The Higher Education Equipment Trust Fund, or HEETF, awards state funds each year to colleges and universities for technology and teaching equipment. Established in 1986 by the Virginia General Assembly, HEETF helps purchase equipment for instruction and research.

Virginia Commonwealth University’s health sciences schools have each benefited enormously throughout the years from HEETF funding. In many cases, HEETF equipment has augmented laboratories and research projects so significantly that additional grants from other sources have been awarded to sustain existing studies or to begin new ones. In this way, HEETF funds are considered vital to the scientific and academic process.

“HEETF supports significant advances in the health sciences, ultimately providing faculty and students access to cutting-edge technology and information. It continually proves an invaluable resource to VCU,” says Sheldon M. Retchin, M.D., MSPH, VCU vice president for health sciences and CEO of the VCU Health System.

Highlighted here are seven HEETF success stories from the schools of Allied Health Professions, Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy and the Massey Cancer Center. Each underscores how these funds help further research, broaden the educational experience of VCU students and benefit the health care community at large.

For structural biologists like VCU Massey Cancer Center’s William Barton, Ph.D., anything that speeds the process of growing proteins is a good thing. That’s because in order to do what they do, these researchers need vast amounts of identical molecules to study.

Though highly simplified, this explanation also begins to clarify why Massey researchers are grateful for the recent HEETF-funded bioreactor for mammalian cells. For Barton’s lab specifically, the $108,000 piece of equipment is expediting research into how mammalian proteins interact, which is extremely valuable for cancer and genetic disease research.

“Understanding the characteristics of proteins involved in tumor growth, for example, can help in the overall research efforts toward better treatments and, eventually, cures,” says Barton, an assistant professor in VCU’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

He explains that his lab is partial to studying mammalian cells instead of those from lower-level organisms. But because such material is both expensive and more complicated in general to harvest, it’s a rarer study.

This is where the bioreactor has proved invaluable, he says, estimating that his lab is spending 75 percent less time to grow and harvest mammalian cells.

Additionally, by creating the “best possible environment to grow” cells, the instrument has cut operating costs in half, Barton suggests.

“Happier, faster-growing cells require less media to grow and can be grown for longer periods of time,” he explains. “Ultimately, the harvest renders more proteins.”

In the end, higher yield means that investigators in Barton’s lab and throughout Massey can spend more time analyzing and recording data and take less time creating the material.

All of this has numerous positive implications across the research spectrum, from pharmaceuticals to treatment options, says Barton.

In explaining his own research and the connection between proteins and cancer, for example, Barton says that tumors regularly take over (or co-opt) blood vessels to sustain themselves and grow.

“Because proteins are a significant factor in the maintenance of the human vascular system, we are studying them at this molecular level, looking for the signaling events of what turns them off and, tandemly, what turns them on to begin with,” he says.

In addition to direct cancer research, this information is helpful to the study of angiogenesis — the process of growing new blood vessels from existing vessels — and to geneticists looking for ways to impede certain genetic conditions fueled by blood vessels.

For pharmaceutical research, the information garnered from Barton’s lab is helpful because proteins are considered viable drug targets, or focal points.

But the research facilitated by the bioreactor has equally impressive in-house advantages for VCU and its students.

“The reactor is essential for effective use of mammalian protein study,” Barton says. “For students, there is a significant value because it enables them to interact with research and materials and train on something they’d likely use only in the industrial setting.”

From standard light microscopes to advanced laser-based and electron microscopes, the imaging equipment inside VCU’s Microscopy Facility in the School of Medicine’s anatomy and neurobiology department forms an essential core for modern biomedical research.

Additionally, the facility is an outstanding resource for graduate and postgraduate training.

“This facility provides access to high-end instruments not typically available in most labs,” says associate professor Scott Henderson, Ph.D., who directs the facility. “When graduate students and postdoctoral fellows leave VCU to pursue future studies, they’re leaving with a level of training in imaging that is good for VCU’s reputation.”

