Sridhar gives talk at Northeast Bioengineering Conference at Brown

Date: 04/07/2008

The following article was featured in the April 2008 edition of Providence Business News.

To really understand nanomaterials, engineer them and put them to work fighting disease and saving lives, you need to have technology that has been developed in recent years, said Srinivas Sridhar, physics department chair at Northeastern University.

“If you make something, you have to be able to see it,” Sridhar told his audience at the Northeast Bioengineering Conference on Saturday, held at Brown University.

For all we know, nanomaterials may have been put into use for ages. The ancient Indians, for example, developed a whole scheme of medicine based on gold and smoke that uses nanoparticles.

But what has enabled nanotechnology to flourish, Sridhar said, is the combination of major advances in microscopy, computation and nanofabrication, that allow scientists to see the particles they are working with, design them on a nano scale and build them.

Combine those advances, in turn, with huge advances in genomics – accelerated by the Human Genome Project – and cutting-edge work in proteomics, which looks at how the body works on a molecular scale, protein by protein, Sridhar said, and you have the basis for today’s nanomedicine “revolution.”

Sridhar, who is also vice provost for research at Northeastern, heads a National Science Foundation-backed IGERT Nanomedicine Center there, and he illustrated how the field is transforming medicine by providing examples from the center’s own work.

Nanomedicine is a “very interdisciplinary field,” Sridhar said, and it’s still taking shape, a “new paradigm” in medicine that has drawn multimillion-dollar investments by the U.S. and other governments around the world.

Scientists start by identifying specific genes involved in diseases, then look at the biological processes, at the molecular level, linked to each disease, and identify potential therapies. Nanotechnology can help at every stage, from diagnosis – detecting disease when it’s just beginning, rather than when it’s fullblown and harder to cure – to imaging to targeted drug delivery and real-time assessments of the efficacy of therapies, Sridhar said.

Only selected materials can be used in nanomedicine because of toxicity concerns, Sridhar noted, but there are still plenty of “biocompatible” options, from gold particles to liposomes and polymers. And along with particles, there are nanosurfaces of great value to medicine, such as those being used on drugeluting stents.

When using metals, scientists are also exploiting the value of magnetism in conjunction with nanomaterials, Sridhar noted, using magnetic fields and electrical currents to draw nanoparticles to the specific places in the cells where they are needed to fight disease. That could be particularly valuable in fighting cancer, he noted, and there are numerous projects at Northeastern and elsewhere that focus on that field.

Sridhar’s presentation was the first of several lectures on cutting-edge technologies.

Arto Nurrmiko, the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Engineering and Physics at Brown, spoke about new implantable brain sensors being developed at the university.

Prof. Paul D. Calvert, chair of the materials and textile department at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, spoke about using ink-jet printing technology to “print” stem cells and proteins, the fundamental building blocks of organisms and the primary constituents of hair, tendons, muscle, skin and cartilage.

Another speaker, Gavin Braithwaite, a vice president of research at the Cambridge Polymer Group in Boston, spoke about a new, injectable treatment for lower-back pain that could spare many patients from surgery. Other speakers focused on new techniques for studying three-dimensional cellular “microenvironments,” new kinds of nanotubes and nanotube-based cellular probes; and a wide range of other highly specialized new technologies.

In addition, there were dozens of short presentations on research being conducted at universities across the Northeast, and there were poster displays highlighting other projects, as well as opportunities for students in these fields to get together.

This is the first time that Brown has hosted the annual Northeast Bioengineering Conference, which has grown substantially in recent years and is considered an opportunity for professional development, networking and especially learning about the latest science.

The Northeast Bioenginerring Conference was organized by Thomas Webster, associate professor of engineering and the orthopedics at Brown. For more information about the event, go to www.nebec.org.