Samuel Stupp

Lonnie Shea and Phillip Messersmith

In a word, revolutionary

Bionanotechnology institute targets advances in medicine

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 in Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, shifted his research to spinal cord injury and linked up with Samuel Stupp, Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science, Chemistry, and Medicine, to work in the field of regenerative medicine. Their innovative efforts, in which synthetic scaffolds are being developed to encourage nerve regeneration, involve chemistry labs in Evanston, where nanoscale materials are made, and labs in the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, where the biological work is done.

Collaborations such this are at the core of the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine (IBNAM), an interdisciplinary initiative bridging the frontiers of medicine, engineering, and science — as well as the University's two campuses. As a result, 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,” says 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.”

IBNAM is a partnership of the Feinberg School of Medicine, the McCormick School, and Weinberg College. 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.

Bottom-up research

“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,” says Stupp, who has briefed the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in Washington, D.C., on regenerative medicine, biomaterials, and nanotechnology. “IBNAM is an umbrella organization designed to promote, guide, and support research in bioengineering and nanoscience in advanced medicine. We are helping to develop a campuswide interdisciplinary community of investigators with interests in these areas. The institute focuses on faculty groups pursuing cutting-edge and technology-rich biomedical research. 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.

Scientists, engineers, and physicians on the Chicago and Evanston campuses already are tackling major medical problems, 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,” says 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.”

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.

Incubating ideas

To support efforts in these areas and others, the institute has established an incubator program to support innovative, high-risk research by teams of two or three investigators, ideally representing both campuses. IBNAM 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 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 as the basis, the second phase is to attract outside funding so the research can continue. Spearheading this activity is IBNAM's new assistant director for sponsored research, Gila Budescu. She assists faculty by identifying external funding targets that match faculty interests, submitting proposals and administering large funded projects.

A number of IBNAM incubator projects already have attracted such 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.

High hopes

“I have high hopes for IBNAM,” says Lonnie Shea, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at the McCormick School. “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, chair and professor of chemical and biological 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. Since blood stem cells are difficult to grow in culture, 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 different blood cell types. This work also could be beneficial for bone marrow and umbilical 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,” says 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. Last year Baxter Healthcare Corporation signed an agreement with IBNAM to collaborate on early discovery projects in nanoscience with the potential for great impact on medicine. Baxter committed $450,000 a year for five years to fund as many as three postdoctoral researchers and up to four annual incubator projects.

IBNAM will occupy 1 1/2 floors in the new Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center in Chicago when it is completed in 2005. The institute's facilities will feature wet chemistry capabilities for making molecules, clean rooms for researchers interested in electronic devices, biological labs for cell culturing, computational and visualization facilities, laser optics, and imaging equipment including advanced microscopes. All of the facilities will be shared by faculty throughout the University to foster collaboration.

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