Henderson is referring to the gamut of imaging equipment inside the Microscopy Facility. He is especially proud of two of the latest acquisitions provided from HEETF funds. A multi-photon (2-photon) laser-scanning microscope and its associated physiological recording equipment (in place since early 2007) are providing new insights for investigators at VCU.

The multi-photon laser-scanning microscope allows investigators to study samples three dimensionally by generating high-resolution optical slices through cells and tissues. Its standout feature, however, is its ability to delay phototoxicity, an inevitable nemesis for investigators dealing with live-cell and live-tissue imaging. Occurring when tissue is exposed to short wavelength light, phototoxicity results in cell damage and, ultimately, death.

“Investigators now have the ability to image living tissue and thicker slices of tissues over prolonged periods of time when that’s more advantageous,” says Henderson.

This is of particular consequence since activity of the Microscopy Facility includes support of research related to the central nervous system, specifically brain injury, central nervous system development, neurophysiology, neuroplasticity and neurodegenerative diseases. For many of these studies, it is essential that the tissue be maintained in a living state.

“Among other things, we’re studying the dynamics of molecules, looking at how molecules interact and their spatial distribution over time,” says Henderson. Before the 2-photon microscope, live-tissue studies were often limited to short durations, due, in part, to the phototoxic effects of repeated imaging. For studies over prolonged periods of time, investigators would often be obliged to image multiple static samples that had been chemically fixed at various intervals of time, he explains.

Combine 2-photon imaging with the associated physiological recording equipment, and the result is a high-performance system that gives investigators a precisely defined view of the material they are studying. The new equipment permits tandem 2-photon imaging and physiological recording of living tissues at greater depths over substantially longer periods of time.

Since 2004, HEETF has provided an estimated $700,000 worth of equipment. This equipment has supported research over the biomedical sciences’ spectrum. The equipment is also providing support for several research grant applications and renewals.

This speaks to one of Henderson’s primary messages. In addition to the advantage such advanced equipment offers in a shared facility, it also bolsters the grants process.

“The productive use of this equipment is a consideration before new high-end equipment is funded,” Henderson says, explaining that funding agencies, eager to know they will be supporting an already successful facility, are impressed when available resources can be used by many.

In 2006, more than 200 investigators representing 76 labs from 23 departments utilized the facility.

“We have a good track record as a shared resource,” says Henderson about the Microscopy Facility, adding that a number of investigators have successfully renewed competitive grants due, at least in part, to the availability of the equipment here.

“All of this equipment is helping to fine-tune research in neurosciences,” he says. “The technology is also facilitating other areas of medical research across multiple departments, including cancer research, development biology and human genetics.”

Assistant professor Yan Zhang, Ph.D., approaches his lab in the same way his department approaches the study of medicinal chemistry: by embracing the multiple disciplines that compose this science and combining context with rigor.

For Zhang, that includes the way he equips and staffs the organic chemistry lab and the radiochemistry lab, both of which fall within the Department of Medicinal Chemistry in the VCU School of Pharmacy.

Trained originally as an organic chemist, Zhang, whose doctorate is in medicinal chemistry, was first tasked upon his 2004 arrival to VCU with setting up the research facilities that would support his students and postdoctoral fellows in their pursuit of drug design and development.

“Basic research depends on strong labs,” says Zhang, who compares the study of medicinal chemistry with an iceberg. “Every drug is at the top of an immense pyramid. It is the pinnacle of research and development.”

In fact, each drug on the market represents between $800 million and $1 billion in research and development. Additionally, for each marketed drug, between one and two thousand compounds must be studied and synthesized, Zhang says.

That’s the calling of the medicinal chemist — to spend hours upon hours inside labs synthesizing and analyzing the organic compounds that may one day become a drug.

“Synthesis, characterization, efficacy and toxicity are some of the primary aspects we’re focusing on,” Zhang says.

If researchers depend on strong labs, as Zhang says, then the equipment inside those labs must be top-notch.

