Posted: September 15, 2010

Visitors to the Center for Affordable Nanoengineering of Polymeric Biomedical Devices Web site can view an interactive 3-D model of the center’s research via a link on this page, www.nsec.ohio-state.edu/overview_III.html. Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design helped create the model, in which individual projects appear as nodes on a network, each connected by filaments to related research in partner laboratories around the world.

A College of Engineering-led research center has been awarded $12.5 million in continued funding from the National Science Foundation.

NSF first established the Center for Affordable Nanoengineering of Polymeric Biomedical Devices in 2004 with a grant of $12.9 million. The center is the only one among NSF’s 19 Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers that focuses solely on the development of polymer-based bio-nanotechnology. In its first five years, the center spawned more than a dozen patents, as well as five commercial spin-off companies.

“I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished so far,” says L. James Lee, center director and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. “This new funding brings us even closer to our ultimate goal of designing and building a nanofactory — an assembly line for affordable, environmentally friendly manufacture of nano-based medical technology.”

Among the center’s developments: polymer scaffolds that support the growth of blood vessels for transplant; techniques for shaping DNA into structures that could one day form sensors for biological agents; and a CD carved with tiny channels that transport fluids for medical testing.

Lee says the center now will focus on system-level integration of its new nanomaterials and nanotechnologies into advanced drug and gene delivery methods and single-cell analysis methods. These will enable personalized nanomedicine through close collaboration with medical researchers at Ohio State’s College of Medicine.