Science Market Update

Recently, Georgetown University researchers received a $3 million NIH bioresearch grant to open a new collaborative HIV/AIDS research center called the Developmental Center for AIDS Research (D-CFAR).

Traditionally, the only kind of conference with the steam to get a lot of people really worked up and to make headlines has been the sports variety, as in "Buffalo embarrasses Washington for critical conference win" or "Big East releases 2012 conference schedule."  But a scientific conference  with 1000 participants and hundreds of simulcasts by teaching hospitals, medical schools, research institutions, university life science departments, state and federal government agencies, health-oriented corporations and nonprofits across the nation?  Welcome to TEDMED 2012, coming to Washington DC (and a big screen near you) this April 10-13, and generating a lot of buzz in its advance wake.

One of the ways to encourage companies to invest in research is to offer them a tax credit incentive, and that's exactly what many states do, including, soon, Alabama.  If the company does their own research, they get one tax break, but if they have it done by a public research institution like the University of Alabama, they get a much larger break: 15% under Alabama's proposed new law. That's good news for UAB, UAT, and other major research campuses in the state. And the rate may be even higher if Alabama tries to match North Carolina's incentive, which just went up to 20%.

Four years into the current recession, you might expect new building projects to be dwindling on the campus of the University of California San Diego, but you'd be wrong.  Yes, there are buildings that were planned back in the day and already have pre-2008 bond funding in place, but then there are newly-proposed (and approved) projects like the Center for Innovative Therapeutics, which will be an "innovator space" and "entrepreneurial life science hub" for translational research. The 100,000sf facility is slated for a 6.3-acre lot between the Moores Cancer Center and the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology that is part of the UCSD Science Research Park. Funding for the new building has reportedly already been secured and the design process is underway.

[Map of Philadelphia from University City to the Navy Yard, courtesy of PlanPhilly]

The UC Davis Cancer Center was recently recognized as a "comprehensive" center by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This is the most prestigious honor that a cancer center can receive and designates the renamed, UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center as one of the top cancer research institutions in the country.

New research labs and buildings are appearing on-campus at the University of Nevada, Reno.  Recently construction was completed on a building that will be a hub for science research.  The Pennington Health and Science Building is standout among other research buildings on campus, with over 59,000 square feet of laboratory, classroom and office space. Here are some quick highlight points on one of Nevada's most cutting edge research facilities. 

Bioresearch students at the University of Colorado, Boulder will be able to do new in depth research into the conversion of biomass to various chemicals and fuels, thanks to a new bioresearch grant from the NSF. The NSF grant was awarded to the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels, or C2B2, a joint research renewable energy facility used by CU-Boulder, Colorado School of Mines, Colorado State University, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

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.

The 225^th Anniversary of the University of Pittsburgh will be celebrated this year. One of their most notable accomplishments was contributing to the launch of the "Biotech Industry". Herbert Boyer, a Pitt PhD graduate helped discover how to cut and transfer individual genes within the DNA molecule and transfer them  from one organism to another.  Boyer eventually founded Genetech, widely considered one of the first successful biotech companies.

In the David and Goliath world of science research funding, young scientists who lack the experience and PI status to pull in funding from sources like the NIH and NSF now have a new resource at petridish.org.  The website, just launched in a beta version, allows scientists to appeal to ordinary folk for funding to support their research, with typically modest goals of $10,000 or less. The nine projects that debuted on petridish.org are almost all led by PhD candidates, post-docs, and staff researchers from top universities, and most are looking to travel to do data collection for life science projects.  These could be tomorrow's big names in science research, getting innovative about moving their research forward now. 

As one scientist said of her and a colleague's experiment in online crowdfunding for their biology research project (quoted in a New York Times Science article):

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.

Science researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are offering to sequence the DNA of 99 patients with rare genetic diseases in order to find the genetic alterations that made them ill. The new effort, known as the Rare99X Clinical Exome Challenge, will allow patients’ DNA to be decoded at the university’s Genomics and Pathology Services (GPS) at no cost to the patients or advocacy groups who represent them.