That’s where HEETF funding stepped in. Since 2004, Zhang has used HEETF resources to incrementally build up what he believes is a “state-of-the-art” laboratory facility.

“All under one roof, we have a lab that synthesizes drug candidates, conducts primary screening and designs new drugs,” he says.

Because of the nature of the research, the full lab is split into two portions, the organic chemistry lab and the radiochemistry lab. HEETF funds have provided more than $70,000 for equipment, including such gems as an HPLC (high pressure/performance liquid chromatography), a minus 80 degrees lab freezer, a number of rotation vaporization (“rotavapor”) simulators, two refrigerated cooling systems, a couple of ultraviolet detectors, a water purification system, a water bath and a bath shaker, and several vacuum pumps.

The equipment supports several projects, including research for an anti-HIV drug. This research, in particular, has garnered swift recognition. After submitting findings in March 2007, the American Chemical Society’s journal, Organic Letters, published Zhang’s team’s research in April.

“Without HEETF, we couldn’t publish results in the top journals,” Zhang says, explaining that publishing is a benchmark for other research grants his group has received, such as those from the National Institutes of Health.

As guidelines for additional funding go, the lab is also meeting another important criterion — the dividend it yields as a shared resource.

Indeed, the medicinal chemistry lab, with its HEETF equipment, is becoming an interdepartmental treasure, providing investigators in other VCU schools and departments the ability to join forces.

“Since we can conduct both chemical synthesis and primary screening, it is much easier to for us set up extensive and intensive collaboration across the campus, allowing for a consortium of research,” Zhang says.

To that point, Zhang and his team are working with faculty members in the Department of Pathology and the Department Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in VCU’s School of Medicine to study the anti-cancer activity of a library of novel compounds. They are also collaborating with colleagues in the VCU Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology to study another series of compounds with the potential ability to fight drug abuse.

Beyond the myriad practical applications for research and development, the medicinal chemistry lab offers graduate and undergraduate students extensive hands-on training, which tests their research mettle and hones their confidence, Zhang says.

“We’re providing firsthand experience with how book knowledge can differ from that of the real research world,” he says. “Labs like ours provide application and intellectual maturity.”

A laboratory process that used to take investigators in the VCU School of Dentistry’s Philips Institute of Oral and Craniofacial Molecular Biology two or three weeks is now complete in 24 hours.

Thanks to an HEETF-funded PCR system for real-time analysis of gene expression, researchers are fast-forwarding their study of disease within the oral cavity, head and neck. Equally important as speed is the unit’s precision, says Andrew Yeudall, BDS, Ph.D., interim director of the Philips Institute.

When the two aspects are combined, the level of quality research is significantly elevated, yielding a collection of more accurate findings with potential results for health care.

“This opens a lot of doors to our students,” says Yeudall. “It exposes them to cutting-edge technology that isn’t often available to them at this level and in this environment.”

Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, is a laboratory technique that exponentially amplifies a portion or fragment of DNA. The $50,000 PCR system has been in place since late 2005 and has allowed investigators to study samples at an “almost single-cell level,” says Yeudall. This tight focus is especially effective when tracking potential malignancies, and early detection can literally mean the difference between life and death, he says.

To explain how the unit works, Yeudall first talks about the nature of his team’s work. Investigators here are studying head and neck squamous cell carcinoma — malignant tumors of the lip, mouth, nasal cavity, salivary glands, sinuses, throat and larynx. In addition to monitoring diseased tissue, the team is interested in predictive markers and strategies for blocking the spread of head and neck squamous cell carcinomas.

Known as HNSCC, head and neck cancer is one of the most prevalent categories of malignancy in the U.S. and can cause significant pain and disfigurement in addition to difficulties with speech, breathing and swallowing. The National Cancer Institute estimates that more than $3 billion is spent each year in the U.S. to treat head and neck cancers. Because most of these cancers are highly curable if caught early, diagnostic research is critical, making anything that both expedites and hones research in this field an indispensable resource.

