Auburn University Research Annual Update 2012

Health Sciences

Auburn University Research2012 Annual Update

R E S E A R C H

A

B

C

D

EF

G

J

I

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A Dept. of Defense $11,414,759

B Dept. of eDucation $16,777,274

C Dept. of energy $1,704,974

D Dept. of HealtH & Human services

$8,030,973

E Dept. of tHe interior $1,105,678

F nsf $7,179,459

G usDa $5,251,060

H otHer feDeral agencies $5,151,458

I state of alabama $27,052,052

J inDustry $16,660,880

K otHer $24,219,087

H

feDeral

non-feDeral

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

114 108 153 124 134 125

sponsoreD aWarDs ($m)

2012AwArDs By sponsor

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EF

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percentage of total sponsoreD aWarDs by unit - fy2012

12%agriculture

1%business

4%cooperative extension

4%education

29%engineering

2%forestry and Wildlife

sciences

7%Human sciences

1%liberal arts

2%pharmacy

6%science and mathematics

15%veterinary medicine

16%centers, institutes, & other

administrative units

less than 1%: architecture, Design, & construction; library; nursing

office of tecHnology transfer metrics

87 invention disclosures, 15 standard u.s. patent applications filed,

82 provisional u.s. patent applications filed, 10 other u.s. patent applications filed,

14 u.s. patents granted, 171 total granted u.s. patents still active, 17 licenses / options executed,

79 active licenses / options, 1 start-up company formed, 16 total active startup companies,

$646,649 from option and license income

The Threads of Discovery

Auburn neuroscientists and electrical engineers work with some of the most advanced magnetic imaging capability to create unprecedented pic-tures of the human brain. Their work is just one thread of our health sciences research. Others evolve from nanotechnologies, genetics, bio-medical engineering, translational research and big data analysis. Together, these threads allow Auburn researchers to bring a remarkable span of expertise to bear on the pressing health issues that impact our world.

Every day at Auburn, we weave our discoveries into new solutions for our nation’s needs. We put ideas to work.

www.auburn.edu/research

AUBURN RESEARCH2012 ANNUAL UPDATE

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as advanced technologies play a larger role in healthcare, so do the engineers who create those technologies. With some of the nation’s best bio-medical and engineering minds, auburn is designing and developing everything from sophisticated diag-nostic machines to lifesaving molecules.

Novel THeRApeUTicSHow do you deliver medicine to an injured eye?

“The state of the art is eyedrops,” says chemical engineer Mark Byrne. “Even if people take them correctly, the drop is out of the eye in 30 minutes due to the tear volume flow.”

Byrne has developed contact lenses that greatly improve drug delivery. He has nanoengineered the polymeric network of the lens to hold drug molecules and release them over time. The lens is successful with anti-inflammatory medications,

3D GeomeTRic BlooD Flow ANAlySiSMore than 2 million people in the US suffer from mitral regurgitation—the heart’s mitral valve fails to close properly and blood that is supposed to be pumped out of the heart flows back. Cardiolo-gists commonly use echocardiographs to diagnose patients who may need valve replacement, but getting an accurate measurement of how much a valve may be leaking is difficult. Enter Auburn electrical engineer Tom Denney and Auburn’s MRI Research Center.

Denney and his team have engineered a 3D geo-metric analysis of the heart’s blood flow. This anal-ysis gives physicians a more complete picture of heart function and allows them to understand the specifics of the problem and make more informed, more effective decisions about treatment.

antibiotic and antifungal products, antihistamines and anti-glaucoma drugs.

Byrne’s group is also engineering nanoparticles to release drugs more intelligently—delivering the right amount of medication at the right time to treat various diseases, including cancer. Increased efficacy, reduced side effects, ease of administra-tion, and reduced frequency of administration will provide substantial benefits to patients and increase quality of life.

Engineering Solutions to Biomedical Problems



NANoeNGiNeeRiNG cANceR TReATmeNTOur understanding of the processes that occur within a cancerous tumor is very limited and with-out an accurate picture, physicians don’t have the information necessary to plan effective treatments. Chemical engineer Allan David is working to pro-duce nanoparticles that recognize cancer cells. The microenvironment in a tumor is much different than in normal tissue, and the “aim is to produce particles that respond to the altered environment found in cancerous tumors,” he says.

Particles that respond to these differences can be used to get information on the biological activity within tumors. “This could lead to cancer treat-ment that’s more personalized and, therefore, more effective,” says David.

“Patients are sometimes over treated for cancers that would not adversely affect them in their lifetimes. We want to distinguish these cases from the aggressive cancers, which need to be treated aggressively.”

HeART TiSSUe ReGeNeRATioNElizabeth Lipke, a chemical engineer, builds con-tracting heart tissue.

