September 21, 2004
Purdue engineer-chemist named to MIT list of top 100 young researchers
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Albena Ivanisevic, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and chemistry at Purdue University, has been included in a list of "100 top young innovators" for work aimed at creating retinal transplants to treat age-related macular degeneration.
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Ivanisevic will be honored with a TR100 award from Technology Review, a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She will receive the award on Sept. 29, during the 2004 Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
The awards, which honor researchers younger than 35 years old, list the "100 top young innovators in technology from around the world whose work is transforming the nature of such fields as biotechnology, computing, energy, medicine, manufacturing, nanotechnology, telecommunications and transportation," according to the magazine.
Ivanisevic, 29, is being recognized for work to create scaffold-like patterns on the surface of a pig's retina, making templates out of molecular compounds called peptides that could promote the growth of transplanted healthy cells to treat age-related macular degeneration. Placing templates on the retina might enable transplanted cells to take hold and grow.
She and her students used an instrument called an atomic force microscope and a device called a cantilever to lay down lines of peptides in a process known as dip-pen nanolithography. The pattern was permanently attached to a dime-size piece of retina extracted from a pig's eye.
Ivanisevic said, "We demonstrated that we could perform lithography, or patterning, on something other than a metal, semiconductor or insulator surface, We are interested in making surfaces that can eventually be used for transplant strategies."
Peptides are made of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
Each of the lines in the template was less than 100 nanometers wide. "Nano" is a prefix meaning one-billionth, so a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or roughly the length of 10 hydrogen atoms strung together.
Macular degeneration is an incurable eye disease that is the leading cause of blindness for people 55 years old and older in the United States, affecting more than 10 million Americans. Retinal pigment epithelial cells deliver nutrients to the retina and remove waste products. Macular degeneration is caused by a deterioration of these cells.
Ivanisevic came to Purdue in June 2002 after completing a two-year National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University. She earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2000 and a bachelor of science degree in chemistry in 1996 from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. She received the Dr. E. Hirschfelder Award for Women in Chemistry, Math, and Physics and the Belle Crowe Fellowship, both from the University of Wisconsin in 2000, and a Dr. William Coppock Chemistry Research Award from Drake University in 1996.
Ivanisevic is associated with two centers in Purdue's Discovery Park: the Birck Nanotechnology Center and Bindley Bioscience Center, which funded the research. Her work also is supported by the NASA Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing at Purdue.
Past TR100 winners include Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; Alexis Borisy, President and CEO, CombinatoRx; Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google; and Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal (now part of eBay).
More information about the award is available by contacting Kristen Collins, managing partner at KMC Partners, (617) 833-5574, kristen@kmcpartners.com.
Writer: Emil Venere, (765) 494-4709, venere@purdue.edu
Sources: Albena Ivanisevic, (765) 496-3676, albena@purdue.edu
Kristen Collins, (617) 833-5574, kristen@kmcpartners.com
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
Related web sites: News Releases about the Emerging Technologies Conference
Purdue University Home Page: https://www.purdue.edu
PHOTO CAPTION:
Albena Ivanisevic, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and chemistry at Purdue University, has been included in a list of "100 top young innovators" by Technology Review, a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She will be honored with a TR100 award on Sept. 29, during the 2004 Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. In this photo she dissects a pig eye as part of her research into retinal transplants for which she is being recognized for the award. (Purdue News Service photo/David Umberger)
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