BRC projects earn Dunn Foundation seed grants
Studies target ‘stealth’ chemotherapy, bad yeast, antibiotic resistance

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Yeast that switches to the dark side, “stealth” chemotherapy, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and a center to study repairing and re-engineering the nervous system have won grants for projects based at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC).

Four teams of scientists are winners of this year’s John S. Dunn Research Foundation seed grants. The awards represent the second round in a 10-year commitment by the foundation to fund projects that foster interdisciplinary and interinstitutional research at the BRC. The Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC) administers the program.

	PHOTOS.COM

Three awards are worth approximately $100,000 each, while a fourth “Event Award” is given for a collaborative research program in an emerging area. The grants are intended to catalyze research programs that will then seek continued funding from private or government agencies.

Matthew Bennett, assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology, is principal investigator on a study to understand Candida albicans, a yeast that can switch from a microbe beneficial to humans in the gastrointestinal tract to one that could be harmful, even fatal, if it invades the skin, mouth or bloodstream. The cell’s DNA is identical in both its white (safe) and opaque (dangerous) forms, a mystery that, when solved, may also provide clues to the workings of HIV and carcinogenesis.

Co-investigators are Michael Gustin, professor of biochemistry and cell biology, and Kresimir Josic, associate professor of mathematics at the University of Houston.

Rebekah Drezek, Rice professor in bioengineering and in electrical and computer engineering, will lead an effort to help cancer patients by minimizing the side effects of chemotherapy. In her “stealthy” approach, nanoparticles would mask cancer-fighting drugs until they reach a tumor, where mRNA binding would activate them. Liz Bikram, assistant professor of pharmaceutics at the University of Houston, is co-investigator.


Yousif Shamoo, associate professor of biochemistry and cell biology and director of Rice’s Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, will investigate why bacteria evolve resistance to drugs, particularly antibiotics. Shamoo and co-investigator Cesar Arias, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, are studying a strain of Vanconycin-resistant Enterococcus that initially responded to the antibiotic daptomycin but quickly developed a resistance, which led to the death of a patient.

“Our goal,” Shamoo wrote, “is to gain a better understanding of how strains such as this become resistant and how we might devise better strategies to prevent their rise.”

The Event Award went to a proposal by Peter Saggau, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, to form a Center for NeuroEngineering to develop technologies for studying, assisting, repairing and re-engineering the nervous system.

“A major challenge of this increasingly important discipline is to connect living nervous tissues and man-made devices,” Saggau wrote in the proposal. “This requires expertise in several areas of neuroscience, neurosurgery, engineering and computational modeling.”

Lending their expertise are several co-investigators from Rice: Steven Cox, professor of computational and applied mathematics; Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Robert Raphael, associate professor of bioengineering; and, from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Nitin Tandon, associate professor in the Department of Neurosurgery.

“Research and development in the area of neuroengineering has tremendous potential for therapeutic applications, including the treatment of neurological diseases, cochlear implants that enable the profoundly deaf to hear, retinal implants that enable the blind to see (and) neural prosthetics that enable the paralyzed to control robotic devices,” Saggau wrote. “Designing man-made systems that interface with living neural systems also will improve our understanding of brain functioning.”

The Dunn Foundation is a longtime supporter of collaborative research through the GCC, which builds interdisciplinary teams and training programs in the biological sciences that involve the computational, chemical, mathematical and physical sciences.