Program Snapshot
The Nanomedicine Initiative has two major goals:
- Understand how the biological machinery inside living cells is built and operates at the nanoscale.
- Use this information to re-engineer these structures, develop new technologies that could be applied to treating diseases, and/or leverage the new knowledge to focus work directly on translational studies to treat a disease or repair damaged tissue.
The program began in 2005 with a national network of eight Nanomedicine Development Centers. Now, in the second half of this 10-year program, the four centers best positioned to effectively apply their findings to translational studies were selected to continue receiving support.
Program Highlights
Chaperone Fragments as Therapeutic Agents for Huntington Disease
Tunable quantum dots for medical imaging
Nanomedicine Development Centers (Active):
- Nanomedicine Center for Nucleoprotein Machines
Gang Bao, PhD, Georgia Tech
Matthew Porteus, MD, PhD, Stanford University
David Roth, MD, PhD, University of Pennsylvania - Center for Protein Folding Machinery
Wah Chiu, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine
William Mobley, MD, PhD, University of California, San Diego
Eric Jonasch, MD, MD Anderson Cancer Center
Judith Frydman, PhD, Stanford University - Nanomedicine Center for Mechanobiology Directing the Immune Response
Michael Dustin, PhD, New York University
Michael Milone, MD, PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Carl June, MD, University of Pennsylvania - NDC for the Optical Control of Biological Function
Ehud Isacoff, PhD, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab/University of California, Berkeley
John Flannery, PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Russell Van Gelder, MD, PhD, University of Washington - Engineering Cellular Control: Synthetic Signaling and Motility Systems
Wendell Lim, PhD, University of California, San Francisco
Nanomedicine Development Centers (Previously Funded):
- Phi29 DNA-Packaging Motor for Nanomedicine
Peixuan Guo, PhD, University of Cincinnatti
- Center for Cell Control
Chih-Ming Ho, PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
- National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors
Eric Jakobsson, PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign