Professor Max Lu (Photograph: Don Thompson)

Guest writer: John Cokley has specialised in reporting science, technology and engineering news since 1984 and has written regularly on the subject for Brisbane's Sunday Mail newspaper since 1993. He has contributed articles to Engineers Australia and Engineering World magazines and his writing has been featured in six internationally distributed books. He has reported for the Australian Associated Press wire service and was the only accredited Australian journalist to attend the 15th United States National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in 1999. Mr Cokley is employed by Queensland Newspapers in editorial training and development and teaches Internet news-gathering and production at QUT. Research team: NanoMac: Dr Huai Zhu, Dr Darren Martin, Dr Justin Finnerty, Dr Zhaohui Han, Dr Sabine Giessler, Dr Joe da Costa, Dr Xiusong Zhao, Dr Jorge Beltramini, Dr Abdulhamid Dajan, Dr Zhengping Hao, Tristan Williams, Indriana Kartini, Zhonghua Zhu Fouad, Haghseresht, Mikel Duke, Christine Pienaar, Jason Orthman, Rong-Gang Ding, Tim Woo, Grant Edwards, Kayleen Campbell Professors Campbell project: Professor Julie Campbell, Professor Gordon Campbell, Associate Professor Les Nathanson (Wesley Hospital), Dr Wei-Leng Chue, Amjid Muhommed, Dr Robert MacGinley, Dr Johnny Efendy (UQ students) Funding: Naomac: » 2001 Vice-Chancellor's Strategic Fund, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and EPSA Faculty ($450,000 a year for three years) » ARC, DISR, Queensland Sustainable Energy Innovation Fund and industries ($400,000?$600,000 a year) Professors Campbell project: » NHMRC ($100,000 a year) Email/Web link: http://nanomac.uq.edu.au www.chemistry.uq.edu.au www.anatomy.uq.edu.au/ centres/crvb Faculty of Biological & Chemical Sciences · Faculty of Health Sciences · Faculty of Engineering, Physical Sciences & Architecture

Biodegradable plastic bags, designer "grow-your-own" blood vessels and a whirlwind DNA test are top of the list this year for researchers in the chemical and medical sciences at UQ's St Lucia campus. And it's a success story which could earn industry investors millions if they take the plunge.

In a stark, concrete-walled laboratory of UQ's Department of Chemical Engineering, researcher Dr Stewart McGlashan has been working with plastics and starch.

By trying various mixtures of petroleum-based polyesters and wheat starch, he and his colleagues in the University's Materials Characterisation and Processing Centre, directed by Dr Peter Halley, have been searching for cheaper, better biodegradable plastics for use in packaging industries.

A 100 percent polyester plastic bag feels and smells exactly like a typical supermarket shopping-bag, while a bag made entirely from wheat starch is stiff, brittle and has a soapy consistency.

A bag made from 70 percent polyester and 30 percent wheat starch is scarcely better.

But turn the recipe on its head, add "a little something" and voilà, success in a mixture of 70 per cent wheat starch, almost 30 per cent polyester and a pinch-just 1.5 per cent-of a new synthetic clay developed earlier by other researchers in the Chemical Engineering Building.

The team has now filed a provisional patent on the promising mixture and intend to commercialise the project.

Dr McGlashan and his colleagues are part of a network of researchers co-ordinated by pioneering academic Professor Max Lu, Director of the University's new NanoMaterials Centre (known as the NanoMac).

At 37, the Chinese-born, UQ-trained chemical engineer is young for a professor but one of the oldest on his team of PhDs and students.

In the NanoMac laboratories, other scientists such as Dr Darren Martin and Dr Huai Yong Zhu investigate natural and synthetic clays and experiment with ways of mixing them with existing plastics to improve their industrial properties such as strength, heat-resistance or filtering capacity.

Their work is akin to playing with elemental building blocks and they are eager to learn from the ultimate teacher.

"We're learning the tricks of Nature," said Professor Lu.

"Much of engineering and materials science has been based on a top-down model in which we sculpt large blocks of materials to make ever smaller components. Now we're learning about the bottom-up method which Nature uses, where tiny particles on the nano-scale self-assemble under the right conditions to make near-perfect structures which are very useful to modern society." (A nanometre is one-billionth of a metre.)

It's called "Biomimetics" and follows the latest trend of finding solutions in Nature for space-age technical problems.

Professor Lu and his researchers at NanoMac are turning to bones to learn about strong but exceptionally light structures, and seashells and clays to learn about how molecules and particles assemble themselves into porous layers and act as filters, useful for cleaning-up air and water pollution.

Already four patents have been filed for nanomaterials developed by Professor Lu's team and these are ready for licensing to the chemical and environmental industries.

Professor Lu says applications include catalysis and cost-effective processes for gas-separation and pollution-control.

The same self-assembly processes are being put to work both within the human body and in laboratories by scientists looking for better drugs and diagnostic tools.

For instance, Professors Julie and Gordon Campbell at the UQ Centre for Research in Vascular Biology ? Julie is the Director ? have made a discovery that, while the product of years of research and hard work, is astonishingly simple.

By placing a piece of plastic tubing into the peritoneal cavity of a mammal (the sac containing the intestines, stomach and other organs), they have discovered that special material will grow over it and form what amounts to a living tube of tissue.

The material, which comes from bone-marrow, forms in a similar way as a pearl in an oyster when a grain of sand is placed inside the shell.

This living tube takes about three weeks to grow and when harvested, has all the important properties of a blood vessel, except in reverse.

The external lining of the new tube is equivalent to the internal lining of an artery.

So the Professors Campbell decided to turn the new living tube inside-out "just as you would a sock when taking it off".

When they sewed the new tube in place of an existing section of artery of the same rat or rabbit in which it was grown, it did the job perfectly and even became more like an artery as time progressed.

"We call it the 'grow-your-own' artery," said Professor Julie Campbell.

The new artery's high-bursting strength and its perfect genetic and immune match with the animal make it ideal for coronary artery bypasses and other life-and-death human operations now bugged by rejection, infection and other surgical problems.

Professors Julie and Gordon Campbell hold the patent for this "designer artery" process and hope to start clinical trials in humans sometime in 2002.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in the United States are keen to co-operate in the research.

Associate Professor Matt Trau, Director of the University's Nanotechnology and Biomaterials Centre, has found other applications for nanostructured materials.

For the past four years Dr Trau and up to 11 other researchers have devoted their efforts to creating new materials to replace damaged bones in humans, developing revolutionary DNA-matching processes, and inventing tiny synthesised devices which can be implanted into patients to take the place of diseased or damaged organs such as the liver.

Each facet of their work is enthralling.

Artificial bone, assembled as if from nothing, is set to replace the steel and plastic implants used today to fix broken or decayed joints in injured or ageing patients.

Clusters of cells, coated in a membrane currently being developed in their laboratories, could make liver transplants obsolete and bring in a new era of organ replacement.

But the quantum leap in this centre-the discovery which turns reality on its head-is a patented DNA-matching technique, which looks like replacing sophisticated DNA microchips valued at more than $1000 each, with tiny vials of relatively simple chemicals valued at $1 a bottle.

Following the modern motto, it's truly "faster, better, cheaper" and could replace dozens of expensive and cumbersome medical tests with the possibility of a single, cheap and rapid test for all kinds of DNA problems and diseases such as cancer.

Researchers such as Professor Lu, the Professors Campbell, Dr Trau and their teams are UQ's newest intellectual exporters, able to discover, patent and licence innovative techniques and attract both much-needed revenue and vital research talent to Australia for the 21st Century.

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