5/9/2015 Engineering students’ research in spotlight at major biomedical conferences

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From left, Rafeed Chaudhury, VictorAtlasman and Girish Pathangey exhibitedtheir work aimed at finding better ways totreat vascular diseases.

Caroline Addington presented details of herresearch to use stem cells to treat peoplewho sustain traumatic brain injuries.

By

Joe Kullman– November 13, 2012

Posted in: Research, Students

Engineering students’ research in spotlight at majorbiomedical conferences

Posted November 13, 2012

Recent international biomedical conferences provided a showcase for

research being done by several students in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of

Engineering.

At the Biomedical Engineering Society meeting in Atlanta, biomedical

engineering doctoral student Rafeed Chaudhury teamed up with senior

electrical engineering major Victor Atlasman and sophomore biomedical

engineering major Girish Pathangey to present their work on a design for a

new pulsatile flow pump system for aortic flow simulation.

It involves a piston pump that can read and replicate customizable aortic

waveforms, and achieve flow rates almost three times higher than what is

currently available on the market at a substantially lower cost, Chaudhury

says.

“This new flow pump system will allow us to better understand transitional flow physics in the aorta, which may lead to

advancements in the ability to treat vascular diseases, design medical devices and revolutionize surgical planning and

predictive medicine,” he says.

Chaudhury’s advisers are David Frakes, an assistant professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems

Engineering and the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, and Ronald Adrian, a professor in the

School for the Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy.

At the same conference, Caroline Hom, a senior biomedical engineering

major and Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative Fellow, presented

her work on a project titled Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics for

Predictable Control of Therapeutic Genes. Her adviser is Karmella

Haynes, an assistant professor in the School of Biological and Health

Systems Engineering.

The research involves transcription factors, which are proteins that

regulate gene expression. Haynes developed a synthetic transcription

factor, called Pc-TF, which binds onto genes that have H3K27me3-

associated regions – a characteristic that normally restricts access of

transcription factors to DNA – to reactivate dormant genes for cancer

treatment and tissue regrowth.

“The work I presented entailed the formulation of an efficient, effective

and broadly applicable procedure for using bioinformatics – the study of methods for storing, retrieving, and analyzing

biological data – to predict the effect of synthetic transcription factors, such as Pc-TF, on gene expression and cell

physiology,” Hom says. “Currently, I am expressing Pc-TF in three different cancer cell lines to confirm the validity of my

procedure.”

Biomedical engineering doctoral student Caroline Addington, working under the direction of  Sarah Stabenfeldt, an

assistant professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, is involved in research focusing on

developing a regenerative repair strategy for people who have incurred traumatic brain injuries.

Her goal is to “to modify a population of neural stem cells so that they may be more efficient and effective at repairing

5/9/2015 Engineering students’ research in spotlight at major biomedical conferences

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Christopher Workman’s researchfocuses on advancing treatmentof cerebral aneurysms. Photo:Jessica Slater/ASU

damaged tissue after a traumatic brain injury.”

At the conference she presented an experiment to examine “the combined effects of extracellular matrix components

and a specific signaling molecule, SDF-1α, on neural stem cell migration and transformation into cells of the central

nervous system.”

The experiment reveals there is a synergistic effect on neural stem cell migration

between certain extracellular matrix substrates and SDF-1α, and that transformation

into neurons was enhanced and more widespread in the presence of SDF-1α.

In the future, Addington says, this data will be used to enhance neural stem cell

sensitivity to SDF-1α.

Christopher Workman, a junior biomedical engineering and biochemistry major,

presented his work at the International Conference of the Engineering in Medicine

and Biology Society in San Diego. The society is part of the Institute of Electrical

and Electronic Engineers.

His project is Classification of Cerebral Aneurysm Fluid Dynamics Using Idealized

Models of Varying Parameters. Frakes is the leader of the project and biomedical

engineering doctoral student Justin Ryan co-authored a paper on which Workman’s

conference presentation was based.

The research is aimed at improving treatment of cerebral aneurysms, which “now

affect two percent of the population, cause 14,000 deaths each year in the United

States and are treated unsuccessfully 50 percent of the time,” Workman says.

His project involves “designing idealized models of the sac-like lesions in the arteries of the brain and building them into

transparent, hollow models,” he explains. “Fluid is run through those models to analyze how it flows in comparison to

anatomical models, so that treatment can be based on a classification system using the geometries of the aneurysms.”

Media Contact:Joe Kullman, joe.kullman@asu.edu

(480) 965-8122

Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering