Winter/Spring 2008

COVER STORY Convergence of Bioscience & Engineering Public and Private Coulter's Legacy Three Nanomedicine Centers Bioscience & Engineering – In Brief

BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING professors at Georgia Tech and Emory University are designing systems to detect Alzheimer’s disease earlier, improving the effectiveness of pacemakers and developing cardiovascular implants to increase the durability of heart valve repairs.

photo by Gary Meek A robot designed to help people with severe motor impairments was developed in assistant professor Charlie Kemp’s laboratory with funding from a Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Translational Research Partnership in Biomedical Engineering award. (See more details in "In Brief – Medical Devices.") (300-dpi JPEG version - 1.16 MB

Translational research projects like these – which move science from the laboratory bench to the bedside – are possible because of a $25 million grant from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation in 2001. The grant includes a unique $10 million endowment to provide ongoing funding for translational research.

“This grant was awarded because I believed in the vision and mission of [founding Coulter Department chair] Don Giddens and his strategy to lead the department to be the best in the nation,” says Sue Van, president of the Foundation. “I am delighted that Wallace’s legacy is helping to plant the seeds of the next generation of biomedical engineering applications.”

In recognition of the grant, the biomedical engineering department at Georgia Tech and Emory University was named for Coulter – an engineer, inventor, entrepreneur and visionary whose motto in life was “science serving humanity.” Coulter, who was a student at Georgia Tech in the early 1930s, invented the Coulter Principle, the reference method for counting and sizing microscopic particles suspended in a fluid.

Remembering laboratory technicians hunched over microscopes manually counting blood cells smeared on glass, he developed the Coulter Counter, an automated device that counts red blood cells. Today, 98 percent of complete blood count tests – the most commonly ordered diagnostic test worldwide – are performed on instruments using the Coulter Principle.

The translational research program captures the spirit of Coulter’s own life’s work because the program requires collaboration between a biomedical engineer and a clinician. The results of the program have been so promising with regard to patents issued, companies launched and follow-on capital raised that it has become the template for the Foundation’s national Translational Research Partnership Program.

Since 2001, the partnership between the Coulter department and the Foundation has continued to evolve, most recently with a global focus.

“Again I believed in the vision of [now College of Engineering dean] Don Giddens,” says Van. “He understands that Georgia Tech must continue to expand its reach globally with leading universities in order to succeed in the 21st century.”

In 2007, the Foundation donated $500,000 to establish a seed grant program between Peking University in Beijing, China, and the Coulter Department.