In the past, scientists had it relatively easy, according to biomedical engineer Christopher Chen. They could spend their days diligently working alone in a private lab, inventing the commercial light bulb (Thomas Edison) or developing the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk). While the concept of the scientist as a solitary genius has always been problematic-after all, science is best as a team effort-today's scientists face problems so much bigger, so much harder to solve, that working solo is rarely an option.
"Nearly all of the easy problems that a single investigator might look at with their special expertise have already been addressed," says Chen, a Boston University William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering. "We're now confronting the harder problems that require interdisciplinary teams to solve them, challenges such as heart disease, cancer, fibrosis, or degenerative diseases impacting the brain."
In 2017, BU trustee Rajen Kilachand (Questrom'74, Hon.'14) made a historic gift of $115 million to the University with the goal of enabling that kind of multidisciplinary work. The majority of the donation, $100 million, was used to establish the Rajen Kilachand Fund for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering. The fund supports interdisciplinary research into and solutions for some of today's biggest challenges.
Since its launch, the fund has awarded $12 million for projects that have advanced science, built collaborative structures for interdisciplinary studies, expanded educational and funding opportunities, and more. Past winners have gone on to secure patents, found companies, score millions in additional funding, and spark spin-off research.
"On behalf of myself, and all the faculty, grad students, and postdocs who are part of our community," says Chen, "I want to express our deep appreciation for Rajen Kilachand's gift."
On Tuesday, BU will celebrate Kilachand Day-which recognizes the founding gift's vision and impact-with a series of events, including an announcement of the 2022 fund award winners, all from ENG:
- Irving Bigio, a professor and undergraduate chair of biomedical engineering, and David Boas, a professor of biomedical engineering. Research into the imaging of myelin and elucidating its role in Alzheimer's disease.
- Douglas Densmore, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Catherine Klapperich, a professor of biomedical engineering. Converting BU's Clinical Testing Laboratory into a core facility on the Charles River Campus, making it part of the existing Design, Automation, Manufacturing, and Prototyping (DAMP) Lab.
To help mark Kilachand Day, The Brink is highlighting some of the past award winners, looking at how the fund helped shape their work and led to new breakthroughs:
Modeling the Human Brain
One example of a project that took on a big challenge is an effort to replicate human brain tissue to improve our understanding of diseases and help accelerate new treatments. In 2019, Benjamin Wolozin, a BU School of Medicine professor of pharmacology and neurology, and Christine Cheng, then a BU College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of biology, led a team awarded $500,000 to model brain diseases such as Alzheimer's using a synthetic 3D brain assembloid, a living tissue that has human neurons and develops the exact pathology seen in human brains.
"The impact of the Kilachand award on our research has been profound," says Wolozin. "We've created an actual model of human brain tissue that develops Alzheimer's disease, rather than a mouse model."
Animal models are problematic because animal neurons differ from human neurons. It also takes nine months to develop disease to a point where it can be studied, whereas the brain organoid establishes robust disease in only three weeks. The team's model is now helping accelerate drug development.
"We've developed a platform that allows us to look at pharmaceuticals," Wolozin says. Among the companies already capitalizing on the team's technology is Storm Therapeutics, a UK firm creating novel therapies for the treatment of cancer and other diseases. "We took Storm's compound and treated it. They're now developing drugs that work in the brain because of what we've done." Wolozin adds that "it's not possible to test a lot of compounds in the brain because the brain keeps compounds out to protect itself." The team's model allows scientists to bypass the blood-brain barrier defense mechanism to look at a compound's impact.
Wolozin says the Kilachand Fund award has helped open up new funding opportunities for the brain model, to the tune of millions of dollars, and enabled new projects by other investigators. Best of all, says Wolozin, the brain model "will lead to treatment that's going to have an amazing impact on Alzheimer's disease, on Parkinson's disease, on Down syndrome, and beyond."
Sleep and Neurodegenerative Disorders
Sleep plays an essential role in our health and is associated with the clearance of toxic waste products from the human brain. But why sleep plays such a critical role in "washing the brain" is not well understood. As people age, the length and quality of their sleep generally declines. Even worse, neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease are linked to declines in sleep, strongly suggesting that sleep reduces the risk of neurodegeneration by preventing buildup of toxic proteins in the brain.
Anna Devor and Laura Lewis, both faculty in ENG's biomedical engineering department, were selected for a Kilachand Fund award in 2021. Their project aims to bring a better understanding of the connection between sleep, the brain, and neurodegenerative disorders.
But their Kilachand Fund award may have had its biggest impact on them during the application process.
"Applying for the Kilachand award was a catalyst that got us thinking deeper about what we wanted to do, and also started us collaborating across disciplines," says Devor. When there was a pause in the awards process for a year due to COVID-19, she says, "so many good things happened to us in the interim as a result of our deeper thinking and collaboration." A few months after their initial Kilachand Fund application was submitted, for example, "we applied for an NIH BRAIN Initiative grant and we were able to get a $14 million grant."
Devor says it's been hugely important to "talk to our colleagues who bring different perspectives, colleagues like Ben Wolozin, people who come up with new ideas to solve these complex problems." She adds one more major impact: the Kilachand Fund award and the approaches it spurred "have been really helpful for our trainees [graduate and undergraduate students, as well as postdocs], enabling them to work with trainees from other disciplines, to see what tools and approaches they use."
Understanding How Cells Work Collectively
Back in 2019, Christopher Chen and his team-which included co-principal investigators Pankaj Mehta, a CAS professor of physics, and Allyson E. Sgro, a former ENG assistant professor and now a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute-were awarded $5 million to study how groups of cells work together. The team has used the award to focus on how cell communities can create functioning tissues, resist antibiotics, or slow the growth of cancerous tumors.
With the help of the Kilachand Fund award, Chen and his team have built a training and collaboration initiative, the Multicellular Design Program, which aims to foster interdisciplinary research into multicellular systems. It has acted as a bridge between scientists and engineers from across BU-from computing, physics, mathematics, engineering, biology, and medicine-and provided new training opportunities for doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows.
"The Kilachand award has catalyzed new interdisciplinary collaborations across departments and colleges here at BU, by funding doctoral and postdoctoral fellows who are jointly supervised by two or more BU faculty," Chen says. "We've also funded a number of pilot projects between BU laboratories, requiring collaboration across disciplines." Those collaborations have built up a research network that, Chen says, "has now enabled us to go after major, externally funded multi-PI research initiatives."
Chen notes that it's difficult to get external funding for new ideas. "You have to already have made some headway toward a solution in order to get that external funding," he says, "and that's exactly how the Kilachand award has helped us." For example, Chen and two of his colleagues recently won an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award from the Paul Allen Foundation for a bold project to develop lab-grown lungs. "We'll use the Allen award to look at how to control the formation of lung tissue using synthetic biology, which was only possible from groundwork we accomplished with the Kilachand award," he says.
As with other past Kilachand winners, Chen has seen his award launch a virtuous cycle. "About half of the fellows that we funded using the Kilachand award have been able to secure external fellowships from NIH, NSF, or other places," he says. "That initial funding has now been multiplied many times over."
