The National ESCA and Surface Analysis Center for Biomedical Problems (NESAC/BIO) has received an additional five years of funding from the National Institutes of Health. The new grant award now extends NESAC/BIO's NIH funding through November 2019. The state-of-the-art instrumentation and research facility is located in the Molecular Engineering & Sciences (MolES) building at the University of Washington.
NESAC/BIO has been funded by the NIH since 1983. Buddy Ratner, UW Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, was the NESAC/BIO Director from 1983 through 1996. UW Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering David Castner has been the NESAC/BIO Director since 1996.
NESAC/BIO core projects are aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art for surface analysis in biology and medicine through a combination of developments in new instrumentation, experimental techniques, and data analysis methods. The center has projects in technology research & development (TRD), collaboration research, service, training and dissemination. The major TRD thrusts for the coming five years are development of time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) methods for imaging, sputter depth profiling and 3D analysis of complex organic materials, cells and biological tissues; characterization of the surface composition and structure of nanoparticles with electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis (ESCA) and sum frequency generation (SFG) scattering and vibrational spectroscopy; developing multi-technique approaches for characterizing the structure and interactions of biomolecules with interfaces.
NESAC/BIO currently has ESCA, ToF-SIMS, SFG and atomic force microscopy (AFM) tools available for use in projects. In the coming months the following new tools will be added to the NESAC/BIO tool set: a Q-Sense quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D), an Insplorion Xnano and an Ionoptika J105 Chemical Imager. The J105 was funded by a grant from the NIH High End Instrumentation Program. To learn more about the center and its ongoing projects visit the website at http://www.nb.uw.edu/