When you think of the programs Virginia Tech is known for, what comes to mind? Most likely, engineering, agricultural and life sciences, technology, and veterinary medicine are at the top of the list. But these traditional strengths have positioned the university to become a leader in an area that may surprise some people: human health.

Building on a strong foundation
Despite the absence of a human medical school, Virginia Tech has always worked to advance research that benefits human health, from disease prevention and genetics to nutritional issues and mental health. Now, says James Bohland, senior fellow for biomedical, bioengineering, and health projects, the university has initiated several efforts to expand its role in biomedical and health research, including its recent restructuring [see "Changes underway at Tech"].

The focus toward human health research is in keeping with the university's push toward achieving top 30-research status, a goal that will further strengthen the quality of a Virginia Tech education. Rankings, which are accorded by a number of key indicators, among them research expenditures, are taken into account by federal agencies when they are allocating funds.

And Virginia Tech is not alone. In its Jan. 3 issue, The Chronicle of Higher Education addressed the growing number of universities similar in nature to Tech--land-grants without a medical school--that are pursuing top-tier research status. The article points out that "no matter how hard they try, 100 universities can't squeeze into the top 20."

University administrators are all too aware of this challenge. "We're not doing anything new, and we need to do it better in order to be successful," Bohland notes. Still, he adds, "Ten years from now, I would like to see Virginia Tech as a model for a university doing top-notch medical research, even though we do not have a human medical school."

Approximately 60 percent of the federal funding for research goes to biomedical research, the nature of which, Bohland says, is changing in a way that fits Tech's strengths, moving toward systems, computational, and molecular approaches. "Where the funding universe is going, coupled with where biomedical research is going, makes Virginia Tech very well positioned to become a leader." To that end, there has been a push toward developing strong collaborative agreements with medical schools and health-care organizations.

The result of one such collaboration, the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, will allow the university to address a growing national trend. Biomedical engineering integrates engineering, life sciences, and medicine to find ways in which engineering principles can be applied to human medicine. Over the past two decades, enrollment in bioengineering graduate programs has increased more than all other engineering fields--partially because the aging Baby Boomer population has focused increasing attention on health issues--and through 2010, employment opportunities in biomedical engineering are forecasted to increase faster than other occupations.

The new school will pair Tech's engineering and veterinary medicine resources with Wake Forest's School of Medicine, allowing the two universities to share interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research as well as costly research equipment. As of November, more than 30 students were working toward their masters and doctoral degrees in biomedical engineering through the school.

Another example of creative collaboration is the partnership between the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI)--a Virginia Tech-based research institute for the commonwealth--and the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Bloomberg School of Public Health. The VBI's sophisticated computer technology and computational tools allow researchers to process JHU's wealth of medical and molecular biology data. The $10-million research partnership is focused on providing much-needed information on some of the world's most deadly infectious diseases, including malaria, taxoplasmosis (a parasitic infection that is the third leading cause of food-borne death in the U.S.), AIDS, and tuberculosis.

Virginia Tech has also entered an agreement with Georgetown University's College of Medicine to explore a partnership in the area of public health, about which more details will be released in the coming months.

Establishing a college of human medicine
A partnership with another medical school has been engineered closer to home. Last fall, the Tech Board of Visitors approved a collaboration agreement with the new Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine (EVVCOM), which will be based at the university's Corporate Research Center.

There are two recognized schools of medicine in the U.S.: allopathic (for a medical doctorate) and osteopathic (for a doctorate of osteopathy). Osteopathic medicine takes the approach that structural and mechanical problems are the source of disease. Based on the belief that structure directly influences function, osteopathic doctors use various forms of physical manipulation to correct structural anomalies, thereby stimulating the body's own self-healing mechanisms. Like M.D.s, D.O.s earn a four-year, post-graduate degree, must pass medical board examinations, and can prescribe medications.

D.O.s sometimes provide the only health-care option in rural areas, and one of the college's goals is to fill the need for more physicians in Southwest and Southside Virginia and Appalachia. Fifty percent of the college's 150 spots are reserved for students from rural Virginia, North Carolina, and the Appalachian regions of West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, Georgia, and Kentucky.

The EVVCOM's other major goal is to become a leader in medical research. Through its collaborative agreement with Virginia Tech, the college can contract the use of university facilities and offices and has hired some faculty from Tech who will have joint appointments at both schools, allowing Tech to include EVVCOM's research in its own expenditure totals. The medical school will also be able to secure funding from the National Institute of Health.

The first class of students will begin its studies this fall in the college's new 60,000-square-foot facility under the leadership of Dean Dixie Tooke-Rawlins, a D.O. and former acting dean at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Missouri, which was established by osteopathic medicine's founder, Andrew Still, in 1892. The EVVCOM is privately funded by a Roanoke-based medical research foundation called the Harvey Peters Foundation, which also funded Tech's Harvey W. Peters Research Center for the Study of Parkinson's Disease and Other Central Nervous System Disorders. The foundation is supported by the estate of the late philanthropist Marion Bradley Via, and the college is named for the son of Marion and Charles E. Via (civil engineering Ô41), Edward B. Via.

