Technology Day 2005 - "Bioengineering: Building Bridges Between the Sciences, Engineering and Medicine"

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VINCENT: Folks, my name is Doug Vincent, chair of the Tech Day committee. I'm really excited today. It's a beautiful day outside. There's not a lot of things that would draw me inside today. But the program we have for you today is one of those things. We have had so much fun putting this program together, working with these five outstanding faculty members. Couldn't be happier than to share that with you all today. We have a little bit different format this year.

We've delayed lunch till after 12:45, so our five speakers will all be before lunch. We'll hear from three of them, have a break, including some fruit and granola, then rejoin here for the last two. And at the end, we'll have some questions and answers. President Hockfield will moderate that. We have a live feed downstairs, to Little Kresge, and we'll go through some more of the details for questions and answers a little bit later in this program.

The goal of that is so this afternoon, folks are free to explore the campus, participate in other class activities, and so forth. So bear with us for a little bit lengthened morning program. We think you will find it worth the while. I need to say thank you to the Alumni Association for the faith that they continue to have in the Tech Day committee. Thank you to the committee. Outstanding year. And of course, thank you to Lou Alexander. Outstanding. Just a pleasure to work with you.

If folks would reach to wherever they have their cell phones right now and find the button on it that says off and turn that off, I appreciate that. Thank you. Just like to introduce now Beth Garvin, Executive Vice President and CEO of the MIT Alumni Association. Beth?

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GARVIN: Good morning. It's a pleasure to see so many familiar faces, and even more exciting to see so many unfamiliar faces. I hope I get a chance to say hello to each of you personally and welcome you back to MIT. Doug and I were just chatting before the program started and I said, don't give me much of an introduction, because nobody wants to hear from you or me, Doug. They're here to hear from the president and to hear from these marvelous faculty.

He noted, however, that, yeah, we're just the glue that holds it together. And I'd like to acknowledge that glue in the Technology Day committee and all the reunion committee volunteers, the reunion gift committee volunteers, reunion row volunteers, tech challenge game volunteers, all the hundreds of people who have helped make Tech Reunions 2005 a fabulous success from all accounts.

It's been my joy this year to be able to introduce our 16th president, Susan Hockfield, to all of you, and to introduce the alumni to her. It has been just a remarkable journey as we first announced Susan's naming. And any of you with an email address that we know have heard from me multiple times about how I think this has been such a wonderful choice for MIT and what a wonderful fit Dr. Hockfield is for MIT at this point in time. So without any further ado, all of the background is in your program book. And I'm sure you've already read of Susan's remarkable accomplishments, so I do nothing more than turn it over to President Hockfield.

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HOCKFIELD: Thank you. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here this morning. Thank you, Beth. It's been a real treat for me to travel the country with you and to have you by my side introducing me to alumni from coast to coast. One of the things that has impressed me enormously about MIT is the kind of energy that just emanates from the place. You walk down the corridors and the place is just bursting with energy. But that energy is carried inside the people of the place.

And so as I travel the country with Beth and her band of just tireless troopers, having them by my side and having them introduce me to many of you over the last, what is it now, almost six months, has just been an incredible delight and a treat. The MIT alumni are, indeed, a very special bunch, special in so many ways, special that you could have finally brought spring to Cambridge. We thank you for that. It's been a grim spring, but this weekend is the first real burst of sunshine. It makes us feel optimistic that we actually might have a summer here.

It's just been wonderful to sample the treats of this reunion weekend. My only regret-- people have asked me what I regret. What are the things I don't like about my job? And my response is always the thing I don't like is only having 24 hours a day. And that's the way I feel about these several days. I mean, I wish I could live every hour of these days three times over so that I could be at all of the events and meet more of you than I'm going to unfortunately have a chance to meet this weekend.

I've met many of you, and I will be meeting several more of you, many more of you, over the next several hours through the end of this reunion weekend. But I promise you in the months and years to come, I will be getting around to meeting all of you. So it's great to be here. This morning's program is wonderful. I can take absolutely no credit for it. There are many happy coincidences that I've seen over the last six months. And certainly the topic for this morning's program is a very happy coincidence.

