“Initial COBRE funding for my nanoparticle research ultimately led to a successful $2 million NIH Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award for moving models to study how medicines travel in the lungs and body,” said Fromen. “That work led to two patent applications and subsequent collaborative research with both faculty peers and industry partners.” 

COBRE investigators often take on future leadership roles on campus, too. Fromen is now a UD Innovation Ambassador, sharing with others her experience in moving discoveries from the lab to the world and advocating for institutional resources that support research translation. Meanwhile, Don Watson, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is leading a newly funded COBRE aimed at developing methods and insights into biochemical pathways and systems affecting human health, building a team that includes several former investigators from the Discovery of Chemical Probes and Therapeutic Leads Center.

“Don Watson, Mary Watson and Catherine Grimes were all investigators on this COBRE as junior faculty. It’s exciting to see them, along with Xinqiao Jia, who was an investigator on the Biomaterials COBRE with PI Tom Beebe, take leadership roles in a new center that will bring 30 additional investigators fresh funding to advance their work,” said Fox.

Creating sustainability for core research infrastructure

This is the third and final phase of the center’s NIH funding. Under Phase III, one-year grants will be awarded for up to 20 pilot projects to help young faculty get new ideas off the ground for advancing chemical tools and approaches to investigate biological systems and address unmet medical needs, Fox said. Recruitment and development of new investigators is also planned through seminar series and workshops, scientific mentoring and continued collaboration with other centers on campus, including Delaware INBRE and the Chemistry-Biology Interface program.

Another major thrust of future work is to create sustainability for infrastructure enhanced or developed over the past decade. So far, Fox and others have brought $7.5 million in sophisticated research equipment to core research facilities developed or built up over the past decade. This includes some 42 major instruments now housed in four research core facilities supported or established under the grant for mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, proteomics and synthetic chemistry.

This sophisticated instrumentation enables various complex research. Mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy equipment enables studies requiring characterization and analysis, small-molecule synthesis, catalyst discovery, computation and microscopy. Proteomics studies monitor proteins and their molecular changes, which has benefits for drug discovery, disease diagnosis and health management, and, potentially, precision medicine. Synthetic chemistry has been used since the 1800s to prepare or synthesize small molecules. For example, most traditional pain medicines, such as Tylenol or aspirin, and traditional chemotherapeutics, including Taxol, are small molecule medicines, making synthetic chemistry studies critical for human health.

These core facilities are broadly used on campus and, apart from the synthetic chemistry core, all are open to industry users.

“For any research that's at the interface of chemistry and biology, this has been a resource for creating the scientific infrastructure that has been heavily relied upon by nearly 600 researchers and 80 research groups,” said Fox.

Over the past decade, center investigators have raised $76 million in funding, with $44 million of this funding still actively applied in research at UD. It’s a significant benefit to the entire scientific ecosystem, particularly students. 

“One of the biggest kicks I get is when I go to a graduate or undergraduate student poster session and, as I'm talking to a student, they're showing data critical to their degree advancement that's from instrumentation that we supported through the center,” said Fox. Since 2015, over 110 undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers have benefitted from the center.

Fox credited core facility directors with playing a significant role in supporting graduate students, training and mentoring them in the use of complex core facility equipment — skills that pay dividends for students on campus and when these newly minted researchers enter the workforce. 

“It's rare to go to a Ph.D. defense and not have the student spend time talking about the core facility directors and how essential they are to their doctoral work,” he said.

As Fox prepares to sunset the center in 2030, he reflected on the importance of bringing together the right people, equipment, mentoring and infrastructure to build up research capacity to deliver solutions that can be translated to society.

He expressed special thanks for the efforts of core facility directors Steve Bai and Caitlin Quinn (NMR); Yinzhi Fang (synthetic chemistry); Papa Ni Asare-Okai (mass spectrometry) and Yanbao Yu (proteomics). He also noted the important role that Dawn Yasik, COBRE administrative coordinator, has played in the center’s success.

“When we started putting this together, we had just hired some fantastic new faculty. It was coming off the 2008-2009 economic meltdown and I wanted to have great colleagues and have them stay here,” said Fox. “Being at a university with great infrastructure was important to me then and it’s important to me now. That's been my incentive.”