Barbara Boyan, the Price Gilbert, Jr. Chair in Tissue Engineering in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, is one of 66 new members and ten foreign associates elected to the academy.

Boyan is known widely for her work in bone and cartilage biology in the fields of orthopaedics, plastic and reconstructive surgery and oral health, with specific emphasis on the role of sex in determining how cells respond to steroid hormones and to biomaterials used in medical devices. She is also an entrepreneur and has seen her inventions move from the design stage to use in patients with musculoskeletal pathologies.

“Barbara’s election to the NAE is a recognition of her scientific knowledge, her pioneering work in translational research and the high esteem in which she is held by her peers,” said Gary S. May, dean of the College of Engineering. “This is a significant recognition for one of our distinguished faculty members and is a testament to the talented faculty we have at Georgia Tech.”

Boyan is associate dean for research and innovation in the Georgia Tech College of Engineering and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. In addition, she serves as executive director of the Translational Research Institute for Biomedical Engineering & Science. Boyan is the director of the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Laboratory for Craniofacial Plastic Surgery Research, the Center for Advanced Bioengineering for Soldier Survivability and the Center for Pediatric Healthcare Technology Innovation.

Boyan is also a Fellow of the International Team for Implantology, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Institute for Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, as well as past president of the American Association for Dental Research, past secretary/treasurer of the Orthopaedic Research Society and founder of several bio-related companies.

William (Bill) George, who earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering in 1964, joins Boyan as a new NAE member. George was recognized by NAE for applying engineering principles to manufacturing to advance healthcare. Currently, George is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, where he has taught leadership courses since 2004. He is the author of four best-selling books. George is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Medtronic.

“We are also delighted that Georgia Tech alumnus, Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, was also recognized for inclusion in the NAE,” said May. “Bill transformed the healthcare industry while at Medtronic. He continues now through his philanthropy at Tech and scholarships to help educate the next generation of engineering leaders.”

 According to NAE, membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature,” and to the “pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

A science fiction fantasy? Not necessarily.

Theregenerative power of tissues and organs declines as we age. The modern daystem cell hypothesis of aging suggests that living organisms are as old as are itstissue specific or adult stem cells. Therefore, an understanding of themolecules and processes that enable human adult stem cells to initiateself-renewal and to divide, proliferate and then differentiate in order torejuvenate damaged tissue might be the key to regenerative medicine and an eventualcure for many age-related diseases. A research groupled by the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, conducted the study thatpinpoints what is going wrong with the biological clock underlying the limited division ofhuman adult stem cells as they age.

“Wedemonstrated that we were able to reverse the process of aging for human adultstem cells by intervening with the activity of non-protein coding RNAs originated fromgenomic regions once dismissed as non-functional  ‘genomic junk’,” said Victoria Lunyak, associate professor at the Buck Institutefor Research on Aging.

Adultstem cells are important because they help keep human tissues healthy byreplacing cells that have gotten old or damaged. They’re also multipotent,which means that an adult stem cell can grow and replace any number of bodycells in the tissue or organ they belong to. However, just as the cells inthe liver, or any otherorgan, can get damaged over time, adult stem cells undergo age-related damage. And when this happens, the bodycan’t replace damaged tissue as well as it once could, leading to a host of diseasesand conditions. But if scientists can find a way to keep these adult stem cellsyoung, they could possibly use these cells to repair damaged heart tissue aftera heart attack; heal wounds; correct metabolic syndromes; produce insulin forpatients with type 1 diabetes; cure arthritis and osteoporosis and regeneratebone.

Theteam began by hypothesizing that DNA damage in the genome of adult stem cells wouldlook very different from age-related damage occurring in regular body cells. They thoughtso because body cells are known to experience a shortening of the caps found atthe ends of chromosomes, known as telomeres. But adult stem cells are known tomaintain their telomeres. Much of the damage in aging is widely thought to be aresult of losing telomeres. So there must be different mechanismsat play that arekey to explaining how aging occurs in these adult stem cells, they thought.

Researchersused adult stem cells from humans and combined experimental techniques withcomputational approaches to study the changes in the genome associated withaging.  They compared freshly isolated human adult stem cells from young individuals, which canself-renew, to cellsfrom the same individuals that were subjected to prolonged passaging inculture. This accelerated model of adult stem cell aging exhausts the regenerativecapacity of the adult stem cells. Researchers looked at the changes in genomic sites that accumulateDNA damage in both groups.

“Wefound the majority of DNA damage and associated chromatin changes that occurredwith adult stem cell aging were due to parts of the genome known as retrotransposons,”said King Jordan, associate professor in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech.

“Retroransposonswere previously thought to be non-functional and were even labeled as ‘junk DNA’, but accumulating evidenceindicates these elements play an important role in genome regulation,” headded.

Whilethe young adult stem cells were able to suppress transcriptional activity ofthese genomic elements and deal with the damage to the DNA, older adult stem cells werenot able to scavenge this transcription. New discovery suggests that this event is deleteriousfor the regenerativeability of stem cells and triggers a process known as cellular senescence.

