While construction workers scurry to build the new Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences, faculty and administrators are thinking about how to get the most out of the interaction between engineering and medicine in one of the center's three wings.
Pratt School of Engineering Dean Kristina Johnson said designing an intellectual plan for enhanced collaboration will be one of her chief goals this semester.
"There's the potential to create something truly innovative and transforming there," she said. "I've been talking to [medical school] Dean Sandy Williams and we've got some interesting ideas that have been fed to us by our faculty."
The new $97 million, 32,000-square-foot complex will house the Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics and Communications in the west wing and the medical-engineering partnership in the east wing.
"The idea is to pick particular ideas co-localized in partnership space," said Morton Friedman, chair of biomedical engineering. BME is one of Duke's top-rated departments and is already one of the natural hubs between engineering and medicine.
Friedman listed several areas he believed could be targets for more effective partnership research, including neuroengineering, drug delivery through the use of nanotechnology, gene technology, cellular and molecular cardiology and tissue engineering.
The partnership came about when the School of Medicine chipped in $20 million for the new center when its costs rose - one of the few impromptu shifts in the University's overall strategic plan. Although the engineering school's plan had called for collaboration with many other schools, administrators came to see this additional cooperation as an opportunity to take advantage of joint resources and expertise.
Mark Dewhirst, professor of radiation oncology, works on drug delivery systems - one area that the partnership space may encompass. Dewhirst examines the effectiveness of microdialysis, and his research group has developed computer models to aid drug delivery and monitor, for example, exactly where and how drugs affect tumors.
"There's a variety of technologies one has to have to be able to do studies like this," he said. "Right now, they're kind of schizoid. Some of the technology is over here in my group, some of it is in my lab, some of them are in [others' labs].... If we had all of that stuff in one place, there would be tremendous gain of function."
Richard Fair, professor of electrical and computer engineering, works on similar collaborative research - creating what he calls a "lab on a chip."
"Everything you can do in the chemical lab you ought to be able to do on a small chip that handles liquids," Fair said. "We've kind of focused on applications in medicine and, in particular, we're working with the genomics technology center to do DNA sequencing on a chip."
The Center for Genome Technology is one of five centers housed within the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and will focus on designing technologies for examining and applying genomic research into everyday medical use, bringing the engineering school into the heart of the University's $200 million genomics initiative.
Fair added that many applications outside of genomic medicine exist for the microfluidics technology.
"We're also starting to work with the clinicians in the neonatal area at Duke Hospital where they deal with premature infants," Fair said. "We think we can do blood analysis on a chip."
Because premature babies have so little blood, doctors can use the technology to perform tests they could not otherwise perform without larger amounts of blood.
Fair said that space in the new center would break down some of the logistical hurdles of medical engineering research as well.
"Proximity is going to help," he said. "Right now, we're not equipped to handle biohazardous materials. We can't even handle whole blood. So this would greatly enhance our ability to work with clinicians. Otherwise, we have to take all of our apparatus to the Hospital and set it up."
Johnson said another key project in neuroengineering is early detection of brain cancer using engineering tools and applications. Brain imaging, an area that is rapidly evolving, involves the technical expertise of engineers coupled with the medical knowledge of doctors.
"If you look at the BME department and all the departments in medicine, we have grown up collaboratively with these connections," Johnson said. "To put up resources and space to solve some of these 10-year goals like preventing heart attacks, curing cancer - why not?"
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