Those of you who read or heard my inauguration address know that one of the things I drew out-- among the very, very many exciting opportunities and challenges for MIT going forward-- is this fantastic convergence between the life sciences and engineering. And this morning's program exemplifies that in just startling ways. In addition, the content of this program that you will hear exemplifies the intellectual rigor and the work at the frontiers of knowledge that really do define MIT as an institution.

I know that the devotion of alumni is one of our absolutely greatest strengths. And keeping MIT strong and vibrant is a team effort that involves all of you as well as all of us on campus. But this great community of MIT that reaches across the country, across the world, is perfectly in line with the Institute's fundamentally collaborative spirit. At MIT, something that I've learned is that we have a gift for learning from one another. We excel at the kinds of intellectual interaction that push conventional boundaries and establish new fields of study, new industries, and new ways of thinking about the world.

The collaborations that MIT fosters depend on our remarkable culture of openness. I've been struck by how the very architecture of the main group symbolizes this. The main group was imagined and then constructed, imagined by Bosworth, as one huge but interconnected building with corridors that link the entire expanse of these enormous buildings. Our historic campus embodies the vision of an institution without internal boundaries, a place where people who are interested in similar problems can work together freely across what might otherwise be disciplinary divides.

In its design, the main group has actually helped invent MIT and helped MIT invent the future. In the years ahead, we will continue to capitalize on our spirit of openness to create new partnerships across our own schools and departments, and with other institutions in the public and private sectors. Collaboration is absolutely essential if we are to fulfill MIT's mission of bringing knowledge to bear on the world's great problems.

The challenges facing us today from climate change to the future of Social Security to the startling spread of contagious diseases are inherently multidisciplinary. Now, MITs distinct ability to catalyze work at the interfaces of existing disciplines also depends on a single uniform standard of excellence. Over the course of this year, I've found an uncompromising dedication to excellence in all of our departments and schools. We see it in the faculty, in the students, and also in the staff around the Institute.

I think this morning's program will demonstrate what I mean. Today's faculty presenters are absolutely stellar researchers. But they're also stellar teachers and members, devoted members, generous members of the MIT community. And they will be talking about some of our era's most exciting advances in science and technology. This generation is bearing witness to a fascinating convergence of engineering and the life sciences. This convergence holds the promise of transforming our lives. But this kind of convergence is not unprecedented. It's a convergence that we saw not so long ago, and we know this precedent.

70 years ago, president Karl Compton insisted that the physical sciences must play a critical role in education and research at MIT. And the result of bringing in the physical sciences into conversation with engineering produced nothing less than a new era for engineering which MIT pioneered. To appreciate the power of the kinds of collaborations that Compton helped spawn through the 20th century's big convergence, you only have to think about the radiation lab that helped develop radar and helped us win World War II.

Today engineering is making the same kind of fertile connections with the life sciences. And I believe we can expect equally revolutionary results. Combining MIT's historic strength and engineering and our newer strengths in biology in the brain and cognitive sciences, we're already opening up unprecedented opportunities for educational innovation, for invention, and for discovery. We're pioneering new educational areas as well as new research directions.

We have biological variants of several of the engineering majors. And next fall, we're going to be initiating a new major in biological engineering. I think this Tech Day program will show you how MIT is leading the way in this new field of all fields, just as we have led the way in disciplines that define the information age. I think it also demonstrates the tremendous contributions MIT can and will be making to this nation and the world. I've been looking forward to hearing these faculty presenters talk about their research for months, and I am delighted to have the luxury of sitting in the audience with all of you today. I'm anticipating an exciting program, and I'm sure that MIT will prove as it has done over the last several months, that my anticipation cannot even come close to what we are actually going to experience.

So enjoy the morning and I will return-- I promise you it's only going to be the morning. But I'm going to return at the end to moderate the question period. So enjoy this morning's presentations. Thank you.

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VINCENT: This is great. Every once in a while, I think a group like the Tech Day committee gets lucky. And we selected last fall, bioengineering, and then to be honored with the president Hockfield's first time presiding over today, sometimes you get lucky. And about that, last fall when we were looking at this topic, trying to understand how do we construct this program, we sat down with Professor Doug Lauffenburger, and he just gave us an education.

And we were so thrilled and learned so much, we said, geez, what do you think? Can you do that on a broader scale? He said absolutely. Remarkably, he thanked us this morning for being a part of it, when in fact, really, we thank he and all the faculty for their time to put together today's program. Doug is the director of MIT bioengineering division. And at this point, just turn it over to Doug.

