Baxter Healthcare Corporation, a global health care company, and Northwestern University's Institute for Bioengineering and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine (IBNAM) announced an agreement to collaborate on early discovery projects in nanoscience.

Nanoscience is defined as the science of making, manipulating and organizing objects 100,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. This field offers great promise for technological breakthroughs in medicine, particularly in the way that therapies are targeted and administered for the treatment of specific diseases.

As part of the agreement, Baxter will commit up to $450,000 per year over the next five years to fund up to three post-doctoral researchers and up to four annual research projects focused on sub-microscopic applications with the potential for great impact on medicine. Northwestern will own all intellectual property generated by the research projects, and Baxter will receive a right of first refusal to exclusively license technologies developed in projects sponsored by Baxter.

"Nanoscience and nanotechnologies hold incredible promise for medicine," explained Norbert Riedel, Baxter's chief scientific officer. "This is an extension of our own work in the area of drug delivery and the design of highly sophisticated devices to improve patient therapies and quality of life. We look forward to working with our partner Northwestern University and its Institute for Bioengineering and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine to develop new and more effective critical therapies for people with life-threatening conditions."

"The collaboration between Baxter and IBNAM holds incredible possibilities," said Samuel I. Stupp, the Institute's director and the Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science, Chemistry, and Medicine at Northwestern University. "It is clear that nanoscience has the potential to profoundly enhance human health and revolutionize the way medicine is practiced. The vision in creating IBNAM is to make Northwestern a key player in this scientific and clinical transformation and we are proud to have Baxter as a partner in this endeavor."

Northwestern University created the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanoscience in Advanced Medicine in order to become a leader in bioengineering and nanoscience by combining the expertise of three Northwestern schools -- the Medical School, the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

The Institute's goal is to promote interdisciplinary research and education in biomedical science and engineering that will ultimately contribute to the development of highly advanced (and, in some cases, currently unknown) procedures in human medicine. This will be pursued by fostering discoveries in frontier science and engineering that can be applied to advanced medicine, particularly phenomena involving the nanoscale.

Through its drug delivery business, Baxter partners with global pharmaceutical companies to develop, manufacture and cooperatively market intravenous drugs in Baxter delivery systems. One area of expertise is in helping drug companies solve solubility issues when attempting to deliver drugs intravenously.