Science Market Update

When it comes to identifying the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, every minute counts. Often it’s not even possible to determine whether a person is afflicted with it until it’s too late: that is, once symptoms start to show. A promising study at the University of Wisconsin, Madison suggests that there exists a way to diagnose Alzheimer’s before the onset of symptoms, not after.

A goal that many are working toward in the biotechnology field is to gather the maximum biological information about people using the least invasive practices. Ultimately, we would like to be able to simply scan ourselves with a little machine and instantly get a full report on our health for personal and doctor use. Moving forward on those lines is the University of Cincinnati, where a research team has announced a unique and unlikely candidate for the job: a portable, adhesive sweat analyzer.

The University of Utah has explored and expoited a number of successful strategies to commercialize its intellectual capital in recent years. Their tech commercialization office is tireless in promoting its proprietary scientific solutions (see last month's blog: Science "Speed Teching" Drives Rapid Commercialization in Utah). But now we're starting to hear about another seriously innovative and fast-moving "laboratory" for cultivating new Salt Lake businesses, and it's a fairly new entity from the U of U's David Eccles School of Business called The Foundry. Instead of creating companies or corporate leaders, the Foundry is a hands-on training program designed to produce entrepreneurs who can identify a successful startup product/business and put together a qualified team to launch and run it.

The Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research may be the biggest prize you've never heard of, and it is big: half a million dollars, to be shared this year by two "towering figures" in cell biology from New York's Rockefeller University. The honors were bestowed May 11 at a ceremony for these eminent Rock research scientists heading laboratories in Molecular Cell Biology and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology:

• James E. Darnell Jr., M.D., who is considered the “father” of RNA processing and cytokine signaling
• Robert G. Roeder, Ph.D., a pioneer in the field of gene transcription in animal cells

According to James Barba, president of Albany Medical Center and chairman of the Prize Selection Committee:

The Laboratory of the Year represents the highest overall standards in both architecture and laboratory design, and generally illustrates push-the-envelope concepts in science buildings. --R&D Magazine

Imagine how much more territory you could explore if so much of your budget didn't have to go for gas. That's the thinking behind both the Better Buildings Challenge issued by the DOE and the University of California Irvine's new and retrofitted Smart Labs, which are getting a lot of attention nationwide for their success at cutting building inefficiencies and expenses by upwards of 50%.  So what makes a Smart Lab so smart? What did building system engineers find when they put their bio research facilities and equipment under the microscope?

You've heard about green labs and green buildings, with solar panels, roof gardens, and underground parking.  UC Irvine's Smart Labs have more to do with the internal systems, though buildings like UCI's Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center building, at right, that are built from the ground up (as opposed to retrofits) also qualify for high LEED ranking and are both green in the broader sense and smart.

The perfect laboratory probably only exists in theory.  The most meticulously-designed lab space, outfitted without sparing expense, will be ideal only until needs change, focus shifts, or growth is required.  That's why lab planners are abandoning perfection for flexibility, and the form that flexibility takes is often modular.  Modular labs can be whole buildings or rooms fabricated off-site and installed to spec, or they can be labs within a solid structure that have been designed with modular concepts to allow for future reconfiguration.

In the research science world, green is a gradient, it is a starting place from which to move in a more sustainable direction. It’s also a gradient that researchers are willing to pay more for.  Over 95% of the researchers we surveyed at an on campus life science marketing event said they would be willing to pay more for green chemistry products.

Are Our Products Green-enough?

LA Times architecture critic and urban culture columnist Christopher Hawthorne brings a different voice to the table in his June 12 Times article when he asks: "doesn't the general freak out over the shutdown suggest, in and of itself, its fundamental folly?"  He wonders if spending $1B on an added freeway lane is really what LA needs to be doing to make the future more...accommodating.
 
Public transit does exist in LA, and improvements, extensions, and rail links are all underway thanks to the Measure R transit initiative sales tax increase approved by voters in 2008, as well as some recent loan money from Washington.  But the real change has to happen in the psyche of Los Angeles County's 9,818,605 citizens.  Yet another LA Times article on the impact of the freeway closure is simply titled: "Caution: lifestyle changes ahead."  It leads with the picture of a happy young couple who planned their wedding this Sunday long before the doomsday forecast.  They will get married all the same.  Because if this is the end of the world as we know it, well, they feel fine.