Georgia Tech, Emory, MCG partner for NIH nanomedicine center
by Megan McRainey, Georgia Tech
with contributions by Toni Baker, MCG
The National Institutes of Health has awarded the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University and the Medical College of Georgia a grant to partner on a Nanomedicine Development Center focusing on DNA damage repair.
Nanomedicine is the medical application of technology development at the minute level.
With up to $10 million in funding, the center will be Georgia Tech and Emory’s third NIH-funded nanomedicine/nanotechnology center in less than two years.
The center, to be based in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, will be headed by Dr. Gang Bao, College of Engineering Distinguished Professor.
Dr. William S. Dynan, associate director of MCG’s Institute of Molecular Medicine and Genetics Program and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Molecular Biology, is the associate director. Dr. Hernan Flores-Rozas, MCG molecular biologist, is a center co-investigator and Dr. Yoshihiko Takeda, MCG rheumatology researcher, is a center researcher.
The center will receive $6 million to $10 million from the NIH over the next five years and almost $3 million from the Georgia Research Alliance, a public-private partnership between Georgia universities, businesses and state government to build the state’s technology industry. MCG will receive approximately $300,000 annually.
In addition to top experts at Georgia Tech, Emory and MCG, the center will collaborate with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University Medical Center, California Institute of Technology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the German Cancer Research Center.
“Georgia Tech is leveraging our strengths in nanotechnology and biomedical engineering to lead the way in the emerging field of nanomedicine, which has tremendous potential to make the practice of medicine more preventive and less invasive,” said Dr. G. Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Tech. “We are very pleased to have the Medical College of Georgia join us as a partner. Together, we are helping Georgia to emerge as a top region for nanomedicine.”
“Dr. Bill Dynan’s role as associate director of this top-tier institution research consortium reflects his scientific stature and his leadership on this successful project designed to study the engineering design principles of nanomachines in the repair of damaged DNA,” said Dr. D. Douglas Miller, dean of the MCG School of Medicine.
The new Nanomedicine Center for Nucleoprotein Machines is one of NIH’s Nanomedicine Development Centers, a key initiative of the NIH’s long-term nanomedicine research goals. Centers must have highly multidisciplinary scientific teams that include biologists, physicians, mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists.
The new center will initially focus on understanding how the body repairs damage to DNA, a molecule that encodes genetic information in each cell. As cells replicate, unrepaired mistakes in the DNA can cause defects that lead to illness.
Learning how protein complexes repair DNA damage could illuminate the structure-function relationships of protein machines in the cell nucleus, called nucleoprotein machines, which synthesize, modify and repair DNA and RNA. This could someday be used to reverse genetic defects, cure disease or delay aging.
“We need to understand the basic engineering design principles underlying how cells repair DNA damage with high precision, and apply this knowledge to the development of novel therapeutic strategies for a wide range of diseases, including cancer,” said Dr. Bao.
“We would like instruments that let us visualize and measure this DNA repair process and understand how the parts of this natural machine come together and the rate at which they do it, the kind of measurements engineers make,” Dr. Dynan said. “Right now, we take millions of molecules that are supposed to be the same and study their behavior in bulk. Here, we will study them one by one.
“We hope that by studying the way natural machines are engineered by the body, we can engineer artificial machines that could carry out these processes, so you could fix genetic defects, for example,” said Dr. Dynan, who studies double-strand DNA breaks resulting from radiation exposure.
Part of the long-term vision for the center is to develop artificial nanomachines that break and rejoin genes in a way that mimics the immune response, he said.