Schools join in biomedical engineering effort
by Jonathan Maze
Of The Post and Courier Staff
Two months ago, Xinkui Hao moved from Hangzhou, China, to Charleston
so he could attend graduate school. At Clemson University.
No, Hao wasn’t lost. Rather, he is the first student in a new biomedical engineering partnership between Clemson and the Medical University of South Carolina that officials from the two institutions announced on Thursday.
Under the partnership, Clemson will establish a tiny branch of its bioengineering department at MUSC. The partnership reflects a growing effort on the part of the state’s three major research institutions—the University of South Carolina being the third—to work together more closely on research.
MUSC
President Dr. Ray Greenberg, left, and Clemson President James F. Barker
sign agreement forming the new Clemson/MUSC biomedical engineering program
Sept. 25.
Officials at both MUSC and Clemson have high hopes for the latest partnership, saying it could bring in millions in research grants and help in the creation of spin-off companies that generate high-paying jobs. It also provides students at both institutions with learning opportunities they didn’t previously have.
“Several seconds of collaboration can lead to years of fruitful research,” said Dan Knapp, Ph.D., MUSC’s bioengineering program director. “It can really go a long way to helping address some of the country’s major health care problems on this campus.”
Cooperation on university campuses is nothing new. Clemson and MUSC have been working together in various forms for decades, and each of them has numerous partnerships with other institutions: the announcement itself was held in the Thurmond-Gazes research building, which MUSC shares with the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center.
But this is the first instance in South Carolina in which faculty from another institution will have a permanent place on the MUSC campus. In this case, two Clemson faculty members, Anand Ramamurthi and Dr. Xuejen Wen, have moved to Charleston and will work out of labs and other space that MUSC has provided.
Two more will join them in a year or so, said Larry Dooley, associate dean for research and graduate studies at Clemson.
Parts of two different grants are being used to fund the project: $6 million from the National Institutes of Health to build the state’s biomedical infrastructure, and $9 million from the National Science Foundation, awarded through the state’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research program.
By working together, the institutions believe they can combine their respective strengths. Clemson has the state’s only bioengineering program, which has more than doubled in size in the past couple of years.
It also has strengths in cell biology.
MUSC, meantime, has a medical school involved in $150 million in research annually.
It also has a developmental biology program and is doing research on the potential of stem cells from human fat, which scientists are hoping can be developed into the many different types of cells that make up the body’s bone, muscle, organs and other tissue. The effort will provide students in Charleston with the ability to get a graduate-level bioengineering degree without leaving town. Such graduates are increasing demand in the medical device industry.
The effort also provides Clemson bioengineering students with the ability to study at an academic medical center and see their research at work in a clinical setting.
The institutions will use videoconferencing and distance-learning to bridge the gap between their campuses, so courses taught at one university can be seen at the other.
Though the partnership is new, there is some precedent. In the 1960s, Clemson engineering students would come to Charleston and do projects at the Division of Clinical Engineering at the Medical University’s surgery department.
One of the leaders of that program, MUSC’s Tom Hargest, developed a fluidized air bed for burn patients. That bed, now used worldwide, led to the establishment of a company called Support Systems International, bought in 1985 by specialized hospital bed maker Hill-Rom Inc., which still has a facility in North Charleston.
That’s the kind of result the two institutions hope will grow from this latest collaboration.
Through the partnership, research is already under way on vascular implants and drug-enhanced cardiac stents, which are devices used to prop open clogged arteries.
One of the program’s long-term goals, Dooley and Knapp said, is to learn how to use an adult’s own stem cells, those found in fat, to grow their own replacement parts, like an artery, that when clogged or diseased would be replaced with the manufactured part.
Dooley said this work will fit in with research that will be done with the South Carolina Center for Regenerative Medicine.
That’s an effort between MUSC, USC and Clemson recently awarded $6 million in 2004 lottery proceeds from the state. Those funds will be matched with money the institutions raise privately.
Knapp said that patients could see the benefits of the work done through the Clemson-MUSC partnership in as soon as three years.
That’s about how long it will take MUSC’s new $292 million hospital to open just across the street from where Thursday’s (Sept. 25) event was held, a fact not ignored by its president, Dr. Ray Greenberg.
“We hope that will be a place of great application” for the work done through the partnership, Greenberg said.
The presence of a hospital, and patients, is a big reason why Xinkui Hao chose to attend Clemson.
Hao received an undergraduate degree in bioengineering from Zhejiang University, which is in Hangzhou, a city of 1.7 million people about 100 miles from Shanghai.
Hao heard about Clemson’s program while in China. The partnership with MUSC helped solidify his decision, and he decided to move to Charleston.
“It’s very important,” he said. “Our research project is very close
to humans. It would be very difficult if you didn’t have a medical school.”
Editor's note: The article ran Sept. 26 in the Post and Courier
and is reprinted with permission.
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