Highly Cited Faculty Series
April Spotlight: Dr. Gary Bowlin, Department of Biomedical Engineering
When Dr. Gary Bowlin was growing up, he saw the compassion his single mother brought to her work as a nurse. “I’ve always had that same need to help people,” he said, “but I really didn’t want to go to medical school.”
Instead, Bowlin, now the Herbert Herff Chair of Excellence and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Memphis, began an electrical engineering major at Youngstown State University in Ohio. A love of chemistry – he’s still in touch with his high school chemistry teacher – meant he quickly switched to chemical engineering, and it was his undergraduate thesis that set him on the path to his career.
“My faculty advisor’s wife was a Type 1 diabetic, and she spent the last part of her life basically living on dialysis machines,” he said. “His personal mission was to find an alternative to that machine. So I began to look at alternative methods to draw glucose from the bloodstream.”
Undergraduate research was unusual in the mid-1980s, and what Bowlin discovered would never be used clinically, but the whole experience was transformational.
“Now I had that biomedical bug,” he said. “It really brought together my combination of engineering and helping mankind.”
Eventually, during his PhD studies at the University of Akron, Bowlin began working with a group of physicians and scientists at Akron City Hospital doing vascular research.
The material used for synthetic vein grafts, then and now, is Teflon, “first used clinically in 1969,” said Bowlin. “We’re still using it today because we haven’t found anything better, and it fails like crazy. How scary is that?”
The Akron group was trying to figure out how to disguise the surface of the artificial vein with natural cells that line our blood vessels, which have a high electronegative charge, said Bowlin. Teflon is highly electronegative, too. “It repels everything, and the cells and the Teflon don’t want to go together. I was using electric fields to repel platelets when I thought, wait a minute. Why don’t I switch that and use it to attract cells? I was able to do that successfully and very rapidly.”
The process, called electrostatic endothelial cell seeding, along with the apparatus he used to perform it, was Bowlin’s first patent. He now holds a total of 17 U.S. patents, along with dozens more issued around the globe.
The list of intellectual property licenses he owns or co-owns is similarly long, and includes SweetBio, the successful Memphis-based biotech startup co-founded by Dr. Isaac Rodriguez. Rodriguez was a post-doctoral fellow in Bowlin’s lab when he co-invented the manuka honey biomaterial technology that is the basis of SweetBio’s product lines.
Those co-inventing partnerships, both in and outside the lab, are critical in Bowlin’s work, too. “I’ve had success developing many different products,” he said, “and I do everything with teams. Biomedical engineers don’t fly solo.”
It was his work with the Akron vascular team that sparked his interest in tissue engineering, then a relatively new field. “That’s really where my focus has remained for the last 30 years,” he said.
At this point in our interview, he takes out a vial, opens it, and slides what looks like a small section of woven soda straw into my palm. A fingertip touch crumbles it to bits.
Bowlin explained: “Take your body and take away the water, the cells, the mineral from your bones. What you’re left with is the extracellular matrix, the structural steel of your body. It’s a nano fabric,” he said. The challenge of recreating this nano structure to try to grow new tissue is what has motivated Bowlin’s career.
“What we’re trying to do is create this tube” – he puts the crumbles back into the vial – “which six months ago was strong enough to be sutured and put in as a blood vessel. The material will dissolve over time, as the body regrows in it.”
The pipe dream: Six months after the nano fiber tube is implanted, it’s gone and a new artery has grown in its place.
“It will be an impressive feat, once it’s accomplished,” said Bowlin, who doubts it’ll happen in his lifetime. “It’s a tremendous engineering challenge to try to do something like that.” Cost and practicality, not to mention the yearslong engineering process, make actually bringing a product to market a huge challenge.
The process he uses to make nano fibers is called electrospinning; picture a “glorified cotton candy machine,” he said, gathering fibers as it spins.
His proudest contribution to science, he said, “is being one of the first to introduce the electrospinning concept to the biomaterials and tissue engineering community. I got introduced to it in the late ‘90s, and as soon as I saw what it was capable of, I knew that this was the holy grail we were looking for.”
While his engineering credits are vast and impressive, Bowlin reserves a special place in his heart for his students.
“All I care about is helping the next generation … that my students are successful,” he says, reeling off a list of where the engineers he’s trained are working now, from academics to industry.
“These are long-term relationships, especially with graduate students,” he said. “I tell my PhD students early on that we’re going to cry at least once together before you graduate. And there’s not a single PhD that I’ve graduated over the years where that has not happened, for whatever reason.”
He is in close touch with many of his former students. “Yeah, that’s how I define success … being invited to be part of their lives, still.”
That approach to student success is one of the things that drew Bowlin to the University of Memphis nine years ago.
“What really sold me is that this university is truly interested in every student’s success,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a first-generation student with no support or the kid whose parents are both PhDs. We’re here to make sure everybody’s successful, and that’s everybody at this university, from the top, down.”
He also names the UofM’s diversity as a plus, something other universities have to work hard to develop. “We have wonderful diversity, but then we have to focus on making those students successful.
“Listen, I’m here to have an impact, okay?” he said. “And I wouldn’t have the same opportunity to have impact other places.”
Of course, some situations are difficult, and some of Bowlin’s students struggle. An engineering degree is rigorous and demanding, after all.
“I make students do an independent project and develop, in detail, information on their own,” he said. “I always tell them: You hate me right now because I dumped all this work on you, but you’ll thank me later.”
One recent validation: A former student told Bowlin, “Your class was the reason I got my job.”
“Again, that's how I define success, by their success,” he said. “I'm not out for reward. I'm not out for awards. A thank you, nowadays, is more rewarding to me. Or, a good cry.”