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LAUFFENBURGER: Thank you very much, Doug, and it's a privilege to be part of this today with all the alumni and friends coming back. We'll see if there's any continuing adjustment that needs to be done. And I'll be darned, there was. What I want to give you is not the research excitement itself. I have to lay out the context for what's happening at MIT and why it's happening, why it's happening now, why it's happening here. And that's the purpose of this talk.

So I'm going to talk about the landscape of bioengineering at MIT and how we're breaking new ground in this landscape. Now, those of you who haven't been back for a while know that this landscape has been changing dramatically, too. Breaking new ground all over the local blocks with new buildings and new excitement. And so that's been changing, as well. But that's not the landscape that I mean.

I want to talk about the intellectual landscape of the interface between engineering and biology. Now, there has been a traditional biomedical engineering landscape, both at MIT and around the country. And this has been around for about 40 years. There's been a field known as biomedical engineering, bioengineering, medical engineering at many places. And what it's been all about is essentially, the marriage of the classical engineering disciplines in which students are trained in mathematics and physics and chemistry, married with medicine to solve medical problems in ways that technology is based on, mathematics and physics and chemistry could.

Now, one important feature of this is that it's a multidisciplinary application field. All the different engineering fields could bring what they had to bear in contact with medicine and solve problems from their own unique disciplinary backgrounds. Accordingly, from the MIT point of view, this was never appropriate as an undergraduate major degree of study because you were better off studying in any of the other classical engineering disciplines and applying your interests to medicine, if you so wished.

At the graduate level, of course, since you were taking these other engineering disciplinary backgrounds and using them to solve medical problems, that was a very appropriate type of graduate study to do within any of the MIT engineering departments-- electrical engineering and computer science, mechanical engineering, material science, chemical engineering, and so forth. And many of these programs benefited from interaction with the health sciences, technology and its connection to Harvard Medical School.

The other feature is that the bio in the bioengineering in the biomedical engineering has, for those 40 years in these programs, essentially been organ level physiology, which is, of course, crucial for medicine, but is essentially descriptive that's not the mechanisms by which living systems operate. So you could describe what was going on in engineering terms and try to work at it from the outside, but you couldn't control the underlying mechanism.

So that's what's been around for 40 years. And it's very important, had very valuable contributions, and will continue to have very valuable contributions, and will continue at MIT within all these other departments. These kind of contributions have been manifested in a variety of career opportunities carried out by MIT alums. Probably many of you have been working in these very fields, medical devices of all sorts, diagnostics like imaging and prosthetics, implants, extracorporeal devices, maybe the pharmaceuticals industry and processing, manufacturing, and delivery.

And in all these very important contributions of biomedical engineering careers, the one interesting feature is that training of engineers in the actual biological science fundamentals really wasn't crucial. You have to be really good at your math and your physics and your chemistry and interface with a physiological problem. That was what was crucial, rather than the biological science itself.

All right, with that as a 40 year backdrop, now what is new besides many buildings going up? What is new in the bioengineering landscape? Well, as president Hockfield told you, we have now created something brand new, and in fact, I will assert, unique-- a biology based engineering discipline that we call biological engineering. Instead of being an engineering discipline rooted solely in math and physics or math and physics and chemistry, this one is rooted in the molecular life sciences. What's at the core of it is genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology.

This engineering discipline is rooted in the mechanisms by which living systems operate, the very molecules and cells that make things happen for good or ill. But these sciences are fused with engineering and analysis and synthesis, just like all the other engineering disciplines fuse analysis and synthesis with physics and chemistry and so forth. So it's focused on taking these life sciences and understanding them in a quantitative and systems oriented way and designing new technologies based on these biological, molecular, and cellular components and mechanisms.

So once you have a discipline now that's just like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, but is now rooted in a different science, now MIT has agreed that this is appropriate for standalone degree programs, both a new PhD program that we started in 1999, and what's quite exciting is a new bachelor's degree program that starts this very fall.

Right. But why has this change happened? Why was this traditional landscape for 20 years and now something very radically new is happening? Why is engineering and biology interaction changing so dramatically? Because the biological science itself has changed so dramatically. The engineering can't change in a revolutionary way unless the science is changed in a revolutionary way. And that's what's happened.