"We're studying how to instruct stem cells to become contracting heart cells, which are the cells that actually do the work," she says. "If your heart is damaged by disease, your body doesn’t replace these cells by itself." Lipke’s work advances our abil-ity to make cells that can repair a damaged heart.

Her research group creates biomimetic materials to mimic the environment that cells experience inside the body for multiple applications: directing

stem cells into becoming heart cells, studying cells that can repair the inside lining of blood vessels — endothelial progenitor cells — and creating 3D engineered heart tissues for studying human heart development and testing drug therapies.

Lipke’s regenerative engineering research holds the potential to improve the quality of life and life span of those who have suffered heart attacks and heart disease.


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auburn scientists have consolidated cancer research into a coordinated, cross-disciplinary approach — the auburn university research initiative in cancer. this consolidation leverages information across university disciplines and connects auburn researchers to col-laborators throughout the state, nation and world.

BoNe cANceR & meTASTASiSThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have underscored the importance to public health of a partnership between human and animal medi-cine. The American Medical Association and Amer-ican Veterinary Medical Association are taking the lead, and Auburn is part of that effort.

AURIC embodies the “One Health/One Medicine” concept that links human, animal and environ-mental health. "Research on dogs, for example, can be applied to people, but the opposite also is true," says Bruce Smith, director of the program and expert in molecular biology and genetics.

Smith works with a genetically-modified virus to treat bone cancer in dogs. This cancer typically occurs in the long bones of the leg, and the usual veterinary treatment is amputation. But, as with human cancers, what kills the patient is often not the tumor in the bone but the metastasis of the cancer into other parts of the body. How can we track down and eliminate metastasizing cancers?

Smith’s virus only copies itself in bone cancer cells. The virus invades the cancer cells, replicates itself and causes the cancer cells to "burst and die.” Smith’s discoveries may soon hold the key to ther-apies that can eradicate cancer cells wherever they may be in the body.

Focusing Cancer Research



GeNeTicS & immUNiTyThe body's immune system attacks foreign entities in the body.

"But cancer is not foreign; it's you," says pathobi-ologist Curt Bird, whose research focuses on the mechanisms that cause cells to proliferate. "The problem with cancer is that some systems get turned on in places they shouldn't."

"The primary tumor is almost never the problem or surgery would be the answer," Bird notes. In-stead, cells metastasize, spreading to other parts of the body.

TARGeTeD cANceR THeRApieS Despite advances in chemotherapy, cancer pa-tients sometimes find the treatment is as bad as the disease. Pharmacologist David Riese is working to develop novel molecules that specifically target cancer without the troubling side effects often associated with chemo.

Working on hormones and receptors implicated in cancer, his strategy "is to identify antibodies that link to receptors and block their functions." Basi-cally, the engineered drug identifies and attacks only the cancer cells.

Riese conducts this research in collaboration with Auburn's Department of Chemical Engineering and the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham.

"These antibodies, we predict, are going to be useful in the treatment of breast and prostate cancer and malignant melanoma," he says. "These are targeted therapeutics that act primarily on the tumor and spare the rest of the body."

Bird has developed a breast cancer vaccine that shows promising results in dogs. The idea is to force the immune system to recognize cancer as foreign and then drive the immune system hard enough to attack the tumors without causing auto-immune disease.

"At the moment, it looks like we have about doubled the survival time in dogs," he says, which could translate into several more years for a hu-man patient.


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DiABeTic HeART DiSeASeWhen the human animal becomes obese, its body chemistry changes. Many of those same changes occur in a primitive breed of wooly Hungarian pig — the Mangalitsa.

"Obesity is linked to diabetes and heart disease, but we haven't fully understood the mechanisms underlying those links because there hasn't been a suitable translational animal model," says animal scientist Terry Brandebourg. "But our initial exper-iments using the Mangalitsa indicate that as they amass body fat, their systems mimic obesity-related metabolic problems that we see in people" — heart disease, vascular disease, hypertension and diabetes.

Brandebourg is experimenting with adding conju-gated linoleic acids, or CLAs, to the animals’ diets. "We're looking at the potential of CLAs to uncou-ple metabolic and heart dysfunctions from obesity," he says. Maybe preventing diabetic heart disease is as simple as taking the right pill.

the boshell Diabetes and metabolic Disease research program aims to move scientific inquiry to practical application.

"those of us at the lab bench studying diabetes and obesity have a strong desire to take that knowledge and translate it into use in the clinic,” says robert Judd, pharmacologist and chair of the program.

Solving the Diabetes Puzzle



cHilDHooD oBeSiTyChildhood obesity multiplies the risk of future dis-eases like hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and cancer; and we are in the midst of an epidemic of childhood obesity. Ironically, part of the solution is simple: more physical activity.

