• Creating Innovative Materials by Blending Science, Engineering, and Biological Precedent
• One-Upping Nature in a Quest for New Materials
• Enzyme "Ink" Shows Potential for Nanomanufacturing
• Smart Nanostructures and Nanobrushes Progress by Engineers at Duke University
• Pratt Engineers Fabricate "Smart Nanostructures"
• From Soft Materials to Cancer Treatment
• AFM Project Leads to Improved Instrument Performance
• CBIMMS To Be Housed in New Facility Under Construction!!
• Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility Opens
• Chilkoti Awarded a Research Grant for $3.2 million

 

Creating Innovative Materials by Blending Science, Engineering, and Biological Precedent

Unlike any human-made products, biological materials such as blood cells and bone have had millions of years to be tested and optimized. The goal of CBIMMS is to use knowledge of these kinds of materials to create new materials based on the complex yet efficient design strategies of nature. See the full article from the DukEngineer at http://www.dukengineer.pratt.duke.edu/04fall/13-DUKEng-MaterialSystems.pdf.

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One-Upping Nature in a Quest for New Materials

Taking their inspiration from the "soft and wet" natural world, engineers are designing new tools and devices that aim at practical applications. About 30 investigators at Duke, plus nearly 20 at other institutions or companies in the United States and Europe, are inovlved in research at the Pratt School for Engineering's Center for Biologically Inspired Materials and Material Systems (CBIMMS). All of them are taking an engineer's look at nature in order to learn how to improve on its designs for human uses. See the full article from Pratt News and Communications Office at http://www. pratt.duke.edu/news/feature_cbimms.php.

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Enzyme 'Ink' Shows Potential for Nanomanufacturing

Nanomanufacturing is at the heart of efforts to make new devices that are far smaller, cheaper, faster and better than existing devices. See the full press release from the Duke News Office at http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/news/ink_0404.html.

 

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Smart Nanostructures and Nanobrushes Progress by Engineers at Duke University

A news release distributed nationally by the university March 30 described progress by Stefan Zauscher, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, Ashutosh Chilkoti, associate professor of Biomedical Engineering, and colleagues in building “smart nanostructures," including "nanobrushes" that can selectively and reversibly sprout from surfaces in response to changes in temperature or solvent chemistry. Zauscher was an organizer of an American Chemical Society symposium last week called "Smart Polymers on Colloids and Surfaces.” The story was picked up by Azom.com, the materials science information Web site. See http://www.azom.com/news.asp?newsID=1206.

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Pratt Engineers Fabricate 'Smart Nanostructures'

Engineers from Duke's Pratt School of Engineering have described progress building so-called "smart nanostructures," including billionths-of-a-meter-scale "nanobrushes" that can selectively and reversibly sprout from surfaces in response to changes in temperature or solvent chemistry.
http://www.pratt.duke.edu/news/releases/index.php?story=148.

From Soft Materials to Cancer Treatment

You may view the online presentation on this topic given recently by David Needham, in collaboration with Mark Dewhirst.

Building on the premise that custom-made materials that behave like biological ones may lead to new kinds of medical therapy, Duke researchers have come up with a sub-microscopic drug carrier for possible anti-cancer treatment. The first phase of clinical testing has begun of heat-triggered liposomes that are engineered to release the agents they carry at the cancer site when tumor temperatures are raised to 41 degrees Celsius. The smart drug carriers were invented by Professor David Needham of the Pratt Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and developed in collaboration with Dr. Mark Dewhirst in the Duke medical center’s Department of Radiation Oncology. The clinical trial is using the special liposomes to carry the anticancer drug doxorubicin as a possible prostate cancer treatment.

The liposomes are artificially engineered waxy capsules just two molecules thick composed of lipids, materials similar to those that surround every cell in the body. The liposomes are small enough to travel through the bloodstream to deliver drugs to designated targets. They can quickly dump their cargo because their special membrane chemistry causes parts of their molecular structures to begin "melting" when heat reaches the critical temperature. Needham explains the liposomes are like soccer balls with stitches. "When the stitches become leaky, the drug that is trapped inside will come out rapidly. Such rapid release from the drug carrier is what is needed in order to kill the tumors."

The Phase 1 trial is being conducted at the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. under the auspices of the licensor of the technology, Celsion Corp., of Columbia, MD.

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AFM Project Leads to Improved Instrument Performance

During the past 4 months, Professors Clark and Zauscher have been working with Brad Schultz, a visiting engineer from Australia to build an atomic force microscope (AFM) and design the software necessary to improve control of single molecule force measurements. The project was initiated in collaboration with Julio Fernandez of the Mayo Clinic, who supplied initial hardware design specifications based upon their current AFM. A combination of software, including LabView and MATLAB has been employed in developing the user interface allowing data acquisition and real-time control of the instrument through digital signal processors.

Past implementations of force controlled modes of operation have relied upon proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control approaches implemented in analog electronics. Control system expertise based in the Adaptive Structures Laboratory at Duke University has been applied so as to automate the design and implementation for each experiment. The design is performed automatically and can be refined as a function of the material properties of the sample under study. This improved instrument will be used to experimentally study the mechanics of biological and synthetic materials within CBIMMS.

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CBIMMS To Be Housed in New Facility Under Construction!!

The Pratt School of Engineering and Duke University broke ground on a new building, the Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine, and Applied Sciences (CIEMAS), in August 2002. This new facility will provide approximately 320,000 square feet (gross) of additional space for teaching, research, and faculty offices. The estimated completion time is two years (August 2004).