In the past 20 years, there have been two major revolutions in biology-- the molecular revolution roughly in the '80s, the genomic revolution roughly in the '90s. So if you took biological science before the '80s, you did not learn these types of biological science. This has all happened in the last 20 years. I went to college in the 1970s. And in the 1970s, I did not learn this kind of biological science. So what was the engineering biology interface, quote, then, before these revolutions, back when I took biological science in the 1970s?

It honestly was not amenable to engineering analysis and synthesis and design. Engineers could not access biology before these revolutions because biological sciences didn't understand the actual mechanisms. Few of the actual components, the parts, had been identified. You could only quantify things at these higher organ levels of hierarchy, which is why engineers worked at the organ physiology level. You certainly couldn't manipulate any of the molecular components. Even if you identified them, there was nothing you could do about them. A gene was a gene and a protein was a protein.

There wasn't enough data to build models and design. And it was hard to generalize from humans to mice to rats to worms and so forth. So the modern era of bioengineering really began with the molecular biology revolution in, essentially, the 1980s, because that permitted mechanistic components to be identified and manipulated. And you can't engineer anything unless you know what the components are and you can manipulate them.

And I just show this for illustration. This is a bone. And for all the traditional years of biomedical engineering, bone could be perceived and dealt with only on the basis of being this macroscopic load bearing mechanical object. For instance, my mother has had six hip replacements. Many years ago she crushed her hip falling off a bicycle. And what could biomedical engineers do about that?

Well, pre the revolution, all they could do was replace that hip as a mechanical load bearing substitute. First wood, crutches, then metals, the implants became metals. Then plastics. The implants became plastics. And none of them worked very long for a variety of reasons, mainly that they really weren't bone. They didn't interact with the surrounding tissue and the immune response. They didn't respond properly to stress and so forth.

But with the molecular biology revolution, now we know this isn't just some macroscopic load bearing object. What has been identified as the cells that are dynamically breaking it down, building it up. The proteins by which the cells are stimulated to break down bone and build it up and the genes that encode for the proteins that tell the cells what to break down and to build up. And so now we have the hope of regenerating not wood, metal or plastic, but regenerating living bone. And you'll hear a little bit of that from Professor Griffith in a minute. So the very fact of identifying what the mechanistic components are and being able to do something to manipulate them was crucial.

Now, this modern era has been catalyzed by the genomic biology revolution in which, just depicted here are a large number of sequencers cranking out the identities of genes and your chromosomes and what kind of proteins they might encode for and so forth, because this has accelerated the rate at which molecular compounds can be identified. Instead of one by one in a hard slog, we can now find tens and hundreds and thousands of them at once. So it's the ability of finding the parts has just been dramatically accelerated.

The concomitant has been showing even how much more complex these mechanisms are than are previously appreciated. People had hoped with the onset of molecular biology that if you could find maybe one gene or one protein, you could just fix something and a disease would go away. The genomic revolution looking at tens and hundreds of thousands of the components and their interactions at once now have made us realize that's going to be really difficult. These are very complex networks and machines.

So these 20 years of two biology revolutions have led us to a now engineering biology interface that's just night and day different. Not only is biology amenable to engineering analysis and synthesis-- we have parts, we can manipulate them-- but again, I would assert that biology benefits from and maybe even requires the engineering analysis and synthesis approach. Now molecular components are being identified. The mechanisms involved in molecular cell actions are being elucidated. Quantitative analysis is possible all the way from DNA structure, protein DNA interactions, up through molecular networks to cell functions to tissue functions. You can quantitatively analyze every step along the way, not just at the organ level.

And molecular components can now be easily manipulated. It's very simple to go in and change a gene, change a protein, change any piece you want. What's the hard part? The hard part is to understand and predict what happens when you're going to do that. Right now it's almost trial and error. And that's what we've got to get beyond. And that's where engineering comes in.

So we believe that this is the time for a new fusion of biology with engineering because of these two revolutions. The molecular biology revolution finally, for the first time, permitted engineers to access the science of biology. And the genomic revolution now requires biology to be addressed by engineering. So we now have the parts. We can manipulate them. And it's darn complex and engineers really can get involved and have to get involved.

