College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

On and in demand

NSF awards chemistry's Victor Lin an Early Career Award to develop controlled release drug delivery applications.
He hasn't even perfected the technology yet, but two East Coast companies are already looking at Victor Lin's future endeavors.

In addition, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has agreed to help fund his method of a controlled release drug delivery system.

That support is the prestigious NSF Early CAREER Award, which Lin, an assistant professor of chemistry, recently received as a five-year, $470,000 grant effective Feb. 1, 2003.

In his project, "Synthesis of Multi-Functional Mesoporous Silica Materials for Studying Intercellular Interaction and Controlled Release Drug Delivery," Lin will design mesoporous materials that are non-toxic, small in particle size, and can serve as non-invasive biosensors. Those materials can also be controlled release drug delivery carriers, which can interact with various cell types either in vitro or in vivo to study many important intercellular communications processes.

These include stem cell differentiation, neuron-glia interaction, cancer cell angiogenesis, and inflammatory immune response.

"Our long-term research goal is to develop a general method for producing multi-functionalized mesoporous materials with well-defined pore and particle morphology," Lin writes.

He is collaborating with Srdija Jeftinija in the College of Veterinary Medicine on this project.

This would ultimately allow drugs to be delivered to specific areas of the human body that need to be medicated.

"We think that this method would only kill the bad cells, such as cancer cells," Lin said, "and actually deliver the drugs when and where we want to through a stimuli-triggered release."

In order to do this, Lin, who has been a member of the Iowa State chemistry faculty since 1999, is proposing that his research group synthesize biocompatible, multi-functionalized nanoporous silica materials with well-defined particle morphology and study selective molecular recognition and controlled release events of drugs and neurochemicals inside the engineered mesopores.

"If I can ultimately build this system and find a way to inject and release the chemicals in the right amount, it will have some impact on the biomedical world," he said.

In addition to the scientific aspects of the project, all NSF Early CAREER awards require an educational component as well.

"As a new faculty member in the Department of Chemistry, I'm particularly interested in developing curricula and teaching methods that could integrate various state-of-the-art research activities into the courses to educate students with interdisciplinary knowledge and training," Lin says.

He plans on using such interactive teaching techniques as chemistry teaching modules and cooperative learning in all levels of courses he teaches at Iowa State. Lin will also develop and incorporate module topics that contain subjects and/or concepts from nanotechnology, materials and biology into traditional undergraduate chemistry courses.

"I would like to introduce my research activities into an interdepartmental course ('Advanced Neuroscience Techniques')," Lin said.

That course is designed for students majoring in neuroscience, chemistry, biomedical science and biomaterials.