Engineering the Perfect Match

box of chocolate

What happens when engineers and clinicians get together

By Dana Goldman  |  Illustrations by Anne Wertheim

Larry McIntire never intended to get into matchmaking.A chemical engineer, he chairs the biomedical engineering department shared by Emory and Georgia Tech, and his interests always have been more academic than amorous. But every year, he finds himself standing in a room full of Emory clinicians and Georgia Tech engineers, breaking the ice, and helping them find potential partners as part of a day-long workshop. 

Larry McIntire chairs the 13-year-old biomedical engineering department, one of the few jointly run departments between a private and a public university.

Larry McIntire chairs the 13-year-old biomedical engineering department, one of the few jointly run departments between a private and a public university.

In this case, the matchmaking is for science. “Engineers say the different things they can do, and the clinicians say the kinds of problems they have,” McIntire says. The clinicians and engineers scope each other out, looking for signs they’ll be compatible with someone who has a complementary skill set. They’re hoping that together they’ll be able to solve medical puzzles with engineering solutions.

After all, that’s what the biomedical engineering department (BME) was designed for—uniting Emory doctors with Georgia Tech faculty who have the technical skills to engineer practical, important medical tools.

Setting up relationships isn’t all McIntire does. Since BME is one of just a few jointly run departments between a private and a public university, McIntire and his team cope with situations that never come up anywhere else: How do you maintain relationships when staff members work at campuses six miles apart? Or with colleagues 7,000 miles away where Emory and Georgia Tech have a third partner in Peking University’s biomedical engineering department? Which school pays for what expenses?

When the collaboration first started 13 years ago, even coming up with a name got complicated. At Emory, programs like biomedical engineering are called “departments.” But at Georgia Tech, BME is the only engineering program not called a “school.”

And yet despite the two different shades of red tape that McIntire sorts through on a daily basis, the consensus is that the biomedical engineering department at Georgia Tech and Emory has been a phenomenal success. The department is ranked as 2nd in the nation for biomedical engineering graduate programs by U.S. News & World Report, and it has spawned countless medical advances in areas ranging from veterinary science to cardiology. Its benefactor, the Wallace Coulter Foundation, for whom the department is named, has helped many of these advances get off the ground. Almost a third of its $25 million grant to the department in 2001 serves as an endowment to provide ongoing funding for translational research.  

A productive partnership

Shuming Nie's SpectroPen, which helps detect tumors during surgery, was developed as a result of his collaboration with Georgia Tech engineers.

Shuming Nie's SpectroPen, which helps detect tumors during surgery, was developed as a result of his collaboration with Georgia Tech engineers.

What faculty and students are doing in BME spans the gamut. In 2009, a BME team responded to a plea from Zoo Atlanta and successfully created the world’s first-ever blood pressure cuff to be used with an unsedated gorilla. In 2010, faculty created software that allows pediatric cardiac surgeons to perform virtual surgery on a patient before making a single incision. The 3-D computer program helps doctors foresee how each patient’s unique blood flow patterns and anatomy might impact clinical decisions in the operating room.

And then there’s the work of BME faculty member Shuming Nie, who directs the cancer nanotechnology programs at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute. For a long time, he had been troubled by the difficulty that surgeons face trying to visualize the entirety of cancerous tumors. “We realized the urgent need for new tools to detect and identify tumors in real time during surgery,” he says.

Nie approached his BME colleagues at Georgia Tech, and together they developed the SpectroPen, a handheld device that detects fluorescent dyes and miniscule light-reflecting gold particles that stick more easily to cancer cells than to healthy cells. “It could help surgeons see the edges of tumors so they can more reliably remove all of it,” Nie says.

The gold particles also were developed by Nie. They consist of polymer-coated gold, coupled to a reporter dye and an antibody that sticks to molecules on the outsides of tumor cells more so than to normal cells. The gold in the particle amplifies the signal from the reporter dye, and those signals are picked up by the SpectroPen, which is connected by a fiber optic cable to a spectrometer.

SpectroPen already has been tested successfully in mice, and Nie is preparing for clinical trials in humans. He believes that SpectroPen wouldn’t have been possible without the engineering/medicine interface. “In a traditional, narrowly focused academic department,” Nie says, “this work would most likely have stopped at the device fabrication step, without the ability for clinical translation.”

Off the sidelines

Another BME success story started in an unlikely place: Grady Hospital’s emergency room. Emergency physician, clinical researcher, and avid sports fan David Wright kept seeing young football players come in to be evaluated for concussions.

“The problem with concussions and sports is there’s really no good way to evaluate someone on the sidelines,” says Wright, a specialist in traumatic brain injury. “At high school games, there usually are no trained people on the sidelines who know how to evaluate the kids.”

In fact, the gold standard for assessing concussions has long been psychological testing, which requires hours in a quiet room with a trained examiner—an impossible situation in the middle of a tight game.

Inspiration hit on an airplane about 10 years ago, when Wright saw a fellow passenger wearing noise-cancelling headphones. “What if we created a test that blocked out external sights and sounds that we could use on the sidelines?” Wright wondered.

Wright and biomedical engineer Michelle LaPlaca applied for funds from BME’s Coulter Translational Research Partnership to make that test a reality. The Coulter grants provide $100,000 for a year’s work on a translational project that includes collaboration between an Emory clinician and a BME engineer.

The collaboration was the first time Wright had worked with an engineer. “They approach things by applying algorithms and math,” says Wright. “They look at problems and figure out mathematical solutions to those problems. But when you put us together it’s synergistic.”

Flash forward to today, and LaPlaca and Wright are patenting DETECT, a helmet-like computerized device that can accurately test for mild cognitive impairment (seen in concussions and early dementia) within about 10 minutes in any location. “We wanted it to be accurate, and we wanted it to be objective. Our goal was that it had to be functional on the sidelines,” says Wright. In fact, some of the prototype testing was done with the Georgia Tech football team, with other research done with seniors at Emory’s Wesley Woods Center.

DETECT is currently being tested in doctors’ offices around the Southeast, and Wright says it’s all thanks to BME. “This could not have happened without the Emory/Georgia Tech collaboration,” he says.

From academe to commerce

If going from idea to solution is the job of the BME department, going from prototype to product takes the help of Emory’s Office of Technology Transfer. This year, the office gave its “Start-Up of the Year” award to another BME brainchild, Apica Cardiovascular, a company specializing in tools to make heart surgery more effective and less dangerous. Emory cardiothoracic surgeon Vinod Thourani co-founded the company with biomedical engineering colleagues after a Coulter grant kicked off their collaborative research in 2002. Apica is one of nine companies that have emerged from BME so far.

And more are likely to follow. Soon McIntire will find himself standing, once again, in a room full of folks looking for the perfect professional partner. Those newly paired collaborators will figure out the logistics of an inter-university partnership—coordinating schedules, deciding on meeting places, working around one another’s institutional responsibilities. Sure, there’s red tape. But at the end of the day, says McIntire, the outcomes make it all worthwhile.  EM

       
 
 

Shuming Nie believes that SpectroPen wouldn't have been possible without the engineering/medicine interface. "In a traditional, narrowly focused academic department," Nie says, "this work would most likely have stopped at the device fabrication step, without the ability for clinical translation."

 
         

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Emory Medicine Fall 2011