HBRI-II award funds creation of biorepository to advance medical research

MSU College of Engineering faculty are part of a cross-campus, multidisciplinary team working to create a biorepository that will serve as a powerful tool for medical researchers. Headed by Nigel Paneth of the Department of Epidemiology, the biorepository project includes researchers from the colleges of Human Medicine, Engineering, Arts and Letters, and Communication Arts and Sciences.

Three sub-teams from the College of Engineering will contribute their expertise.

• Computer Science and Engineering faculty Bill Punch, Sakti Pramanik, Pang-Ning Tan, and Jon Sticklen will apply and extend information processing and data mining methods to track biorepository samples, link related demographic patient data, and link multiple biorepositories, thus enabling large scale medical studies.


• Mechanical Engineering faculty Clark Radcliffe and John Lloyd will develop specialized refrigeration methods to cut biostorage costs and better ensure sample stability and integrity.


• Mechanical Engineering professor Ronjan Mukherjee will focus on applications of robotic retrieval techniques for handling biorepository samples.

The Biorepository Team was recently awarded a seed grant from the MSU Health and Biomedical Research Initiative II program.

(Date Posted: 2006-07-31)