Just as a few illustrations, if we think it's something like cells migrating the cells of your immune response seeking out cancer cells or viruses or healing a wound, how would you make that happen? How would you enhance the rate at which wounds were healed or immune response operated? Or if this was a tumor cell metastasizing to an improper organ, how would you stop that? Well, we have to understand how this cell migration works in terms of what's depicted here schematically, it's a machine.

This is the cell and the membrane and it's connected molecularly to the extracellular matrix and allows the cells to crawl and pull their way through. And the cell has motors inside that are generating the forces in just the right places. It's an exquisite molecular machine. And we need to understand it in terms of molecular structures and properties and biophysics and biomechanics. And these machines aren't autonomous. They're not spontaneous. They're highly regulated.

The cells will migrate under some conditions and not under other conditions. They'll proliferate under some conditions and not other conditions. What's regulating them? Well, there's a fascinating set of biomolecular signal processing circuits that take information from the environment and say, what should I do now? Should I migrate? Should I not? Should I proliferate? Should I not? Should I die from a stem cell? Should I differentiate into something else? How do I decide?

So they take their information from their surroundings and process those signals and change their gene expression, metabolism inside a skull, and so forth, and carry out different functions. They do signal processing. So we need to understand this regulation of the machines by these signal processing networks the way, perhaps, electrical engineers, computer scientists and so forth might think about regulatory circuits.

And a fascinating thing that's really becoming realistic to think about-- especially at MIT because we realistically think about things that most places really only will speculate about-- there's an opportunity of a field called synthetic biology, where folks on this campus and others are trying to design these machines and networks from scratch. Instead of just intervening in them one molecule here or there, they're saying, can we design our own DNA sequences that will produce the right proteins that will interact in the right ways to build a network or a machine with the right sort of topology then that would carry out a dynamic function of one sort or another?

People are building their own machines and networks from designing their own DNA sequences from scratch. A fascinating field and it's starting here. There's a young professor named Drew [? Wendy ?] who's really the-- it's very interesting. He's assistant professor and he's known as the father of the field. So that doesn't happen very often. Now at the same time, we start with these mechanistic underpinnings. We say, for an engineer to access biology, you've got to have the parts. You've got to know what the parts are. You've got to be able to manipulate the parts.

But of course, you don't do that in a vacuum. You wanted to think about what higher level functions you're aiming at, whether it's physiology, pathology, therapeutic interventions, brand new devices, like I suggested on the previous slide, brand new materials. Professor Belcher will talk about brand new materials from biomolecular mechanisms. [INAUDIBLE] will talk about new types of therapeutics from these molecular mechanisms.

So you've got to think about the complexity of biology in one dimension, which is many, many components at once in another dimension of all the information you know about it-- sequence, structure, thermodynamics, kinetics, mechanics. And in the other dimension of the physiological complexity-- individual cells, cells and population, cells and tissues, and so forth. So the underlying mechanisms govern the higher level functions.

And to an engineer, this is the way we think. You think you're thinking about higher level system function and how you're going to design that or how you're going to intervene in it from the molecular and cellular components. So there is something that we call this discipline of biological engineering that is both the discipline important for science and for technology. And it looks a lot, in these first few bullets, it should look just like any of the other engineering disciplines maybe you studied-- chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and so forth-- because you and it will analyze complicated many component hierarchical systems.

You do that in all those other engineering disciplines. You'll synthesize designed technologies, not trial and error. We don't build any other technologies by trial and error. It's time that we really stop doing medicine by trial and error. And I think Martha Gray will talk about that, as well. And all engineers operate with this paradigm. There's different ways to pose it. But measure and model and manipulate with design principles and parameters, computational models, and so forth, construct your own components to have the right properties.

The only difference between biological engineering and all the other engineering disciplines is what are our components and mechanisms? In other cases, it might be organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, solid state physics. In our case, it's biological molecules, biological machines and networks, and the cells that comprise, essentially, the organizing principles for these. So just like any other engineer, except the science is different. But the science is still quantitative manipulable components.

So it's clear to us that this is time to have created a new biology-based engineering discipline to sit alongside its sibling disciplines in the School of Engineering. And the idea of creating a new engineering discipline isn't new. MIT does this every few decades. Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, at one point in time didn't exist. At one point in time they were established as now physics based engineering disciplines. 100 years ago, chemical engineering didn't exist. Materials science and engineering really didn't exist.

