Bringing Medical Advances to Patients

The research that Scott Hollister does in his lab on U-M’s North Campus sounds like sci-fi.

Say a patient has jaw cancer that has irreparably damaged the bone. Hollister, a biomedical engineering professor, and his team use a CT scan of the patient to create a replica of the bone. This replacement, a scaffolding made of a biodegradable material, is seeded with a growth factor or the patient’s own stem cells and then surgically implanted in the body. Over time, a new bone grows to replace the scaffolding, which the body absorbs.

Hollister expects this process will soon be cleared for use in patients. However, he has learned through time and experience that turning concepts into reality can be daunting. He remembers about 10 years ago when the media started predicting what tissue engineering—also now called regenerative medicine—would accomplish.

“To be honest, it’s been hyped a lot. … They said it’s going to be able to grow hearts in a jar … it was sort of wild stuff,” said Hollister, expressing what he said is a widespread frustration in his field. “I think nobody understood the hurdles—not just the technical hurdles, but the regulatory hurdles and the commercialization hurdles that you have to go through to get it in the clinic.”

In keeping with the entrepreneurial efforts occurring across campus, the University is figuring out how to help academics like Hollister get their ideas to actual patients in the clinic. One resource now available is the Medical Innovation Center. Founded in 2008, the MIC enables new medical technologies by bringing together clinicians, scientists, dentists, engineers, and business pro fessionals. And because U-M ranks near the top of many of these and other areas of study, it is an ideal location for collaboration.

One specific approach for the MIC to promote collaboration is its postgraduate fellowship program, which brings together medical, engineering, and business professionals to find market solutions to medical problems. The first cohort of the program launched Tangent Medical Technologies, a development stage medical device company that offers a much improved IV catheter. The company recently completed a $4.5 million Series A equity financing.

“Surgeons are inventors by nature, but they work 16-hour days,” said James Geiger, the center’s executive director, who is a U-M pediatric surgeon and innovated a surgical clamp for infants. “The challenges of securing funding, finding collaborators, and getting FDA approval can be insurmountable without help.”

U-M pediatric otolaryngologist Glenn Green is working through the MIC with Hollister on an innovative splint to help children with compressed tracheas, and the center is helping the pair explore FDA approval. It is also helping Hollister on a project to create custom, seethrough devices that orthopedic and craniofacial surgeons can temporarily snap into place over bones during surgery to guide them as they cut.

As time goes on, Hollister expects that more and more of the burden and risk of bringing ideas to market will fall on the shoulders of academics. He views the MIC as a valuable way for them to bring more of their ideas to life.

“At the end of my career, I’d like to look back and say at least some stuff I did helped patients,” he said. “That would be much more satisfying than just publishing papers.”

Brad Whitehouse

To view a video of Scott Hollister, visit umalumni.com/videos and search for “Hollister.”

Alumna Bioengineers Human Veins

A U-M alumna and her company have created “off the shelf” human veins for use in life-saving vascular surgeries.

Laura (Fencil) Niklason, MD’91, is a professor of anesthesiology and biomedical engineering at Yale University and a leading expert in cellular therapies and bioengineered tissues. She is founder of the private company Humacyte, which led the development of the bioengineering for the technology.

Humacyte developed the first bioengineered veins made from human cells that retain their strength and efficacy during long-term storage, making the veins implantable into anyone and immediately available at the time of patient need. These bioengineered blood vessels also showed improved resistance to obstruction and clotting. Additionally, the new method allows large numbers of grafts to be cultured from one cell bank, which has the potential to significantly reduce manufacturing costs.

The technology received a 2011 Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics magazine as an innovation that is changing the world for the better.

“It is always gratifying to be recognized for our work,” said Niklason. “And this technology is especially exciting because of the great potential that it holds to improve the lives of patients with heart disease and diabetes.”

The bioengineered veins are manufactured in a novel bioreactor system, decellularized, and may be stored for up to 12 months under refrigerated conditions. Decellularization renders bioengineered veins nonimmunogenic, making them implantable into anyone.

