STC.UNM Provides funding for promising technology at UNM.

by Karen Wentworth

UNM Investment in Faculty Research Brings Technology Closer to Market
When a university owned non-profit corporation invests cash to support research, it’s the strongest indication that researchers are creating something interesting. This year STC.UNM gave three groups of researchers $25,000 each to refine their technology so it can be licensed for manufacture.

A research group from UNM’s Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Department and the Health Science Center’s Department of Pathology are consolidating a decade’s worth of research into a biosensor that may be the next great technology to come from UNM. The biosensor can read multiple viral pathogens almost instantly.

Is your illness a particular strain of flu? This sensor would be capable of giving your doctor an immediate answer. The basic research has been done but the question is: what happens next?

Associate Professor of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Plamen Atanassov says, “We would like to see this technology be taken further because it has practically reached maturity. It is an eight channel immunosensor that can designate eight different strains of flu.” The researchers are not interested in staring their own company to manufacture the devices, so STC.UNM is looking for a company to license the technology from UNM.

This technology is unusually versatile. It can be configured to detect viral or bacterial pathogens in the blood; perform diagnostic tests in search of autoimmune diseases such as lupus or rheumatic arthritis; search for pathogens in food such as salmonella, e-coli, campylobacter or lysteria; and look for hanta virus infection in mice or people.

The principal investigators include Atanassov, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Gabriel Lopez, Research Professor of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Dmitri Ivnitski, Research Assistant Professor of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Ravil Sitdikov and Research Associate Professor in Pathology at the UNM School of Medicine Stephen Young.

Using Nature to Balance a Devastating Disease
When Vallabh Shah, associate professor in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Internal Medicine at UNM’s Health Sciences Center skinned his knee as a small boy, his mother would mix a paste of curcumin and water to put on the wound to hasten the healing.

Now he and David VanderJagt, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Loraine Deck professor of Chemistry are testing curcumin, an ingredient in turmeric, to determine whether it might be effective in preventing a serious health problem.

Kidney patients who are on dialysis find their white blood cells are exposed to a cascade of oxidative and inflammatory stresses as the blood is pumped out, filtered, and returned to the body. The stress from dialysis can activate genes that promote oxidative stress and inflammation. Once a patient has inflammation, he becomes much more vulnerable to a range of pathologies. Their goal is to stop the dialysis-induced development of inflammation so that patients, who may undergo dialysis three or four times each week, are protected from this repeated pro-inflammatory stress.

The UNM research group wants to use curcumin or a related compound to try to dampen oxidative stress during dialysis and keep inflammation at bay. They believe an appropriate anti-inflammatory agent such as curcumin could be placed directly into the dialysis media to protect blood cells from activation during the dialysis procedure.

Funded by STC.UNM, the project is still in the exploratory stage as the investigators work on gathering enough data to obtain a grant from the National Institute of Health to do research in preparation for human trials. Shah says they must be able to show a promising investigative path to move their research into the next phase. If they are able to prove the anti-inflammatory properties of curcumin in this clinical setting, they may be able to make a big improvement in quality of life for kidney patients at a critical stage of their disease.

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