The Roy and Diana Vagelos Research Laboratories (Photograph by Felice Macara)
From the Director's Desk
Dr. Peter F. Davies Welcome to the second IME Newsletter. A highlight of this second year of the institute was the completion of the Vagelos Research Laboratories (dedicated November 1997), which provides excellent research, seminar and office space in approx. 11,000 sq. ft. on the first floor of the building. IME laboratories are designed to optimize the interactions of engineering and biomedical research, and house centralized research facilities for tissue culture, molecular and cell biology, and advanced optical microscopy. The balance of the building is occupied by the Chemical Engineering department, with which IME is closely associated, and the Chemistry Department.

IME membership has grown to 46 faculty, of which 13 are new recruitments to Penn. The latest arrivals (see profiles) are Keith Gooch, Ph.D. (Bioengineering), a tissue engineer recruited from MIT, and Irena Levitan, Ph.D. (Pathology), an electro-physiologist recruited from Allegheny University, who works on mechano-sensitive ion channels in cells. Additional recruitments are in progress during this exciting phase of development. As new recruits establish their research labs and membership in the IME by existing Penn faculty increases, two objectives of the Institute are paramount. First, critical masses of expertise are reached in interdisciplinary areas of importance to IME interests that provide opportunities for research funding. Second, regular interaction between clinicians and basic scientists stimulates opportunities for translational medicine - the integration of research bench knowledge into clinical medicine.

Several initiatives are underway. The largest is the preparation of a Bioengineering/IME Leadership Award proposal to the Whitaker Foundation, that follows a successful preproposal (4/98) to the Foundation. A reorganization of Bioengineering undergraduate and graduate education with greater emphasis on clinical exposure during training is a key element of the initiative. An NIH Program Project Grant in cardiovascular bioengineering and an NIH Training Grant for interdisciplinary training in bioengineering are also in development for submission in early 1999. IME members Leif Finkel and Kwabena Boahen were awarded a 3-year $1.6 M grant from a new NSF program in Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence, and in the private sector a 2-year collaborative research agreement with Zeneca Pharmaceuticals for hemodynamic gene discovery has recently been finalized. In addition to large program initiatives, the IME serves as a focus for individual interdisciplinary grant applications at the Medicine/Engineering interface which involve research expertise extending beyond traditional disciplines and that embrace co-investigators from the Medical and Engineering schools.

The IME seminar series is now established as the flagship series in biomedical engineering, broadly defined. Penn scientists with diverse interests regularly attend lectures presented by leading international, national, and Penn investigators. The excellence of the program was recognized by funding through the Interdisciplinary Seminar Fund from the Vice Provost for Research. Two annual IME joint lectures were held with great success - the first IME/LRSM joint lecture was delivered in December by the biophysicist Evan Evans (University of British Columbia), and Prof. George Georgiou (University of Texas) was the second IME/Chemical Engineering Chance Lecturer in Engineering and Medicine in February. Dr. David Tirrell from Cal Tech will deliver the 1998 IME/LRSM Lecture on November 12. A further highlight was the visit of and lecture by Penn Alumnus and NASA astronaut Michael L. Gernhardt, Ph.D., invited by the Engineering School, the Institute for Environmental Medicine and the IME as part of Engineering Week events. We are very excited by the lectures lined up for this yearıs series (last page of this newsletter). We look forward to the first IME retreat in February 1999, and to a specialized symposium on Nanotechnology, co-sponsored with the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute, later in 1999.

IME members continue to publish and to lecture worldwide. Many honors and distinctions have been won during the past year, some of which are listed below, reflecting the quality of Penn faculty. Most important, however, and a feature that distinguishes Penn from many of its peer institutions, is the high level of meaningful cooperation between investigators that assures that the total teamwork effort is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. It is the mission of the IME to catalyze these interactions, and stimulate fundamental research at the interface between biomedicine and the engineering/computational sciences that will lead to innovative applications in biomedical research and clinical practice.

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