ANN ARBOR—Four University of Michigan research teams received $7.28 million of funding from the Michigan Life Sciences Corridor in grants announced Wednesday by the state of Michigan. This year the Corridor awarded grants totaling $30 million allocated from the state’s tobacco settlement money to encourage life sciences product development and economic growth in Michigan. The U-M projects will tackle some of the biggest health problems in the state, including cancer, kidney disease and disorders of the blood vessels in the brain.

Trojan Horse Drug Delivery

James R. Baker Jr., the Ruth Dow Doan Professor of Biologic Nanotechnology and chief of allergy and clinical immunology in the Medical School, leads a team that will receive $1.3 million to develop a tiny drug delivery platform that invades a cancer cell and poisons it from the inside. The polymer nanodevices target a drug to a specific tissue, reducing side effects that occur when a drug hits the wrong kind of cell. Each tiny particle is studded with molecules that bind to the surface of specific cells, in this case tumor cells. The particle, and the drug it carries, are then internalized in the cell, where the platform partially dissolves, releasing the drug. “You get much more effective and specific killing of the cancer cells delivering medications this way,” Baker said.

Earlier Detection of the Deadliest Cancer

Craig Logsdon, professor of physiology and a member of the Comprehensive Cancer Center, is leading a $2.4 million effort to develop a blood test for pancreatic cancer, which has the worst five-year survival rate of any cancer. As with all cancers, early detection is the key to survival, but pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to diagnose in time to save the patient. A test for marker proteins unique to pancreatic cancer might enable doctors to make the diagnosis sooner. The goal is to identify some characteristic molecules that indicate cancerous pancreatic cells. “Discovery of molecules expressed in pancreatic cancer may also lead to new treatments for this deadly disease,” Logsdon said.

Stem Cell Therapy for Kidney Disease

H. David Humes, professor of internal medicine at the U-M Medical School, will be using a $1.4 million corridor grant to test a new therapy for patients with kidney failure who use kidney dialysis to clean their blood at least three times a week. These chronic dialysis patients often experience fatal complications that are related to inflammation. Humes believes the problem may be an absence in the patients’ damaged kidneys of tubule cells, which normally keep inflammation in check. Using an outside-the-body device he developed, that processes blood through a tube containing living kidney cells, Humes hopes to replace the function of tubule cells to these patients and forestall the development of inflammatory complications.

Fighting Brain Lesions with a Natural Plastic

Daryl Kipke, associate professor and director of the Neural Engineering Laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, received a $2.21 million grant to further develop a material that can be injected through microcatheters to stabilize malformed blood vessels in the brain, making them safer and easier to treat surgically. These brain vascular lesions, including aneurysms, can be hardened to a “soft gel consistency” with the injection of a seaweed-based polymer Kipke’s lab has developed. ALGEL is biologically benign and might eventually be used to fill or plug up blood vessels without triggering an immune response, Kipke said. Corridor funding was also granted to two U-M labs that provide core technology to researchers throughout the state. The Michigan Proteome Consortium, led by U-M biological chemistry professor Phil Andrews, received $2.1 million. The Michigan Center for Biological Information, led by assistant professor of cell and developmental biology Brian Athey, received $1.6 million.

RELATED LINKS

• Michigan Life Sciences Corridor
• Life Sciences at Michigan
• David Humes