Science Market Update

The Texas Medical Center in Houston recently welcomed a new center to combat Immune Disorders.  The Frank C. Arnett, M.D. Center for Autoimmunity and Immunology is named after the retired UT Medical School researcher who studied autoimmune diseases.  University research conducted here will attempt to isolate and identify the genes associated autoimmune disorders.

By now it is clear that the big funding compromise the congressional supercommittee hoped to hammer out together has failed to come into being, meaning that automatic, across-the-board spending cuts for federal discretionary programs will go into effect. The probable result for the NIH's portion: cuts between 5-10% each year for the next 10 years.  Will the President try and intercede?  He says No.  Are people happy with Congress' performance after this bipartisan failure?  Decidedly not: NPR reported over the weekend that Congress' approval rating is at an all-time-low of 9%.  Students, researchers, professional and industry organizations, and universities with vital bioscience programs especially are continuing to be very vocal about the pending funding cuts.  We wait to see if and where the axe will fall exactly, though complacency is not the order of the day.  Everyone seems to agree that the US needs to maintain its edge internationally as a leader in science and technology, but how to do that while reducing the deficit is a problem still without an equitable solution.

The University of Hawaii (UH) System includes 10 campuses across the Hawaiian Islands.  The flagship campus is at Manoa, in a residential valley above Waikiki Beach, just outside the capital city of Honolulu on the island of Oahu.

Dr. Cynthia Kenyon and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, started on an ambitious project two decades ago (much challenged at first): to combat age-related diseases by figuring out what the genetic basis is for aging itself.  That research has produced results that have quite literally changed the terms of the debate, overturning the previous assumption that aging was haphazard and unrelated to genetic behavior.  Thanks to Dr. Kenyon's determination to pursue her research, we now have several enticing keys to the way that bodies get old, or not, and we know that genes do in fact regulate the process of deterioration that tends to accompany aging.  "Aging youthfully" might best describe the longterm aim of Kenyon's work, or "negligible senescence," meaning that age does not lead inevitably to decreased vigor and increased susceptibility to disease.

As early as February of 2012, project organizers plan on opening the New York Genome Center, a new center for genomics and medicine, in Manhattan. NYGC’s collaborating members include a number of public and private contributors, among them 11 academic institutions, private philanthropists, technology collaborators, the New York City Economic Corporation and the New York City Investment Fund. In total, contributing members have donated $120 million to the project so far.

The Emory School of Medicine has launched a new Biomedical Informatics Department.  The new department will create more faculty positions and will help encourage opportunities for improved training, education and research in this emerging field.

Stem cells are remarkable for the promise they hold to regenerate diseased or otherwise compromised organs and tissue in the body.  At the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, researchers at the Barshop Institute of Aging and Longevity Studies are particularly focused on how a patient's own stem cells can be used to treat degeneration caused by aging, such as bone loss.  Proprietary cells (i.e. ones from your own body) are the best biological match for therapies to treat you, but the problem is that they're too mature and therefore much less effective than young cells in transforming themselves into new and useful parts.  Some people have begun to bank cells from birth, such as those from the umbilical cord, for a child's future need.  For the rest of us, there is the very real possibility of coaxing our own older stem cells into a more youthful, robust, and potent state by growing them on a younger scaffold.

By now you've probably heard of "lab-on-a-chip" technology, where engineers take a lab analysis process that once required, well, a lab, and make it possible to run that analysis on a handheld smartphone device.  Results are generated in real time, cheaper, and without bulky equipment.  In this case, Michigan State University (MSU) plant pathologists are using the device in a field of vegetables under attack by pathogens.

Last year, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle acquired a newly-constructed 177,000 sf building adjacent to its campus on South Lake Union for $36Million.  The complicated business of moving all of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division (VIDD) labs and faculty from their current building(s) into the new space is scheduled for June of 2012.  While there will be an overall increase in lab square footage, the main advantages of the relocation involve building quality, location, and financial benefits.

