Vietnamese Associate Professor Receives Research Grant of Over $16 Million

Dr. Thanh, 40 years old, is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering.

The research team he leads has received four R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the organization’s most generous, totaling more than $9.5 million, according to an announcement on October 14. Of this, $7.5 million will go to the lab and staff at the University of Connecticut (UConn), and the rest to collaborators.

Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also approved two grants for Thanh's group, totaling $6.6 million.

In a post on the University of Connecticut homepage a few days ago, Mr. Thanh was rated as a "star" in Biomedical Engineering, one of the school's most funded researchers.

His research is at the intersection of biomedicine, materials engineering, the use of nanotechnology and microtechnology.

"We always want to solve big problems in medicine, problems that have a big impact on human health," said Mr. Thanh.

R01 grants are highly competitive and are awarded by the NIH for research and development projects aimed at improving health, extending life, and reducing disease and disability.

Of the four grants, two are for brand-new research, worth $2.1 million and $1.5 million, respectively. Thanh is the lead researcher on the first project, which aims to stimulate and accelerate the healing process of defects in the body’s longest bones, such as the femur and tibia.

"Bones in most parts of the body can regenerate themselves, but if the injury is to a long and large bone, the body needs support to regenerate," he explained.

Currently, severe injuries to long bones are often treated using stem cells to stimulate the healing process. However, this technique causes serious side effects that can leave patients weakened.

Mr. Thanh's team tried to reduce the above risk by making a tissue scaffold from safe biological material, capable of generating electrical pulses to stimulate the bone recovery process.

The second R01 is for a microneedle technology project that delivers multi-purpose antibodies that can last long in the body of infants who are breastfed by HIV-infected mothers. This helps the infants maintain immunity to the HIV virus. Currently, this process is expensive and cumbersome because the antibodies need to be stored at cold temperatures and must be injected multiple times.

Associate Professor Thanh said the microneedle patches will help simplify the above process significantly and reduce the cost of cold storage. Together with colleagues at Eastern Virginia Medical School (USA), he will test the effectiveness of the anti-HIV patches on animals in the near future.

According to him, this method helps deliver antibodies to the recipient without causing pain. In the final stage, the patches will be tested on children at high risk of HIV infection due to breastfeeding.

The third grant, worth $2.16 million, was awarded by the NIH to research how to increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy for brain cancer patients, using biodegradable ultrasound technology invented by Thanh.

The fourth grant, nearly $2 million, is for a bio-tissue scaffold made from biodegradable polymers that is powered by electricity. Thanh said he will study whether the scaffold can regenerate human cartilage as it has been successfully tested on rabbits. This method could be a breakthrough in the treatment of patients with osteoarthritis.

With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Thanh's team received $6.6 million, divided into two phases, to develop a microneedle patch capable of injecting multiple vaccines into people at the same time.

"We are trying to expand research on this patch. It can simultaneously deliver many types of vaccines or antibodies into the body, fighting hepatitis, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, HIV and polio," said Mr. Thanh.

He added that polio still affects people in developing countries, most severely in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thanh hopes the project will help completely eliminate the threat of the disease.

The University of Connecticut said that the total amount of funding that Thanh has received since 2016 - when he started working at the school - is now 25 million USD. The school assessed that "this is a testament to the great influence and importance of Associate Professor Thanh's research".

It took years to attract these grants, Mr. Thanh said.

"We work hard and have many high-quality studies published in famous scientific journals. That has helped create successful and influential projects," said Mr. Thanh.

Dr. Nguyen Duc Thanh is a former student of Le Quy Don High School for the Gifted, Da Nang. He graduated with a degree in Physics from Hanoi University of Science and Technology in 2007. A year later, he received a scholarship from the Vietnam-US Education Foundation (VEF) to study for a PhD at Princeton University, completing his thesis in 2013.

He then pursued a Postdoc program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was appointed by the University of Connecticut as Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor (2022) in the Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering.

He received the NIH Young Pioneer Researcher Award (2017), top 18 outstanding young manufacturing engineers in the world awarded by the American Manufacturers Association (2018), top 10 inventors under 35 years old in the Asia-Pacific region voted by MIT, top 10 outstanding young Vietnamese faces (2019).

Currently, Mr. Thanh owns more than 20 patents and is a senior member of the American Academy of Inventors. He guides 21 doctoral and postdoctoral students in his laboratory, 4 of whom are from Vietnam.