats using near-infrared spectroscopy.”
Short description of Esmerats talk:
Calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD) is a significant cause of morbidity among the aging population and is a strong risk factor for additional cardiovascular events. Currently, there are no therapeutic options for CAVD other than valve replacement or repair due in part to the incomplete understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Our work has focused in studying a flow-sensitive miRNA, miR-483, that we previously discovered as a potential therapeutic target of CAVD. By conducting an in-silico analysis to discover potential flow-sensitive targets of miR-483 we discovered Ube2c, a key player in the ubiquitin pathway that has never been studied in cardiovascular disease. Our data has showed that miR-483 controls inflammation and calcification via silencing of Ube2c, by treating porcine aortic valves with miR-483 mimic we can significantly decrease aortic valve calcification.
Short description of Lee’s talk:
In brain research, small animal preclinical models provide a valuable platform to study disease mechanisms and to investigate novel therapeutic strategies. Measurements of cerebral oxygen saturation (SO2) and blood volume (CBV) in these animals would aid in the characterization of cerebrovascular-related brain disease progression and therapeutic effects. However, current imaging techniques assessing SO2 and CBV in mice and rats are expensive and typically require a transcranial window, thus limiting their suitability for longitudinal (weeks – months) monitoring. To overcome this limitation, we have developed a novel, non-invasive technique to quantify SO2 and CBV using small-separation frequency-domain near-infrared spectroscopy. We validate this new technique in vitro and in vivo using both tissue-simulating phantoms and neonatal rats. Unlike other techniques, our non-invasive approach provides quantitative measures of resting state oxygen saturation and blood volume without resection of scalp or thinning of the skull of, comparison between animals, longitudinal assessment within a given animal. We plan to employ this method to study preclinical models of sickle cell disease, traumatic brain injury and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy.
]]>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
Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986).
Writer: John Toon
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was first published on Dec. 26, 2017 at the Research Horizons website. It was revised as follows: a subtitle was added.
]]>What used to look like fleeting cacophonies of electrical impulses in the brain is looking to neuroscience researchers more and more like a sustained matrix of electronic percussion. For years, they have been analyzing patterns hidden in neurons’ electrical buzzes, and now, they have revealed in neurons continued stretches of orderly drumroll-like rumblings speckled with thrashing impulses, or spikes, that stimulate neighboring neurons.
“These signaling patterns last a lot longer than we thought,” said Annabelle Singer, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Singer led the in vivo study on mice together with Ed Boyden, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“We used to think that neurons would fire spikes to neighboring neurons for a few milliseconds, and that was all it would take to make the next neuron spike,” Singer said. “Now we’re seeing that you get these repeating patterns of rumblings and spikes sustained over hundreds of milliseconds, even close to a full second.”
That’s about how long it takes a human heart to complete one full beat.
The rumblings are jumbly fluctuations of electrical potential within a neuron before it fires a spike. The spikes are big electrical signals that communicate with neighboring neurons.
Taken together, the sum of the spikes in the brain make its circuitry compute so that we can walk, talk, and live life.
The researchers published their study on the newly discovered patterns in the Journal of Neuroscience. Official publication date is February 14, 2018, but the study is already available online without embargo. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Friends of the McGovern Institute, the New York Stem Cell Foundation, the MIT Intelligence Initiative, and the Lane Family.
The combination of observing the patterns’ percussion-like characteristics as well as their sustained lengths in the brains of awake mice make this a novel finding, Singer said. Some similar previous studies have been performed on mice that were anesthetized, which strongly altered brain activity when compared to awake brains.
Here are some questions and answers about the observed patterns and their significance.
The researchers recorded the activities of individual neurons in the hippocampus, which is located in the lower center of the brain, with a robotic device called a patch clamp. It’s a hollow glass needle one micron in diameter that latches onto a single neuron via suction and measures its electrical activity.
The researchers observed electrical rumblings, symbolized here by a drumroll. And they observed spikes, symbolized here by a cymbal crash.
