IGERT News Posts

WPI School of Business Professor, Frank Hoy was presented with the Max X. Wortman Jr. Award for Lifetime Achievement in Entrepreneurship by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) at its 2014 conference in Fort Worth, Texas, on January 9.

This award recognizes a lifetime in entrepreneurial achievement that encompasses the ideals on entrepreneurial activity. Eligibility extends to members who have engaged in successful venture creation, and to those whose life’s pursuits supported and advocated entrepreneurial ideals.

Director of the Collaboration for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Paul R. Beswick Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at WPI, Hoy was recognized by his peers for playing a leadership role in advancing entrepreneurship education and research. He has been an active member of USASBE for many years and served as its president in 2003. He continues a long, distinguished career spanning three decades, contributing in outstanding ways to education, research, and practice – starting and growing numerous ventures. Additionally, he has published more than 50 academic articles on small business and entrepreneurship, and coauthoring nine books and textbooks.

Today IGERT students had a round-table discussion with Dr. Keith Sawyer, a visiting professor from UNC and a researcher on creativity and innovation. After introductions, Dr. Sawyer started off talking about the differences in ‘innovation culture’ of today’s society verses one in the 1960s. More recently, innovation is become trendy and companies are starting to recognize the need for an innovative mindset in all aspects of company transactions rather than just the R&D department alone.

Dr. Sawyer highlighted the past challenges of transferring knowledge from the R&D division to the manufacturing division. Sometimes researchers develop a new technology and felt as if they were ‘throwing it over a wall’ hoping that someone on the manufacturing side would catch it. The classic example is with Xerox PARC whose researchers developed a computer complete with mouse and graphical user interface, but when presented it to other departments of the company, no one seemed to value the innovation as a marketable product.  However, when Steve Jobs invited by a friend toured Xerox PARC he immediately recognized the personal computer as a radical innovation that would change the world and started the line of Macintosh computers.

One of the challenges with commercializing innovation is first recognizing that what you have is a useful product that could meet an unmet market need. The goal of the WPI IGERT is to teach IGERT students how to recognize translatable applications of their research and to find ‘uses’ of the basic research they are doing in the lab.

Dr. Sawyer has written a book about innovations and collaborations entitled ‘Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration’. He talked briefly about companies patenting inventions that they don’t really know how to pursue in hopes that someday someone might have an application and license their invention to market as part of a profitable product creating a ‘patent thicket’. In order to produce the best innovation, companies may have to acquire patents own by other companies. Although this may hinder development of innovations, it requires companies to collaborate if they share patents needed to form the best product. Again, there are parallels to the Gateway community. The IGERT is meant to be interdisciplinary as ‘BioFabriacation’ cannot be lumped into one department, but encompasses a multitude of different ones. Students in the program have access to professors in intersecting fields facilitating both collaboration and innovative problem solving.

In conclusion, the IGERT program is training students both to have an innovative mindset and to form collaborations. Both attributes as Dr. Sawyer highlighted, is clearly needed by companies today especially in the biomedical field to create translatable products with high consumer value. In a culture where the motto ‘Innovate or die’ is becoming more and more real, these skills are needed for the continued production of quality medical products and devices and the persistence of strong companies.

Tanja Dominko, DVM, PhD, associate professor of biology and biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), is the 2013 Slovenian Ambassador of Science, a national award given to one Slovenian native each year in recognition of outstanding achievements and global scientific impact. The award also honors Dominko’s international engagement in developing programs that bring together WPI students and faculty members with Slovenian colleagues to address important biomedical challenges.

Slovenian President Borut Pahor presided at the awards ceremony on Nov. 22, 2013, in the city of Maribor, where Dominko joined nine other scientists and engineers who received national awards for a range of accomplishments. At the event, President Pahor spoke of the vital need to support scientific research and education on a global basis to help improve the human condition—a message that Dominko says resonates deeply with her personal and professional goals to discover and translate new knowledge of human physiology to help cure disease.

Dominko is globally recognized for her research in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. Her work has spanned embryonic transfer, cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer, and the basic science of early embryogenesis. She is currently at the forefront of the science of cellular reprograming, exploring how mature human skin cells can be coaxed to become more like stem cells able to recapitulate damaged tissues throughout the body.

IGERT fellow Heather Cirka was awarded an American Heart Association (AHA) Predoctoral Fellowship from the Founders Affiliate. These AHA fellowships are very prestigious and competitive. Heather is doing her graduate research with Prof. Kris Billiar in the Biomedical Engineering Department.

Researchers develop novel method to image worm brain activity and screen early stage compounds aimed at treating autism and anxiety.

