Seeds of Innovation

Three interdisciplinary teams with wide-ranging goals at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience have gotten off to a fast start on pioneering explorations in biotechnology, thanks to a homegrown program that supports innovative early-stage research.

The winning teams of the 2014 Petit Bioengineering and Bioscience Collaborative Seed Grant are working to improve the prediction of disease (Hang Lu and Patrick McGrath), design better drug delivery strategies to fight cancer (M.G. Finn and Susan Thomas), and unveil (and better understand) the processes through which cell receptor signaling is initiated (Robert Dickson and Cheng Zhu).

Each of these fledgling collaborative teams was awarded $100,000 for two years to kick-start new research en route to long-range aspirations.

“The seed grant program is fantastic, because it supports bold ideas that don’t have preliminary data,” says Lu, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “Patrick and I have been wanting to work on this particular idea of evolving model systems to study multigenic diseases. We are extremely happy to have the support to pursue it now. We’re hoping to garner preliminary data to seek NIH funding in the long run.”

The program, now in its third year, gets to the heart of the Petit Institute mission, as it encourages a multidisciplinary approach to cutting-edge research, with each team bringing together an engineer and a scientist in a collaborative research endeavor, addressing complex biotech challenges by combining the distinct strengths of each lab. For example, as Lu and McGrath (assistant professor in the School of Biology) explain in their proposal, “Technologically and conceptually, what we propose here has never been done before. This pilot is truly enabled by the genomics know-how of the McGrath lab and the technological advancement of the Lu lab, which is a unique combination not found elsewhere.”

By applying a directed evolutionary approach, they expect to eventually be able to identify interacting genes that can be used as biomarkers for lifespan and age-related diseases, “and also as synergistic drug targets that can be used to ameliorate side-effects by lowering dose-levels of pharmaceuticals.”

Zhu, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, he and Dickson, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry), are “trying to develop methods that allow in situ measurements of protein-protein interactions in live cells,” says Zhu. “The lacking of such methods hinders the development of a broad field in biology.” Currently, no method allows this kind of crucial measurement, Zhu and Dickson say in their proposal.

Meanwhile, Finn (professor and chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry) and Thomas (assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering) are working on a project with what they say will ultimately “impact the drug delivery field by introducing a new chemical means to temporally control drug release,” according to their proposal.

“In some ways, this approach runs counter to the prevailing drive in the field toward ever more sophisticated ways to respond to environmental cues,” the researchers say, adding, “While such technologies are undoubtedly valuable, there is also value in a cleavage mechanism that one can use like an alarm clock.” Stretching the analogy a bit further, they describe an alarm clock in which the start and end times, and intensity (and composition of the alarm) are all programmable.

“Results from this study,” Finn and Thomas say in their proposal, “will form the basis of numerous collaborative grant applications and a long-term collaboration between two labs with distinct but synergistic expertise aimed towards the design and effective drug delivery strategies for cancer therapy.”

Funding for the seed grants comes mainly from the Petit Institute’s endowment as well as contributions from the College of Sciences and the College of Engineering. Each research team receives $50,000 a year for two years, with the second year of funding contingent on submission of an external collaborative grant proposal.