Could “America's stupidest city” discover a way to minimize the crippling effect of strokes or perhaps a cure for cancer?
At a facility most Fort Wayne residents probably don't even know exist, researchers are exploring those and other medical mysteries in an effort that may ultimately save lives and should nevertheless improve the city's image and economy.
“It would be nice if more people knew we were here. The work we're doing is significant,” said Kent Redman, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Indiana University School of Medicine on the IPFW campus. Since 1996 he has been supervising research into whether certain enzymes might be helpful in fighting cancer. Elsewhere in the state-of-the-art Medical Education Center dedicated two years ago, Assistant Dean Dr. Fen-Lei Chang and neuroscience professor Robert Sweazey have been exploring ways to more easily identify brain damage caused by certain types of strokes and to develop drugs capable of stemming or even reversing that damage.
I'm no doctor and The News-Sentinel is not a medical journal, so I won't attempt to describe their work in detail. Redman's research involves modifications to RNA (ribonucleic acid, similar to the more-familiar DNA), while the work led by Chang and Sweazey is examining the brain to better identify the post-stroke “penumbra” – the portion that has sustained some (but not total) damage from loss of oxygen and could respond to treatment. The fruits of their research, if any, will eventually explain themselves in the form of new procedures, medication and scanning equipment.
But the benefits of their efforts transcend medicine, because they epitomize the kind of high-tech activity this city must promote and attract more effectively.
“Fort Wayne has a history of innovation, and there's no reason we can't” continue that, Chang said, noting that the campus' proximity to local hospitals, the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center, Warsaw-based orthopedics firms and Manchester College's new school of pharmacy planned for Parkview's new north-side campus could offer opportunities for collaboration and mutual benefit.
“Fort Wayne has had some entrepreneurial physicians, and we've worked with them in the past,” said Karl LaPan, president and CEO of the Innovation Center on Stellhorn Road that provides space, expertise and other assistance to start-up ventures – the kind that could spring from successful medical research.
That's important because, as the Census Bureau reported just last month, wages in Allen County continue to decline. In 2009, the local median household income of $47,901 was 7 percent lower than the nation as a whole, while – 40 years earlier – the income of $9,911 was 17 percent higher than the national median.
But even if the school's research fails to yield the hoped-for results – always a possibility where science is concerned – the medical activity on IPFW's campus is likely to yield benefits.
Since IU's local medical school expanded from a two- to four-year program two years ago, students who previously had to leave Fort Wayne to pursue a medical degree can now do so here. That will help keep some of our best and brightest closer to home.
The presence of medical degrees and research, in turn, could boost efforts to attract other innovators and employers to Fort Wayne – people who could reverse the downward wage spiral that reflects the loss of high-paying, low-skill jobs.
“Whether it's in medicine or technology, we need to create things, then make them here. That's how Fort Wayne grew in the first place. It's our future, otherwise we are lost,” said Economic Development Alliance President Andi Udris, whose efforts to attract high-tech, high-paying jobs have often focused on the defense industry but knows the medical field is also ripe with possibilities.
Chang and Udris are right about this city's innovative past, which included everything from gasoline pumps to TVs to hand-held calculators. Sweazey, who has also conducted research into Alzheimer's, says a growing medical community can help rekindle that.
“This can lay the foundation for economic development and is tied to well-paying jobs. To date, our results have been very impressive,” he said.
With a prognosis like that, maybe Men's Health Magazine – which based its 2005 assessment of our collective intelligence on the presence (or lack thereof) of universities, degrees and similar factors – will in the future have to look elsewhere for its amusement.
You just can't make fun of people who are trying to cure cancer.