Though the pattern of rumblings wasn’t uniform, it rose and fell like a drumroll undulating between softer and louder volumes. Spikes occurred much more rarely than drumbeats, but with notable timing.
“The spikes repeated in the same spots with high precision, so they weren’t just random,” Singer said. “They came around the peaks of rumblings, not always right on top of a peak but within a hair of it.”
It would be like a cymbal crash hitting not every time, but every few times the undulating drumroll topped a volume peak. And the drumroll-cymbal-crash patterns sustained themselves for surprisingly long periods.
“The time periods of activity that was structured like this were much longer than we expected,” Singer said. “People have shown sustained periods of signaling like this for 100 to 300 milliseconds before, but this appears to be the first time it’s been seen for 900 milliseconds (nearly a full second), and it may go on even longer.”
When one neuron fires a spike, that electronic impulse hits neighboring neurons and influences the receiving neurons’ rumblings until they fire spikes, too.
“A neuron receives these fast inputs. There are many different drumbeat patterns coming from many different neurons around it,” Singer said. “The patterns we observed in one neuron were being driven by other neurons firing into it like a whole drum section with short little bursts.”
At first sight, that may appear to be a cacophony, but if the jumbly patterns repeat, a consistent percussion of rumblings in the neuron may result.
“I think people have thought about neuron firings as random then suddenly organized in a concerted kind of way,” Singer said.
That could be pictured as many neurons behaving spastically until it was time to get to work, then abruptly firing as a group in near unison. This does appear to happen under the right circumstances, but as a prevailing picture of neuron firing, it may be lacking something.
“We’re starting to see more structure, very complex structure in what was thought to be randomness,” Singer said. “There is a lot of activity that is ongoing that is organized and that we need to understand, as well.”
The researchers examined cells important for memory, but further research will be required to know what role the observed firing patterns may have in its function. The researchers are also working together with engineers at Georgia Tech to develop new robotic patch clamping devices that listen simultaneously to the firings of neurons connected to one another.
Also READ our feature on neurology research: The Brain, Cosmos in the Cranium
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These researchers also collaborated on the study: Craig Forest, Ilya Kolb, and Michael Wang of Georgia Tech; Giovanni Talei Franzesi, and Edward S. Boyden of MIT, and Suhasa Kodandaramaiah previously at Georgia Tech and MIT and now at the University of Minnesota. The research was funded by the following of the National Institutes of Health sources: Computational Neuroscience Training (grant DA032466-02), a Director’s Pioneer Award (1DP1NS087724), a Transformative Award (1R01MH103910), and further NIH grants (1R01EY023173, 1R01NS067199, 1R01DA029639, 1U01MH106027 and 5R44NS08310803). It was also funded by the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative, which is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Mathematical Science (grant 10421134), and funding also came from the MIT Intelligence Initiative, the Lane Family, and the Friends of the McGovern Institute.
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1519-17.2017
]]>Writer: Ben Brumfield
@benbgatech
]]>The aim of the partnership agreement is to create a greater availability of research support services for faculty at all the Georgia research universities, to minimize duplication of resources, and to expand and maximize collaborative research opportunities.
“One of the key aims of the Georgia Research Alliance has always been to unite our research universities across the state in increasing biomedical innovation and economic development for the benefit of all Georgia citizens,” says GRA President C. Michael Cassidy. “Sharing these core research facilities, which often include expensive equipment and specially trained personnel, is an ideal opportunity to enhance team science while increasing research efficiency and saving time and money.”
In addition to Georgia Tech, the Georgia Research Alliance includes Augusta University, Clark Atlanta University, Emory University, Georgia State University, Mercer University, Morehouse School of Medicine, and the University of Georgia. Falling within that large umbrella are the 16 state-of-the-art core facilities administered through the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.
Steve Woodard, assistant director, core facilities, for the Petit Institute, says the agreement, "recognizes the need for collaboration and the exchange of both equipment and technical expertise between research universities in Georgia. From a Petit Institute perspective, it allows our cores to realize additional revenue while catalyzing collaborations between research groups across the state.”
