September 2017

Faculty members from the FSU College of Medicine and the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering are partners in recent grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Yi Ren, professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, is co-principal investigator with Jingjiao Guan of Engineering. (See photo on right.) They were awarded a two-year grant of more than $141,000 for a project titled “Microdevice-Armed Macrophage for Treating Cancer.”

Also, Yi Zhou, associate professor in Biomedical Sciences, is co-principal investigator with Yan Li of Engineering. Their two-year grant totaled more than $142,000 for “Engineering Extracellular Matrices in Forebrain Organoids for Studying Neural Degeneration.”

Jeffrey Joyce, the College of Medicine’s senior associate dean for research and graduate programs, said this is just the beginning of research cooperation between the two colleges.

“These awards are tangible evidence of the fruitful collaborations between our faculties to advance translational research,” he said. “The emerging opportunities in successful aging research represent another area of success that both colleges will continue to support.”

Ren and Guan are working to develop a novel therapy for treating metastatic cancers. It would involve attaching tiny devices to the surface of certain white blood cells that can accumulate in the tumors.

In their project, Zhou and Li plan to develop a novel in vitro Alzheimer’s disease model using artificial “organoids” to test and identify treatments.