$20M grant awarded to S.C. colleges

  • David Quick
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  • Posted: Friday, July 24, 2009 12:01 a.m.
    UPDATED: Thursday, March 22, 2012 7:28 p.m.
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Roger Markwald, chairman and professor of the Cell Biology and Anatomy Department at MUSC, will serve as the scientific director for the tissue biofabrication project.
Grace Beahm /The Post and CourierRoger Markwald, chairman and professor of the Cell Biology and Anatomy Department at MUSC, will serve as the scientific director for the tissue biofabrication project.

The National Science Foundation awarded a $20 million grant Thursday to 10 South Carolina colleges and universities for research that could lead to producing human organs.

The money, parceled out over five years, is the largest competitive award the foundation has ever granted in South Carolina.

It will establish a statewide academic alliance in the field of tissue biofabrication, in an endeavor dubbed by researchers as "The South Carolina Project."

The Medical University of South Carolina will be the lead institution in the alliance, which is a rare and impressive collaboration.

The alliance includes the state's two other major research institutions, the University of South Carolina and Clemson University; South Carolina State University, Claflin University, Voorhees College, the University of South Carolina-Beaufort, Furman University, and two-year technical colleges Denmark Tech and Greenville Tech.

Big chunks of the grant will go toward hiring 22 faculty members in fields of expertise that do not exist in South Carolina and toward expanding and upgrading MUSC's bioprinting lab into an advanced, tissue biofabrication center, according to the project's scientific director, Roger Markwald.

"This will be the hub of all the interactivity between the other institutions," said Markwald, chairman of MUSC's Cell Biology and Anatomy Department. "The goal is to use the expertise from everyone in the state to basically transform the technology."

Bioprinting, which is the process of printing cells at high speeds into three-dimensional structures, was pioneered at MUSC and Clemson by MUSC's Vladimir Mironov and Clemson's Thomas Boland, earlier this decade by retrofitting a laser jet printer.

As a result of the breakthrough, 12 private companies now manufacture bioprinters for a variety of purposes, and researchers are working on ways to engineer organs.

Markwald said the next major hurdle is to discover a way to build "the branching vascular trees" that are needed for engineered organs to be living and viable.

Once accomplished, tens of thousands of people on waiting lists for donor organs will have organs created from their own adult-derived stem cells.

Creating vascular organs "is the impediment to tissue engineering," said Markwald, noting that the pinnacle of the work would be creating a kidney. He said the bioengineering research process will create an array of spin-off technologies and accompanying economic opportunities.

The annual budget for the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency, is $9.5 billion, including $3 billion in federal stimulus money. The foundation receives about 45,000 requests for competitive grant funding and awards 11,000 grants.

"This five-year award combines world-class science with expertise from medicine to engineering to computer science to mathematics and journalism," said the foundation's Lance Haworth, who attended a news conference Thursday at the Statehouse.

Haworth said he considers the collaboration ambitious. The science, he said, draws on partner institutions that will allow students at many levels and from many backgrounds to experience science and explore the unknown.

The collaborations will expand the workforce and help secure the country's global leadership in fields of science and engineering, he said.

Jerry Odom, principal investigator for the award and executive director of the University of South Carolina Foundations, said he is proud of the number and variety of the institutions participating. "Usually you'd see on an award perhaps two, three, maybe four, if you're lucky, partners within the state," Odom said.

"We have 10 institutions of higher education that will be involved in this program, as well as the South Carolina Research Authority."

Odom said the gathering of officials from the 10 institutions, including nine of the institutions' presidents, is evidence of the commitment of South Carolina's professors and students to the research.

South Carolina State University will receive $1.5 million to establish a master's program in biorobotics and biofabrication. That will build upon a $1 million grant from the foundation in 2004 that was used to expand faculty expertise in biocomputing and neuroscience.

S.C. State President George Cooper said the research grant will bolster the new nuclear engineering program and provide new ways to apply the degree. S.C. State also plans to develop cyber-textbooks based on the research, he said.

Cooper said he expects the grant to have a ripple effect in the community by inspiring upcoming teachers, highlighting the importance and excitement of scientific advancements and drawing investors to the state.

In an interview Wednesday, MUSC President Ray Greenberg said the grant not only expands research opportunities for faculty and education opportunities for students, but also provides an economic impact by leading to "commercializable technology" and laying the foundation for a knowledge-based economy throughout the state by attracting high-tech businesses.

Greenberg credited the grant, the third major federal grant for research in South Carolina in six months, to the General Assembly for the lottery-funded, endowed-chairs program that provides funding for MUSC, Clemson and USC to attract scholars from around the world.

As a result, the research at the schools has drawn funding from the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health and now the National Science Foundation, he said.