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With an $800,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, a leading supporter of high-impact medical research, science, and engineering, USC is creating an open laboratory in its NanoCenter to develop new technologies in tissue engineering, sensing, drug delivery, vaccine manufacturing, and other biomedical applications.
The W.M. Keck Open Laboratory for Bionanoparticle Technology Discovery and Development is a partnership between USC and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Two faculty members in USC's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Qian Wang and Cathy Murphy, have teamed with Scripps chemistry professor M.G. Finn to pursue this cutting-edge research.
"We want this lab to provide a platform for collaborators across several disciplines," Wang said. "Scientists from chemistry and medicine at USC already are working together with bionanoparticles, which is a fairly new research area. Mechanical and chemical engineering, biology, pharmacy, physics, and other disciplines likely will be a part of this research in the future."
For some time, Wang has been conducting research with the turnip yellow mosaic virus -- a common plant virus that's harmless to humans -- focusing on the virus' shell as a potential vehicle for transporting nano-sized bits of cancer-fighting drugs. That research has yielded promising results, and the plant virus turns out to be an ideal structure for other nanotechnology research.
"The plant viruses used in our laboratories are very stable and uniform in size so you could use them to create a grid for screening, filtering, or detection. You also could conceivably combine the virus with metal particles to create a photonics application: using light instead of electrons to send information," Murphy said.
Murphy's research team has developed new techniques for making nano-sized particles of gold and silver. Attaching those metal particles to the plant virus opens the door to creating biomedical agents, hybridized materials, vaccines, and new agents for drug delivery.
"Nanoscience is about making stuff, and we're finding that the traditional boundaries of materials science, biology, physics, and chemistry are blurring in the nano world," said Tom Vogt, director of the USC NanoCenter. "That's why we're creating an open lab -- anyone can use it, and we expect to welcome people from many different disciplines."
Vogt believes USC was successful in competing for the Keck Foundation funding because of the professional recognition Wang, Murphhy, and Finn have received for their previous research in nanoscience. Another asset for USC is its NSF-funded research group, headed by philosophy professor Davis Baird, which studies the societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology.
"You can't develop any field of research too far without putting it in a societal context," Vogt said. "The result could be public rejection and that's exactly what happened when people voices opposition to genetically modified foods in Europe and protested nuclear energy in the United States."
The Keck Foundation-sponsored open laboratory could lead to future funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency as the science of making bionanoparticles more fully develops.
Meanwhile, development of the 1,500-square-foot bionanoparticle laboratory has begun in the USC NanoCenter in Sumwalt College. The facility will include separate rooms for ultracentrifuges, incubators, liquid chromatography systems, and other specialized equipment such as a state-of-the-art ICP-OES, DSC, and NIR fluoriphotometers. As part of its matching funding for the Keck grant, USC will support two post-doctoral fellows to manage the lab's equipment and operations. That support infrastructure is important, Vogt said, because instrumentation is valuable only if an institution has qualified research scientists.
Most importantly, the W.M. Keck Open Laboratory for Bionanoparticle Technology Discovery and Development will provide exciting educational opportunities for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. Some will be trained to use the lab's high-tech instruments, and many more will be exposed to the possibilities of bionanoparticle research.
"Dr. Murphy and I ran a high school camp this past summer that trained students how to harvest, analyze, and modify the plant virus, and we will continue this effort in the future," Wang said. "This helps them to better understand the research related to biotechnology and nanoscience, and, to consider choosing a career in this exciting emerging field."
2/06
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