When Milan Mrksich (BS, '89) started his freshman year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he had no idea what to expect as a first-generation college student.
The son of immigrant parents from Yugoslavia, Mrksich grew up in a modest neighborhood on Chicago’s southwest side in a home where English was a second language. He attended a high school where very few students went on to major universities like Illinois.
“I was good at math, and I liked math and science,” said Mrksich, who planned to be a chemical engineering major to achieve his main goal of getting a good job after college.
Then he took his first organic chemistry class his freshman year and his thinking began to change.
“I was fascinated by the logic of organic chemistry, and I really loved thinking on a molecular scale,” said Mrksich, who is now vice president for research at Northwestern University, where he is also a professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry and cell and developmental biology.
Professor Steve Zimmerman taught that organic chemistry class and invited the freshman to get involved in his lab’s research.
For Zimmerman, Mrksich really stood out.
“I remember that class and how Milan would sit in the 217 Noyes Lab classroom paying rapt attention but not taking any notes at all. I knew he was going to be a really terrific student or at the bottom of the class. After the first exam it was clear because he got the highest grade,” Zimmerman said.
Mrksich said that is when he fell in love with organic chemistry.
“It was fascinating to me that we could build molecules using synthetic methods and perfectly control molecular structure even though we couldn’t observe the products in the way we do objects in our material world” he said. “The understanding that we could manipulate molecules and their structures as a way of controlling your properties just amazed me, fascinated me. And I loved being in the lab and having access to state-of-the-art instrumentation,” he explained.
Mrksich went on to earn his PhD in chemistry at California Institute of Technology and then to Harvard University to do work in surface chemistry as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor George Whitesides. That experience went well, and Mrksich went on to his first independent research position at the University of Chicago, where his work blended surface chemistry and chemical biology.
“We learned to build surfaces that mimicked surfaces in biology, and we used these substrates to dissect how cells attach to and migrate on their protein matrices or environments and really start to understand that chemical logic,” he said. “We really did some nice work in identifying adhesion ligands.”
His work progressed to analytical applications of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs). When the department bought a new mass spectrometry instrument, Mrksich was purely curious and asked a student researcher to try analyzing a monolayer.
“I didn’t know if it would be interesting or not. But it turned out to be extremely interesting, because we found immediately that mass spectrometry of this sort would show us the masses of every molecule on our surface,” he said. “So that discovery close to 20 years ago really opened a whole new area in the lab where we now had a characterization tool that let us explore reactions at the surfaces and would let us characterize them.”
They called the technique SAMDI mass spectrometry (self-assembled monolayers for desorption-ionization mass spectrometry). They ramped up to 1,000 reactions a day – characterizing and discovering new reactions or understanding how they operated.
“Then we started to recognize this could be a really powerful technique in drug discovery,” he said.
Many drug development programs use high-throughput screening – running a vast number of experiments – to find which molecules will block enzyme actions that cause or lead to disease. And the screening typically relies on a fluorescent signal that’s not always reliable. Another drug development method is uses radioactive labels – which are unsafe, costly and slow.
“The SAMDI method avoided the use of fluorescence or radioactivity,” he said. “So, we had this way of looking at enzyme activity that didn’t need labels and that meant that we have fewer false negatives and fewer false positives and we could apply this format to just about every enzyme.”
His lab focused on making the technique high throughput, doing 10,000 experiments a day, then 50,000 a day, and now, a few hundred thousand a day.
“About a dozen years ago, we really started to believe this could be a game-changing method in drug development, in high-throughput screening,” Mrksich said.
Mike Scholle, a biotech entrepreneur whom Mrksich had worked with previously, came on board to make the process robust, utilizing robots and automation and developing software to read the results automatically. They launched a company, SAMDI Tech, that progressed from one pharmaceutical client to a few clients to 75 clients over several years.
The technology has been central to more than 200 drug development programs, including drugs related to cancer, immunology, metabolic disease, and antivirals.
And in early 2022, they signed an exclusive partnership with Charles River Laboratories, a global leader in providing services to the pharmaceutical industry, and sold the company to Charles River a year later.
“To know that the technology we have developed has to date enabled the development of dozens of drugs that otherwise might not have gotten off the ground or might have taken a lot longer – that’s tremendously rewarding,” Mrksich said. “Many of us who go into research, we are interested in the science, the challenges, the opportunity to learn something new about how the world works, but we also want to do good.”
Now, Mrksich said he has a new opportunity – to think about how he can give back. First on his list was supporting undergraduate research opportunities for students in the chemical sciences at Illinois.
“Because that’s how I got started,” Mrksich said. “I had no idea when I had that undergraduate research opportunity how it would change my life, my career, my trajectory. And I think it’s one of the remarkable things about a university experience. Students don’t know what they’ll experience or what they’ll learn or what they’ll get excited about, but it is often life changing. And it’s something I wanted to support and give that opportunity to more students so that every summer there would be a cohort of students that had the benefit of a summer research experience.”
The Milan Mrksich Scholarship for Undergraduate Research was established in 2022 and supported its first two student researchers this past summer.
And Mrksich also wanted to honor Professor Zimmerman, so he established the Steven C. Zimmerman Scholarship for Undergraduate Research, which also supported two student researchers this past summer.
Mrksich said Zimmerman opened his eyes and gave him the chance to join his lab and learn what research was and how it works and what it could do.
“And I just thought it was very fitting that half of the summer scholars would be named after him to honor his commitment to undergraduates over his entire career,” said Mrksich, who encourages undergraduates to get involved in research.
Rina Newhouse, an Illinois undergraduate in the Class of 2023, has gotten involved in research, and as one of the first scholarship recipients funded by the Mrksich gift, she spent the Summer of 2022 working on the chemical structure of a new class of protein.
Newhouse described the experience as “mind-stretching.” She said it allowed her to dig her heels into the depth of science rather than just learning passively.
Another recipient, Curtis Althaus, an undergraduate double majoring in chemistry and astronomy, spent the summer continuing previous research on lithium intercalation and got the great experience of presenting his work to his lab mates.
In the end, Althaus said his research approach ultimately did not work, and despite feeling like a year of work had gone to waste, he realized failure is the most efficient way to grow.
“I’m very thankful for having the experience that I did,” he said.
Mrksich said it’s a true benefit to chemistry majors to experience working with faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students doing world class research.
“Even if you don’t go into research as a professional, you learn so much by learning how it is done – that it’s hard work, many things fail but you stay at it, you pay attention to detail and work hard and advances could come slowly and sometimes they could come quickly,” he said. “For those students who learn that research is their passion, it’s life changing and prepares them to go to grad school, often to the best programs in the country and get started in their own research.”
In chemistry and research, Mrksich said there are benefits of having an inclusive and diverse group of researchers working together, so the scholarship’s selection criteria also promote diversity and inclusion.
“And it’s still true that many students who come from either underrepresented backgrounds or backgrounds that didn’t give them exposure to the opportunities – and I consider myself coming from that type of background – can really benefit from their first experience and insight into how research works and what it’s like to participate in it,” said Mrksich, who credits his success to his parents who taught him to pursue his interests and worked hard to give him opportunities.
He also credits his mentor and his alma mater.
“I credit the University of Illinois, a flagship institution, with outstanding opportunities for students and outstanding research that is making discoveries and contributing to the field in so many ways, and I credit Professor Zimmerman for giving me the first direct opportunity to get involved at a time when I had no idea what would lie ahead for me.”