IBNAM/Baxter Early Career Award Recipients
Baxter Healthcare Corporation
and Northwestern University Announce Nanoscience Collaboration
Deerfield, Ill. June 18, 2002 - Baxter Healthcare
Corporation and Northwestern University’s Institute for Bioengineering
and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine (IBNAM) today announced an
agreement to collaborate on early discovery projects in nanoscience.
Nanoscience is defined as the science of making, manipulating and
organizing objects 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of a
human hair. This field offers great promise for technological breakthroughs
in medicine, particularly in the way that therapies are targeted
and administered for the treatment of specific diseases.
As part of the agreement, Baxter will commit up to $450,000 per
year over the next five years to fund up to three post-doctoral
researchers and up to four annual research projects focused on sub-microscopic
applications with the potential for great impact on medicine. Northwestern
will own all intellectual property generated by the research projects,
and Baxter will receive a right of first refusal to exclusively
license technologies developed in projects sponsored by Baxter.
“Nanoscience and nanotechnologies hold incredible promise
for medicine,” explained Norbert Riedel, Baxter’s chief
scientific officer. “This is an extension of our own work
in the area of drug delivery and the design of highly sophisticated
devices to improve patient therapies and quality of life. We look
forward to working with our partner Northwestern University and
its Institute for Bioengineering and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine
to develop new and more effective critical therapies for people
with life-threatening conditions.”
“The collaboration between Baxter and IBNAM holds incredible
possibilities,” said Samuel I. Stupp, the Institute’s
director and the Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science,
Chemistry, and Medicine at Northwestern University. “It is
clear that nanoscience has the potential to profoundly enhance human
health and revolutionize the way medicine is practiced. The vision
in creating IBNAM is to make Northwestern a key player in this scientific
and clinical transformation and we are proud to have Baxter as a
partner in this endeavor.”
Northwestern University created the Institute for Bioengineering
and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine in order to become a leader
in bioengineering and nanoscience by combining the expertise of
three Northwestern schools -- the Medical School, the McCormick
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Weinberg College
of Arts and Sciences
The Institute’s goal is to promote interdisciplinary research
and education in biomedical science and engineering that will ultimately
contribute to the development of highly advanced (and, in some cases,
currently unknown) procedures in human medicine. This will be pursued
by fostering discoveries in frontier science and engineering that
can be applied to advanced medicine, particularly phenomena involving
nanoscale.
Through its drug delivery business, Baxter partners with global
pharmaceutical companies to develop, manufacture and cooperatively
market intravenous drugs in Baxter delivery systems. One area of
expertise is in helping drug companies solve solubility issues when
attempting to deliver drugs intravenously.
Baxter Healthcare Corporation is the principal domestic operating
subsidiary of Baxter International Inc. (NYSE: BAX), a global health
care company that, through its subsidiaries, provides critical therapies
for people with life-threatening conditions. Baxter's bioscience,
medication delivery and renal products and services are used to
treat patients with some of the most challenging medical conditions,
including cancer, hemophilia, immune deficiencies, infectious diseases,
kidney disease and trauma.
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