Yeudall explains that in order to quantify gene expression at such infinitesimal levels from a small number of cells, it’s necessary to amplify the starting material. PCR accomplishes this portion of the process, but it’s first necessary to reverse transcribe RNA into a DNA copy. The reverse transcription step can be combined with the PCR step, speeding up the procedure. This PCR technology measures DNA amplification in real time and allows investigators to bypass much of the optimization associated with semi-quantitative PCR methodology.

Measuring gene expression used to take up to three weeks and required the use of radioactive probes but with the efficiency of the unit, it’s now closer to a one-day process, Yeudall says.

Additionally, by virtue of the way the unit operates, it can screen a number of samples quickly and use much smaller amounts of the starting samples. This also means that researchers can get more information from tissues, an especially helpful prospect when tissue samples are limited, adds Yeudall.

All of this translates to several medically exciting offshoots, including the potential for earlier detection and enhanced treatment options.

Related to treatments, Yeudall sees the potential to utilize the instrument to help better indicate how a tumor might progress so that treatment could be specifically tailored for the expected outcome.

“In that way, it’s very exciting and should help us combat the disease more effectively,” Yeudall says.

If valid research depends on removing as many variables as possible, investigators in the VCU School of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology are producing even more reliable results these days.

That’s because a new piece of equipment, the small animal IVIS Imaging System, allows them to monitor gene evolution hourly or daily. Housed in the lab of Pin-Lan Li, M.D., Ph.D., the IVIS Imaging System is revealing the real-time expression of exogenous genes transfected into rat kidneys using luciferase as a reporter gene.

Li’s group is evaluating the changes and functions of genes that have been introduced into rat kidneys using a light-producing enzyme to make the alterations show up in animal organs or cells. The group is studying rat kidney genes for a variety of complex scenarios, in particular, their role in the development of high blood pressure and end-stage kidney disease, and the IVIS Imaging System is making it more precise, more accurate and more efficient.

This translates to more reliable data that’s also used extensively in research areas such as cancer, diabetes, drug metabolism, heart disease and stroke.

The IVIS Imaging System 200 Series is a 2007 HEETF-funded instrument and, as department Chair Billy Martin, Ph.D., says, helps keep VCU on the cutting edge.

“Technology is moving so quickly, to stay ahead is challenging but critical to attracting faculty, students and for future grants,” Martin says. “HEETF plays an enormously important role in that endeavor.”

Because strong data bolsters additional grants, both Martin and Li are optimistic that the preliminary research from the new instrument will aid in future grant proposals. After just five months of using the IVIS Imaging System, the department was awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“That came about partially as a direct result of this equipment,” says Li. “We have every reason to expect more [funding] from the research we are seeing here.”

In explaining how the lab is using the imaging system, one of Li’s primary investigators, assistant professor Ningjun Li, M.D., describes why the new IVIS-inspired process is so helpful.

In essence, because it is able to evaluate an organism in vivo (literally, “in life” or a living organism), the IVIS Imaging System can record cellular levels and genetic activity seamlessly. Researchers can record gene expression and function at different time points in the same animals. Previously, the same process required a number of interruptions as well as a number of animals, which produced unavoidable variations in data.

Though other technology can assess changes in living tissue, their instruments are traditionally space- (and budget-) invasive and complex. Compared with magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography machines, which can cost more than $1 million, the IVIS Imaging System’s $300,000 is a bargain. Additionally, because the system gauges changes on the molecular level without the use of hazardous materials, its resulting research is potentially more advantageous and safe.

“When we can detect molecular activity, we are seeing changes much earlier,” explains Ningjun Li. “With this piece of equipment, we can follow the disease from its onset.”

Because it can monitor living organisms, the IVIS Imaging System is more cost- and time-efficient as well, he adds. The old method’s preparation for gene detections, alone, might take two or three days, while this one takes about 20 minutes.

Martin points out a final advantage of an instrument with such sensitivity and exactness: “It is also a very important verification of what Dr. Li’s group has been doing.”