Motives Matter

Why people volunteer—not whether they volunteer—is what really counts when it comes to health, a new U-M study shows. It indicates that those who volunteer mainly for some sort of personal benefit live no longer on average than non-volunteers.

“On the surface, volunteering seems to be a purely selfless act,” said Sara Konrath, the lead author of the study and a social psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “But, in fact, people volunteer for a wide range of reasons, from getting out of the house and meeting new people to doing something good for people who need help.”

Subjects in the study rated how important they found various reasons for volunteering, and the more important they rated other-oriented reasons, the more likely they were to be alive after four years. These reasons included feeling compassion for people in need or knowing that the volunteering was important to their loved ones.

Konrath said that while this research did not examine why motive matters so much, work by co-author Stephanie Brown and others has shown that concern about others helps us tap into the same system that operates in mothers and other caregivers.

“This system is a suite of thoughts, emotions, and underlying neurological and psychophysiological circuitry that helps deactivate stress responses and activate hormones, such as oxytocin, that restore physiological function,” Konrath said. “Basically, it buffers the stress of caregiving and promotes well-being.”

She added that the current finding suggests it may be a poor idea to encourage people to volunteer because it’s good for them.

“Volunteering is increasingly being encouraged in schools and organizations via the media—including Oprah Winfrey’s ‘Angel Network’ and even by President Obama,” she said. “Of course, it’s reasonable for volunteers to expect some benefits for themselves. But it’s ironic that the potential health benefits of volunteering are significantly reduced if self-benefit becomes a person’s main motive.”

Nanoparticles May Inhibit Alzheimer’s Disease

Nanoparticles of the right dimensions and shape may be the key to combating the plaque that destroys neurons and leads to symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders, a new report shows.

U-M chemical engineering professor Nicholas Kotov says the nanotechnology can be used to attract and capture the longer fibrils that are known to form plaque related to neurodegenerative disorders.

“Both amyloid peptides and nanoparticles exhibit a strong ability to self-assemble into fibrils,” Kotov said. “We were very pleased to see amazing inhibitory effect on amyloid fibrillation, which opens the door for new approaches to the development of drugs to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.”

One nanoparticle can capture more than 100 amyloid peptides. This high efficiency of fibrillation inhibition makes nanoparticles similar to some proteins that the human body uses to protect itself against the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

The substance used in the study is toxic, but Kotov’s laboratory is working toward engineering nanoparticles that are compatible to humans. Such particles could help clear, or at least contain, the growth of the debilitating plaque.

Perfect Black Veil Can Flatten Objects

A carbon nanotube coating developed at U-M acts as a “magic black cloth” that conceals an object’s 3D geometry and makes it look like a flat black sheet.

The 70-micron coating, or carbon nanotube carpet, is about half the thickness of a sheet of paper. It absorbs 99.9 percent of the light that hits it, researchers said.

“It’s not cloaking, as the object can still cast a shadow. But if you put an object on a black background, then with this coating, it could really become invisible,” said Jay Guo, principal investigator and U-M engineering professor.

To demonstrate this concept, the researchers made a raised, microscopic tank-shape on a piece of silicon.
They then grew the carbon nanotube carpet on top of the entire silicon chip. In photos taken through an optical microscope, they show that the tank is imperceptible. As a control, they did this again, carving out a rectangle that was not coated with carbon nanotubes. The rectangle is visible on this chip, but the tank remains hidden.

The “perfect black” material created for this coating has a host of applications. It could be used in display screens for ultra-high contrast and a crisper picture, as a solar heating device, or as inspiration for a new type of camouflaging paint for stealth aircraft.

The University is pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market.

Medical Innovation at Michigan

Explore some of the fascinating ways the University of Michigan is helping advance medicine. The Alumni Association presents a series of upcoming events on medical innovation as part of the Leaders and Best series of its Lifelong Learning program.

Growing Replacement Parts: Tissue Engineering at Michigan, February 29

Innovations in Pediatric Medicine and C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital Tour, March 22

Personalized Oncology, April TBD

Visit umalumni.com/lifelonglearning for details.