Professor George Georgiou, Joe C. Walter Jr. Endowed Chair in Biomedical Engineering, was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in Washington D.C. He was cited for his seminal contributions to protein engineering, especially the development of therapeutics to biological warfare agents, protein manufacturing technologies, and combinatorial library screening methodologies.
Professor George Georgiou, Joe C. Walter Jr. Endowed Chair in Biomedical Engineering, was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in Washington D.C. He was cited for his seminal contributions to protein engineering, especially the development of therapeutics to biological warfare agents, protein manufacturing technologies, and combinatorial library screening methodologies.
Georgiou's research has had a profound impact in protein engineering, the development of therapeutics and on the fundamental understanding of protein biogenesis. His biochemical engineering contributions include the invention of numerous, commercially important technologies for facilitating protein discovery and manufacturing, and the development of therapeutics for anthrax and other infectious diseases. He is also the first biochemical engineer ever to discover a major new biological pathway (the global control of RNA degradation in bacteria), and has made seminal discoveries in the areas of oxidative protein folding and protein secretion.
Georgiou has co-authored 150 refereed publications in the most prestigious journals including Cell, Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Biotechnology. His papers have been cited over 5,000 times. He is also the co-inventor of 30 international patents, 18 of which have been licensed to nine pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The breadth of his inventions, which cover fields from protein engineering to biomanufacturing to the removal of sulfites from wine, provides a clear illustration of his creativity. Georgiou has supervised more than 20 Ph.D. students and 12 post-doctoral fellows.
Georgiou was educated at the University of Manchester (BS) and Cornell University (MS and PhD degrees, all in Chemical Engineering). He has been at UT since 1987, first as a Professor of Chemical Engineering and since 2001 with joint appointment in both Biomedical and Chemical Engineering. He has been recognized by a number of major awards including the 2003 Professional Progress Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers awarded to the best researcher in the field under the age of 45, the 2003 University Cooperative Society's Research Excellence Award for Best Paper by the University of Texas, the 2003 Marvin J. Johnson Award in Microbial and Biochemical Technology of the American Chemical Society, the 1995 Bergman Award of the US-Israel Science Foundation, and numerous honorary lectureships. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, both in 2004, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 1996.
Georgiou's contributions to the field have been pioneering. Over the last 15 years he has invented a set of powerful technologies for aiding the discovery and manufacturing of commercially important proteins. His technologies that Dr. Georgiou have been licensed by a wide variety of major pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Together with his long-time collaborator, Professor Brent L. Iverson of the Dept of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UT, they developed antibodies that bind to the anthrax toxin with exquisite affinity, thus preventing its lethal action. The administration of the antibodies was shown to completely protect laboratory animals against infection with anthrax spores. This discovery was heralded in 2002 as the most significant breakthrough in the fight against anthrax by the world press including CNN, Reuters, and BBC. The anthrax therapeutic antibodies are currently in advanced development and launching of a therapeutic product by Elusys Therapeutics is projected for 2006.
More recently, Georgiou, Iverson and their students, announced another breakthrough in infectious diseases therapeutics, by showing that antibodies fragments that bind and neutralize key virulence factors confer protection against infection in vivo, in the absence of complement -or antibody dependent-cytotoxic mechanisms. The practical implication of this finding, is that low cost, bacterially expressed antibody fragments conjugated to PEG for high serum persistence may prove very effective for the treatment of infectious diseases. This breakthrough has opened the way for the development of low cost therapeutic and prophylactic antibodies for a variety of important infectious diseases.
Georgiou and his co-workers have also developed the first truly high throughput method for the quantitative measurement of enzymatic activity at the single cell level. Using this technique they subsequently achieved the engineering of enzymes that display high catalytic activities and exquisite selectivities not unlike those seen in enzymes isolated from natural sources. In yet another recent breakthrough, Georgiou, Iverson and Penn State Chemistry Professor Steven Benkovic combined the construction of enzyme libraries via non-homologous recombination techniques with high throughput screening methodologies leading to the generation of novel enzymes. The most important application of this technology is the generation of hypoallergenic "humanized enzymes" for therapeutic applications.
Election to NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature and the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing and/or implementing innovative approaches to engineering education. Professor Georgiou's official induction will take place in Washington DC in October 2005.