Pin-Lan Li’s investigators have, in fact, received numerous professional accolades for their ongoing research projects. In January 2007, Ningjun Li’s research was published in Hypertension, a highly prestigious scientific journal of the American Heart Association, one of many publications that recognized their innovation.

“With better equipment we see stronger data,” says Martin. “And that helps with everything from retaining and attracting the best faculty and students to securing funds for more research. It’s very important.”

Thanks to HEETF funds, students in both the School of Allied Health Professions’ Department of Nurse Anesthesia and the School of Nursing are getting a level of instruction that exceeds the experience of previous generations.

For nurse anesthesia students, the classroom becomes as close to a firsthand experience with patients as possible because of a $10,000 software upgrade to the patient simulation lab.

“The fidelity is such that students are able to suspend their disbelief to the extent that the experience makes quite an emotional impact,” says Suzanne Wright, CRNA, assistant professor and director of the department’s Center for Research in Human Simulation, which is where the simulation lab exists.

Established in 1998, the center has used HEETF funds over the years to help build the graduate curriculum resources. This most recent addition allows instructors even more opportunities to expose students to “rare but critical anesthesia-related events, those which have potentially devastating consequences,” says Wright.

“As anesthesia has become safer today than at any time in history, students have limited opportunities to experience these uncommon, but life-threatening events while in regular clinical rotations throughout the community,” she adds. “Simulation has provided a way for us to educate student clinicians to be better crisis managers.”

Cecil B. Drain, Ph.D., FAAN, FASAHP, dean of the School of Allied Health Professions, agrees. “This state-of-the-art human simulation technology places VCU’s Department of Nurse Anesthesia on the cutting edge of patient-safety research and training,” he says. U.S. News & World Report has ranked VCU’s Department of Nurse Anesthesia the No. 1 nurse anesthesia program in the country.

Overall, the lab engages students with human patient simulators wired to react immediately to the type of care the students are providing. When all is well, the beeps are smooth and the “patient” breathes normally. In the face of a crisis, however, students must think and act fast or their “patient” suffers the consequences.

The 2007 upgrade also allows instructors, who sit at the computer in the control room behind a one-way mirror, to create problems for the practicing student. Additionally, the entire event can be recorded and used in the classroom in a subsequent debriefing session.

As an innovative instructional tool, the improved simulation technology enables educators to maximize resources, meet educational objectives and make significant strides in improving patient safety.

“We believe that competence enhances confidence,” says Wright. “Without the level of realism afforded by the upgrade, the students would not experience these rare events in the same way. The realistic environment is a critical component.”

Nurse anesthesia department Chair Michael D. Fallacaro, D.N.S., CRNA, agrees with Wright’s assessment on the realism, adding that application is imperative to strong instruction.

“We’re moving away from traditional methods of instruction to applied instruction. As opposed to just lecturing, we can model a real-world experience in a high-fidelity setting,” Fallacaro says. “If they can’t apply the knowledge, what good is it?”

All of this rings true to assistant professor Sandra Voll, M.S., R.N., CNM, WHNP, FNP, in the School of Nursing’s Clinical Learning Center. “Health care is changing and students need more confidence when they enter,” says Voll, who directs nursing’s learning center. “Simulation is an extremely important aspect of education now.”

Most recently, the center has used HEETF funds to purchase several items that are improving the classroom experience and bringing VCU’s nursing faculty and students “into the 21st century,” says Voll.

New technology includes videoconferencing equipment, a progressive scanner and a system that makes the overhead projector of old look like the classroom equivalent of rubbing two sticks together to get fire. In total, HEETF funded more than $30,000 worth of equipment.

“It’s really changing the style of teaching,” Voll says. “We’re moving to a learner-centered environment, able to move through lecture materials more efficiently so that we can open the classroom up to more interaction.”

For example, the Crestron Touchpanel system, which is part of the lecture podium, allows the presenter to control everything from microphones and DVD player to the projector and lighting. This at-your-fingertips option greatly streamlines a materials-based lecture, explain Voll and Sue McGinnis, director of information technology for the nursing school.

