From the Director's Desk
Dr. Peter F. Davies
This eventful year has seen the continued growth and development of the IME with additional recruitments and increased membership across the university. Several major distinctions have been won by Members of the Institute. Bill DeGrado was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; Lou Soslowsky received the Hughston Award (Sports Medicine); Tracy McIntosh received the Caveness Award (Brain Injury Association); and Scott Diamond received the Colborn Award (Chemical Engineering). The first recruitment phase is nearing completion with the arrivals of Paul Janmey (Harvard Medical School) as Professor of Physiology, and Valerie Weaver (U Cal-Berkeley) as Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Both are terrific interdisciplinary biomedical investigators who arrive to set up their labs in the Vagelos Building in August (see profiles below). This year also saw the implementation of a collaborative research agreement between the Director's lab and Astra-Zeneca Pharmaceuticals for cardiovascular gene discovery using microarray technology. More interactions with the private sector are a priority for the next phase of the Institute's development. Another important priority is the promotion of greater interactions between basic scientists and clinical specialists. Collaborations between IME faculty and IME Members in Pharmacology and Medicine have resulted in the award of a Cardiovascular Program Project grant ($6.5 million, P.I.: Garrett FitzGerald) from the NIH. Lou Soslowsky received a Whitaker Foundation Special Opportunity Award in Orthopaedic Bioengineering ($1.0 million), and instrumentation grants were awarded to Peter Davies (Atomic Force Microscopy Facility; NIH) and Susan Margulies (Multiphoton Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope; NSF). These instruments will be installed by the end of 1999. Initiatives currently in review include a Whitaker Foundation Special Opportunity Award in Injury Biomechanics, a NIH Bioengineering Research Partnership Grant, and an interdisciplinary predoctoral and postdoctoral Training Grant (NIH). When we added up the total grant support of IME Members, an astonishing $90m is distributed among 55 faculty and $60m is pending!
The IME Seminar Series, which hosted 46 speakers during the '98-'99 academic year continues to attract a strong interdisciplinary audience; seminar cosponsorships with various departments is working particularly well. The first IME Retreat, attended by 85 investigators, was held in February and a symposium on Nanotechnology and Biomedicine cosponsored with the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute was held in May.
As the new millennium approaches, it is obvious that interdisciplinary biomedical research is in the ascendancy. The NIH has embraced bioengineering into its grant structure through the efforts of the Bioengineering Consortium (BECOM), and recently Representative Burr has submitted a Bill to Congress to establish a Biomedical Imaging and Engineering Institute at the NIH. The Whitaker Foundation has stimulated enormous national interest in the discipline through its new Leadership and Development Awards as well as through extensive Special Opportunity and individual research grants. Barriers to the integration of engineering and physical sciences into biomedical research and clinical application are considerably lower now than five years ago, and public expectations are high that these initiatives will eventually translate into better, and in some respects revolutionary, health care. Penn stands ready to lead these endeavors.
National rankings at Penn move up: the Bioengineering program at Penn moved up two slots to the sixth position among Bioengineering/Biomedical specialty programs in the 1999 U.S. News and World Report survey. The superb Medical School infrastructure that supports the IME moved up yet again in national rankings. In the 1999 U.S. News and World Report survey, Penn was ranked number three (up from joint fourth) and it retained its first place position for rate of increase of NIH grant support. In total NIH grant support, Penn ranks number two just behind Johns Hopkins University.
A Collaborative Research Agreement with AstraZeneca
The IME and Astra-Zeneca Pharmaceuticals entered a strategic alliance to conduct hypothesis driven research on "Hemodynamic Gene Discovery". The company provides considerable expertise in microarray technology allowing vascular cell transcriptional profiling to be mapped to altered hemodynamics. Peter F. Davies directs the program. The agreement is initially for two years, starting January 1999. The research is conducted at the IME, and in Astra-Zeneca's U.K. and Wilmington, Delaware, research facilities.
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