Science Market Update

The University of Pittsburgh has strong ties with the Pittsburgh Veteran's Administration Medical Center located next door, and those relations are about to be strengthened with the establishment of the UP School of Medicine Center for Military Medicine Research as well as a new research facility under contruction at the VA's University Drive campus (photo right).

Did you know you can be considered a "pot-head" without ever touching, let alone smoking, marijuana? When early neuroscientists went looking for the mental hardware that allowed the body to respond to the active ingredient in the cannabis sativa plant (called THC), they found much more than they were bargaining for. They did in fact identify a perfectly-shaped receptor in the brain. Puzzled at why it would exist (surely the human body was not designed with cannabis-intake in mind?), they went on to discover that the body itself makes a cannabis-like substance, called an endocannabinoid, and that it is part of a complex system regulating appetite, pain, pleasure, and immunity. So, technically, your brain is already wired for pot, and your body produces it all by itself.

Bio researchers in the Gene Expression Laboratory  and Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego have done something remarkable: they've succeeded in turning blood from the umbilical cord (cord blood) into the more specialized cells found in neuronal networks. And they've done it in one transcriptional move using a single protein. Like embryonic stem cells, cord blood stem cells are undifferentiated, meaning they can transform into any cell type. This plasticity has been recognized and studied for several decades now, but typically multiple transcription factors are necessary to create specialized stem cells like those found in the brain.

University expansion is never uncomplicated, especially in an urban environment where density is high, real estate is ultra-expensive, and development is intensely regulated. Yet new buildings do go up in places like New York City if you have the drive, wealth, and reputation of an institution like Columbia University, which is currently constructing not only new buildings but an entirely new campus to expand its academic and research programs. In addition to the original Morningside Heights location and the Medical School campus in Washington Heights, Columbia has purchased and is building a new campus in the "Manhattanville" neighborhood, stretching from 125th Street to 133rd Street in West Harlem.

How is it that a prominent Rockefeller University professor and director of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior is sought out by a fashion magazine one month, the New York Magazine the next, and a CBS interview just last week? Dr. Leslie Vosshall studies the mechanism of scent recognition in humans on the one hand, and attraction to humans by mosquitos on the other. We still know so little about smell, and even less about why an insect like the mosquito hones in on one of us more often than another, but the Vosshall Lab is adding insight to the genetic basis of olfactory recognition. Given that mosquitos are a global vector for disease, including right here in the U.S., Vosshall's research aims to find out what it is about a particular one of us that excites the little bug to such raptures. If we know that, perhaps we can intervene productively to keep them at bay. As for the fashion magazine (Elle Canada), they wanted an expert on scent to comment on designers' and retailers' new fad for marketing their products with a scent component.

[Georgetown University and the Washington DC skyline, courtesy of the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience]

Sometimes sacrifices have to be made in the name of progress. In the case of Utah's just-opened USTAR collaborative research building on the Salt Lake City campus of the University of Utah, no one seems to be lamenting the loss of a golf course that used to lie between the Medical School and an engineering complex. Not when the new 208,000sf, $130M, state-of-the-art Sorenson Molecular Biotechnology Building is there instead, with all of its bright and shiny promise to drive innovation and economic development in the Beehive State.

The NIH has funded a five-year, $21 million Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism grant to support a multi-site consortium led by Oregon Health & Science University researchers Kathleen A. Grant and Betsy Ferguson. The grant represents the second competitive renewal for the INIA consortium (founded in 2001), which is made up of 15 lead investigators from 10 institutions in the United States and Europe.  OHSU's share of the current funding is $6.3M. Dr. Grant is the head of neuroscience at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC), where Dr. Ferguson is an associate scientist. The Division of Neuroscience at the ONPRC conducts research aimed at identifying and defining fundamental aspects of the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying nervous system function.

Thanks to a longtime Minnesota philanthropist and the State of Minnesota, neuroscience and diabetes researchers at the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic are looking at millions in research grant funding from two new programs:

• The Wallin Discovery Fund for neuroscience at UMinn ($500K/yr.)
• The Decade of Discovery Program for diabetes research at UMinn and the Mayo Clinic ($1.86M)

Minnesotans are already familiar with the generosity of the late Win Wallin, formerly of Pillsbury and Medtronic, whose name is on a new Medical Biosciences Building in the Minneapolis Biomedical Discovery District (on the Twin Cities campus), and whose scholarship program has sent promising urban students to college at UMinn for two decades.  Now, in his honor, a new grant program has been announced by the Wallin charity to provide $500,000 a year in funding for bold research in neuroscience at the University.  UMinn recommended neuroscience as the best candidate field for the new grant program, which will provide support to bridge the gap between seed funding and result demonstration sufficient to draw NIH grants.

Biomedical scientists, and especially pharmacologists, have probably always suspected that most of the good stuff is already out there, and the challenge is to find it, synthesize and refine it, and make sure it doesn't kill you in the process of curing you.  Rain forest expeditions turn up thousands of novel plant compounds that might very well form the basis of a successful new drug therapy. Then there are the plants that cultures have been utilizing for centuries to treat various maladies but may have been dismissed as illusory "folk remedies." Now many of these traditional medicines (call them already-discovered compounds) are being reexamined and studied in the lab for their medical potential, sometimes with eye-opening results.