News Briefs

Two Tech Professors Win NIH New Innovator Award

September 24, 2009

Two Georgia Tech professors have been honored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for work that celebrates creativity and innovation among young and promising researchers.

Dr. Melissa Kemp of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and Dr. Christine Payne of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry are the first Georgia Tech faculty members �“ and first in Georgia - to receive the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

The award provides $1.5 million in research funding - $300,000 a year for five years �“ to each early career investigator honored. Now in its third year, the 2009 NIH New Innovator Award will be presented to 50 individuals to recognize their potential to produce major impact on broad, important problems in biomedical and behavioral research.

Kemp is being recognized for research that utilizes engineering methods to analyze complex biochemical networks. Specifically, she is studying how oxidative environments influence immune cell function. One of her goals is to develop computational models that can predict responses to drug interventions for inflammatory disease and cancer.

"I am thrilled and honored to receive this award at an early stage of my career,” Kemp said. “Young researchers often feel pressure to conduct ‘incremental science’ in order to acquire funding. The grant provides my lab the financial freedom to explore unconventional ideas as part of our research efforts.”

Payne’s honor is in recognition for her research targeting and delivering nanoparticles to living cells and the development of microscopy methods to image dynamic events inside cells. Her research has promising applications in the arena of drug and gene delivery along with displaying potential to further understand the fundamental functions of the cell.

“This award provides a great opportunity to focus on the science of nanoparticle-cell interactions and the development of new fluorescence microscopy methods,” Payne said.

While both Kemp and Payne have received the award for their individual achievements, the two are also involved in a joint collaboration that combines microscopy, modeling and biochemical analysis in an effort to understand the intracellular environment.

The NIH Director’s New Innovator Awards were announced today. Kemp and Payne are both in Bethesda, Maryland, to accept the honor.

More information on the New Innovator Award is at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/newinnovator. For descriptions of the 2009 recipients’ research plans, see http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/newinnovator/Recipients09.asp.

For more information Contact Don Fernandez (Phone: )

Bioengineering student named Kauffman Fellow

September 17, 2009

Georgia Tech bioengineering Ph.D. student Yash Kolambkar is one of 13 postdoctoral researchers to be named among the first Kauffman Postdoctoral Fellows.

In addition to providing a salary and benefits to support the fellows’ research over the course of the yearlong fellowship, the Kauffman Foundation has matched each fellow with an academic advisor to mentor him/her on matters beyond research, and an experienced investor or corporate leader to serve as a business mentor. During the fellowship year, each fellow also will undertake an industry internship suited to his or her research interests and objectives.

Kolambkar is a researcher in the biomedical field with a strong focus on translation of research ideas into commercially viable products.

Yash has earned a technology commercialization certificate from the nationally recognized TI:GER (Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results) program, based at Georgia Tech and Emory Law School. In the program, he developed a commercialization plan for his PhD technology, which would restore cartilage in osteoarthritic patients. He has been a consultant to VentureLab, where he identified and evaluated Georgia Tech technologies with strong commercial potential.

He is currently preparing to successfully defend his PhD thesis.

For more information Contact Don Fernandez (Phone: )

New Center Focuses on Personalized Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis

August 7, 2009

The Integrative Cancer Research Center (ICRC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology is joining forces with the Center for Cancer Research and Therapeutic Development (CCRTD) at Clark Atlanta University (CAU) to establish a Collaborative Cancer Genomics Center (CCGC). The partnership will integrate expertise at both universities that will focus on understanding the underlying causes of prostate, ovarian, pancreatic and lung cancers.

John McDonald of Georgia Tech, Shafiq Khan of Clark Atlanta University and George Daneker of St. Joseph’s Hospital join forces to personalize cancer treatment. (Image courtesy: Clark Atlanta University)
300 dpi Hi-Res Version (1.62 MB)

Shafiq Khan, director of Clark Atlanta’s CCRTD, said, “The molecular, bioinformatic and clinical expertise necessary to move forward with such a personalized cancer diagnosis and treatment program exists at the collaborating institutions. Establishment of CCGC will complement the existing experimental infrastructure necessary to generate the genomic data required to attain our goals.”

John McDonald, director Georgia Tech’s ICRC, added, “We are particularly interested in developing algorithms that will allow us to use gene expression and DNA sequence data that we gather from specific patients to generate a customized prognosis and optimal therapeutic treatment program for individual cancer patients.”

Under the collaborative agreement, CCRTD will house and operate the CCGC’s high-throughput next generation sequencing instruments. The resulting sequence data will be assembled and analyzed at ICRC. Patient samples will be provided by the Ovarian Cancer Institute (OCI) and Saint Joseph’s Hospital’s Translational Research Initiatives in Oncology for the Management of Personalized Healthcare (TRIOMPH ) program. Clark Atlanta and Georgia Tech scientists will join clinical experts from OCI and TRIOMPH to interpret and evaluate the resulting data.

Housed at CAU in the Thomas W. Cole Jr. Research Center for Science and Technology, the CCGC is scheduled to begin operation in the fall of 2009.

For more information Contact David Terraso (Phone: 404-385-2966)