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A Biological Universe
in a Drop of Blood
By Elisa Ludwig
It is no surprise that a chemical engineer would study
liquid flowing down a pipe. What may be unexpected
is that Scott Diamond, the recently named Chair of
Penn Engineering’s Department of Chemical and
Biomolecular Engineering, studies human blood, one
of the most complicated fluids on the planet, as it
flows through an essential pipe, the coronary artery.
When things go well, blood flows smoothly. But
dangerous clotting events can cause heart attacks
and strokes, still the nation’s deadliest killers.
Diamond uses liquid-handling robots, originally
developed for the pharmaceutical industry, to run
thousands of measurements on a small volume of an
individual’s blood. “Each person’s blood has a unique
personality, a phenotype, in the way it responds to all
the many different stimuli present during a clotting
event,” Diamond says. His team uses these data sets
to train computer models to predict the severity of a
heart attack given one’s blood profile. These computer
simulations help identify the patient-specific benefits
or risks of a particular drug therapy.
His fascination with human biology began during
his undergraduate years at Cornell University in
the mid-80s, just as the first recombinant protein, a
blood clot dissolving enzyme called tPA, was being
developed by Genentech. Intrigued by the body’s own
production of tPA, Diamond discovered during his
Ph.D. work at Rice University that fluid mechanical
forces could actually activate the tPA gene inside
endothelial cells lining blood vessels.
Training for Diverse Careers
As faculty member and Chair, Diamond continues to
approach chemical and biomolecular engineering as a
discipline that synthesizes knowledge and demands
collaboration. “The compelling aspect about chemical
engineering is that our graduates can go on to work
in energy, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, electronic
materials, or any number of wide-ranging areas,” says
Diamond. “Our goal at Penn is to provide specialized
curricula and concentrations so that by the time
students graduate, they develop profound knowledge
in their interest areas.”
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