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Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD, is afraid of boredom. "There is nothing I hate more," he says. "If anything has driven me in my research—in both direction and intensity—it's been the desire not to be bored."
Both Kohane's career and training reflect an intellectual restlessness. Halfway through medical school at Boston University, Kohane did a PhD in physiology before going back and completing his MD. He subsequently trained in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston, anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and finally in pediatric critical care back at Children's. But a few years later, Kohane was learning a new field again—this time biomedical engineering at MIT. "Changing what you do every few years refreshes your mind," says Kohane.
Working as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Robert Langer, ScD, institute professor at MIT, Kohane learned a lot about how drugs and materials interact with the body and the engineering aspects of drug delivery—particularly the body's tendency to thwart drug action by preventing drugs from going where they need to or by breaking them down prematurely.
Today, with his own lab, Kohane is a prolific inventor of drug delivery systems and biomaterials, employing microspheres, nanoparticles, hydrogels and other technologies, while still seeing patients in Children's Medical/Surgical ICU. Staving off boredom, he's applied these technologies in widely varied ways, with inspiration coming from just about anywhere.
"Often, when I'm at the bedside and a patient has a certain problem, I think: 'I wonder if I can fix that,'" says Kohane.
Early in his career, he saw an 8-year-old girl with epilepsy and intractable focal seizures. Her doctors put her into a temporary barbiturate coma to minimize seizures, which came back every time she was taken off the drugs. The problem stemmed from a specific area of the brain. "Why can't we just drill a hole into the seizure focus, drop in a drug release system and just put that bit of brain to sleep?" Kohane wondered. He went on to develop drug delivery systems that could be injected directly into the brain. So far tested in a rat model of epilepsy, they have been shown to last for days rather than hours without any apparent adverse effects.
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In the last three years alone, Kohane has published more than 20 papers in wide-ranging fields. His inventions include hydrogels that can be inserted into the abdomen after surgery, preventing abdominal tissues from sticking together and causing serious complications like bowel obstruction. Other hydrogels, with antifungal properties, are designed to coat medical devices, potentially protecting hospitalized patients from fungal infections. For patients with pulmonary hypertension, Kohane has developed inhalable drugs that specifically dilate blood vessels in the lung. For children with ear infections, he's developing topical sustained-release antibiotics that can be applied directly to the eardrum in a single treatment, avoiding a prolonged course of oral antibiotics. Also under development are contact lenses that slowly release medications after eye surgery.
Kohane's ideas branch in so many directions that he himself has trouble remembering them all. "The problem with many fields is that you become very restricted to a topic," he says. "But I find everything interesting." Recently, Kohane even collaborated with the food industry, developing a device to enhance the smell of microwave pizzas—tiny spheres that release fragrant oil when heated.
Kohane now wants to teach the next generation of researchers to draw on disciplines outside their own. In his lab of PhD graduates and MDs from many different backgrounds, few initially saw how their areas might converge. "That's a huge weakness, I think," says Kohane. "So in our lab we make people cross-train."
Ultimately, Kohane envisions a center at Children's that will enable physicians to train in pharmacology and engineering and engineers to train in biology and medicine—with the overall goal of developing new biomaterials and drug delivery systems and taking them to patients. "I want to move the field forward," he says. "It's a very exciting time." |
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