Johns Hopkins chemical and biomolecular engineering faculty are playing leading roles in two prominent centers dedicated to probing the physics of cancer and improving the manufacturing process for biopharmaceutical drugs.
The Johns Hopkins Physical Sciences-Oncology Center, a National Cancer Institute-funded research center started in 2009 to unravel the physical underpinnings of the growth and spread of cancer, has been approved for continued NCI funding. The five-year, $9 million grant will allow investigators with the Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for NanoBioTechnology, the Whiting School of Engineering, and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to continue their work investigating the physics of cancer, says Denis Wirtz, the PSOC’s principal investigator and director, and the Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The center began with a five-year, $14.8 million NCI grant.
“We know a lot about how a primary tumor can come about, driven by mutations in genes, and how these mutations can promote the proliferation of cells,” says Wirtz, who also serves as Hopkins’ vice provost for research. “However, much less is known about what actually triggers the physical cascade of steps that contribute to metastasis,” including the migration of cancer cells from a primary site to secondary sites, and how these cells thrive and grow in oxygen-deprived environments that would kill normal cells.”
Johns Hopkins also is one of four academic institutions leading the new Advanced Mammalian Biomanufacturing Innovation Center (AMBIC), a National Science Foundation-supported government-academic-industrial cooperative research center to study and improve manufacturing processes for biopharmaceutical drugs. With $600,000 in seed money provided across the four institutions each year from NSF, plus support from participating industrial partners, AMBIC is poised to start research projects this fall, says chemical and molecular engineering professor Michael Betenbaugh, AMBIC’s director and the site leader for Johns Hopkins.