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Cellular Bioengineering snags the nation's top R&D honors

And the winner is ... : The R&D 100 award proves CBI's staff is at the top of its game. From left to right: Shaosheng Dong, Michael Coy, Amy Weintraub, Leslie Isaki, Romie Lattrell, Tony Lee, Hank Wuh, Ge Ming Lui, Rosalynn Chan, Kevin Chinn. Photo: Cory Lum

The R&D 100 awards. Dubbed "The Oscars of Invention," they are the nation's top honors in research and development, presented annually by R&D Magazine to the companies and organizations behind the best, brightest innovations in America. With former award-winning inventions ranging from the fax machine to the artificial kidney, making the list is no small feat. A fact that isn't lost for a second on Hank Wuh, founder and chief executive officer of Honolulu-based Cellular Bioengineering Inc. (CBI), which this year has been selected an R&D 100 Award recipient, for its development of the Neural Matrix Chip. "It's an honor. It truly is an honor," says Wuh. "They only pick 100 companies each year, and we're very proud to be one of them."

When it receives its award on Oct. 20, in R&D's home city of Chicago, CBI will be in the company of the country's leading technological pioneers, such as Lockheed Martin, General Electric, Hitachi and NASA, which have all won the award in years past. It's an amazing achievement for a small biotech firm located in the side streets of Moiliili. It's even more astonishing when you consider that the company, which specializes in regenerative medicines (the bioengineering of replacement parts for aging or injured tissues and organs) has only been around for two years.

"We've been moving at a pretty fast pace, and we don't expect it to slow down," explains Wuh. The company is on a roll. It first started with a handful of employees and one project: the bioengineering of corneal cells for transplant use. It's since grown to 15 employees (about half of whom are returnees to the Islands), who together are currently developing four new technologies, in addition to the corneal cells, in the areas of ophthalmology, urology, dermatology, nanopolymers and nerve growth.

While each project is noteworthy in its own right, it is the company's nerve-growth technology, the Neural Matrix Chip (for which it won the award) that is the most significant innovation. "We're basically growing nerve cells on computer chips," explains Wuh, adding that, while he and his team have taken nerve growth to new heights, California-based Lawrence Berkeley National Lab actually created the foundation for the technology, then licensed its development to CBI.

"I was visiting some of the scientists there, and they showed me this technology they were working on for nerve growth. As a matter of good will, we (CBI) helped them out, suggesting they file a patent and so on. So when the time came for Lawrence Berkeley to license the technology out for development, their tech transfer office thought they'd license it to a huge international company, but the scientists felt so strongly about our relationship, they said, 'We'd really prefer to work with this little company in Hawaii,'" says Wuh.

What Nerve: Using its own moniker, CBI demonstrates its ability to grow nerves in a specific pattern on the surface of a chip. Source: Cellular Bioengineering Inc.

Traditionally, scientists have found it very hard to grow nerve cells on any kind of surface, let alone grow it in specific patterns. What CBI has done is revolutionary, growing nerve cells, in specific patterns, on computer chips. The chips allow scientists to record and process information gathered from the nerve clusters–something researchers so far have not yet been able to do.

"Right now, computer chips are purely silicon-based, but many people believe we can make these chips work more intelligently if there's a biological component," says Wuh. "And we know, it's far out there. It's high tech. But it's also conceivable. If you can conceive it, then it's possible."

The potential applications for the Neural Matrix Chip are vast and varying, and Wuh and his staff are constantly coming up with new ideas for its use, the most obvious being nerve growth for the replacement of injured or severed nerves. Another potential application, for which CBI has already received federal funding, is the detection of chemical and biological threats. The chips, for example, could be deployed into a battlefield before troops, exposing any hazardous materials in the environment. A third, and perhaps the most futuristic, application is cognitive or molecular computing. Wuh describes it as the ability to grow brain cells on these chips, which they could then hook up to a super computer to understand how information is stored and processed in the brain. He uses memory retention as an example: "It is possible to have nerves from the memory cortex of the brain, where we store certain information, attached to a chip. That device could perhaps then augment or supplement our internal memory. Eventually, we could create an external memory for humans, similar to external hard drives for computers."

Whew! Molecular biology, computer chips, nerve growth–if it all sounds very science fiction like, don't worry, you're not alone. "It's sci-fi stuff for me," says Ed Cadman, professor of medicine at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, "and I'm a scientist!" Cadman, who first met Wuh six years ago, is both impressed with and proud of the level of research CBI is pushing out of its small Moiliili laboratory.

"Hank came back to Hawaii to get in on the ground floor of the biotech industry and he's done a phenomenal job," says Cadman. "This award is a great honor for Cellular Bioengineering and, at the same time, it's a great honor for Hawaii and its biotech industry. Right now, there are relatively few companies for the local VC community to invest in, but with companies like Cellular Bioengineering coming here, developing technologies, providing jobs and getting this sort of national recognition, it helps open up a lot more opportunity down the road."

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