Science Market Update

Bioresearchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have invented an ingenious method for shining light on one of the most mysterious organs we have: the brain. Their tool of choice is a thin, flat LED that can be seamlessly and innocuously injected, causing minimum invasiveness and disturbance. The LEDs will help advance our understandings of bodily organs like the brain through the field of optogenetics.

A microscopic worm by the name of Schistosoma mansoni has been long credited with a long lifespan and an uncanny knack for regeneration. Thanks to recent research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the worm’s secret is out: it utilizes adult stem cells to restore and replace itself at will.

Biotechnology vendors and lab suppliers in Illinois will find a well-funded market of science researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, according to recent NIH and NSF funding statistics. In 2012, the NIH awarded the university $69.7 million in research funding. Of the different bio departments at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the money was distributed as follows:

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, biological engineers have created what is becoming known as a “bio-bot.” It’s neither a cyborg nor an android, and it can fit on the face of a dime. What makes it special is that it can walk independently: that is, without the help of any mechanisms or electronic parts.

If you’ve ever been in need of a blood thinner, or you’re an avid reader of the Science Market Update, you’re probably familiar with the drug warfarin. Warfarin is an anticoagulant, which means it decreases the clotting ability of the blood in order to fight blood clots. However, it’s known to cause adverse effects if taken in the wrong amounts. In one of our September articles, we talked about research underway at the University of Illinois at Chicago that focused on prescribing the proper dosage of the drug. Meanwhile, just a few cities over, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are working on an alternate drug to warfarin.

In the search for early life we are going where we have never gone before...with newly-funded astrobiology research at the University of Illinois.

Human beings like stories. We think narratively. If there isn't a beginning, middle, and end, we try and create them from the information we have at hand, because things happen in time and, we like to think, with purpose and significance. Life science research takes as its subject living things, and all living things have a life cycle, at the end of which they die, just like in a story. There is no stasis, and nothing in real life happens in a clean room: living things interact with other living things and physical processes in what we sometimes call ecosystems, which are messy, elegant places of contingency and interdependence.

Why is this important to what you do in a day, or to the life scientist's work in his or her lab? It's a reminder, that however specialized someone's research is, or however much you manage to condense your product's virtues into a series of bulleted words or half-phrases, there is always a bigger narrative in the background, and it pays not to lose sight of it. Because narrative is not just a way of organizing things in time, it's about communicating, and that's what people do with each other. Even scientists. And if you're in sales, especially, you want to make that connection with a customer that turns into a relationship, so any opportunity to humanize (let's say narrativize) your interaction with that scientist is valuable.

We live in an age obsessed with cleanliness.  Hand washing is at an all-time high, as are sanitizers of every sort.  It's not enough that our municiple water is filtered at a plant somewhere before coming into our homes, no, we need to filter it once more before it's safe to drink.  Yet even that level of screening for contaminants may not be enough. For people living near air force bases there's an additional threat, and it's caused by a specific chemical used in rocket fuel: ammonium perchlorate. Perchlorate has a tendency to end up in the water supply near these bases, and traditional water filters don't do the trick when it comes to screening out the toxin.  Fortunately, two entrepreneurial materials science researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have come up with a novel filtering material that does screen perchlorate, and they are well on their way to commercializing their invention, thanks to two federal small business awards and the support of the pro-business University of Illinois Research Park.

Waste is an inevitable bi-product of human life, industry, and agriculture.  One of the scientific challenges we face as a society is managing that waste and minimizing its deleterious effects on the environment that we depend upon for current and future sustenance.  This ecosystem management increasingly involves the utilization of life science processes whereby good bacteria eat the unwanted effluent and render it neutral or even beneficial through an organically bioactive treatment system.  This process is called bioremediation, in contrast to chemical sterilization systems (e.g. chlorination) that can cause problems downstream. 

What happens when you bring together a pathologist with a group of computer scientists specializing in quantitative light imaging?  In the recent case of research colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), you get a very promising solution to the problem of analyzing large groups of red blood cells for abnormalities that may point to serious diseases such as sickle cell anemia and malaria.