When the call went out last year for seed proposals aimed at developing a possible new research initiative at the Beckman Institute, three of the 11 proposals selected for funding involved biological imaging.
A long list of Beckman faculty members and colleagues from outside the Institute proposed projects that involve using bioimaging for advancing medical research in the areas of breast cancer, speech birth defects, and targeted delivery of drugs and other agents at the molecular level.
The growing interest in bioimaging and biological engineering for medical and other scientific uses can be measured by the goals of funding agencies and through the use of various imaging modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging, optical imaging, and ultrasound imaging by researchers from an increasing number of disciplines. The magnets at Beckman’s own Biomedical Imaging Center, for example, have been used in expected ways such as neuroscientists imaging the brain, and in surprising fashion, like engineers imaging microfluidic flow. Bioimaging is one of four cornerstone research lines at the recently created Department of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
If a new Beckman Institute research initiative were added within the near future, bioimaging would seem to be a likely candidate. Beckman Director Pierre Wiltzius said discussion of a new research initiative is still a few months off, but added that bioimaging would be a natural fit.
“For the Beckman Institute this is a very natural area for us to be in because that is the interface where we want to be at, between the physical sciences and the life sciences, biological sciences, and social sciences,” Wiltzius said. “Where it gets interesting in the context of the Beckman Institute being driven by interdisciplinary research is that bioimaging in itself can also be interdisciplinary, or multimodal, with many different techniques applied at the same time. That is something that is very much by nature a Beckman-like topic.”
Wiltzius said there are a couple of reasons for the emergence of bioimaging as a field of study.
“I think generally there is a lot of emphasis on bioimaging. In optical imaging this is indeed driven by technological advances that come all the way from new infrared light sources invented in the telecommunications industry and new detectors, signal processing and so on,” he said. “The other reason is that as a lot of these tools have been developed in the physical sciences and engineering, they do find new applications in the life sciences and biological sciences.”
Beckman faculty member Michael Insana is playing a leading role in bioimaging developments at the University of Illinois and at the Institute. Insana, who was chosen to head the new Bioimaging Science and Technology group at Beckman, is co-author of one of the seed proposals and is a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering.
Insana said a possible research initiative centered on bioimaging would complement a broader push to integrate bioimaging theory and research with real-world applications.
“From my point of view in bioengineering we’re trying to put together a new department,” Insana said. “How are we going to be able to compete with people like Duke and Johns Hopkins, and other places with strong medical schools? The things we thought about focusing on were really important and interesting problems in the biological sciences for which new technologies can be applied. The area that I, and many of us in this group, have been funded to work on is cancer.”
The seed proposal from Insana and four other Beckman collaborators – Thomas Huang, Zhi-Pei Liang, Stephen Boppart, and Rohit Bhargava – is for developing molecular imaging technologies for imaging breast cancer.