Our anchor speaker is here, Dr. Shu Chien.
Dr. Chien is a National Medal of Science Laureate.
He’s the director of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at UC San Diego, and as you – if
you were with us last night, he’s one of the honorary founding fathers of the NIBIB
legislation.
And he’ll summarize his thoughts about the conference.
Oh, it’s here, OK.
Got it.
Thank you very much, Steve.
It’s my great pleasure, privilege and honor to be here and to give some concluding remarks.
The first thing I’d like to say is warmest congratulations to you, Rod, Dr. Pettigrew
and everyone in the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering for
your outstanding work in the institute and for the community and for the patients.
This is truly remarkable.
It’s only 10 years old, it’s not even a teenager, but what you have done is so mature
and so accomplished and the influence so far-reaching; it’s really beyond belief.
It’s really remarkable.
And also today’s program, the 10th anniversary celebration, is wonderful indeed.
First we have lectures on innovation for health: Dr. Francis Collins, Dr. Phil Sharp, Dr. Chuck
Vest, and the last lecture by Dr. Hricak.
These are all visionary lectures from the current to the future, like the last lecture,
and from the national level to the global level.
So it really covers a lot of ground for us to think about, and it’s very stimulating.
And then we have outstanding lectures on various innovative technologies, such as Dr. Roger
Tsien’s lecture on surgery through molecular fluorescence imaging, Dr. Carol Pugh’s lecture
on use of sensors and simulation to quantify clinical palpation, and Dr. Hari Shroff’s
lecture on high spatial and temporal resolution imaging.
And then we have the two very moving stories from our patients, Mr. Summers and Mr. Cassano,
then also videos that we saw on innovation discovery and health, and there are technology
showcases, which I would not read because it’s in the program, except to say that
it impacts on a lot of diseases, including influenza, cancer, cardiovascular disease,
ophthalmological diseases and neurological diseases and beyond.
So it’s really a marvelous program today.
I personally learned a great deal and have a lot to think about about the future.
Now, Dr. Sharp mentioned about the three revolutions.
While I give a lecture on perspectives in biomedical engineering, I’d like to show
the slides which are exactly the same as what Dr. Sharp says about – almost 60 years ago
the double helix was a big breakthrough in biology, and then at the turn of the century,
the sequencing of the human genome.
As a result we get such a vast amount of data and information that necessitates the integrative
approach to biomedical sciences and engineering.
Now, this includes the integration of biology, medicine and engineering, integration across
different levels in the biological hierarchy and integrational education research technology,
and a translation.
I’ll use one slide each to illustrate this.
This is to illustrate that biology, medicine and engineering need to be integrated together
for the improvement of human health.
Of course, the ultimate purpose is to improve the health of people and combat disease.
In terms of biological hierarchy, we go from genes to molecules to cells, tissues, organs
and systems.
Of course, genes and systems are interrelated as well.
So we have this whole series of different scales, but they’re all interrelated.
We need to take an integrative approach to understand the whole system from every level
on up.
Now, we need a cooperation not only between academia, clinical medicine and industry but
also the society, government and the foundations.
So we need to all work together in order to improve people’s health.
So in this regard, NIBIB plays a very important role, and it not only works with academia,
medical community and industry as well as a foundation and as a society.
So really, it is playing a very major role in improving people’s health.
And NIBIB was formed 10 years ago.
It was exactly when the second revolution had just happened, so it was very timely that
it had – has the mission to improve human health by leading the development, accelerating
the application of biomedical technologies, and it’s committed to integrate the physical
and engineering sciences with the life sciences.
It was stated from the very beginning, to advance basic research and medical care, and
the vision is to change health care.
It will push the frontier to make this a reality.
And I’d like to show a few slides how NIBIB has fostered the career of young and established
investigators.
We just heard a lecture by Dr. Roger Tsien.
He repeatedly mentioned this Dr. Nguyen Quyen, who is actually a surgeon.
And I’d just like to say here that as a surgeon specialized in ear disease and skull
tumors, she received a mentored clinical scientist research career development award, KO ’08
from the NIBIB so she would have time to be trained by Dr. Roger Tsien in the techniques
that you heard.
And she developed this imaging technique, which you saw in Dr. Roger Tsien’s slide,
to allow her to distinguish the tumor tissue from the nerves so that they can do surgery
very clearly on the tumor to remove it as completely as possible without injuring the
nerves.
So this is a really remarkable achievement fostered by NIBIB.
She also received the R01 and also the New Investigator Award.
And this is Dr. Dalin Tang who is – was trained as a mathematician.
And as a mathematician, he said that this is the first R01 he received in 2004, and
that enabled him to work with medical doctors, engineers and radiologists to lead to the
formation – development of this index, computational plaque vulnerability index, so that he can
show how vulnerable the plaque in the artery is.
And he said this is all due to the fact that he was supported by the NIBIB.
Dr. Ghovanloo of Georgia Tech – he also was trained in engineering primarily, and
then NIBIB allowed him to push forward his research on neuroscience and assistive technologies.
And as a result, he was able to work with clinical experts, get his tenure and work
on new areas such as speech and language pathology.
Some of his results are shown here.
And the last one I’d like to show is Dr. Dennis Discher.
He is a more established investigator, and he received the NIBIB grant to allow him to
develop this very novel concept that the extracellular matrix elasticity can modulate the stem cell
differentiation on the hard tissue such – hard matrix such as greater than 30 kilopascal,
you would tend to have bone development, as shown by the marker here, and for the soft
ones, they would develop neuro-like marker, and the intermediary one would be muscle.
And this has become a very important paper that formed the foundation of a lot of studies
in this area, a huge impact, and led to his election to the National Academy of Engineering.
The paper in Cell in 2006 has been cited more than 2000 times in less than six years and
is one of the five most cited papers in Cell.
So this is really remarkable.
And he also trained Dr. Engler, who was the first author, as a graduate student.
Now he is a faculty at UCSD.
So this also allowed the training.
So all of these really show how the NIBIB has not only fostered research, but also research
training.
As I look at the NIBIB funding, this is what I gathered from the website.
It may be wrong, but my sense is it has not really increased that much from 2003, which
is about 270 million (dollars), to today about 320 (million dollars).
Considering the inflation factor, as Dr. Francis Collins mentioned, the real dollar actually
has decreased.
It is truly remarkable with this kind of limited resources the NIBIB can achieve so much in
research and research training.
And if we had more funds for NIBIB, what can be achieved is even going to be much, much
more.
Now, what NIBIB has done is on the one hand foster fundamental research; on the other
hand, its translation to clinical application and industrial products.
And this is the goal for innovation for health.
So again I go back to the slide I showed before, how NIBIB has worked with all these sectors
to achieve the purpose, the function of cooperation and integration.
Its achievement is truly remarkable.
It’s – and in the future I can see it’s going to be even much, much more so.
So at this 10th anniversary, I’d like to express my warmest wishes for a happy anniversary
to NIBIB, a decade of innovation in health, amazing innovations, discoveries and contributions
to health.
Warmest congratulations, most sincere thanks, all best wishes for a marvelous future for
NIBIB.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
Thank you, Dr. Chien.