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Something extraordinary is happening at Georgia Tech.
We are transforming approaches to disease and human health
through a visionary new facility, the Engineered
Biosystems Building.
The Engineered Biosystems Building
is a strategic resource for the biosciences sector,
one of the fastest growing industries in the state.
EBB provides outstanding students, faculty, and staff
with the resources they require for success.
It is an investment in our future.
It also provides an environment for discoveries, many of which
will become innovations that will save
and enrich lives for generations to come.
As a public-private partnership between the state of Georgia
and the philanthropy of individuals, corporations,
and foundations, EBB features 200,000 square feet
of multi-disciplinary research space.
The building brings together scientists and engineers,
to increase our understanding of complex diseases,
and to generate new drugs and new therapies
for cancer, arthritis, diabetes, Alzheimer's
and other disorders.
Georgia Tech is poised, through tremendous development
over the last years, and our position as leaders
in the biosciences, bioengineering, biotechnology,
to really and truly reach a new level.
And this new facility will allow us to do that.
Building on Georgia Tech's strength
as a leader in biomedical engineering
and the biological sciences, EBB is the first phase
in a long term plan to expand the infrastructure
and resources in these vitally important fields.
It is located at 10th Street, between State Street
and Atlantic Drive, which has reopened
as a pedestrian walkway.
The facility is adjacent to the Biotechnology Complex, the U.A.
Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Building, the Ford
Environmental Science and Technology
Building, the Molecular Science and Engineering Building,
the Parker H. Petit Biotechnology Building,
and to the Marcus Nanotechnology Building.
The research that is being done within EBB
is good for Georgia's economy, driving innovation,
commercializing new devices, drugs, and technologies,
forming new companies, and creating high skill,
high paying jobs.
EBB is our home base.
We have research going on across the entire campus at Georgia
Tech, but we really needed a place
that we could claim as home base.
And there we want to bring together opportunities
for students, for faculty, and for visitors
to know about the extraordinary work that we're doing together,
and really make Children's top of mind.
And what we hope is that by doing that,
people will become more and more interested in doing
pediatric research, and they'll think about children,
and they'll think about the talent that they have,
and how they can use it to change
the future of pediatric medicine.
Disease is not simple.
To understand it, and to beat it,
we must quantify, analyze, and manipulate
the cellular logic of life.
The research neighborhoods within EBB
were designed and programmed to facilitate this vision.
One research neighborhood is chemical biology,
using the power of chemistry to synthesize and manipulate
biology.
What we do is we take a therapeutic protein
and we assemble it, or we fabricate it
into structures, like nanoparticles, or gels,
or fibers, and these structures enable
the protein to be protected in the body,
but also transport it to where it
needs to go inside of a cell.
So we have a lot of different applications,
autoimmune diseases, vaccination, cancer.
The facilities that have been built here are incredible.
So we've never been in a place that is really
built for our research.
So already, we are noticing how much more efficient we are,
and how much more results and how much faster
our research can move.
But then, also having the whole community
here makes it really ideal for not just continuing
what we were doing before, but really
expanding into different ideas, and being
able to work with partners.
In essence, this building, you could look at it
as an academic pharmaceutical company.
But it's so much more than that, because here also
are people who study fundamental issues,
really basic science that enables discoveries that we
don't know are coming yet.
It's a continuation of the Georgia Tech way,
but it does it in an even more effective way,
I think, then has been programmed before.
The administration and our generous donors
have helped us invest in core facilities
in this building that are really magnificent.
Core facilities are laboratories that
have very expensive and very sophisticated
equipment that are available for all investigators at Georgia
Tech to use.
Each piece of equipment in those facilities
is too expensive for anyone research group to purchase,
and many research groups can use them.
And so they are force multipliers
for the production of wonderful research science,
and development in engineering.
Another research neighborhood is cell and developmental biology,
harnessing biological principles to design novel,
cell-base therapies.
I think always the very exciting breakthroughs
in science come at the edge of a discipline,
when people start interacting with other researchers
in other disciplines.
And so this building combines a lot
of different people with various thematic similarities,
but different expertise together,
in order to generate those breakthroughs.
One reason I'm very excited to be at EBB
is my neighbor in the lab space is Hang Lu,
and professor Lu is an expert in microfluidics.
So this is a very exciting collaboration between myself
in computational modeling and Dr. Lu in microfluidics,
because we're able to use her micro-fabricated chips
to arrange ourselves into very precise locations,
and stimulate them with waves of different chemicals.
The third research neighborhood is systems biology,
which ties it all together by using computation
to model life, and how it fails in disease.
With this combination of three types of people,
collaborations can start from anywhere.
It's these fundamental discoveries
that will ultimately lead to new insights about diseases
and disorders.
We have identified themes, programmed the building
around faculty, designed an amazing building,
a building that will inspire us to do better than we have.
This facility is enhancing Georgia Tech's
commercialization, efforts, which
will create new technologies, new products,
and generate new startup companies that
will have a positive impact on Georgia's economy.
We thank those visionary individuals and organizations,
whose private philanthropy, in partnership with the state,
made this life changing facility possible.
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