2005-2006 TRECC Accelerator Researchers

High-Efficiency Hemostatic Agents | Rapid Viral Infectivity Detection | Mobius: Software for Analysis and Optimization of Complex Systems | Intelligent Multisensor Fusion | Toward Hazard-Aware Spaces | Thin Film Liquid Conductivity Sensor

High-Efficiency Hemostatic Agents
Funding from TRECC’s Accelerator Awards Program will support the development of a sustainable Center for Hemostasis Research to capitalize on highly novel findings in our laboratories in the areas of blood clotting and nanotechnology.  Current hemostatic agents have limited efficacy because none employ tissue factor (TF), the trigger of blood clotting in vivo.  Although by far the most potent known clotting agent, TF is an integral membrane protein, so TF-containing hemostatic agents are difficult to manufacture and stabilize.  We are developing advanced hemostatic agents with dramatically improved efficacy to treat uncontrolled bleeding in trauma and surgery. 

James H. Morrissey is Professor in the Biochemistry Foundation and the College of Medicine at UIUC.  Since 1985 Dr. Morrissey’s research has been the regulation of the blood clotting system in both normal hemostasis and thrombotic diseases.  These studies have focused on the basic biochemical mechanisms by which the blood clotting system is triggered on cell surfaces with a particular emphasis on protein-membrane interactions in clotting.  This has led to a number of spin-offs with potential clinical applications, including novel clinical assays for markers of thrombotic risk and new, high-efficiency topical hemostatic agents for treating traumatic or surgical bleeding.  Dr. Morrissey received his Ph.D. degree in biology in 1980 from the University of California, San Diego, and did postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford in the UK and the Scripps Research Foundation in La Jolla, California.  Before coming to UIUC in the fall of 2000, he was a member of the faculty of the Scripps Research Foundation and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.

Rapid Viral Infectivity Detection
This project will complete proof-of-concept testing in several common viruses of a novel diagnostic for the detection of a pathogenic virus.  Currently, there is no way to screen for a general pathogenic viral presence (i.e., to determine if a particular virus infection is capable of affecting cellular DNA), and at the same time determine if a particular viral infection has disturbed host cell DNA.  This assay for the presence of pathogenic viruses stands in stark contrast to all existing assays that are principally directed at identifying viruses. To date, there are no tests that directly measure the ability of viruses to infect cells through monitoring the damage that a virus can cause to a cellular organelle (such as the nucleus). Although there are viral tests available to detect the presence of viruses through surrogate markers, these assays are often confounded by false-positive markers, uncertainties regarding the nature of chemical reactions that rely on affinity, or by disease states that produce similar antigens to those thought to be specific for a virus. 

This novel test will minimize or eliminate these deficiencies in testing cells for viral pathogenicity.  Further, this test has the advantage of letting the reference lab or physician know very quickly whether any particular strain of virus has pathogenic potential. This is extremely important, because it is well established that many viral infections do no damage to the host's cells or cellular organelles, and a positive result for the presence of a virus that does not cause damage complicates the diagnosis and treatment of harmful viral diseases.

Robert Folberg earned his MD degree from Temple University in 1975. He completed residency training in both ophthalmology and anatomic pathology and was a fellow at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. After serving briefly on the faculty of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA, in 1984 he moved to the University of Iowa where he first identified and associated the presence of patterns of extracellular matrix in uveal melanomas with adverse outcome. Together with Andrew Maniotis and other colleagues, he identified the mechanisms that generated these patterns as vasculogenic mimicry. In 2000, he became Head of the Department of Pathology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and recruited Maniotis to join the department. His collaboration with Maniotis continues with an emphasis on the development of novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for many types of cancer. Folberg has also partnered with Peter Bajcsy, another TRECC recipient, to develop novel techniques for 3D tissue reconstruction from confocal microscopy images. He engages in research in medical education and currently teaching more than 130 physicians in training at nine institutions on the East Coast and in the Midwest and South using bidirectional interactive videoconferencing, web based instruction, and virtual microscopy.   

Andrew Maniotis currently serves as program director of a research initiative focused on the cell and developmental biology of cancer in the Department of Pathology at UIC.  He is currently working on problems that involve the reverse transformation of cancer, chromatin structure, development of cancer and virologic pathogenicity and therapeutic assays, and bioengineering as applied to cellular tensegrity and cancer. In recent years, Maniotis and his laboratory staff and bioengineering students have developed several new cancer diagnostic and therapeutic assays that are currently being further developed and are undergoing testing for clinical applications.  These assays are being used to test new therapeutic regimens for melanoma and breast cancer.  Maniotis earned his Ph.D. in cell biology from the department of Molecular Cell Biology and Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, in 1991.  As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, he worked on cellular tensegrity with Donald Ingber and anti-angiogenesis with Judah Folkman.  As a research scientist at the University of Iowa, Maniotis, along with Robert Folberg and others, discovered a new phenomenon in cancer biology known as vasculogenic mimicry. 

Mobius:  Software for Analysis and Optimization of Complex Systems
Mobius is a modeling and analysis tool used to develop and analyze models of complex systems to gain an understanding of the systems’ reliability-, availability-, and security-related behavior. Möbius is extremely beneficial for scientists who are investigating systems that are complex and expensive/impossible to study directly, or for engineers who want to study key properties of many different designs without paying the costs to construct each design. For example, Möbius has been used to help design a new emergency radio network for the United States coastal waterways by constructing models of the dozens of antenna stations, and then studying how different assumptions on the likelihood of radio failures and variations on repair policies affect the availability of the network at multiple locations. Möbius technology has also been used to do design trade-off studies on both satellite and cellular networks, as well as availability studies on high-availability computer systems.
 
