Profession Notes

A unique MD-PhD program designed to produce physicians who can use engineering know-how to solve medical problems enrolled its first student at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland this fall. The program is expected to eventually accept 70 to 80 students a year who will have training to become physician/ engineers. About 10 students a year are initially expected to be admitted to the program, which will take seven years to complete, according to university officials. Patrick Crago, who chairs the CWRU Department of Biomedical Engineering, says students will focus on the creation of novel devices or platform technologies for diagnosis and treatment of patients, rather than on basic biomedical science. "I have found no other MD-PhD program with a specific biomedical engineering focus," Crago says. The medical school will fund the physician training and research faculty members will support the dissertation phase with research grants until it secures program-specific money from local or national funding organizations. Nathan Berger, dean of the CWRU medical school, says the new program is timely because "technological advances and the development of new devices will play increasingly important roles in our healthcare system." He added that the program will put CWRU and Cleveland "on the leading edge of medical technology and development." Berger says graduates of the new program will be prepared for careers in the biotechnology and biomedical device industries, as well as for academic careers in biomedical engineering or clinical medicine.

The National Science Foundation has awarded $65 million over the next five years to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, and Rice universities to fund centers in nanoscale science and engineering. The NSF says the centers are expected to significantly advance information, medical, manufacturing, and environmental technologies. For Milan Mrksich, that means picking the brains of life scientists connected with Northwestern's Center for Integrated Nanopatterning and Detection Technologies to confirm a virus particle or a bacterium actually occupies the surface he crafted to selectively trap and bind that particular organism. It's a no-brainer for this associate professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago to make the samples stick to the surface. But, he says, it is more difficult to determine whether the trap actually lured the bacterium. "I couldn't do this without the center," Mrksich says. "It makes it easier for researchers to get out of their individual boxes and collaborate with colleagues. It gives me resources I don't have myself. And it puts all the pieces together." Physical chemist Kevin Ausman, executive director of Rice's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, needs life scientists to analyze the cancer-curing potential of gold nanoshells and to assess the unique properties of nanomaterials for therapeutic and diagnostic functions in medicine. "We want to show nanotech is more than self-replicating nanobots," he says. "We're going to make this a vital, commercialized field. And we're going to use the biotechnology business model of small groups of highly motivated risk-takers to drive the new discoveries."

The University of California system-wide Biotechnology Research and Teaching program is moving from UC Berkeley to UC Davis. The program, founded in 1985, supports research, teaching and other efforts related to biotechnology statewide According to Lawrence B. Coleman, University of California vice provost for research, the program was moved to UC Davis because of the campus' vision for enhancing the educational and training aspects of the program. UC Davis beat out contenders UC Irvine and UC Riverside. The new director of the program Martina Newell-McGloughlin, currently director of both the UC Davis biotechnology program and the UC system-wide Life Sciences Informatics program cites UC Davis' "great breadth of biotechnology and 'incredible support' from the campus" as factors that contributed to obtaining the program. "The program will continue to fund basic research at UC campuses and expand the training and educational component to provide training for graduate students and faculty in biotechnology related fields," says Gussie Curran, associate director of the life sciences informatics program. To meet the ever-growing demand for skill biotechnicians, UC Davis offered biotechnology training courses this past summer that were very well attended. Curran comments that the biotechnology research and teaching program provides an opportunity to expand such courses and take them to other campuses as well. "We're now seeing a merging of information technology and biotechnology," says Newell-McGloughlin. "By creating collaborations between specialists in different fields, the UC biotech program will create the basis for future technologies," she says.