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Using viruses to heal
FLC grad wins prestigious award to fund his research
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Dr. Schuyler van Engelenburg (Chemistry, '05)
Photo courtesy of the Boettcher Foundation
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According to the National Science Foundation, Fort Lewis College (FLC) is one of Colorado’s top producers of chemistry Ph.D.s, with only Colorado State University, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Colorado School of Mines ahead of FLC. One of those Ph.D.s who earned their undergraduate degree at FLC, Dr. Schuyler van Engelenburg (Chemistry, ’05), is doing big things with the start he received in Durango.
Dr. van Engelenburg, who is currently an assistant professor at the University of Denver (DU), was selected for the Boettcher Foundation’s Webb-Waring Biomedical Research Award this summer. This prestigious honor includes $235,000 to fund his research for up to three years. He is the first DU researcher to win the award, and only one of 10 Boettcher investigators selected from Colorado this year.
Dr. van Engelenburg is working on technology that will improve the ways scientists use viruses to deliver genetic material into cells. The goal is to help people suffering from genetic disorders in a more precise and safe manner.
“As a Boettcher investigator, I wanted to take this opportunity to turn the table on Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and begin to engineer the virus to do something potentially useful for medicine,” he explains. “Researchers have been using viruses as shuttles (or vectors) to deliver genetic information to recipient cells in the laboratory for a very long time. Even with current viral vectors though, researchers don't have much control over where the viruses deposit this foreign genetic material in the genome. With the Webb-Waring research award, we are aiming to build this control into the HIV virus to safely and site-specifically deliver genetic information to recipient cells.
“If successful, we should then be able to deliver corrective genes with these engineered viruses to patients’ cells who are suffering from genetic diseases. One such genetic disease we are focusing on is SCIDs (Severe Combined Immunodeficiency). SCIDs afflicted patients have a very specific defect in an important gene for developing the immune system. We hope we can target this defective immune gene with our engineered viruses and replace it with a new functional one. This would give us the ability to potentially regenerate a patient's white blood cell population and restore the immune system.”
Though science was always an interest for Dr. van Engelenburg, it was the opportunity to learn from and work with Fort Lewis College chemistry professors that showed him the path that would become his life’s work.
“Coming to FLC, I started as a computer science major, but it really was my first chemistry class with Professor Ron Estler that reignited my interest in chemistry,” he recalls. “Professor Ted Bartlett gave me my first summer research opportunity in organic chemistry and I was hooked. Professors Les Sommerville and Rob Milofsky are also to thank for their mentoring and research training. It was this phenomenal education and research training in the fundamentals of chemical reactivity and analysis that collectively prepared me for graduate school.
“I would not go back and change a thing about my FLC undergraduate education. I knew early on that I wanted to earn a Ph.D., but might not have guessed I would be performing my post-doctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health, let alone in the fields of cell biology and optics. I am very fortunate that my career path landed me a professorship at the University of Denver and I am enjoying giving back to Colorado students the same way my former FLC professors gave to me.”
To learn more about the chemistry program at Fort Lewis College, visit www.fortlewis.edu/chemistry.