Block by Block
Kevin Bicker is building potential drug compounds to battle deadly infections Seventeen years of organized soccer—from youth leagues to his college senior year—had Kevin Bicker on track to become an orthopedic surgeon. “I had a lot of experience with orthopedic surgeons,” Bicker said. “I was an athlete. Seeing the doctor due to injuries, I enjoyed the sort of work they were doing. So I connected with a surgeon.” Bicker shadowed some orthopedic operations for an occupation he considered the “construction worker of the medical field.” During his junior and senior years of high school, Bicker was fascinated by knee and shoulder surgeries. He even sat in on his mother’s carpal tunnel surgery. An advisor at Bluffton University in Ohio, a small Mennonite school where Bicker competed in college soccer, offered a new plan. Bicker could double-major in biology and chemistry. He would have all the electives he needed for pre-med, but he could do a lot of different things if he changed his mind. “Then I got into organic chemistry, and I fell in love—which doesn’t happen for a lot of people,” Bicker said. “I realized . . . I really wanted to be a professor and teach.” As a graduate student at the University of South Carolina, Bicker’s initial research revolved around peptide libraries— collections of similar molecules. Bicker likens such libraries in chemistry to Lego towers, changing out some molecules in the chemical group being similar to changing colors in a stack of the building blocks for different combinations. Bicker’s early work centered on coming up with either cancer treatments or diagnostics. He followed up grad school by moving to south Florida to take a postdoc position at the Wertheim UF Scripps Institute, now part of the University of Florida system. There he studied enzymes—proteins responsible for various body functions. Bicker’s top focus was enzymes that are related to body inflammation or autoimmune diseases.
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“I was working on developing molecules that could block the activity of those enzymes,” Bicker said. “They shut down things such as rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, and lupus.” Once hired at MTSU, he set up a lab and started working on trying to develop anti-infective peptides—combating infections caused by things like bacteria, a fungus, or a virus. Bicker’s lab can create 50,000 to 100,000 peptide molecules per day. Manually testing that many is impossible. So how does the lab prevent a massive gap between molecule production and testing? Enter high-throughput screening. “Screening or interrogating these libraries in a quick way— we developed a technique,” Bicker said. The high-throughput screening technology developed in Bicker’s lab is patented for use specifically by MTSU. It is not something every pharmaceutical company has in their respective laboratories. Over the next three to five years, Bicker hopes to have some leads on new medicines to treat nasty infections out in trials. Odds are good Bicker will eventually score his goal. —Brian Hudgins