As lecturers move through their materials, they’re able to engage students more with elements like the HEETF-funded graphic tablets, or Smart Tabs, as they’re known. Displaying the optic nerve on screen, McGinnis demonstrates how a presenter can use a stylus as a pen to “draw” or define on the tablet as if it were a notebook. Students sitting in the classroom can view in high definition exactly what the instructor is talking about.

“Instead of keeping their heads down as they take notes or try to reproduce a diagram, students can follow along and really interact,” McGinnis says.

Like their colleagues in the School of Allied Health Professions, the nursing school’s Clinical Learning Center also can digitally record students in action while a separate class watches and critiques. In addition to being efficient, this technique creates a team atmosphere, an important tone to transfer to the hospital environment when they graduate, says Voll.

“Overall, all of this equipment is improving the way we teach and the way our students learn,” she says. “That all results in stronger caregivers.”

In the VCU School of Nursing, quality of life is getting a quantitative nod from research, and along the way some of life’s most vulnerable members are reaping substantial benefits.

Inside both the Department of Maternal Child Health and the Center for Biobehavioral Clinical Research, investigators have access to some of the most innovative equipment available. That’s due in large part to HEETF funding, which has helped pay for items such as an electrical signal conditioning unit, new critical care pulse oximeters, a multiplex bead array system and a scintillation counter.

Though the names might not roll off the tongue, the benefits to research and the people it ultimately helps are invaluable.

A cancer patient might not be able to explain how the Bio-Plex system measures numerous cytokines at once, allowing investigators to more quickly study how these small proteins (which serve as signaling and regulating molecules for cells inside the immune system) are affecting his own immune system. But when he recovers more quickly from a cold or has fewer side effects from chemotherapy, it’s earned his favor.

“If we can reduce the psychological and emotional stress, we may be able to boost the immune system,” says professor Nancy McCain, R.N., DSN, FAAN, director of the Center for Biobehavioral Clinical Research. “For those who have chronic or critical diseases, even small improvements can add significant quality to life.”

McCain points to the Bio-Plex system as a representative HEETF-funded instrument because it’s proving advantageous in so many ways. In addition to expediting and sharpening research, it’s one of several HEETF pieces that combine for a state-of-the-art core lab accessible to other researchers as common-use equipment.

“Two or three years ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed of this lab,” says McCain, adding that with each piece of equipment, VCU’s School of Nursing offers students better opportunities and attracts strong faculty. “All of that, in turn, strengthens our reputation and reinforces the grants process.”

Much like the cancer patient, the mother of a preterm infant who’s finally enjoying motherhood instead of agonizing that her child isn’t gaining weight, knows the importance of the electrical signal conditioning unit without understanding even what it is, much less how it works.

Professor Rita Pickler, R.N., Ph.D., PNP, chair of the maternal child health department, has been researching feeding behaviors in preterm infants since the early 1990s. Currently the principal investigator on a five-year, $2.2 million National Institutes of Health grant studying “feeding readiness” in preterms, Pickler underscores the importance of HEETF equipment in the ongoing research.

“The equipment has allowed us to build on our research over the years,” she says, adding that investigators are still getting strong information from equipment that’s been in use since early studies. “We have equipment that’s provided data from thousands of feedings, now. If we can get more use out of it, we do.”

This reuse aspect is often cited in reviews and applications for additional funding and renewals, she says.

The electrical signal conditioning unit, for example, helps capture data electronically that was once hand-counted and recorded, Pickler says, explaining that though full-term newborns are able to coordinate the suck-swallow-breathe combination that’s necessary to successfully feed, preterms often have difficulty. Tools like the electrical signal conditioning unit and the coordinating plethysmograph allow investigators to study with more efficiency and precision how the skill matures.

“The only language that’s accessible to us is their behavior, which includes their physiologic responses,” she says. “The better we can gauge those, the more accurately we can measure, the better we understand what they’re telling us.