Breaking Through Walls in Research

by Dawn McMullan

By breaking through traditional walls that isolate researchers in different fields, the Institute of Biomedical Sciences and Technology is opening doors for life-altering medical and scientific breakthroughs.

Consider the Research

Dr. Steve Goodman's laboratory was successful in discovering the cause of the irreversibly sickled cell (pictured), which is present in people who suffer from sickle cell anemia.

Consider the research involved in creating better cancer drugs, helping the elderly drive longer, or keeping sickle cell anemia patients alive longer.

A chemist can’t do any of this alone. Neither can a biologist, a computer scientist, a physicist. But put their skills together, as UTD has done in creating the Institute of Biomedical Sciences and Technology (IBMST), and amazing things can happen.

We often hear about ‘‘research breakthroughs,’’ but sometimes those are limited in scope because of walls within the research field that separate different disciplines. The IBMST started in January 2003 with the intent to break through some of those walls by merging the work of research scientists in many fields.

At first the IBMST had 11 faculty members, all from UTD. At that time, the Institute’s director, Dr. Steve Goodman, hoped to eventually have 50 faculty members from places other than UTD and U. T. Southwestern Medical Center. Now he has 63 faculty members from nine universities from Dallas to Brownsville. In addition, the Institute’s 18-member advisory board, led by Stephen Fluckiger, includes two Nobel laureates (Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid and Dr. Russell Hulse), as well as a former astronaut (Dr. Mary Ellen Weber), and Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson.

The IBMST’s official mission is to ‘‘integrate the biological, physical, cognitive, and engineering sciences to enhance human health and quality of life.’’ To meet this goal, many disciplines must work together—molecular and cell biologists, chemists, physicists, nanotechnologists, mathematicians, statisticians, engineers, computer scientists, neuroscientists, hematologists, and social scientists.

This is the future of scientific research, according to Goodman, who was chosen to serve as editor-in-chief of Experimental Biology & Medicine beginning in July 2006.

‘‘It occurred to me around the year 2000 that to do the type of science I wanted to be involved with was going to require large teams of scientists that went beyond the type of faculty you normally find in a medical school,’’ Goodman says. ‘‘Normally, you have your biochemists, microbiologists, physiologists, and pharmacologists within a medical school, but you don’t have your chemists and your physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists. I wanted to get myself into a position where I would be surrounded by the type of multidisciplinary expertise that could be applied to biomedical research.’’

That’s what the IBMST has created, and it isn’t common in the academic world. Although that is changing—slowly—and UTD is at the forefront of that change.

‘‘I think this particular concept is unique because we spread not only over disciplines, but also over institutions and medical schools that cover the entire state of Texas,’’ Goodman says. ‘‘We are ahead of the curve in every way.’’

For example, the Institute has put in a grant proposal to create interdisciplinary graduate education in the areas of biotechnology, bioengineering, and bio-imaging. The classes would be offered by telecommunication, but in real time, so a student could interact with their professors and classmates, independent of campus location. In addition, students would use electronic lab notebooks to do their thesis research, allowing UTD professors to review the notebook and have conversations with the students regardless of location.

Carbon nanotubes like the one above (purple) coated with peptides (green and orange) have many applications. Scientists at UTD and U. T. Southwestern are developing ways to kill cancer cells with them.

At its core, the IBMST has four primary focus groups, chosen carefully when the Institute opened.

‘‘It’s nice to have this very broad range of scientific expertise, but you don’t want the folks to be too diffuse in focus,’’ Goodman says. ‘‘We decided on four different focus areas. They are not set in stone. As research changes in the future, we may add, we may delete.’’

Currently, the four focus groups are:

Diseases of the Aging Brain
Blood Disorders
Molecular Diagnostics and Biomolecular Technology
Bioengineering, Security, and Defense

Diseases of the Aging Brain

Diseases of the Aging Brain group is led by Dr. Sandi Chapman and Dr. Santosh D’Mello. This focus group is studying such questions as how the normal brain thinks and remembers; how aging, disease, or injury impacts this ability; how to strengthen and measure brain function in disease and health; and where, when, and how brain cells die.

‘‘This cell death can be a normal and abnormal process,’’ Chapman says. ‘‘By bringing together our two areas of expertise, as Dr. D’Mello finds markers for brain cell death, I can conduct studies of cognitive function to see how his biological markers are related to behaviors that affect everyday life, and how different medications may impact this process. In turn, as we find genetic factors associated with certain cognitive profiles and brain disease, we may also address how brain cell death is altered in these syndromes.’’

The work this focus group is doing will immediately impact the problem of diminishing motor skills—especially those used while driving a car—for the elderly. Federal funds are available, which IBMST hopes to get, to create a human motor performance laboratory to research the many skills required for driving, such as speed perception, correction, and reaction time.

‘‘Driving skills are predicted to be one of the most neglected yet deadly disabilities and societal concerns likely to emerge [as the aged] population increases so dramatically over the next two decades,’’ Chapman says. ‘‘The goal is not so much to say when someone should no longer be driving, but to see if subskills can be strengthened in healthy aging to help older citizens keep driving safely longer.’’

Blood Disorders

One area of study for the Blood Disorders focus group, led by Goodman, is sickle cell anemia. The disease is of particular interest to Goodman, who has spent much of his career researching it. What has baffled scientists for decades is that even though everyone with sickle cell anemia has the same genetic defect, some have many problems with the disease and die before the age of 10 while others have relatively few problems and live until they are in their 70s.

