In the history books their names stand out – Balboa, Magellan, De Soto. They were the explorers of the 1500’s. Meet a new group of explorers who are engineers at Georgia Tech and whose discoveries are being made in a new way. These explorers work with confocal microscopes, bioreactors, fume hoods, tissue culture cabinets, and flow cytometers. The world they explore is within the human body. They are searching tissues, cells, proteins, on levels well beyond the human eye. Their goal is to discover medical breakthroughs to make Georgians and individuals worldwide healthier.

Mark Prausnitz

Meet Mark Prausnitz, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Prausnitz’s interest in drug delivery mechanisms has led to his research in developing a microneedle patch. Prausnitz’s vaccine-delivery device is a steel patch with an array of needles, each about half a millimeter long. The array is coated with liquid vaccine mixed with a thickening agent. This dries, leaving the needles impregnated with solid vaccine. The needles painlessly puncture the skin, but do not go through it. Moisture from the body then dissolves the vaccine and it spreads into the skin in minutes. The biggest benefit of the microneedle patch may be the ease with which people could self-administer drugs or vaccines. Preliminary work with diabetics has found the patch can deliver insulin successfully and with less pain than a hypodermic. "Instead of needing to go to the doctor, you could just stop by a pharmacy and pick up a patch," Prausnitz says, noting that this could be especially helpful in the case of the potential outbreaks of measles and malaria in Haiti, or any other future pandemic, where vaccines need to be delivered quickly. Using only doctor-administered injections "could take months before the whole country would be vaccinated," he says. "But if you empower the patient, the U.S. Postal Service could deliver vaccines to everyone's home and the whole country could be vaccinated in a matter of days."

Ravi Bellamkonda

Meet Ravi Bellamkonda, Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Bellamkonda is working to help individuals with spinal cord injuries by developing an improved version of an enzyme that degrades the dense scar tissue that forms when the central nervous system is damaged. By digesting the tissue that blocks re-growth of damaged nerves, the improved enzyme – and new system for delivering it – could facilitate recovery from serious central nervous system injuries. The enzyme, chrondroitinase ABC (chABC), must be supplied to the damaged area for at least two weeks following injury to fully degrade scar tissue. But the enzyme functions poorly at body temperature and must therefore be repeatedly injected or infused into the body. Bellamkonda’s research has found ways to eliminate the thermal sensitivity of chABC and developed a delivery system that allowed the enzyme to be active for weeks without implanted catheters and pumps. The delivery system also enables the combination of therapies. “These results bring us a step closer to repairing spinal cord injuries, which require multiple steps including minimizing the extent of secondary injury, bridging the lesion, overcoming inhibition due to scar, and stimulating nerve growth,” said Bellamkonda.

Evan Zamir

Meet Evan Zamir, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Zamir’s research searches to understand how tissues and organs actually arise in the embryo. The primary mission of Zamir's research program is to uncover the biophysical mechanisms that both drive and regulate tissue origin and development and cell movement during embryonic development by using gastrulation as an experimental system for studying these phenomena. Gastrulation is the development of an individual organism which gives rise to vital internal organs, including the heart. It has become increasingly apparent that many of the genetic regulatory mechanisms that control cellular processes during gastrulation play crucial, if not central, roles in abnormal developmental processes that can occur in children or adults — notably, cancer. Zamir’s interest is in several areas of human health such as heart development, cancer, tissue engineering that involve many of the same fundamental cellular processes and genetic pathways.

These are just a few of the faculty who blend traditional “physical” engineering techniques with biological “life” sciences and medicine. The College of Engineering  (COE) has a strong commitment to biomedical engineering and biotechnology development. Crossing all disciplines, COE researchers continue to probe, discover, and explore the human body as they seek discoveries that will improve the quality of human health and life.