And they came into being as chemistry based engineering disciplines. So now we are in the 21st century creating another one. It just happens to be a biology based engineering discipline. And the biology is molecular life sciences. And it comprises both technology and science facets. We are designing and developing biology based technologies, as you'll see in the ensuing talks. And at the same time, I think we're facilitating the advance of the science itself, turning engineering back to the science and how can we understand it better? So it's a two way street between the science and the technology, as any good engineering discipline, really, is.

I won't go into this in much detail, but we are very excited about the new biological engineering major that starts this fall. Professor Griffith, who speaks next, was really the principal architect of this. He spent an immense amount of time constructing this in partnership with many other departments. And all I want to show you is the science core beyond the typical freshman year. It requires organic chemistry, biochemistry, molecular cell biology, genetics, just as I said, along with the mathematics that one would require.

And then what's listed here are nine brand new courses. We didn't just sort of cobble together, oh, let's borrow a course from-- let's borrow a subject from this department, a the subject from that department, a subject from that department. These are nine new courses all designed from scratch saying, if we're going to understand and manipulate this kind of biology of genetics and biochemistry and molecular cell biology, what is the way an engineer would do that? What's the right thermodynamics to study this science? What's the right mechanics to study this science? What's the right signal processing or fields or control or computation?

You can't just borrow the same old and sew them together. It's brand new engineering, because it's brand new science. So these are brand new subjects. And a lot of faculty effort, but the faculty are very enthusiastic about this. What's the point of learning this new discipline? We're very convinced and we have lots of confident input, likewise, from our friends out in industry that there's going to be new types of places that engineers have never been hired before because engineers haven't been capable of knowing this kind of a science. So, yes, medical devices, but instead of building the boxes these folks are going to design and manipulate the interactions of these devices with their environment.

So maybe you still have a prosthetic hip. Maybe we can't quite regenerate my mother's hip from cells and genes and proteins quite yet. But her hip may fail less if we can figure out how to interface that synthetic material with the immune response, the inflammatory response, the surrounding tissue and so forth so that it doesn't fail there. Medical diagnostics but now will be in terms of these biological mechanisms. Analysis will be at the gene and molecule and cell levels, the appropriate information technology.

We can imagine cell and tissue based therapeutics. Engineers will be involved in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, not just to manufacture and to deliver, but to actually design and to develop, to discover. These kind of biological engineers will help facilitate the discovery of where the right targets should be, what the right therapeutics should be, because of their ability to think in a quantitative systems oriented manner about these very, very complex systems, and all the way along the way to predict pharmacology effects, toxicology effects, and so forth.

And finally, but maybe even more importantly, in terms of the scope. Biological engineers will not only contribute to medicine and human health in a very powerful new way. They, we believe, will transform many of the other non health care associated fields, creating new types of materials and devices in a perhaps environmentally benign manner with much more controlled properties, things you'll hear from Professor Belcher, understanding better toxicology environmental health, the pathogens, the toxins, carcinogens in our environment, national defense, new types of biological sensors and actuators that can carry out functions in far more exquisite ways than physics and chemistry might by themselves.

So let me end the sort of pictorially. The traditional biology medicine engineering landscape looks something like this. You can imagine problems driven by applications in health care-- maybe clinical, hospital, aerospace, military, maybe the pharmaceutical device diagnostics industries. And I'm speaking only about the engineering disciplines here, certainly the science disciplines would be analogous situation. You could take any one of these engineering disciplines-- chemical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, material science-- based on chemistry, physics, and math, the way it has been for 40 years, interface with medicine be a wonderful biomedical engineer and solve problems in the health care field.

That's been the traditional pathway and it's an important pathway. You can also contribute to biotechnology perhaps in the processing manufacturing and delivering or so forth. So what's new, what's new-- and some of you over here won't be able to see this-- there will be something new showing up in the bottom left hand corner, which is the sibling discipline of biological engineering, that according to the curriculum I just showed you a couple of slides ago now takes as a central science based genetics biochemistry molecular biology, cell biology and can very powerfully interface with medicine and solve biomedical engineering problems for the health care industry, can also be applied to novel types of biotechnologies, both for the health care industry in terms of therapeutics and in other types of diverse industries as new materials, the environment, and so forth. And so we're just placing this new discipline alongside the old ones because it has a new science space.