Federal and state mandates are in place to promote school-day physical activity in children. Leah Rob-inson and colleagues recently completed a study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which assessed what policies are being implement-ed and whether the policies actually lead to more physical activity during school hours.

Robinson is analyzing and interpreting the data to learn the answer as she works to improve the health of Alabama’s school children.

iNSUliN ReSiSTANceIn simple terms, insulin encourages your body’s cells to take glucose from your blood and store it as glycogen in the liver and muscles. In type 2 diabetes, either the body does not produce enough insulin or cells ignore the insulin that the body does produce.

Endocrinologist Suresh Mathews has identified a protein, fetuin A, that dampens the effect of insulin. Elevated levels of the protein mean a high-er risk for developing diabetes. Mathews is now working to unravel the molecular mechanisms of fetuin A.

"This protein is a bad guy," he says. "If we can de-crease the level of this bad guy, we can improve our chances of being healthier."

DiABeTeS & AlzHeimeR’S DiSeASePatients with type 2 diabetes in mid-life face a sig-nificantly higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease later.

"We're looking to find ways to disrupt the diabe-tes-Alzheimer's link," says molecular neuroscientist Ramesh Jeganathan.

Jeganathan has focused his research on under-standing the diabetes and Alzheimer’s connection, and his aim is to find molecular targets that can be used to break the diabetes-Alzheimer’s axis. If he can break the diabetes-Alzheimer’s connection, he will substantially improve the life expectancy and quality of life of many type 2 diabetic patients.


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TReND ANAlySiSFrom years of experience, nutritional epidemiol-ogist Claire Zizza knows secondary data analysis. She takes a fresh look at previously collected data and finds patterns that point the way to healthier dietary behaviors.

Because nutritional needs vary, Zizza tailors her re-search to the specific needs of different age groups. As we grow older, for example, our hunger drive lessens. We need the calories, but we just don’t get hungry. The same is true for hydration and thirst. Like the hunger drive, our sensation of thirst de-creases with age. “In some older adults,” she says, “the only water they drink in the evening is when they take their medicine at night.” Zizza explored a mountain of data available through the National Health and Nutrition Survey and found that regu-lar snacking, while not particularly healthy for the young, improved both nutrition and hydration in older adults.

With this information, Zizza can recommend the dietary pattern the elderly should adopt for a lon-ger, healthier life.

our healthcare system generates a huge amount of in-formation. if we can analyze the data properly, we can determine the most effective solutions to some of our most pressing health problems. if we can understand and provide the knowledge the public needs, we can enable individuals to exercise control over their own healthcare and improve the overall quality of life. auburn researchers are working on both fronts.

iNFoRmATioN TecHNoloGyHow do you measure the effectiveness of health-care? “By what hurts and what heals,” says pharma-coepidemiologist Richard Hansen. Hansen works to tease the answer to this question out of electron-ic medical records, insurance claims and several other large databases.

The information is there, “but it’s messy,” he says. Different databases often describe or code the same event differently, making meaningful conclusions difficult. With funding from the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and the National Pharmaceutical Council, Hansen is working to improve outcome measures. This work is facili-tated by a common data model. With that model, information is reported consistently across various databases, which facilitates analysis.

How well do healthcare treatments work? What’s the impact of alternative treatments on the out-comes of healthcare? Despite the complexity of the problems or the messy data, for Hansen, the issue is simple. “We want to know what works and what doesn’t."

Improving Health Through Big Data



AppS & DASHBoARDSAs the baby boomers move into the ranks of the elderly, of the dependent, or the chronically ill, the demands they place on our healthcare sys-tem will grow and grow. With the application of information technology, nursing scientist Kathy Jo Ellison intends to address these issues. “If we can get control of the data, we can understand what populations need what information,” and she’s working to provide information to both caregivers and patients.

Seventy-five percent of the caregivers for the dependent elderly have no training. “We need to improve their competence,” Ellison says. The infor-mation may be out there — on the web or in the library — but frequently the caregivers don’t have the time or the resources to find it. Ellison proto-typed a caregiver app that makes relevant informa-tion easy to find and use.

Once, long-term physician-patient relationships were the norm. No more. With a command of large data sets, Ellison envisions a personal medical “dashboard” that integrates tailored medical data and allows the individual to take better control of, if not manage, their own healthcare. “One thing that is missing from our healthcare system is a sense of personal responsibility for health choices.”