Fighting cancer from a consolidated front
When veterinary pathologist John Robertson recently gave a tour of the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine (VMRCVM) to several campus employees, he asked those who knew someone with some form of cancer to raise their hands. "Every single one of them did," he says. "I knew they would."

One in every four deaths in the United States can be attributed to cancer, making it the second-leading cause of death in the nation. According to the American Cancer Society, about 1.3 million new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in the U.S. in 2003, and more than half a million people will die from cancer this year.

For years, Virginia Tech researchers and research centers have worked to improve the detection and treatment of cancer. "We [Tech] have a unique vision and unique skills that we can apply to biomedical research, especially cancer research," Robertson says. "We have very nontraditional ways to look at everything."

This nontraditional thinking is demonstrated by a new method for treating cancer cells, an interdepartmental collaboration developed under the auspices of the Optical Sciences and Engineering Research Center (OSER) Photodynamics Mini-center. Karen Brewer and fellow researchers in the Department of Chemistry developed new tri-metallic supra-molecules that can be positioned directly in cancer cells. When the supra-molecules are "excited," or activated, by a therapeutic wavelength delivered through the tissue, they become toxic to the cancer cells and destroy them.

Brian Storrie and Maria Teresa Tarrango-Trani of biochemistry devised a means of delivering the molecules to the cancer cells. Some cancer cells have naturally occurring receptors for a protein, the non-toxic B fragment of shiga toxins. By attaching the supra-molecule to the fragment, researchers can target the cancer cells and use the fragment to deliver the agent to the exact spot in the cell that needs to be treated. Once the supra-molecule is in position, it needs to be activated by light. Ken Meissner and researchers in OSER are currently investigating two techniques that more effectively concentrate light in tissue. They are fundamentally similar--both come into contact with the skin and send a concentration of light to the tumor site. Meissner is also working to fine-tune the wavelength of the light that is delivered to the site, which will provide even more effective treatment.

Currently, most cancer is treated by chemotherapy and radiation therapy, both of which destroy healthy cells surrounding the cancer cells and can result in debilitating side effects. The new method, however, is non-surgical and can be delivered to the specific cancer cells, avoiding the debilitating side effects of traditional treatment methods, which gives it the potential to be a groundbreaking means of treating cancer.

Numerous other cancer research projects on campus cover a broad spectrum of approaches. In the Department of Chemistry, David Kingston and other professors are working on means of bettering chemotherapy treatment. Kingston is the first chemist in the United States to have studied the chemical qualities of TaxolTM, which is one of the world's best-selling anticancer drugs. The Center for Photonics Technology, based in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is developing a diagnostic device to look at cancer characteristics in serum and plasma that might lead to early diagnosis of cancer. Bill Huckle in biomedical sciences and pathology and Will Eyestone in large animal sciences are working with Kim Forsten Williams in chemical engineering on angiogenesis, the study of ways to prevent the formation of new blood vessels in cancer cells, which is how the disease spreads. Small and large animal clinical nutritionist Korinn Saker (Ph.D. veterinary medical sciences Ô95) is looking at comparative models of feline mammary glands, hoping to find a dietary answer that will help stifle tumors.

Much of the support for Tech's cancer research has come from the Carilion Biomedical Institute (CBI), the Roanoke, Va.-based umbrella organization formed by a unique collaboration among Tech, the Carilion Health System, and theÊUniversity of Virginia. The CBI oversees prototype development, commercialization, and the spin-off of technology created by its supporting research centers at the two universities: OSER at Virginia Tech and the Medical Automation Research Center at UVa.

The VMRCVM recently established the Center for Comparative Oncology (CeCO) to serve as a unifying resource for the 40 Virginia Tech researchers across campus who are currently involved in some form of cancer work. Veterinarians are more involved now in cancer research than ever before because significant improvements in cancer diagnostics have increased the oncology caseload in many community veterinary practices; current studies indicate that about 25 percent of all pets will die from cancer. In addition, because of similarities in the ways tumors occur and develop in both people and animals, comparative oncology--the study of the behavior of tumors in different species--is a solid foundation for consolidating cancer research at Tech.

Robertson, the director of the CeCO, wants the VMRCVM to become a national repository for primate genomics. Despite the strong biological similarities between humans and primates, he says, "the overall incidence rate of tumors is 10 times greater in people than in great apes world-wide. We want to find out why." Although there are obvious differences in risk factors, including environment and voluntary behaviors such as smoking, a comparison of genes may provide some answers as to genetic causes of cancer.

Today, the CeCO is looking for resources to build its program, and long-term goals include expanding clinical facilities and recruiting a team of clinical oncologists. It has already established a working relationship with the American Cancer Association. Five years from now, Robertson says, "I want us to be a national presence in cancer research. We're going to be a player."

And although his vision is far from simple, it is one of hope. "We're going to beat this."