A research team, lead by Professor Dirk Albrecht, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and The Rockefeller University in New York has developed a novel system to image brain activity in multiple awake and unconstrained worms. The technology, which makes it possible to study the genetics and neural circuitry associated with animal behavior, can also be used as a high-throughput screening tool for drug development targeting autism, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and other brain disorders. Read more…

Assistant Professor Ray Page, from Biomedical Engineering has been awarded two grants from Datar Genetics.

The first is a $1.5M grant for his project titled “Towards development of a complete function in vitro model of human skeletal muscle tissue.” The focus of this research addresses the need for models of human skeletal muscle function that enables the discovery, development, and testing of therapeutic products to treat skeletal muscle disease. The approach involves a novel combination of various cell types derived from adult human tissue and a unique tissue engineering approach that permits the formation of functional tissue that can be used to model human skeletal muscle function in vitro. Successful execution of this research will enable more efficacious development drug and therapeutic strategies for human musculoskeletal disorders and tissue replacement therapies than is currently possible using animal models and traditional cell culture systems.

The second is a $500K grant, also from Datar Genetics, for his project titled “Development of methods to recover DNA from compromised tissue for somatic cell nuclear transfer.” The list of endangered species world-wide is growing at a remarkable rate. While there are many genetic material and cell cryobanks established to preserve germplasm and viable cells to be used to preserve viable animals for future repopulation, some genetically valuable or diverse samples can be lost due to failure to cryopreserve cells in the viable state. This project aims to employ novel micro dissection and cellular reconstitution procedures to produce viable cells from tissue that is deemed non-viable according to the current state of the art. Success in this project will provide a means to restore the diversity of species in the event of catastrophic loss due to irrecoverable viable tissue.

This year the IGERT grant welcomed five new students. From Aug.22 to Aug. 28^th the new students spent time getting to know each other, IGERT faculty members and the current first year IGERT fellows. During the Boot Camp the IGERT fellows helped the new students get acquainted with WPI while also providing them with instruction on various biofabrication techniques.  They also attended seminars  on the Innovation Mindset with Dennis Stauffer of Insight Fusion, LLC  and on Innovation, Creativity and Teamwork with Gina Betti, Associate Director for WPI’s Collaborative for Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

With a five-year, $3 million R01 award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), through the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a team of researchers led by Gregory Fischer, PhD, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and robotics engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and director of WPI’s Automation and Interventional Medicine (AIM) Laboratory, will test a new, minimally invasive approach to treating brain tumors that promises to accurately destroy malignant tissue while leaving surrounding tissue unaffected. This approach would be a significant improvement over current treatments.

The system will use a robot designed to work within the bore of an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner to precisely guide a probe through a dime-sized opening in the cranium to the tumor with the aid of real-time MRI images. The probe will destroy the tumor by heating it with interstitial high-intensity focused ultrasound (iHIFU). Developed by industry collaborator Acoustics MedSystems Inc., the device can emit ultrasound energy in a highly directional manner so only malignant tissue is heated, even with irregularly shaped deep-brain tumors. When guided by live MRI images, using a novel robotic manipulator developed by Fischer’s lab and specially designed MRI coils developed by Reinhold Ludwig, PhD, professor of electrical and computer engineering at WPI, the probe will be able to accurately target the tumor.

 IGERT fellow Todd Alexander has completed a summer internship at Semprus BioSciences, a biomedical company that provides medical devices to patients. While there Todd worked on modifying the surface of endotracheal tubes in order to improve clinical outcomes such as occlusion and ventilator associated pneumonia.

Professor Glenn Gaudette has been awarded a $1.94 million, 5 year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The research involves using biopolymer microthreads to deliver stem cells to hearts that have been damaged by heart attack or chronic disease, to promote muscle regeneration. Prof. Gaudette will be working in collaboration with Prof. George Pins, and Michael Laflamme, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology at the University of Washington.

These microthreads are each about the size of a human hair and, can be braided into cable-like structures that mimic natural connective tissues. They were first developed in Pins’s lab as a potential tool for repairing torn anterior cruciate ligaments (ACL) in the knee, the microthreads were then transformed by Gaudette and Pins into biological sutures that can be used to stich stem cells directly into wound sites and damaged tissues.

Vessels that deliver blood and oxygen to the heart are choked off, during a heart attack, therefore damaging sections of cardiac muscle. The damaged or “infarcted” muscle scars become rigid and unable to contract, diminishing the heart’s ability to pump blood. The ultimate goal of Gaudette’s team is to use the regenerative capabilities of adult stem cells to transform portions of that scarred tissue back into working heart muscle.