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auburn is fast becoming a hub of health-related activity, much of it located in the auburn research park. auburn, east alabama medical center and siemens have collaborated to install 3 tesla and 7 tesla mris, among the most powerful in the world. renowned orthopedist Dr. James andrews looks forward to setting up shop and working with the soon to be operating edward via college of osteopathic medicine. in the spirit of auburn research, these and other health programs actively benefit the state, region and nation.

oSTeopATHic meDiciNe In 2015, the first class of medical students will set foot in the Auburn Research Park. That’s when the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM) opens its branch campus in Auburn. VCOM is a private, not-for-profit college that requires no state funding for its operations or construction.

Alabama ranks 46th out of 50 states for the num-ber of primary care physicians. Auburn and VCOM will address this shortage and, in particular, benefit underserved, rural areas by returning physicians to where they’re needed most. John Rocovich, found-er and chairman of the board of VCOM, says, “our collaboration with Auburn is important because of the outstanding commitment to science, research and education.”

Putting Ideas to Work at the Auburn Research Park

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mAGNeTic ReSoNANce imAGiNG & moDeliNGAuburn’s MRI Research Center houses both a 3T and 7T MRI. Currently, researchers use this advanced imaging technology in three areas. First, cardiovascular research develops new tech-niques for imaging and modeling heart function. Second, cognitive neuroscience investigates what happens in the brain when we think and react. Third, technology development focuses on the research and creation of new hardware and software to meet the challenges in clinical and experimental high-field MRI.

Magnetic resonance imaging and modeling are among the most important diagnostic tools available to modern medicine. Auburn’s research not only enhances the use of these tools but also expands our understanding of the human body.

pARTNeRSHip wiTH ReGioNAl HeAlTH pRoviDeRSTerry Andrus, CEO of East Alabama Medical Center, thinks the collaboration between EAMC and Auburn is natural. “We’re both interested in promoting the welfare of the region,” he says. Currently, EAMC and Auburn have partnered on the MRI facility, which the medical center uses for clinical imaging and the university uses for research. As VCOM produces students, EAMC will become a primary teaching hospital and affiliate of the branch campus.

woRlD-clASS oRTHopeDicSOn Saturdays, you’ll find him at the Auburn game. On Sundays, he’s with the Washington Redskins. Jim Andrews is arguably the nation’s best orthope-dic surgeon. His longstanding commitment to re-search, outreach and injury prevention makes him a perfect fit for Auburn where he’ll soon establish a clinical practice, work with VCOM to teach ortho-pedics and sports medicine and take advantage of the 3T and 7T MRIs at the MRI Research Center.


AUBUrn rEsEArCH2012 AnnUAL UpDATE

auburn university researcH contacts

Rodney L. Robertson, PhD

Executive Director, Huntsville Research Center

530 Discovery DriveHuntsville, AL [email protected]

John D. Weete, PhD

Assistant Vice President (acting), Technology Transfer & Commercialization

Executive Director, Auburn Research & Technology Foundation

570 Devall Drive, Suite 101Auburn, AL [email protected]

Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., Lt. Gen. (USA-Ret)

Senior Counsel for National Security Programs, Cyber Programs and Military Affairs

Research Program Development Office2150 Mike Hubbard Boulevard Auburn, AL [email protected]

John M. Mason, Jr., PhD, PE

Associate Provost & Vice President for Research

202 Samford HallAuburn, AL [email protected]

Carl A. Pinkert, PhD

Associate Vice President, Research


Martha M. Taylor

Assistant Vice President, Administration


Larry Fillmer

Executive Director, Program Development

2150 Mike Hubbard BoulevardAuburn, AL [email protected]

John M. Mason, Jr., phD, pEAssociate provost andVice president for research

www.auburn.edu/research/johnmason

it Doesn’t take recitation of evidence to know we face a crisis in healthcare; and it doesn’t take a catalogue of tragedy to under-stand that old age, chronic illness and catastrophic disease touch us all. So it should be no surprise that the subject of health and health-care can — and should — com-mand our attention.

The health challenges we face are difficult and complex and their solutions demand new strategies. At Auburn, we’ve discovered that these strategies must spin out from traditional medical research disciplines as well as areas of study outside traditional fields. Here, we’ve pulled the threads of our research together and woven our established strengths with new collaborations that prompt new thinking. Engineers work with pharmacists; veterinarians collab-orate with biochemists; and food scientists solve problems with information analysts.

With this interdisciplinary approach, we’ve developed nation --leading expertise in biomedical imaging, drug delivery mecha-nisms, food safety and security, obesity and diabetes treatment, and we’re making significant gains with cancer and heart disease. Our scientists and researchers partner with industry, government and medicine to speed solutions where they’re needed most.

This report is just a glimpse at how Auburn puts ideas to work. We hope you will join us. Learn more about our programs at www.auburn.edu/research.

closing tHougHtsAUBUrn rEsEArCH

2012 AnnUAL UpDATE

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Auburn University Research Annual Update 2012

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