Scenes from the sandbox

A striking view spreads from inside the new Pelotonia Research Center. Gazing southeast through big laboratory windows lining the outer walls, you see in the foreground neighboring Wexner Medical Center buildings on Kenny Road. The burgeoning hospital tower rises in a near distance dotted by familiar campus structures. Beyond is the horizon’s silhouette of downtown Columbus, epicenter of one of the nation’s fastest growing regions.

This view crystallizes the connection between Ohio State and its surrounding community, embodying the university’s land-grant mission of research, education and public service. Such ideals are built into the Pelotonia Research Center, where scientists are searching for bold and urgent solutions to society’s biggest health challenges, including cancer, heart disease, mental illness, food insecurity and much more.

“The big ideas that we want to go after at Ohio State really rely on big teams of people that think a little bit differently,” says Peter Mohler, executive vice president for research, innovation and knowledge, chief scientific officer for the Wexner Medical Center and the John H. and Mildred C. Lumley Chair in Medicine.

The Pelotonia Research Center—one of the largest capital projects of Time and Change: The Ohio State Campaign, costing $227.5 million to build—opened in June 2023 to provide that fertile place where interdisciplinary ideas and expertise cross-pollinate with a welcoming of new partnerships between academia and business. It’s a scientific hot spot where working researchers, clinicians and students make our university’s ideal real. You see creativity enhanced by connectedness, resulting in new ideas and new answers.

Let’s take a look.

When he enters the PRC, Dr. Elshad Hasanov doesn’t just see fellow cancer experts. As he heads upstairs to his laboratory, he also encounters biologists, neurologists, pharmacists, veterinarian researchers, psychologists, industrial designers and various types of engineers. “You realize, wow, this is exactly where the groundbreaking work happens,” says Hasanov, an oncologist and immunologist at Ohio State.

This scientific tapestry clarifies Hasanov’s own research mission—to find new ways to help patients as soon as possible—and surrounds him with a unique potential for such novel discoveries. “Being close to them makes it very feasible to enrich the collaborations,” he says.

Proximity also provides confirmation of what Hasanov saw in Ohio State when he was recruited by the university two years ago from Houston, Texas, where he was serving as a medical oncology fellow at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Hasanov saw Ohio State climbing research rankings, breaking its own records for research spending and building its roughly 350-acre Carmenton district, part of a vision for a community shared by the university, the nonprofit state economic development group JobsOhio and the city of Columbus. And he saw the 305,000-square-foot Pelotonia Research Center—a glass and gray-trimmed anchor of Carmenton—and the next-door Energy Advancement and Innovation Center, which opened in November 2023 and now houses his clinical office, a brief plaza walk from his lab.

“The institution is at a growth curve,” says Hasanov, recipient of a 2021 Kidney Cancer Association Young Investigator Award for his immunology research. “You realize that if there are buildings coming together, those buildings need to be filled in with science, discovery and patient care. You feel like there are good opportunities here to cultivate new ideas and let them grow.”

Hasanov left Houston in 2023 to join the Pelotonia Institute for Immuno-Oncology, created by Ohio State four years earlier to study the immune system’s role in fighting cancer. His lab and surrounding institute are on the PRC’s third floor, one above the university’s Comprehensive Cancer Center-CURES.

Although the Pelotonia Research Center is named in recognition of nonprofit Pelotonia’s collaboration with Ohio State, the building’s focus includes more health and well-being challenges. Floor 5, for example, has labs to address heart issues and women’s health. Labs targeting food insecurity are on ground level, conveniently across West Lane Avenue from the university’s Waterman Agricultural and Natural Resources Laboratory.

Instead of designing floors for a certain college or department, they were constructed so that the center’s multiple laboratories—organized into “neighborhoods”—foster connection and community. “The open space and building’s infrastructure allows that we don’t sit in silos,” Hasanov says. “We know who is working in this building. The fact that you’re located in the same proximity basically smooths the interaction.”

Hasanov heads a diverse research team searching for answers to why kidney cancer often spreads to the brain and how to slow or stop metastasis. His collaborators have backgrounds in machine learning, clinical medicine, biology, computational biology, epigenetics and bioengineering. They’re from eight countries, and their combined work is set to launch a new clinical trial.

Picture the width of a human hair. Now imagine something being 10,000 times smaller. That’s the size of a nanodomain, a cluster of proteins found in a cell membrane.

Rengasayee Veeraraghavan can see that minuscule structure inside cell molecules by using state-of-the-art equipment for light and electron microscopy. “With the newest technology, I can see down to 2 nanometers,” he says.

Nanometers are units of measurement. A sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick. “What looks like a random cluster of molecules, I can see detail in there about how they’re organized and put probes on different parts of them so we can track those domains individually,” says Veeraraghavan, a cardiac physiologist and associate professor of biomedical engineering at Ohio State.

Life depends on those details, each important to the health of a heart. Heart diseases cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. That’s why Veeraraghavan is glad to see biomedical engineer Seth Weinberg in a different lab on the same fifth floor. Partnership is steps away. “The reason we need to work with Seth is that his lab is really pushing boundaries, inventing new ways of computational modeling,” he says.

Thomas Hund, director of the Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute, collaborates with a team—led by Veeraraghavan and Weinberg—from the colleges of Medicine, Pharmacy and Engineering to seek preventive therapies through new understanding of cardiac arrhythmia, a condition that causes an irregular heartbeat, leading to different heart diseases.

The heart beats in a precise sequence involving 12 billion muscle cells. Thump. Thump. Thump. Nanodomains contain a handful of key ion channel proteins that contribute to the spread of electrical signals from cell to cell in the heart. Thump. Thump. Thump. What is it about those proteins that sometimes causes signal disruption?

