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The National Institutes of Health has awarded Georgia Tech, Emory University and the Medical College of Georgia a grant to create the Nanomedicine Center for Nucleoprotein Machines to focus on DNA damage repair. With up to $10 million in funding, the center will be Tech and Emory's third NIH-funded nanomedicine/nanotechnology center in less than two years.
Gang Bao, a distinguished professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, will serve as director of the center. William Dynan, associate director of the Medical College of Georgia's Institute of Molecular Medicine and Genetics and a Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar in molecular biology, will serve as the associate director.
The center will receive between $6 million and $10 million from the NIH over the next five years and almost $3 million from the Georgia Research Alliance.
"Georgia Tech is leveraging our strengths in nanotechnology and biomedical engineering to lead the way in the emerging field of nanomedicine, which has tremendous potential to make the practice of medicine more preventive and less invasive. This is the third nanomedicine/nanotechnology center that the NIH has awarded to Georgia Tech and Emory University, and we are very pleased to have the Medical College of Georgia join us as a partner in this one. Together we are helping Georgia to emerge as a top state for nanomedicine," said President Wayne Clough.
The center will initially focus on understanding how the body repairs damage to DNA, a molecule that encodes genetic information in each cell — a problem that lies at the heart of many diseases and illnesses. As cells replicate, mistakes are created in the DNA that, if not repaired, cause defects that lead to illness. DNA breakage can also occur from ionizing radiation, which is found in the environment, cosmic rays, radon gas and even the soil, as well as in the human body, primarily from potassium and carbon.
Learning how protein complexes repair DNA damage could be the key to understanding structure-function relationships in the cell nucleus' protein machines, called nucleoprotein machines, that synthesize, modify and repair DNA and RNA. This could someday be used to reverse genetic defects, cure disease or delay aging.
"We need to understand the basic engineering design principles underlying how cells repair DNA damage with high precision and apply this knowledge to the development of novel therapeutic strategies for a wide range of diseases, including cancer" said Bao. "The probes, tools and methodologies developed in our NDC will be applicable to a wide range of biological and disease studies."
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