Professor John McLean of the Department of Chemistry has been awarded a $2.7M Grand Opportunity (GO) grant from the National Institutes of Health as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The NIH “GO” grants program supports projects that address large, specific biomedical and biobehavioral research endeavors that have the potential for high short-term impact, and a high likelihood of enabling growth and investment in biomedical research and development, public health, and health care delivery. The title of Prof. McLean’s grant is “Elucidation of Leukocyte and Macrophage Biomarker Signatures from Drugs of Abuse”. Prof. McLean will study macrophages and other blood cells from normal and cocaine-addicted rats and mice in automated, high-throughput biomicroelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS) coupled to ion mobility mass spectrometers in an effort to obtain comprehensive measurements of metabolic precursors, products, and signaling molecules in real time. His lab will analyze the wide-spectrum of temporally varying biochemical signature of the living cells before and during exposure to precise doses of cocaine and alchohol administered to cells in the traps using automatic inference of mathematical models. Prof. McLean hypothesizes that the resulting metabolic models and biochemical signatures from the cells of addicted animals and normal animals will differ significantly due to permanent alterations in cell physiology brought about by prior exposure. A group of biomedical, chemical and computer engineers, chemists, molecular biologists, and physicists at Vanderbilt, Cornell, Duke, and the CFD Research Corporation will optimize computer-controlled nanoliter bioreactors that would use optical, electrical, and electrochemical sensors, two-dimensional mass spectrometry, and novel computer algorithms to design and conduct experiments on small populations of living cells. The goal is to automatically infer the underlying nonlinear dynamical equations governing the behavior of the cells and their environment in the presence and absence of cocaine and alcohol.
Last Updated: October 2, 2009 |
