April 8, 2004

Tackling health care problems with technology

Institute for Bioengineering and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine connects physicians, engineers and scientists who are pushing medicine forward in innovative ways

By Megan Fellman

After his daughter was paralyzed in a skiing accident in 2001, John Kessler, Benjamin and Virginia T. Boshes Professor and chair of the department of neurology, shifted his research to spinal cord injury and linked up with Samuel I. Stupp, Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and of Chemistry and a professor of medicine, in the field of regenerative medicine.

Guillermo Ameer, assistant professor of biomedical engineering.

The innovative work, in which synthetic scaffolds are being developed to encourage nerve regeneration, involves chemistry labs in Evanston, where nanoscale materials are made, and labs in the Feinberg School of Medicine, where the biological work is done.

Collaborations like this are at the core of the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine (IBNAM), an interdisciplinary initiative bridging the frontiers of medicine, engineering and science, as well as the University’s two campuses. As understanding of molecular biology expands and new developments in nanotechnology emerge from the lab, Northwestern is in a strong position to push medicine forward in new ways.

“There are many important problems in health care that the public would like to see solved,” said Stupp, director of IBNAM. “Detecting and stopping cancer at earlier stages, targeting drug delivery to avoid harmful side effects, regenerating tissues and organs, preventing diseases such as Parkinson’s and diabetes, and slowing down the aging process are a few. To succeed, we need to create new partnerships between medicine and technology.”

Headquartered on the Chicago campus, IBNAM is a partnership of the Feinberg School, the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The University established the institute in 2000 to develop new tools and technologies for clinical applications and to ensure Northwestern’s leadership position in biomedical science and engineering.

Samuel Stupp, IBNAM director and Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and of Chemistry and a professor of medicine.

“I’ve always been of the opinion that excellence in research at universities needs to be realized from the bottom up, not from the top down,” said Stupp, who twice briefed the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in Washington, D.C., first on regenerative medicine and biomaterials and then on nanotechnology.

“IBNAM is an umbrella organization designed to promote, guide and support research in bioengineering and nanoscience in advanced medicine. Acting as a catalyst, we are helping to develop a campus-wide interdisciplinary community of investigators with interests in these areas,” said Stupp. “The institute focuses on faculty groups pursuing cutting-edge and technology-rich biomedical research, driven by the spirit of a bottom-up approach to research excellence. This approach is vital to our efforts of attracting the very best new faculty to Northwestern.”

IBNAM members work collaboratively with other interdisciplinary research centers, among them the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, the Institute of Neuroscience and the Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly. IBNAM also is working to establish relationships with Northwestern’s affiliated teaching hospitals, as well as with biomedical industries.

“Northwestern is particularly poised to embrace nanotechnology in the areas of cancer and genetics,” said J. Larry Jameson, Irving S. Cutter Professor and chair of the Feinberg School’s department of medicine. “When completed, the Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center will house IBNAM, along with the Cancer Center and the Center for Genetic Medicine. The proximity, coupled with the scientific opportunities, is a powerful formula for research and discovery that can be translated into medicine.”

Scientists, engineers and physicians from the Chicago and Evanston campuses already are tackling major medical problems together, with particular emphasis on regenerative medicine, the creation of nanoscale gene chips (probes that identify genes and mutations) and targeted drug delivery.

“Future nanoscale gene chips could contain 10,000 times more information than conventional gene chips,” said Mark Hersam, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, who is working on this problem. “The hope is that one day you could give a blood sample and find out your entire genetic code the same day.” The Human Genome Project, which decoded one genome, took 10 years.

IBNAM members also are addressing a major concern with drug therapy: the negative side effects that often accompany medication’s curative powers. The development of nanostructures that travel to specific tissues to deliver drugs could help eliminate toxic effects, such as those associated with chemotherapy.

To support efforts in these areas and others, the institute has established an incubator program for innovative, high-risk research by teams of two or three investigators, ideally representing both campuses. This critical funding helps investigators collect the preliminary data that is often necessary to secure external funding from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Since the incubator program was launched two years ago, 80 investigators have been involved in 34 projects ranging from “Microtube Assemblies for Artificial Lungs” to “Design of Smart Microparticles and Nanoparticles for Advanced Medicine.” Of these, 22 have been joint efforts of faculty on the Chicago and Evanston campuses.

With IBNAM-funded research projects under way, the second phase is to attract outside funding so the research can continue. Spearheading this activity is IBNAM’s assistant director for sponsored research, Gila Budescu. The third member of the IBNAM staff, she last year joined Stupp and administrator Pat Persaud, who has been with the institute since the beginning.

Phillip Messersmith, associate professor of biomedical engineering.

Budescu assists faculty by identifying external funding targets that match faculty interests, submitting proposals and administering large funded projects. She will expand IBNAM’s Web site (www.ibnam.northwestern.edu) to include a wealth of online resources, making it an integral and dynamic part of the institute.

Last summer, IBNAM submitted a major Bioengineering Research Partnership application to NIH seeking support for collaborative work on regenerative scaffold technologies for the central nervous system and diabetes. Regenerative medicine is at the proposal’s core, with a special emphasis on engineering and the development of new technologies. The initiative brings together seven labs from both Northwestern campuses with expertise in clinical medicine, molecular self-assembly and scaffold technologies.

A number of IBNAM incubator projects already have attracted external funding. One, which could lead to the creation of egg banks so that women undergoing chemotherapy could preserve their reproductive potential, was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Teresa Woodruff, associate professor of neurobiology and physiology, and Lonnie Shea, assistant professor of chemical engineering, are working with Ralph Kazer, M.D., associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and an infertility specialist, to develop strategies to provide the synthetic environment needed to support the egg maturation process. Mature eggs that are frozen cannot be used for infertility treatments because they are destroyed in the freezing process. Immature eggs can be frozen, but they need an artificial environment that allows them to mature to the point where they can be fertilized successfully.

“I have high hopes for IBNAM,” said Shea. “I am interested in working on problems with both clinical and academic significance. There is excitement over what IBNAM can do because it brings people with different expertise together to solve these important problems.”

William Miller, professor of chemical engineering, and Phillip Messersmith, associate professor of biomedical engineering, are addressing another problem: the need to expand the number of blood stem cells available for cell and gene therapies. Blood stem cells are difficult to grow in culture — they differentiate into the various blood cell types before large numbers of stem cells can be produced.

Miller and Messersmith are developing an artificial environment that mimics what stem cells experience in the body, with the goal of allowing the cells to divide with no loss of their potential to form the different blood cell types. This work also could be beneficial for bone marrow and cord blood transplants and is being supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. (Bone marrow and umbilical cord blood are sources of stem cells.)

“We brought our ideas together with IBNAM acting as a catalyst,” said Miller. “While the incubator funding is not enough to sustain a project long-term, it is enough to get investigators started, which is very valuable. These collaborative projects can really pay off for the University.”

Other external support has come from the biomedical industry. In 2002 Baxter Healthcare Corporation signed an agreement with IBNAM to collaborate on early discovery projects in nanoscience. Baxter committed $450,000 per year for five years to fund as many as three postdoctoral researchers and up to four annual incubator projects focused on submicroscopic applications with the potential for great impact on medicine.

“Interdisciplinary research requires ‘multilingual’ scientists, engineers and clinicians who can make nontraditional connections,” said Stupp, who loves to work at the increasingly growing interface between biology, physical sciences and engineering. “That’s what this institute is all about.”