RUTGERS

Collaborative Activities

How to Become a RESBIO Collaborator

Eligible projects should have: 

    • Potential to challenge one or more of the core technologies technically
    • Potential to make a core technology relevant to more areas of biomedical research
    • Potential to extend the underlying science of the technology
    • Expectation of significance and productivity after one year
    • Independent funding

Selected projects will receive collaborative resources from RESBIO
but no direct financial support.

Examples of Collaborative Activities

Dr. Julia Babensee and her team at Georgia Tech are studying the effect of polymeric biomaterials on activation of dendritic cells (DC).  After developing a high-throughput assay for testing DC activation, they approached RESBIO to recommend polymer libraries that could be tested.  RESBIO provided polymer libraries for this collaborative project and also developed a high-throughput testbed with selected polymer coatings that could be seamlessly fitted into the Georgia Tech testing method to enable rapid screening of polymeric biomaterials.  Within 3 months after the initiation of this collaborative research, Babensee’s team was able to identify a polymer that resulted in the least activation of DCs, which was the goal of the project.  The outcome of this research was published in the journal Biomaterials in 2012. 

Peng Meng Kou, Narayanan Pallassana, Rebeca Bowden, Barry Cunningham, Abraham Joy, Joachim Kohn, Julia E Babensee, Predicting Biomaterial Property-Dendritic Cell Phenotype Relationships from Multivariate Analysis of Responses to Methacrylates, Biomaterials, Volume 33, Issues 6, February 2012, Pages 1699 – 1713

Dr. Laura McNamara, a post-doctoral scientist at University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, came across a paper published by Prof. Prabhas Moghe of RESBIO in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences on a method to predict mesenchymal stem cell lineage using analysis of images acquired from confocal microscopy. She recognized that method could be used in her research studying mesenchymal stem cell transformation on nanotopography on titanium surfaces.  She discussed this overlap with her professor Dr. Matthew Dalby, and that led to a collaborative project between the two groups culminating in a publication in the journal Biomaterials in 2011. 

Laura E. McNamara, Terje Sjöström, Karl E.V. Burgess, Joseph J.W. Kim, Er Liu, Simon Gordonov ,Prabhas V. Moghe, R.M. Dominic Meek, Richard O.C. Oreffo, Bo Su, Matthew J. Dalby, Skeletal Stem Cell Physiology on Functionally Distinct Titania Nanotopogrpahies, Biomaterials, Volume 32, Issue 30, October 2011, Pages 7403–7410.


RESBIO was approached by the NIBIB P41 Center for Neural Communication Technology (CNCT) at the University of Michigan and Wadsworth Center to address a technical challenge in the placement of probes into brain tissue for the purpose of stimulating and reading neural signals.  The polymer synthesis group of RESBIO designed and synthesized absorbable polymers to overcome deficiencies of the non-absorbable polymers in use at that time. This collaboration resulted in a publication in the journal Acta Biomaterialia in 2011.

Dan Lewitus, Karen Smith, William Shain, Joachim Kohn, Ultrafast Absorbing Polymers for Use as Carriers for Cortical Neural Probes, Acta Biomaterialia, Volume 7, Issue 6, June 2011, Pages 2483 – 2491. Learn more about CNCT here.