“Bysuppressing the accumulation of toxic transcripts from retrotransposons, wewere able to reverse the process of human adult stem cell aging in culture,”said Lunyak.

“Furthermore,by rewinding the cellular clock in this way, we were not only able torejuvenate ’aged’ human stem cells, but to our surprise we were able to resetthem to an earlier developmental stage, by up-regulating the “pluripotency factors” – the proteinsthat are critically involved in the self-renewal of undifferentiated embryonicstem cells.” she said.

Nextthe team plans to use further analysis to validate the extent to which therejuvenated stem cells may be suitable for clinical tissue regenerativeapplications.

Thestudy was conducted by a team with members from the Buck Institute for Researchon Aging, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California,San Diego, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Memorial Sloan-Kettering CancerCenter, International Computer Science Institute, Applied Biosystems andTel-Aviv University.

Citation:
Inhibitionof activated pericentromeric SINE/Alu repeat transcription in senescent human
adult stem cells reinstates self-renewal.  Cell Cycle, Volume 10, Issue 17, September 1, 2011

Written byDavid Terraso, Georgia Tech/Kris Rebillot, Buck Institute

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Called PneumoniaCheck, the device created at Georgia Tech is a solution to the problem of diagnosing pneumonia, which is a major initiative of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Pneumonia, an inflammation of the lungs, kills about 2.4 million people each year. The problem is particularly devastating in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, where a child dies of pneumonia every 15 seconds.

Developed by mechanical engineering students, graduate business students and faculty at Georgia Tech, PneumoniaCheck will be commercially launched this month to healthcare professionals through the startup company, MD Innovate Inc.

“Georgia Tech created a simple and new device to detect the lung pathogens causing pneumonia, “ said David Ku, Georgia Tech Regents’ Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Lawrence P. Huang Chair Professor for Engineering Entrepreneurship in the College of Management, and Professor of Surgery at Emory University. “It has the potential to save more lives than any other medical device.”

Last year, Ku was asked by the head of virology at the CDC to develop a quick and economical way to diagnose pneumonia, particularly in developing nations where it is a leading cause of death among children.

Ku challenged a group of mechanical engineering and bioengineering graduate students to develop an accurate device for diagnosing pneumonia. Current sampling methods using the mouth and nose are only 40 percent effective. The samples are typically contaminated by bacteria in the mouth, which leads to misdiagnosis and an incorrect prescription of antibiotics.

In developing nations, many children with respiratory infections fail to receive adequate care, and the overuse of antibiotics has led to an increase in drug-resistant bacteria. An accurate, easy-to-use and widely available new diagnostic test could improve identification of bacterial respiratory infection in children, reducing the inappropriate use of antibiotics and the long-term negative impacts of drug resistance, according to a recent article in Nature titled “Reducing the global burden of acute lower respiratory infections in children: The contributions of new diagnostics.”
As a Tech graduate student, Tamera Scholz and her peers developed the solution – PneumoniaCheck.

The device contains a plastic tube with a mouthpiece. A patient coughs into the device to fill up a balloon-like upper airway reservoir before the lung aerosols go into a filter.  Using fluid mechanics, PneumoniaCheck separates the upper airway particles of the mouth from the lower airway particles coming from the lungs.

“It’s interesting because it’s so simple,” said Scholz (M.S. ’10 Mechanical Engineering), who is now an engineer for Newell Rubbermaid. “It’s not a fancy contraption. It’s a device that patients cough into and through fluid mechanics it separates upper and lower airway aerosols. Through each iteration, it got simpler.  … I like that I will be able to see it make a difference in my lifetime.”

Once the device was developed, Taylor Bronikowski and a group of Georgia Tech M.B.A. students from the College of Management started developing a business plan for PneumoniaCheck that starts locally and grows globally.  They used the device as a test case to develop a Triple Bottom Line company in India that could result in financial profits, environmental sustainability and social benefits, such as jobs and healthcare.

“Our goal is to provide better medicine at a cost savings to patients and hospitals,” Bronikowski said. “We wanted a worldwide solution, so patients in developing nations can afford it.”
Bronikowksi, Ku and Sarah Ku formed the startup company, MD Innovate Inc., in 2010 to manufacture the device in large quantities and organize distribution and commercialization. The device is now being used in pneumonia studies at Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta and the Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center, Ku said.

The FDA has cleared PneumoniaCheck for sale in the U.S. The device is licensed but its patent is pending.  The company will start selling PneumoniaCheck in the U.S. in January and it could hit other countries in two years, Ku said.

“It’s a great feeling, working on something that has the potential to save thousands of lives,” Bronikowski said.

On the horizon, Ku and future Georgia Tech graduate students will be developing a simple and effective method for diagnosing pneumonia in regions without healthcare facilities or basic infrastructure.

Made from beautifully fabricated steel and eight mobile arms, medusai can play percussion and strings with human musicians, dance with human dancers, and move in time to multiple human observers.

It uses AI-driven computer vision to know what human observers are doing and responds accordingly through snake gestures, music, and light. Gil Weinberg, the director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology, knows it’s unsettling. Wienberg is also a faculty member of the Institute for People and Technology.

Read the full story at Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology.