“It’s not easy to put this on over a suit,” said the provost after the opening of the Dr. John T. MacDonald Foundation Biomedical Nanotechnology Institute’s nanofabrication facility, located at UM’s Miller School of Medicine. LeBlanc joined nine other white-suited executives in a tour led by Onur Tigli, UM assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
“We dress like this to protect the devices we are making,” Tigli said.
By keeping the room sterile, researchers will be able to work with everyday materials but on a nano-scale — about 100,000 nanoparticles fit into one piece of human hair. In nanotechnology — creating and manipulating materials down to the atomic level — researchers build devices that can capture cancerous cells or replace insulin-making cells in the pancreas.
The hope: Nanotechnology — a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter — will lead to cures for cancer and diabetes, among other conditions. Nanotech devices, for example, would carry medicine directly inside cancer cells, sparing the patient from chemotherapy’s nausea and hair loss.
“This facility puts us on the cutting edge of some of the most scientific and technological research in the world,” said UM President Donna Shalala. “It’s transformative.”
Dr. Richard Cote, director of the John T. MacDonald Foundation Biomedical Nanotechnology Institute, said the room needs to be clean because “even a dust particle is enormous compared to what we are working with.” UM recruited Cote from the University of Southern California.
A typical office building contains 500,000 to 1 million particles per cubic foot of air. The clean room is designed to never allow more than 100 particles per cubic foot.
Cote said that by using nanotechnology, researchers will be able to detect diseases early, deliver treatment to the right place at the right time and restore tissue and organ function. They’ve been developing a nano-scale blood test that will identify tumor cells in the bloodstream, before they can metastasize to other organs in the body.
In 2012, the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation gave the nanotechnology department a $7.5 million grant to increase its efforts in the field. UM used the grant to build the clean room and to recruit researchers.
The researchers are developing nanotech devices to be used in medicine, engineering, chemistry and physics. In science, nanotechnology is creating smaller and faster computer chips.
By combining the fields, more can be done to devise cures and treatments for prevalent diseases, Cote said.
“Having this facility is fundamental to the success of our program,” he said.
©2015 Miami Herald