In the beginning of August, we published an article about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to encourage 27 interested universities to come up with innovative ideas for high-tech campuses and compete for space in one of three areas in New York City. While Manhattan local news website DNAinfo.com  reports that at an unrelated press conference, Mayor Bloomberg said he is not rejecting the idea that more than one school may win the competition, he also said that up to $100 million in public funding for the project is on the line, so the city will probably work with just one school to begin with.

The University of Alabama in Birmingham runs one of an elite group of Comprehensive Cancer Centers in the United States, as designated by the National Cancer Institute (NCI).  The NCI's Translational Research Program is in charge of administering SPORE awards, which are focused on specific organ sites.  Now UAB is also a SPORE grantee for its brain tumor program, thanks to a recent $2.3M award over three years to its Cancer Center in conjunction with the UAB Division of Neurosurgery. UAB is one of only four institutions to receive a brain-tumor SPORE grant.

November is Diabetes Awarness Month and November 14th is World Diabetes Day. With that we would like to feature Harvard Medical School's Dr. Denise Faustman, who has been awarded the 2011 George and Judith Goldman Angel Award for her biomedical research on a cure for Type 1 diabetes.

Research at the University of Michigan shows that zinc may help alleviate or stop cellular damage from type 2 diabetes. The research appears in the Journal of Molecular Biology.

We’ve noticed a trend in public/private alliances and an increase in translational research facilities being built at university medical school campuses.  Specifically, we've written about these innovative research funding trends in this blog series:

Translational Research (i.e. basic science to clinical science) centers are opening across the country at top medical schools and universities.  These facilities can be largely privately-funded through philanthropy (see Duke and the Coulter Translational Research Center); publicly-funded through the NIH, such the university centers in the CTSA program; or, adjunct to hospital facilities (like Penn Med's new lab facility), may leverage funding through treatment and care channels.  Bringing new technology to market through university translational research means private funding sources (such as VC) are not required to invest in the earlier, riskier, stages of new drug and product development. 

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) undergraduate competition is an annual event sponsored by MIT that challenges teams of undergraduate scientists around the world to design and build novel biological systems from standardized "biological parts".  The 2011 Competition just wrapped up, with the World Championship Jamboree held at MIT over the weekend of Nov. 5-7. Sixty-five teams advanced to the Championships from the three Regional Competitions: the Americas, Asia, and Europe.  The Grand Prize was taken by the team from the University of Washington, in Seattle.

Much in the way a service or police dog may be the advance guard for its human partner in situations where there are unknown safety factors, stem cell therapies performed on companion animals may pave the way for human treatments.  To accomplish that translational goal, North Carolina State University has entered into a collaborative research and clinical endeavor with Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center to accelerate the development of new therapies with promising benefits for people as well as the animals on which they are initially used.

Germany has a long and illustrious history in photo-optics and many of its young scientists come to the U.S., and specifically to the University of California, San Francisco, to do their doctoral and post-doc work involving microscopy.  Such was the case of Dr. Jan Huisken, who developed mSPIM technology while working in the UCSF biochemistry lab of Dr. Didier Stainier as a post-doc from 2005-2009. 

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) recently released a quarterly financial report that showed solid growth for Western Pennsylvania's largest health care provider and one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the US.  It also announced that it will be begin construction on a $300M facility to house its nascent Center for Innovative Science, which "will bring together leading scientists willing to develop bold, new approaches to understanding complex diseases," according to UPMC's president.  In conjunction with its academic partner, the University of Pittsburgh, UPMC is already recruiting nationally for "a scientific leader in genetics and genomics" to head the center.

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.

The Center for Human Genome Variation (CHGV) at Duke University School of Medicine has just received a $25M grant to lead a 5-year, international study to identify the genetic basis of human epilepsy. The grant was awarded as part of a genetics of epilepsy "Center without Walls" initiative funded by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS) to a team of leaders in epilepsy and human genetics from around the world.  Heading that team is Dr. David Goldstein, who is a professor of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology, professor of Biology, and director of the CHGV at Duke.