The Biomedical Engineering Society’s 2002 International Award was presented to UCSD professor of bioengineering Marcos Intaglietta at the society’s annual meeting in Houston.
The award honors Intaglietta’s pioneering discoveries about how oxygen is transported through the microcirculation to the body’s tissues.
Among his research, which was conducted with former UCSD professor of medicine Robert Winslow, is the finding that blood substitutes can improve overall blood flow and reduce the heart’s workload. They also discovered that blood substitutes could be designed to hold oxygen in reserve, only releasing oxygen to those tissues that need it.
These discoveries helped explain why many of the blood substitutes under development by biotechnology companies caused high blood pressure and other side effects in patients.
Intaglietta was also the first to develop testing techniques that allow researchers to see, measure and analyze blood flow in the microscopic blood vessels over time in living animals. His seminal 1998 paper on oxygen transport is counted among the top 10 of the journal’s most frequently cited engineering publications, according to The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Throughout his career, Intaglietta has welcomed a constant stream of international colleagues as visiting scientists in his laboratory. He has also worked with governments and health care institutions in Europe, Latin America and Asia to promote the development of alternatives to blood transfusions.
NPACI to present research at computing conference
The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure will present a research exhibit and related demonstrations at SC2002, the world’s largest annual high-performance networking and computing conference, from Nov. 16 through Nov. 22 in Baltimore.
The NPACI exhibit booth will allow visitors to explore supercomputing technology and the breakthroughs in science it makes possible, as well as participate in the community that makes up NPACI, which involves 41 partner institutions and receives part of its funding from the University of California.
Along with highlighting the accomplishments of NPACI’s projects, the partnership’s booth will showcase its role in the TeraGrid, which will be fully deployed in 2003 as the world’s most powerful computing infrastructure for open scientific research.
Throughout the conference, researchers will demonstrate how NPACI-developed technology has led to major scientific successes, such as visualizing the evolution of a galaxy, simulating the flow of blood through a heart and the creation of a National Virtual Observatory.
Summaries, locations and times of all of the NPACI presentations and demos are available at http://www.npaci.edu/sc2002. More about SC2002, which is themed “”From Terabytes to Insights,”” is available at http://www.sc2002.org.
