:: Interview Video

:: Research & Innovation

Related Links -

:: What's Going on at USF?
:: News at USF

:: USF Cancer Biology

:: Technology Corridor

:: USF Research Annual
:: Report (PDF)

* * *

Medicine and Oranges

What do research on citrus processing, better delivery systems for cancer-fighting drugs and underwater sensing systems have in common? Chemical Engineering Professor Richard Gilbert.

In a study funded by the Florida Department of Citrus, Gilbert and fellow engineering faculty members Tapas Das and William Miller of the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering solved a tricky problem facing the citrus industry.

Citrus processors pay growers different prices based on the sugar content of their oranges, Gilbert said. But different sampling methods used by different processing plants mean a grower can take a load of oranges to one plant and get a low price for the produce and take the same load to a different citrus processing facility and get a higher price for it.

‘They were using five different methods to sample sugar content and everyone was unhappy,’ Gilbert said.

The state’s citrus department wanted one standardized method of sampling the content of oranges. Gilbert, Das, Miller and graduate student Eric Roe devised a system of sampling and then sorting oranges according to their sweetness content. Their sampling system has been adopted by the state Legislature, and by law must be used by the state’s citrus processors by 2005.

Going from oranges to medicine might seem like a big leap, but Gilbert’s research also applies to the field of drug delivery systems. College of Medicine professors Dr. Richard Heller and Dr. Mark Jaroszeski were studying ways of directly inserting drugs into cells to combat several types of medical conditions, especially cancer.

Heller and Jaroszeski wanted to see if a well-known anti-cancer drug called bleomycin could be used to treat solid tumors. Bleomycin has been used in cancer treatment for more than 20 years, primarily as one of three drugs used to treat skin cancers. However, bleomycin has been shown to have significant side effects (such as stopping the blood cell production inside bone marrow, which often leads to anemia), and was proving to be less than ideal for treating more solid tumors.

Heller and Jaroszeski found that cancer cells in the lab did respond to bleomycin, but that the medicine was not having the same effect on actual patients. This led them to believe that bleomycin was being stopped by cell membranes found in tumor cells.

The two physicians asked Gilbert to help develop a method of inserting the bleomycin into cells without destroying the cell walls. The three researchers developed a method of using ‘needle electrodes’ to create openings in cancer cells that allows for introduction of drugs (and altered genes, in the case of gene-replacement therapies). The needle electrodes send an electric pulse into the cell wall that results in a very small opening, allowing the chemical or genetic material to enter the cell without
destroying it.

Gilbert said the patented procedure has shown great promise. The potential for this drug-and-gene delivery method caught the eye of Genetronics Biomedical Ltd. Genetronics and the USF researchers jointly developed the needle electrode method, and the university agreed in September 2000 to license its rights to certain patents to Genetronics. Additional testing of the drug- delivery technique is currently under way.

Gilbert is also working with Kent Fanning, a professor in the USF College of Marine Science, on a specialized sensing system for use on an autonomous underwater vehicle.

- story by Dave Liller

* * *