Opinion | Michigan benefits from university research. Funding cuts hurt state

In 1952, a Detroit surgeon needed a machine that could do the work of a human heart. He asked General Motors.

GM engineers, who spent their days moving oil and gasoline, built him a pump for blood. On July 3, at Harper Hospital, it kept a 41-year-old man alive for 50 minutes while the surgeon repaired a damaged heart valve. Henry Opitek lived nearly 29 more years. The pump is now in the Smithsonian. The surgeon’s school was Wayne University then; it’s Wayne State University now.

That operation happened in Michigan for a reason. It took a medical faculty willing to attempt what nobody had dared previously and engineers who could build a machine precise enough to be trusted with a living man’s blood. Michigan had both.

Headshots of Kevin M. Guskiewicz, Richard J. Koubek, Domenico Grasso and Richard A. Bierschbach — The authors are presidents of Michigan’s research institutions: Kevin M. Guskiewicz, Michigan State University; Richard J. Koubek, Michigan Technological University; Domenico Grasso, University of Michigan; and Richard A. Bierschbach, Wayne State University.

Three years later in Ann Arbor, a University of Michigan epidemiologist announced that the polio vaccine worked. He’d designed the trial and evaluated the results himself, tracking 1.8 million children — one of the largest medical studies ever run. The country accepted the answer because of Michigan’s care. In 1952, polio paralyzed more than 21,000 Americans. By 1965, the number was 61.

A decade later, a Michigan State University biophysicist and his team found that platinum compounds stop cell division, a discovery that led to today’s wide use of cisplatin to treat many cancers, including ovarian, bladder, lung, stomach and testicular cancers. The U.S. death rate from testicular cancer has dropped by two-thirds since 1975, according to the National Cancer Institute.

In 2013, Michigan Technological University turned a century of expertise to a new use. A stent holds a blocked artery open — but once it heals, the metal has no job left. Michigan Tech, founded to serve the mining industry, had spent generations studying how metals corrode. Its researchers pioneered zinc as a stent material, dissolving at a pace close to what a healing artery needs: fast enough to vanish, slow enough to hold.

Four problems solved in Michigan, by Michigan research universities.

We lead those four universities. The same work is underway in those labs today — and it’s more ambitious than ever.

At Michigan State, researchers found why ovarian cancer often stops responding to cisplatin — the same drug their university discovered decades ago. A protein in the cancer cells called TPPP3 acts like armor, helping cells resist the drug’s strength. In the lab, blocking it made the cells vulnerable to cisplatin again. Patients with lower levels of TPPP3 already live longer and respond better to treatment. Researchers are now working on a drug that directly targets TPPP3 and a test to flag patients at risk before resistance develops.

At the University of Michigan, a team may have found the cause of preeclampsia, a dangerous rise in blood pressure during pregnancy that has defied explanation for a century. Researchers traced three competing theories back to one gene network. Shutting it down prevented the disease in mice and reversed its signs in human placental tissue. One of the researchers had preeclampsia herself.

At Wayne State, researchers are tackling why so many pregnancies end in miscarriage — a process that requires the mother’s immune system to accept the developing baby. Their findings show that immune-related complications differ by the baby’s sex from early in development. Because lost pregnancies break down differently for boys and girls, preventing miscarriages may ultimately require sex-specific strategies.

At Michigan Tech, engineers build working replicas of a patient’s own heart, pump artificial blood through them and track every particle with lasers to find exactly where a clot would form. Their current federal grant targets Kawasaki disease, which inflames the arteries of young children. Soon, a surgeon may rehearse an operation on a copy of a child’s heart before ever touching the child.

None of that work has reached a patient yet. Neither had a heart pump, a vaccine, a cancer drug or a dissolving metal on the day the work began. Each took years and required a state that understood what it was building.

Michigan’s research universities are not a cost the state absorbs. They are the reason a Detroit surgeon could get a pump built in 1952, and the reason a child’s heart can be modeled in Houghton this morning.

If lifesaving discoveries were not reason enough to support university research, consider the economic impact.

Every research endeavor and discovery is part of the economic engine that generates $51.4 billion in annual economic activity in Michigan, 7.1% of our state GDP.

A call for cuts to university research is a call to cut the lifesaving and economic benefits Michigan residents have received for generations. Let’s not abandon discoveries in our labs today that will benefit us all tomorrow.

That work is underway this morning in Ann Arbor, Dearborn, Detroit, East Lansing, Flint, Grand Rapids and Houghton.

We are nowhere near finished.