“Collaborating together in one space enables us to have conversation to make sure we speak enough of the same language,” says Weinberg, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering and professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. “That’s definitely a really big challenge in all interdisciplinary research. We want to make sure that we speak enough of the same common vocabulary that we can learn from each other.

“Experiments are being performed 20 feet down the hall, so collaboration is very natural. Folks from our research group will sit in and observe experiments and truly develop an appreciation for where the data comes from. We can start to get a deeper understanding of the system we are studying. It allows us as computational modelers to develop a better intuition for what are the important features for our model to capture.”

Hund says modeling of cardiac electrical signaling in groundbreaking detail opens possibilities for designing new experiments and developing life-saving treatments for cardiac arrhythmia. All aided by a lack of barriers inside the Pelotonia Research Center. 

People on the outdoor public plaza sometimes stop to look through 8-foot-high windows into a PRC ground-level laboratory. They do the same from a hallway on the room’s other glass side [shown at the top of this story]. Often, they point.

“I don’t know what they’re saying, but they seem very excited about what they’re seeing,” says Megan Malara ’14, ’17 MS, ’20 PhD, director of the Medical Modeling, Materials and Manufacturing (M4) Lab.

Ohio State’s M4 Lab also hosts tours, many with gawking elementary and high school students. Visitors pick up a brain or a heart or a jawbone—organs made on 3D printers by staff and students—from a demonstration table and pepper Malara with questions. “They’re very excited about what they’re seeing,” she says. “It’s a good showcase of the activity going on here.”

Such moments fulfill a Pelotonia Research Center goal of putting science on display. In the M4 Lab, you see medicine, advanced manufacturing and other materials-related research coming together to engineer solutions for new medical device technology that serves real-world needs.

Malara and her staff of five from the College of Engineering’s Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence, collaborating with the College of Medicine’s Department of Otolaryngology, mentor 15 to 20 undergraduate students from aerospace, biomedical and mechanical engineering, and industrial design who participate in research and clinical projects.

The team uses numerous fabrication methods—including silicone molding and polymer filament and photopolymerization 3D printing—and other manufacturing capabilities. “Essentially, you design something 3D on a computer and the printer builds it layer by layer—think of it like a cake,” says Malara, an expert on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

“We’re getting a diversity of projects as they come in,” Malara says. “We’re kind of finding people that have all these interesting needs that wouldn’t know about us, and we wouldn’t know about them, if we had not been located here.

“Having people at a high level who say yes to moving something forward makes you feel we can make an impact at a faster pace.”

Seven graduate students and their supervisor are bathed in sunlight as they meticulously conduct a lab test together at the PRC’s second-floor headquarters of Ohio State’s Center for Cancer Engineering-CURES program. “We like big windows and the natural light,” says team leader X. Margaret Liu ’05 PhD, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

Tanvi Varadkar ’24 MS is using a syringe to draw a sample of cell tissue—embedded in a thin layer of vitreous water—to be pumped into a bioreactor harvester in front of her. On the same work bench is a $90,000 transmission electron microscope that’ll produce high-resolution images of the sample for computer analysis.

“This facility is great,” says Varadkar, a graduate teaching associate. “Everything you need is here, very systematic, well within your reach. It’s not scattered across campus at different sites. This building was made to ensure that we can perform our research very well and smoothly.”

Liu and Lufang Zhou, professor of surgery in the College of Medicine and in biomedical engineering in the College of Engineering, co-authored a study published in Cancer Journal in December. It showed how their combined research strategies produced a new gene therapy that experiments proved is effective at shrinking brain tumors and cancer tumors in mice. “That’s why we bring engineers together with different expertise,” Liu says.

Now the CCE-CURES project has Liu testing additional potential therapeutic effects of mLumiOpto, her team’s name for the innovative technique they developed to precisely deliver their gene therapy. Can this therapy also treat triple-negative breast cancer and other cancers? They seek that light in this day’s sunshine.

Back upstairs, Liu’s team is using sophisticated electron microscopy to read the light emitted by the cells in a test sample packed with their gene therapy. Next, specialized computer software for data analysis done on this floor will help reveal how the antidote affects the sample’s nanoparticles. “If it shows that the therapy kills the cancer, we can block the spread,” Liu says.

This evaluation process is necessary to understand the proper dosage of gene therapy needed when applied to a mouse model during in-vivo preclinical tests in the PRC’s basement. “It’s so convenient to work here,” Varadkar says.

Teamwork throughout the building is paying off. Liu says a venture capital company is talking with Ohio State about a possible partnership on her team’s gene therapy. Commercialization could lead to drug production to help people.

Peter Mohler looks to his left through the glass-lined northwest corner of the Pelotonia Research Center and points to a similar looking gray building in Carmenton. “Right there is what’s called Andelyn Biosciences,” says the university’s research leader. Andelyn Biosciences, which began as a Nationwide Children’s Hospital startup, is a developer and manufacturer of gene therapies and opened its 180,000-square-foot manufacturing headquarters in Carmenton in June 2023.

It is already home to offices for Pelotonia, Ohio Life Sciences (the state’s industry association for the life sciences) and Koloma Inc., a startup pioneering sustainable hydrogen extraction technology that was co-founded by Earth Sciences Professor Tom Darrah, the company’s chief technology officer and director of Ohio State’s Global Water Institute.

In November, the Board of Trustees approved agreements to develop another 50 acres in Carmenton, including mixed-use development. Ohio State plans a commercialization and entrepreneurship center with two floors for the Center for Software Innovation and space for emerging companies.

That building will stand adjacent to the first university-owned structure in Carmenton, the PRC, where Mohler gazes through a window and sees time and change.