Many Cornell faculty on the Ithaca campus are engaged in research that promises to dramatically improve medical science and human health.

For example, researchers are attempting to gain a better understanding of genes that predispose people to certain diseases and to develop gene therapies that reverse the progress of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

Others are involved in the design of new tools that can advance medical care, devices small enough to navigate and repair human tissue or to deliver drugs directly to the site of tumors. Discoveries are being made at Cornell that could lead to cures for certain types of human blindness and that will create a new generation of more effective hearing aids.

Among them is Marjolein van der Meulen, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and associate scientist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Her research into understanding the skeleton's ability to bear load positions her at the interface of engineering and the biological sciences. She communicates an infectious enthusiasm for doing "something that can improve society and really help people."

Currently she is looking closely at how variations in material properties impact bone strength, with an eye towards understanding the changes that occur during osteoporosis. Understanding these differences, and how they can contribute to the ability to bear loads, is having an impact on designing drugs to reduce fracture risk, the clinical outcome of osteoporosis.

Van der Meulen's interest in bioengineering germinated in high school after seeing a 60-minute video on neuromuscular stimulation for paraplegics and becoming fascinated by a device placed on patients' legs that let them walk without crutches. As both an undergraduate and graduate student, she majored in mechanical engineering but conducted research in biomedical engineering.

"I am a bit unusual, as far as engineers go. In engineering, researchers generally work on tools and methods but intellectually I am really a part of the medical community and my research is more applied and clinical."

Rick Cerione, professor of molecular medicine and of chemistry and chemical biology, is interested in improving human health through better drug design. His research focuses on understanding the molecular basis of various human cancers and identifies "novel cellular proteins that are essential for cell growth, differentiation, or cell death"

During the past decade, he and his research group have discovered a number of proteins that play key roles in these fundamental processes. His "hope is that some of these proteins will be therapeutic targets for anti-cancer drugs."

He is also increasingly interested in how the brain works, in part, because many of the same proteins and pathways used to achieve cell growth control are also responsible for fundamental aspects of brain function (learning and memory).

"In the future I would like to develop multidisciplinary approaches, combining genetics, structural biology, and small molecule chemistry, to better understand the complex networks responsible for how cells grow and establish whether similar mechanisms play into how the brain works."

One of Cerione's collaborators is Kelvin Lee, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. Lee is interested in signal transduction between cells, which is essential for the research he conducts in protein profiling and gene expression.

Lee directs the Cornell Proteomics Program; proteomics involves the identification of proteins in the body and the determination of their role in physiological functions. Proteomics will have great impact on the future of biotechnology and medicine and can lead to new drug design for use in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease.

Recently, Lee was named among the top 100 young innovators in the world in Technology and Business magazine for his work in using proteomics to develop a diagnostic test for mad cow disease and one of its human versions, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, at early stages. Before Lee's test, the disease could only be diagnosed through a brain biopsy typically performed after death. Both diseases result from a variant form of a normal protein called a prion that causes a normal protein to misfold.

Lee has "always been interested in the life sciences," but chose to major in engineering as an undergraduate so he could then apply that skill set to research in the life sciences. "We want to continue our search for diagnostic markers, and we want to develop new technologies for protein profiling (through the Nanobiotechnology Center) which will enable us and many others to perform proteomics experiments faster and with greater accuracy."

Three voices; three research programs; and three examples of the dynamic collaborations that are driving life science research at Cornell and generating discoveries that will transform healthcare in our world.

• Van der Meulen collaborates with researchers at the Veterinary College, the Hospital for Special Surgery, and Weill Medical College as well as colleagues in engineering, the biomedical sciences, and material sciences.



• Cerione's work spans laboratories and facilities in Veterinary Medicine, Molecular Biology and Genetics, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology.



• Lee has clinical collaborators around the country providing needed tissue samples and local collaborators at Cornell in the Nanobiotechnology Center, Theory Center, and the Agricultural Research Service providing tools and devices, theoretical frameworks, and computational modeling.

"These collaborations are essential and valuable to the students and people in my lab," says Lee. He is also very clear about what he sees as the ultimate impact of the research he pursues: "The primary value will be that we produce students (undergraduate, graduate, and postdocs) who are trained to apply proteomics and systems biology approaches to the study of important problems."