CBIMMS will be assigned approximately 25,000 square feet of office and laboratory space in this new facility. Architectural drawings of the laboratories and atrium are provided below. A real-time sneak peak of the construction site is found at:
http://www.pratt.duke.edu/Facilities/webcam.php

CIEMAS will also house the Duke NanoFabrication Facility which consists of a 6,000 square feet cleanroom dedicated as a shared facility for the fabrication of micron- and nano-scaled structures for applications in photonics, biomedicine, biology, microelectromechanical systems, and nanostructures for physics and chemistry research on the nanoscale. The CIEMAS will also house an analytical laboratory and a systems laboratory. The Analytical Laboratory will include an atomic-force microscopy laboratory, a mechanical property measurement laboratory, a thermal property measurement laboratory, an acoustic property measurement laboratory, and an optical/magnetic property measurement laboratory. The Systems Laboratory will include a colloid suspension laboratory, a MEMS system integration and prototyping laboratory, a microsystems assembly laboratory, a biological systems laboratory, and a design systems laboratory.

The DNFF will be a state-of-the-art cleanroom, characterization and testing facility. It will house substrate cleaning stations (aqueous and plasma cleaning), thin-film etching equipment (aqueous and reactive-ion etching), thin-film deposition equipment (chemical vapor deposition at atmospheric and low pressures), high-temperature processing equipment (oxidation, thermal doping, and annealing furnaces), pattern transfer equipment (optical lithography, and e- and focused-ion beam lithography), and metal processing equipment (sputtering and physical evaporation). DNFF will be used as a campus-wide shared facility for the fabrication, characterization, testing, and prototyping of micro-scale and nano-scale structures used in science and engineering research. It is intended to be used by faculty, post-doctoral, and graduate students in all of the departments in the Pratt School of Engineering, as well as those from Trinity School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Medicine. All fabrication, characterization, testing, and prototyping processes will be carried out partly by a technical staff and partly by trained graduate and postdoctoral students on a fee-basis for each process. The DNFF Director (recently hired) will oversee both of these technical areas of the facility and the administrative and programmatic duties of the DNFF. The DNFF Engineer is responsible for the operation, installation, maintenance and repair of the different processing tools. It is customary to divide the CleanRoom into different sectors and to put a technician/engineer in charge of a set of tools with a common theme, e.g., lithography sector technician, high-T sector technician, metallization sector technician. It is presently estimated that the CleanRoom will have a minimum of three technicians/engineers one for the areas of wet and plasma etching, cleaning, and lithography, one for the areas of high-temperature processes of oxidation, diffusion, and chemical-vapor deposition, and the third for the area of sputtering, metallization, and vacuum systems. The Characterization Laboratory will have a minimum of two technicians/engineers--one in charge of SEM/TEM/AFM-type tools and the other in charge of SIMS/FIB/Auger-type tools. The remaining areas of the laboratory can be operated by trained graduate and postdoctoral students.

The DNFF will be a shared facility that can be accessed by researchers on a fee-per-process basis. The fabrication and analytical equipment based in the DNFF will be made available to all users and the fees collected from users will be used to cover the operating costs of the DNFF. We plan to make this facility accessible to outside users at the same or higher fee structure.

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Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility Opens

http://smif.lab.duke.edu/

The Duke University Materials Initiative identified a significant need for similar instrumentation and equipment by faculty members in chemistry, biochemistry, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, cell biology, and mechanical engineering and materials science. The Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMIF) operates as an interdisciplinary shared use facility. It was opened in the summer of 2003 with funding from the Provosts office. SMIF is available to Duke University researchers from the various schools and departments as well as to “external users from other Universities, government laboratories or industry. Hourly-based user fees are charged as a means of recovering the direct costs associated with operating the facility.

This facility will include equipment such as: atomic force microscopes (AFMs), scanning electron microscopes, tunneling electron microscopes, vaccuum process equipment, and an x-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS) [Kratos Axis Ultras]. Note: This is all major equipment that is usually beyond the means of a single investigator, e.g., the XPS will be only the third system in the state of North Carolina available for academic research and teaching. By creating a shared facility for investigators to use, we are capable of providing significant instrumentation resources at a minimal cost to the University.

In addition, interim fabrication facility space (1500 sq. ft) in Hudson Hall will open in September 2003. The renovation is scheduled to be completed by September 1, 2003.

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Ashutosh Chilkoti Awarded a Research Grant for $3.2 million

The Center for Biologically Inspired Materials and Material Systems (CBIMMS) is pleased to announce that Ashutosh Chilkoti, an Associate Prof. of Biomedical Engineering and Assistant Director of CBIMMS in the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University was recently awarded a research grant for $3.2 million over a five year period from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta for the development of a nanophotonic sensor to detect category A pathogens and their molecular markers. The multidisciplinary team of researchers assembled by Prof. Chilkoti span faculty from the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and investigators in the Duke University Medical Center, North Carolina State University and University of Michigan. The other Pratt investigators on the team include Dr. Nidhi Nath (Biomedical Engineering), Prof. Anne Lazarides (Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science), and Adam Wax (Biomedical Engineering). The investigators from DUMC are Dr. Munir Alam (Duke Human Vaccine Institute) and Dr. Dan Kenan (Pathology). The other members of the team are Dr. Dan Feldheim from the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina State University and Prof. L. Jay Guo from Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Michigan. This represents the fourth major grant awarded through multi-disciplinary activity led by CBIMMS faculty during the past year, including an NSF IGERT, NSF NIRT, and NSF MRI, bringing total funding for the Center to $7.7M over this period.