Mobius is an extensible software environment with an existing core set of software modules. New modules, developed through the commercialization of University of Illinois research, can be integrated into Möbius, making it possible to analyze much more complex systems using less time and computer power/memory.

William H. Sanders is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at UIUC.  He is a world expert in methods for assessing computer system and network dependability, security, performance, and performability. He is also director of the Information Trust Institute (ITI) at UIUC. His most influential work in model-based evaluation was the co-development of two tools for assessing the performability of systems represented as stochastic activity networks: UltraSAN and Möbius. The tools have been distributed widely to academic and industrial institutions, where they have contributed to groundbreaking work in fields ranging from cancer research to systems engineering. Prof. Sanders is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector and the AQuA, ITUA, and DPASA middlewares for providing dependability and security to distributed and networked applications.

Tod Courtney is a senior software engineer and researcher in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at UIUC. He is the principal developer and software architect for the Möbius modeling and simulation tool. His current research interests include stochastic modeling formalisms and algorithms, modeling tool development, dependability/performance/security system design validation, and intrusion-tolerant middleware for distributed systems. In addition to his current interests, he has a diverse background in software engineering for a wide range of scientific computing applications, covering areas of image processing, three-dimensional modeling and rendering, computational electromagnetics, and signal processing. 

Intelligent Multisensor Fusion
Intelligent Multisensor Fusion (IMF) is a new technology for combining low-level (sensor) and high-level (feature) inputs to automatically detect targets of interest in an environment.  There are many possible civilian and military applications for IMF.  This project focuses on the development of a civilian application.  We propose to construct a self-aiming surveillance camera that would use IMF to detect objects of interest in an environment, and then aim a high-resolution digital camera at those objects and take and store digital snap-shots of them.  With a fully-functional, self-aiming camera system for use in the laboratory already constructed, this system will be prepared for deployment and testing in a real-world environment. 

Thomas J. Anastasio is currently Associate Professor of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and a full-time member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at UIUC.  His experimental experience ranges from postural studies in humans to eye-movement recording and single-neuron electrophysiology in fish, birds, and monkeys.  His main focus is on computational studies of neural systems.  He has done computer simulations of neural networks in the brainstem, tectum, and cerebellum, using control and dynamical systems theory, and probability and information theory, in addition to supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement neural network learning paradigms. 

Toward Hazard-Aware Spaces
This project addresses the problem of building hazard aware spaces (HAS) to alert the inhabitants of an affected area or community to imminent danger. A prototype HAS system is under development for detecting fire, vision impairing light, earthquake, extreme sonic waves and dangerous gases. The long-term goal is to sense and detect indoor hazards and then alert humans with information about where, when and what hazards occur.

Peter Bajcsy is currently with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, working as a research scientist on problems related to automatic transfer of image content to knowledge. In the past, he had worked on real-time machine vision problems for semiconductor industry and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology for government contracting industry. He has developed several software systems for automatic feature extraction, feature selection, segmentation, classification, tracking and statistical modeling from electro-optical, SAR, laser and hyperspectral data sets.  Bajcsy’s scientific interests include multi-instrument and sensor measurement systems, image and signal processing, statistical data analysis, data mining, pattern recognition, novel sensor technology, and computer and machine vision.

Rob Kooper is a member of the Image Spatial Analysis Group at NCSA.  His research interests are in human-computer interaction and graphics.  Kooper received his B.S. in computer science from the University of Delft in the Netherlands in 1996 and his M.S. from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001.

Thin Film Liquid Conductivity Sensor
Electrolytic conductivity measurements have extensive use in many engineering, chemical and biological applications, such as in water purification, electroplating, and chemical, blood and urea analysis, to name a few. Conventional conductivity measurement methods with electrodes, or inductive devices without electrodes, have poor spatial resolution. In some applications, there is a need for microscale sensors that have very small volume sample analysis.  In addition, there are miniature systems built with MEMS and classical techniques that also need microsensors to monitor operation.  The potential uses for such low-cost microsensors range from lightweight, energy-efficient water purifiers used for desalinization to dishwashers and washing machines.  Microsensors are also required by many applications in science and technology that need to be able to measure concentration of electrolytes in environments where the concentration and temperature vary spatially and over a wide range of orders of magnitude.  Currently under development is a conductivity sensor that works for all of these cases and applications.

Mark A. Shannon is the director of the Micro-Nano-Mechanical Systems (MNMS) Laboratory at UIUC, a 2000 square-foot class 10 and 100 cleanroom laboratory devoted to research and education in the design and fabrication of micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems (MEMS & NEMS), microscale fuel cells, high-temperature microchemical reactors, micro-nanofluidic sensors for biological fluids.  The focus of his research is on developing new fabrication technologies and processes for these and other applications. He is also the Director of the NSF STC and the WaterCAM WPS; he is the James W. Bayne Professor of Mechanical Engineering; and he is an affiliate of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bioengineering, and the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Engineering.  Shannon received his B.S. (1989) M.S. (1991) and Ph.D. (1993) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, received the NSF Career Award in 1997 to advance microfabrication technologies, the Xerox Award for Excellence in Research, and the Kritzer Faculty Scholar in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.  He is currently a Willet Faculty Scholar in the College of Engineering at UIUC.