You notice in parentheses in the middle I have bioengineering because at MIT what we've decided to do is called bioengineering the whole scope. So biomedical engineering, medical engineering, you can think about as the precise application, regardless of the engineering discipline itself, to medical problems. Biological engineering is this new biology based discipline. And then bioengineering just covers the whole scope. So you can major in electrical engineering, minor in biomedical engineering. You can major in biology, minor in biomedical engineering. Or now you can major in biological engineering per se and have a whole world of applications open to you.

What do I want to say about the landscape, this is another landscape that's changed. These are the faculty that are affiliated with the biological engineering department at this point in time. And if you can see the colors, you can see how the landscape has changed. The names in blue, many of them who might be familiar to you, were members of the department when we started in 1998. The names in green have all been hired since then. And they give great credit to the president and the provost and the deans of these last few years of investing in this brand new opportunity for MIT, which I truly believe were at the forefront of, were defining, and the Institute has been investing in in terms of its most precious asset, which is people.

Finally, I may say, to go back to this landscape, that it's crucial to emphasize that we do this in partnership for the Department of Biology. We have a wonderful-- I won't say unique, but it's really unusual-- partnership between biological engineering in the school of engineering and biology in the school of science in terms of faculty members who have appointments in both, courses we've co-developed and co teach, parts of the undergraduate curriculum that are now transparent research programs and so forth. And so biology is mainly located in this brown box. Biological engineering is mainly located in this blue box.

But we have this wonderful handshake partnership. And I really think this could have happened only at MIT, because of the world class biology department, because of its own role in defining the biology of the molecular biology revolution and the genomic biology revolution that they could appreciate what we wanted to do from the engineering school in having a similar revolution in biological engineering. So I thank you for your patience with this overview. The real excitement is going to come from the next few people because they're going to show you the fascinating things that we're actually doing. But I hope this painted you a picture of what is new, why we're doing it, how we got there, and why this is really such an extraordinary point in time. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

VINCENT: Wow. That's pretty incredible. What a remarkable turn of events these last few years. And what a great setup. Thank you, Doug, for really teeing up the rest of the excitement this morning. I mean, it is a remarkable story about the courage, the vision, the leadership, to look to do this. And this is I think what I know I certainly love about MIT, and I hope this sort of thing continues. Next we're going to hear from Professor Linda Griffith. As Doug talked about, Professor Griffith was instrumental in pulling together a new undergraduate major here, bioengineering, at MIT. She's also going to share with us some of the really fascinating work in tissue engineering.

[APPLAUSE]

GRIFFITH: I've been giving a lot of talks at MIT in the past year, mainly about our new education program. And it's really wonderful to be able to share with you some of the research that drove a lot of faculty at MIT to try to create the kind of student who could push these research frontiers forward. I'd like to acknowledge at the beginning before I start the research talk the wonderful support we've gotten from the Alumni Association in helping develop our curriculum.

Several of the faculty received a class of 1960 Teaching Award for some of the very early ideas that we had in moving toward this kind of program that would bring biology and engineering together. And it allowed us to work with students a lot more effectively. And we're very, very grateful for that support for the education program.

What I'd like to do in describing a little view of the field of tissue engineering today is give you two sort of vignettes. One is where the field is going in terms of what we classically think of of tissue engineering in building organs and tissues to treat patients. And so that's the bench to bedside part of the talk. In the second part of the talk, I want to give you a glimpse into what may seem like a more mundane, but ultimately, I think, is a far more powerful application of tissue engineering, and that's coming back to the bench and using tissue engineering for a range of applications and drug development that will hopefully help us put all the surgeons who do organ transplants out of business someday. Except for, of course, my postdoc mentor.

So to get us oriented, let's think about what generated enormous excitement in the field starting almost a couple of decades ago. And I call this tissue engineering version 1. A common paradigm in the field is that we have some kind of source of cells that might be used to regrow a tissue. And in this case, we could imagine a patient who's lost the outer part of their ear could have some cells taken from their rib cartilage if only we could grow them into the proper shape to put in the patient.

So this is just an example of how you might do that and make a scaffold that's made of a porous biodegradable polymer, actually common surgical polymer, combine it with cells. And here this is a demonstration that you can implant this kind of cell polymer scaffold beneath the skin and have the tissue grow from the cells that were implanted onto the polymer. This was an experiment done using a mouse model. And you can see the shape of a human ear growing on the back of this mouth after a couple of months.

