Ryan C. Bailey hopes to develop an ultra-sensitive measurement technology to identify deadly diseases at the molecular level.

Bailey, professor of chemistry, was named a recipient of the 2007 National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award.

He received a $1.5 million grant, to be distributed over five years, due to the creative research potential he demonstrated to produce important medical advances.

The National Institutes of Health selected the award recipients through an extremely competitive process.

Bailey will use the award to contribute relevant research to the medical world and has recently made advances toward his objective.

“Our research is attempting to find ways to detect and classify disease, namely cancer,” Bailey said. “We have been putting our focus on detecting cancer and using the $1.5 million to build a lot of new instrumentation.”

Bailey has used the money granted by his prestigious National Institutes of Health award to create a blood protein machine that detects and classifies deadly disease.

Bailey also noted building instruments that work was the first big achievement of the project.

“We are attempting to make the instrument that would read blood proteins that report on the disease state of different organs,” Bailey said. “We have already been able to detect and measure one cancer biomarker at clinically relevant levels.”

Work on this project is being done by graduate students working on their dissertations.

“This grant has given us the opportunity to be thorough and extensive in our research,” said Adam Washburn, a graduate student. “We have had a greater opportunity to experiment with blood protein in order to identify protein markers.”

Bailey’s group is working to develop new bioanalytical tools to understand the onset and progression of the disease.

Single cell investigation is necessary when researching cancer metastasis and immunotherapy.

According to the Web site “Chemistry at Illinois,” the related long-term goal of the group is the comparative analysis of protein diversity within individual cells.

For this to be recognized, new technologies must be developed that allow for cellular contents to be catalogued in a high-thoroughput fashion.

Platforms for these efforts are arrays of metallic nanopores, and Bailey’s team is investigating both the electrokinetic transport and nanoscale plasmonic properties of these materials.

It is Bailey’s hope that this research will make a significant impact on cancer detection and the world of medicine outside of the University.

“I feel very grateful to be able to benefit from the grant,” said Abraham Qavi, graduate student. “It has given graduate students opportunities to take a lot of chances in medical research, which potentially allow for much greater rewards.”