‘‘If everybody has the same genetic defect, why is there this great variance in terms of clinical severity?’’ Goodman asks. ‘‘This is perhaps the most important question left in this research field.’’

The Institute’s ability to use the expertise of those who research red and white blood cells and plasma, those who specialize in protein biochemistry, proteomics, hematology, bio-statistics, and computer science is key. By bringing all of these disciplines together, there is hope for finding an answer to this mysterious question.

‘‘It’s the type of project that would be absolutely impossible if you had a single-investigator lab working on sickle cell disease,’’ Goodman says. ‘‘This is the type of study that needs a multidisciplinary team.’’

Molecular Diagnostics and Biomolecular Technology

Molecular Diagnostics and Biomolecular Technology group is led by Dr. Steve Levene, who has a background in chemistry and mathematics with major research interests in nucleic acids and protein-DNA interactions. He and his group are trying to better recreate the intracellular state of DNA outside of the body so they can more effectively target drugs, such as anti-cancer drugs.

The problem has been that human DNA inside cells is quite compacted and coiled like a telephone cord. Recreating this state of DNA—and determining the implications of DNA defects on diseases like cancer—has been tricky. To better accomplish this, Levene turned to colleagues outside the biomedical field for help. Many of the latest methods for characterizing anticancer drugs involve attaching DNA molecules to a solid surface, like a glass microscope slide.

‘‘A major problem in this field is if you want to have a way of addressing a specific sequence on the surface, you have to have a way of knowing where you would put a particular molecule,’’ Levene explains. ‘‘This is not expertise I have, and yet we need it to do what we want to accomplish. So there is a faculty member in electrical engineering whose expertise is modifying surfaces. He can, with very high precision, create certain surface chemistries that will enable us to attach DNA molecules at specific locations.’’

In the next three to five years, Levene’s research could make great strides toward better drugs for diseases like cancer, all made possible by IBMST, which provided a place for this uncommon medical and engineering collaboration.

‘‘If you want to design better drugs, you need a better form of DNA to work with,’’ he says. ‘‘Eventually, the goal will be the design of new, more specific drugs for diseases like cancer, the development of drugs that have potentially fewer side effects. What you want to have in cancer therapy is very, very high levels of specificity because you want to minimize the negative impact on healthy cells.’’

Bioengineering, Security, and Defense

This image of a protein-bound DNA molecule, visualized by using an atomic-force microscope, may help scientists learn to target anti-cancer drugs and other medications more effectively.

Dr. Rocky Draper and Dr. Subbarayan Venkatesan lead Bioengineering, Security, and Defense group, which forms a bridge between researchers in chemistry and those in biology. ‘‘So often the two fields don’t spend enough time interacting,’’ Draper says.

For example, to improve cancer drugs, researchers are trying to specifically target nanostructured materials to cells. These nanostructured materials can absorb energy from certain wavelengths of light and convert it to heat. Thus, shining the right type of light on the cancer cells that have taken up the nanostructured materials heats up the cells. And when they heat up, cancer cells are killed. All that takes the expertise of a nanotechnologist, a chemist, and a biologist.

The work of this focus group goes far beyond the cellular level. It brings together researchers from several disciplines so they can integrate biomaterials research with engineering and computer science in ways that can affect people in society directly. The group’s aim is to create new technologies that not only can sense things like cancer cells, but also have other applications in homeland security and defense. For instance, combining research in nanotechnology, computer networking, and biosensors could help develop a communication system that enhances society’s emergency preparedness.

A Shared Playing Field

Each of these groups integrates different specializations to work toward a different set of goals, but altogether they represent one major shift in academic research.

‘‘As science matures and easier problems get picked off, the problems that are left are usually the problems that require a lot of interaction and cooperation,’’ Draper says. ‘‘We come up with ideas of how to do things that couldn’t be done without combining backgrounds.’’

The IBMST is a first step to building bridges between different fields so they can cooperate and interact. While academia is slow to change, and the scientific research realm is no exception, the change is happening. The problem historically has been that higher education requires students to study such a narrow field, they don’t learn much about other related fields.

‘‘When they focus so narrowly, they lose the ability to talk to one another,’’ Draper says. ‘‘When someone in physics tries to talk to someone who is in biology, it’s like someone speaking Hindi talking to someone who speaks Russian. You have to spend a fair amount of time teaching people in these different disciplines to communicate. Sometimes they’re talking about the same thing but have different words for it.’’

To further this collaboration, it is the job of Dr. Da Hsuan Feng, UTD’s vice president for research and economic development, to make sure the IBMST gets the funding it needs.

‘‘In the end, a vision without funding is hallucination,’’ says Feng, who makes sure the Institute’s projects are of the highest scientific quality and looks for funding opportunities, including working with members of Congress.

What the scientists at the Institute are doing sets the tone for what UTD as a whole is doing, Feng says. ‘‘If UTD has any interest in becoming a world-class university of the 21st century, this is what it needs to do.’’

And none of it would be possible without great leadership, adds Goodman: "The IBMST faculty are all indebted to former UTD President Dr. Franklyn Jenifer for his creative vision in establishing the Institute, and to our current President Dr. David Daniel for appreciating its importance in catalyzing UTD’s emergence as a top-tier research university.’’

Editor's Note

Dawn McMullan is a freelance writer who is a frequent contributor to UTD Network.

Breaking Through Walls in Research” appears in volume 8, second edition, of the Winter 2006 issue of UTD Network.

This is the first article in an ongoing series: The Human Side of Science. These series will explore the human impact of UTD's scientific work.

Updated: 2006-10-30