New therapies for cancer, AIDS and other diseases will be the target of a Northwestern University researcher who Wednesday won a federal grant worth about $4.5 million.
Chad A. Mirkin, director of Northwestern’s nanotechnology center, was one of nine scientists to win a Director’s Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health.
Mirkin’s past research has spawned two area companies, Nanosphere, based in Northbrook, and NanoInk, based in Chicago.
He was the only Midwest-based scientist to win a Pioneer Award, which was established this year. Some 1,350 scientists were nominated.
The Pioneer Award is intended to provide exceptional scientists with resources to pursue “high-risk, high-impact” research related to the improvement of human health.
Mirkin’s earlier research produced tools that diagnose infections at very low levels and enable researchers to manipulate atoms and molecules using dip-pen lithography technology, a technique for inscribing materials onto a gold plate.
Mirkin said he intends to use the new federal funding to extend his research focus from diagnosing ills to providing therapies.
“We have forged a series of strong collaborations with medical doctors who are excited about using nanotechnology to explore how HIV infects individual cells and how it moves from one cell to another,” said Mirkin.
His research will address fundamental questions such as whether one virus particle can invade a cell by itself, or if it requires several particles. Using tools Mirkin and his colleagues have developed over the past decade, he will place an individual virus particle next to a single cell to observe what happens.
“Most of what we know about this activity comes from averages of many viruses and many cells,” he said.
“It’s really exciting to work with individual cells, working at the nano-level, to try to understand what makes a certain virus particle potent.
“We want to learn how to deactivate it. This is central to designing therapies,” Mirkin said.
The other eight researchers who won Pioneer Awards are based in Massachusetts, California, North Carolina and Texas.
Dr. Elias Zerhouni, NIH director, said his agency was impressed with the number and quality of nominees for the awards.
“By bringing the awardees’ unique perspectives and creativity to bear on key medical research questions, these scientific pioneers may one day develop seminal theories or technologies that will propel science forward to improve human health,” he said.
