Innovation is being rewarded at Ohio State.

Rene Anand, neuroscientist and professor of pharmacology, and Metin Gurcan, assistant professor of biomedical informatics, have begun projects with grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Each received an Exceptional, Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration grant from the NIH in 2009.

The scientists, both part of the College of Medicine at OSU, are researching treatments for everyday ailments.

Anand, who received $1.37 million from the NIH for his project in September, is studying the cell behavior of electric eels and electric rays in an attempt to discover new ways to create remedies for diseases and disorders.

“One of the biggest barriers today to drug discovery is that most of the targets, whether it be cancer, neurological disorders, diabetes, etc. are membrane proteins — proteins that are embedded in the cell membrane,” Anand said. “The way we discover drugs is we get crystal structures from these proteins, and design the drugs to make them specific to the target.

“The problem with this process is that these membrane proteins are difficult to produce for crystallography,” he said.

Based on the fact that the electric eel has a large amount of a specific-membrane protein needed to generate electricity in its cells, Anand realized they would form an excellent factory to produce other membrane proteins.

“What we are going to try and do is trick the cells of these species into producing human membrane proteins of our interest using what they use to generate electricity,” Anand said. “If they do, it opens up the gateway for producing every membrane protein possible.”

The professor will be working with Texas A&M biophysicist Gregg Wells, a former colleague, on the four-year undertaking. The majority of the research will be done at OSU.

“We discussed this idea 15 years ago over a cup of tea,” Anand said. “If I succeed in getting these membrane proteins, he will proceed to crystallize them.”

Anand said he believes these grants will help promote out-of-the-box thinking to solve problems in biomedicine.

“You can’t encourage innovative thinking if you don’t fund it,” Anand said.

Gurcan is creating a massive computer platform that will revolutionize the way doctors and scientists observe ailments. He is beginning his initial research with the issue of osteoarthritis.

He said almost 90 percent of humans older than 70 will contract the disease, yet doctors know very little about it.

“To understand a disease as complex as osteoarthritis, I felt that we need to really look at it in a holistic way,” Gurcan said. “We have different parties looking at the same disease, and disagreeing on what it looks like.”

His plan is to come up with a computational infrastructure in an attempt to better understand osteoarthritis. This will also assist in figuring out which of the several current therapies for this disease is the most effective.

The purpose of Gurcan’s 32-terabyte computer platform is to root through the thousands of medical journals, articles and papers regarding osteoarthritis, searching for similarities.

“We are harnessing the power of computers to analyze these papers
and look for certain key phrases, and look at it to see if any of these phrases are appearing a lot to indicate a relationship,” Gurcan said.

If his research is successful with osteoarthritis, he hopes to be able to translate the idea of a large computer framework to other diseases.

“What we are going to introduce is more quantification into medicine, which will enable us to measure things in a more accurate way,” Gurcan said. “When you can measure things, you can improve
things.”

Gurcan received $1.2 million from the NIH for his two-year project.