And so this kind of application generated lots of excitement because it actually works, and it works fairly well. And so these kinds of things are now moving into the clinic. We can ask the question, though, if it works for us an application like that which is fairly constrained in the number of patients, will it work for applications where there are lots of patients and more serious problems? So the answer, happily, is yes. This shows a radiograph from the patient of one of my collaborators, George Marshall, at the Cleveland Clinic. This patient has a very large tumor in his bone. You can see the diffuse area here is cancer of the bone. And it needs to be removed.

So what will happen in a patient like this, and happen in this patient, typically, is this part of the bone gets cut out. And what's done right now is, because it's a very large defect in the bone, a piece of cadaver bone will be placed there in order to give the patient support following the surgery. Well we all can imagine that cadaver bone doesn't heal so well. There are potential problems with infection. It's not quite the same as having the real bone.

Another application area that some of you may be facing arises from injuries to joints. You can see, perhaps, pretty clearly that this soccer player here is experiencing an injury that will later lead to great problems with his joint. And, in fact, people who experience injuries like this and even lesser ones will go on offense to develop osteoarthritis. That's a wearing away of the surface of the cartilage that lines the joint, in this case, in the knee.

And osteoarthritis is a leading cause for hip implants. My mother also just had a hip implant, and it was due to the wearing away of the cartilage in her knee. So wouldn't it be better than having a joint replacement that goes on to lead to complications later and never works perfectly as the original joint? Wouldn't it be better if we could somehow repair this lesion, and grow cartilage back, and, have it secured firmly to the underlying bone just as it is in the normal tissue?

So one of the great areas of activity at MIT, at my lab and and many others, is trying to combine these concepts of understanding the facets that govern cell behavior, the underlying molecular mechanisms that cause cells to migrate into a wound bed and cause, say, stem cells that are present there to proliferate and turn into bone or turn into cartilage. We're trying now to combine these factors the molecular factors that govern the properties of cells with engineering approaches that would create environments that cells could be transplanted into these sites and go on to form new tissues. So in work in our lab, we said, okay, what we really need are two aspects of this.

We need to be able to build a large scaffold that would be like the house that these cells would live in. And at the same time, we need to be able to give those cells cues for what they should be doing when we put them in an implant site. So a common situation in the clinic is an orthopedic surgeon would have available, if he's doing a joint replacement or wants to repair a joint or repair a bone, he can harvest bone marrow from that patient. And the bone marrow has in its stem cells that can go on to form bone.

So we ask the question, can we build a scaffold that will help those cells go on to form bone. And so let me just take you through one part of solving this problem. In order to build a device that could be used to put the cells on, we had to invent a whole new way to process materials that would be appropriate for implanting into people.

So when I started out doing this, materials processing wasn't my particular area of strength. I knew a lot about the cells and how to design polymers to interact with cells, but making those into a big device wasn't something that I was that talented at. So it turns out that MIT, as we all know, is a place where you run into people all the time from different disciplines. I ran into a mechanical engineer who had invented a process called three dimensional printing.

And he'd invented it to do rapid prototyping of airplane engine parts, essentially. So what we decided to do together is say, gee, when you're making airplane engine parts, you need to make complicated shapes, you need to build them from some kind of computer model. It sounds like that's the same kind of challenge we face in building scaffolds for bone regeneration. We might want to start with an MRI image of a patient's jaw, for example, and build a new jaw just exactly to match the other half of the patients jaw. So can we take a process that's computer controlled and that builds complex three dimensional objects up from scratch, can we take that and adapt it to tissue engineering?

So starting about 10 years ago, this is exactly what we did. So we could start with an idea saying, okay, we have a computer model for what we want to build. We want to build a scaffold that has lots of pores and channels that will facilitate tissue in growth. And we want to build it in a particular shape. And the way that we can do that is to build it up as a series of very thin, two dimensional layers, step by step.

So the three dimensional printing process is one of many kinds of manufacturing and prototyping processes that are now endemic in many areas that are called solid freeform fabrication methods. They build up complex objects as a series of thin two dimensional slices. So you start, in this case by spreading, a powder of the material you want to build an object from, in our case, a bio material.