As part of the Center for Collaborative Research, NSU will open the Cell Therapy Institute for cell-based biomedical research in spring 2016, in collaboration with Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, one of the world’s leading medical universities that has conducted over 40 percent of academic medical research in Sweden.
Research programs at the new institute will focus on cancer, cardiovascular disease and disorders known to cause blindness. To help support the programs, the institute will offer high quality resources in the areas of genomics, cell therapies and flow cytometry.
Thomas Temple, senior vice president for translational research and economic development and an orthopedic surgeon, is one of the new researchers at CTI. He will conduct research on cancer stem cells and bone regeneration alongside Director of the Cell Therapy Institute Richard Jove, who was previously the director of molecular oncology at the Moffitt Comprehensive Cancer Center and Research Institute.
Temple said that the new group of researchers has a “global flavor” and that many of the primary researchers are from the Karolinska Institutet.
“It’s all part of NSU President George Hanbury’s vision to create a truly transformative research enterprise at NSU and leading scientific discovery with clinical enterprise — in other words, getting ideas from the bench to the bedside in rapid order,” he said.
Aside from the research projects already announced, Temple said the institute is also in the process of forming groups of computational biologists, recruiting more researchers from Europe, working with Professor Stephen O’Brien from the Department of Biological Sciences to set up a genomics group and collaborating with the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Center to discover drugs that stem from sea life.
“It’s really taken off in a major way,” Temple said. “Everything is coming together at once. The educational piece is linking to the research piece, which will be linked to the new hospital. It will all be seamless — all these new discoveries will make their way into the hospital and be available to the patients who need them.”
Temple said that students must be involved in research at the institute and that he believes the opportunity will attract a lot of students who have a profound interest in research and have a scientific background.
“It’s all about education and training the scientists for tomorrow. We really want students to be involved in the laboratory enterprise and in educational processes,” he said. “Students are the future of scientific endeavor, and if they don’t engage, then we’re going to have a problem in society. This is really going to raise the bar as far as sophistication, greater jobs, a sense of purpose and a sense of pride in the community.”
The Center for Collaborative Research is a 215,000-square-foot facility next to the Health Professions Division. It will include wet labs for research, a General Clinical Research Center, the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine, Rumbaugh-Goodwin Institute for Cancer Research, the Emil Buehler Research Center for Engineering, Science and Mathematics and a private incubator for information security businesses.
For more information on the NSU Cell Therapy Institute, visit nova.edu/research/cell-therapy/index.html. For more information on the Karolinska Institutet, visit ki.se/en/startpage.
PHOTO CREDIT: PHOTO PRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM J. KATZMAN
