Governor tours BME laboratories

Ultrasharp ultrasonic silicon needles. A palm-sized embryo-culturing laboratory. A microwave alternative to mammograms. During a September 15 visit to the engineering campus, Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson saw how some UW-Madison biomedical engineers apply their cutting-edge research in the nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology fields.

Assistant Professor David Beebe uses tiny technologies to solve problems in biology and medicine. "It takes about a million times more fluid to fill one of these," explained research scientist Glennys Mensing, holding up a Petrie dish and comparing it to a palm-sized microchannel device. From his research of these microfluidic systems, Beebe created the spin-off company, Micro Agri Systems, Inc., which could revolutionize how breeders handle and manipulate embryos. Rather than using mouth pipettes, Beebe's technology could allow them to culture embryos in microchannels molded in plastic, and make in vitro production steps easier, more accurate and less expensive. And while traditional in vitro embryonic culture rates take almost twice as long as the natural rate; Beebe's group, in collaboration with Matt Wheeler at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has shown it can match the natural rate, graduate student Henry Zeringue told Thompson.

At the touch of a screen, Professor Gregg Vanderheiden can make everyday products, ranging from automatic teller machines and microwaves to cellular telephones, accessible to people with disabilities. His EZ Access interface includes features for people with low vision, blindness, reduced hearing, deafness, physical disabilities, reading problems, inability to read and more. The technology, developed at the Trace Research and Development Center, already is in use in job kiosks at the Mall of America, Minneapolis. And 85 percent of the accessibility code in Windows 95/98/NT/2000 computers was developed at Trace, said Vanderheiden. In the lobby of Engineering Hall, he demonstrated some computer accessibility features. "How do you vote?" Vanderheiden asked Thompson, showing him the EZ Access voting kiosks that will debut this fall. "Republican," deadpanned the GOP governor.

Professor Amit Lal (right) explains the technology behind his microsurgical tools to Governor Tommy Thompson. (20K JPG)

Standing in Assistant Professor Amit Lal's laboratory, Thompson learned how Lal integrates microelectronics, microelectromechanical machines, acoustics and ultrasonics with silicon micromachines. Someday, surgeons using Lal's silicon ultrasonic surgical tools will be able to remove one epithelial cell layer at a time, cut a single blood vessel in the retina or terminate blood flow to a tumor. Soldiers could use his vortex needle pump to measure their protein and determine whether they're getting sick. "I've been told the mosquito is Wisconsin's official state bird," joked Lal. He studied a mosquito's bite to develop his mimetic needles, which pierce without pain.

As part of the university's cluster-hiring initiative, Associate Professor Daniel van der Weide conducts much of his research on the molecular scale. He designs, builds and applies tools that help researchers answer questions related to chemical sensing, understanding diseases, drug discovery and advanced computational elements. To speed drug discovery, he says it's possible to test thousands of compounds at once on a single parallel array. "Using microfabrication techniques, we can take a biological idea that's been around forever and make it much, much faster and much, much denser," said van der Weide. He also collaborates with Middleton-based Prairie Technologies on research that might explain how brain cells "talk" to each other--facilitating understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

As an alternative to the mammogram, Assistant Professor Susan Hagness hopes to develop a microwave imaging method to detect the presence of breast tumors. Her goal is to discover tumors earlier and eliminate some of the anxiety women feel while waiting to find out if a tumor is benign or malignant. "The physical basis of this technology is that there is an enormous contrast between the properties of normal and malignant tissue," she told Thompson, whose wife is a breast-cancer survivor. Hagness' group is gathering data about the dielectric properties of malignant, benign and normal tissues, as well as developing a biopsy method to examine tissue in the breast.

Throughout the tour, Thompson used words such as "amazing," "incredible" and "outstanding" to describe what he'd seen. "I'm very impressed and there's tremendous economic potential for the state in the things you're developing," he remarked afterward.