Turning health research inside-out: A Q&A with Joerg Lahann

The Biointerfaces Institute at the University of Michigan was launched with the recognition that the most transformative healthcare breakthroughs happen across disciplines, not within them. It gathers more than 550 researchers in a 56,000 square-foot facility, enabling close collaboration and boundary-breaking discoveries.

Since its founding in 2012, the Institute has posted nearly $300 million in research expenditures, registered more than 356 inventions and 131 United States patents and sparked 15 new startups.

Housed in the former Pfizer complex that U-M repurposed into the North Campus Research Complex (NCRC) in 2009, the Institute was an early example of the public/private collaboration model that has turned the complex into a hub of innovation. Today, the NCRC houses more than 3,700 employees, a mix of university researchers and private-sector tenants. 

 The Biointerfaces Institute’s 39 faculty members focus their research in six key areas:

• Advanced materials and drug delivery
• Bio innovations in brain cancer
• Cell and tissue engineering
• Nanotechnology
• Neural engineering
• Single-cell technologies

We sat down with Joerg Lahann, the Institute’s director, to learn more about how its unique structure, funding opportunities and workshops help students and faculty prosper and drive innovation. Lahann is the Wolfgang Pauli Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering, a professor of materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering and macromolecular science and engineering.

How does the Institute’s structure change the nature of healthcare research?

Our structure basically turns the traditional healthcare research process inside out. Traditionally, research has been separated into individual labs, and those labs address one facet of a problem. And while that’s great for going deep into a specific area, it can be difficult for all those separate teams to work toward a single, unified solution.

The Institute comes at research from the opposite direction—we start by asking “what’s the big problem we want to solve?” And by starting with the big picture, we can identify all the different domains that need to be involved and enable them to work together as a team from the outset. It enables us to innovate much more quickly, especially given the complexity of today’s healthcare challenges and solutions.

What does that kind of team science setup look like in practice?

One thing that’s different from a lot of other research environments is that we’re all located together. If you came to visit me, you’d see colleagues in many different roles and disciplines clustered around my office—engineers and clinicians, professors, postdocs and grad students, all within close proximity. That means we can bounce ideas off each other, get answers to questions in other disciplines and generally move things forward faster.

It’s also a great place to be a grad student, because you’re constantly getting insights from other research areas, and you have the opportunity to work with really accomplished researchers on a day-to-day basis. I’d love to be a graduate student here.

What’s an example of how collocating different disciplines enables you to work differently?

We do one-to-two-day multidisciplinary workshops called Challenges, where we can go from asking a question to producing a funded proposal that could provide an answer.

Let’s say we’re looking at a particular challenge related to ovarian cancer, for example. We can quickly get maybe 100 people together and break them up into multidisciplinary teams, perhaps an oncologist, a cancer scientist and an engineer. That’s very powerful, because a different field might have an answer to a question you’ve been puzzling over for months.

Each team comes up with a proposal, so you might have a dozen proposals and the best three get funded. Now you’ve very quickly set up new avenues of research and potential new paths to big solutions.

Obviously, it’s great for the teams that get funded, but even the ones that don’t often spark new collaborations as well. So we pack a lot of innovation and opportunity—and funding—into a short period of time.

We also have something called an Incubator Award, which is designed to encourage a broader swathe of researchers to pursue grant proposals.

Another example is that the North Campus Research Complex is also home to Innovation Partnerships, U-M’s technology transfer organization that helps researchers bring new ideas to market. The specialists there provide support in filing patents, licensing technology and launching startups. In fact, they’re some of the best in the country. In 2024, U-M ranked No. 2 in the nation for IP-based startups, with 28. Two of those came out of the Biointerfaces Institute.

Tell us more about Incubator Awards.

If a Biointerfaces Institute faculty member wants to pursue a large-scale collaborative research grant, they can write a brief proposal. If it’s approved by the executive committee, then they get an Incubator Award—$25,000 to bring a team together and another $25,000 when the grant is submitted.

We developed Incubator Awards because we realized it’s healthy to have a broader range of ideas. So we developed Incubator Grants as a way to make that happen.

Getting new voices and new perspectives involved in solving big medical challenges is really at the heart of what the Biointerfaces Institute does. We’re incredibly fortunate to have a top engineering school, medical school, dental school, pharmacy school and hospital all in one place, and institutes like ours are an important way to ensure they’re all working together to serve the greater good.

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