Core research facilities at the eight institutions include imaging; immunotherapy and immune monitoring; chemical and biomolecular analysis; genomics, proteomics, lipodomics, glycomics and metabolomics; nuclear magnetic resonance; mass spectrometry; flow cytometry; transgenic mouse and animal models; electron microscopy; cancer tissue and pathology; cellular imaging; molecular modeling and drug design; confocal microscopy; DNA sequencing; neuroscience (behavioral studies); brain imaging; high containment lab; isotope studies; nanotechnology; biomarkers; flow cytometry; biostatistics; high performance computing; and clinical trials.
“Emory University and the University of Georgia have had a reciprocal agreement for core facilities for the past two years,” says Michael Zwick, assistant vice president for research in the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. "This partnership has worked so effectively, we decided to expand this strategy to include all the research universities across the state. We are very enthusiastic about the prospects for a highly successful partnership through our core facilities.”
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This award recognizes no more than 40 Georgia Tech faculty members who excel in the eyes of their students measured by their scores on end-of-course instructor evaluations. Only faculty members with a high response rate and a near-perfect evaluation score on the Course-Instructor Opinion Survey (CIOS) are considered and nominations are not allowed.
Kemp’s research focuses on robotics with an emphasis on mobile manipulation and human-robot interaction in the context of healthcare. He has adjunct appointments in the School of Interactive Computing and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is the director of the healthcare robotics lab and is training the next generation of engineering students in healthcare robotics technologies, so they can better understand the changing needs of patients, their caregivers and healthcare providers.
The award is given by Georgia Tech’s Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL). Award recipients will be recognized at the Center’s Celebrating Teaching Day on March 8, 2018.
]]>The IEEE Grade of Fellow 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. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.
Desai is being recognized “for contributions to medical and swarm robotics.” A BME faculty member since 2016, he also serves as associate director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines and as director of the newly launched Georgia Center for Medical Robotics. Desai’s research interests are primarily in image-guided surgical robotics, cancer diagnosis at the micro-scale, and rehabilitation robotics. Before joining Georgia Tech, Desai was a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Mukhopadhyay is being recognized “for contributions to energy-efficient and robust computing systems design.” An ECE faculty member since 2007, he leads the Gigascale Reliable Energy Efficient Nanosystem (GREEN) Lab, where he and his current team of 12 Ph.D. students develop smart machines that are able to generate usable information from real-time data for diverse applications - from self-powered sensors to mobile phones to high-performance servers. Mukhopadhyay’s team explores algorithmic principles to make these systems energy-efficient, robust, and secure, and pursue their experimental demonstration in silicon.
Romberg is being recognized “for contributions to compressive sensing.” An ECE faculty member since 2006, he is the School’s associate chair for Research and holds the Schlumberger Professorship. In addition, Romberg serves as associate director for the Center for Machine Learning. He conducts research that is on the interface between signal processing, applied harmonic analysis, and optimization. Romberg and his current team of six Ph.D. students are interested in both the mathematical theory and real-world implementation of algorithms to make difficult processing tasks much easier.
Sangston is being recognized “for contributions to coherent detection of radar signals in clutter.” He initially came to GTRI from the U.S Naval Research Laboratory in 1996. His research in target detection in difficult clutter environments from the mid-1990s up till the present time has been a fruitful source of ideas and motivation for many investigators pursuing advanced research on radar target detection problems throughout the world. He currently works in the Sensors and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory (SEAL), where he conducts research that seeks to combine advanced geometric and algebraic ideas to solve challenging radar signal processing problems.
The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000-plus members in 160 countries, the association is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power, and consumer electronics.
Dedicated to the advancement of technology, the IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 1,300 active industry standards. The association also sponsors or co-sponsors nearly 1,700 international technical conferences each year. To learn more about IEEE or the IEEE Fellow Program, please visit www.ieee.org.
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