Subra Suresh of MIT brings nanotech know-how to the study of cells and disease.
Yvonne Carts-Powell
Biologists spend much of their time studying the biochemistry of the cell, but not the stiffness or stretchiness of the cell.
MIT materials science professor Subra Suresh is trying to change that. His interdisciplinary group of students and postdocs, in collaboration with biologists, is using tools originally developed for nanotechnology to study the mechanical effects of diseases, such as cancer and malaria, on individual cells.
Subra Suresh
Credit: Donna Coveney/MIT
Biologists have known for years that the physical deformation of cells is part of certain disease processes. Now they can use the tools of nanotechnology to study those changes. “This is a very exciting way to probe systems,” says Michael Sheetz, head of the biological sciences department at Columbia University. Mechanical measurements of cells could be a simpler, more robust method of detecting disease, he adds.
Before he worked on biological problems, Suresh studied synthetic materials on a molecular or atomic scale. About five years ago, he decided to focus his work on cells and disease. He quickly stumbled on the field of malaria research. “There were no physicists or engineers studying it at the time,” he says.
When he presented some of his early work on malaria-infected cells to malaria researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris in 2004, they were excited by the potential of his technology. “I had no difficulty convincing microbiologists that this is something that would be good [research] to do jointly,” says Suresh.
Stretch test
In his lab, people trained in biology, materials science, and engineering have adapted optical tweezers–a tool commonly used by materials scientists to manipulate atoms and molecules with beams of laser light–to study the mechanical properties of living cells.
For example, they used the tweezers to measure the force required to stretch red blood cells infected by the malaria parasite in order to examine how the stiffness of the cells changes during the growth of the parasite.
Last year, the group reported that malaria increases a red blood cell’s stiffness 10-fold, a much higher number than expected. The ability of red blood cells to remain flexible is essential for both proper blood flow and their survival.
The materials science community benefited from this work as well. Existing optical tweezers didn’t apply enough force to the blood cells, so the group developed a new instrument that not only was capable of applying a wider range of forces, but was also automated and could be calibrated. “We wanted to do it correctly from a mechanical background,” says Suresh. For the malaria work, Suresh received a prestigious award at the annual Materials Research Society meeting held in Boston last month.
Bridging communities
Since moving into the biomedical realm, Suresh has been working to narrow the cultural gap between materials scientists like him and biologists. “Initially, when you bring very different communities together, some of the terminology is totally alien,” says Suresh. “It took some time to get over those barriers.”
To overcome those barriers, he created an international organization, Global Enterprise for Micro-Mechanics and Molecular Medicine, to help researchers around the world collaborate on problems at the intersection of engineering, life sciences, technology, medicine, and public health. The one-year-old group put on a training program this past summer and will host a conference next summer in Singapore.
“Subra Suresh is a visionary leader in global collaboration in research and education,” says Jimmy Hsia, director of the nanomechanics and biomechanics of materials program at the National Science Foundation. “His work has created a new set of tools for potential new discoveries in biomedical research.”