There is still no magic pill for the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight, but research into the cellular mechanism of fat production is turning up promising avenues for therapeutics that are closer than you might think.  We mentioned "good brown fat" in a recent article on hormone research at Harvard.  Scientists in the Diabetes Center and the Department of Cell and Tissue Biology at the University of California San Francisco, Parnassus Campus, are also looking at brown fat production as a treatment for obesity. 

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

Thanks to a $15M charitable gift from the Helmsley Trust, Rockefeller University is establishing a new research center to focus on digestive diseases: the Center for Basic and Translational Research on Disorders of the Digestive System. With research faculty from 20 Rockefeller labs working in the fields of immunology, microbiology, cancer biology, and metabolic disease, the collaborative center will support the training of Ph.D students, postdoctoral researchers, and physician-scientists, as well as provide seed grants for early phase projects and funding for the purchase of equipment.

Led by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the six-week MyHeartMap Challenge is a trial science research project that uses crowd-sourcing to locate and gather information about automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) in Philadelphia. The challenge runs from January 31 to March 13, during which time participants can use a free app on their iPhones or Android phones to take pictures and document the location of publicly accessible AEDs in Philadelphia.

A dangerous situation presents itself when bacteria evolve defenses against antibiotics. Experience has shown us that it can be a discouraging catastrophe for public health when a new drug-resistant strain, or a gene that confers resistance, shows up in a new place, as happened when the NDM-1 gene (which is resistant to up to 14 drugs) showed up in New Delhi drinking water. Scientists are searching for a way to defeat that debilitating resistance, however, and every so often there's encouraging news: On February 4, North Carolina State University chemistry researchers published a study in which they said that they’ve found a molecule that makes antibiotics 16 times more effective against recently identified antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.”

Cornell University has recently created the Kevin M. McGovern Family Center for Venture Development in the Life Sciences and announced the center’s first occupant, Cornell’s native Glycobia Inc. According to INDY, the center makes its home on Ithaca’s campus in Weill Hall and was founded to help promising Cornell life science companies created by inventors at the university’s four campuses to develop their technologies, improve their businesses, and prepare them for substantial investment to help them grow. The center will work with regional, state and national leaders to help startups advance their businesses in a way where they will have important effects on the economy and the field of life sciences.

The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the largest, most successful established biotech hubs in the US, thanks in part to the presence of 3 of the world's top universities: UCSF, UC Berkeley, and Stanford.  Strong on intellectual capital, the area has been notoriously short of real estate since developers were ordered to stop filling in the Bay back in the 60's.  Fortunately, as manufacturing waned, industrial land became available for redevelopment as high-tech R&D lab space, which is how UCSF's Mission Bay campus eventually came to be.  Across the Bay to the East, bayfront industrial property is seeing a similar repurposing, with particularly mushroom-like life science growth in the little city of Emeryville, though also in neighboring Berkeley and Richmond.

The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has been producing top scientists for a long time.  One notable alum, who went on to found the research science company SAIC, has recently donated $15 million to his alma mater, ensuring that Michigan will continue to train and support future generations of innovative engineers.  In honor of this generous gift, the University will name its new engineering building on the North Campus after the donor and his wife, hence the Bob and Betty Beyster Building for Computer Science and Engineering.  This isn't Robert Beyster's first gift to UM Ann Arbor either. In recent years, he has contributed toward research in biofuels, cloud computing and security, and gene therapeutics. He has also funded a class on employee ownership though the Center for Entrepreneurship.  Michigan has one of the top engineering programs in the country.

Dr. Jonathan Fielding and his wife, Karin Fielding, have donated a generous gift valued at $50 million to the UCLA School of Public Health. The gift is the greatest in the school’s 50-year history, and in appreciation of this, the school will be renamed the UCLA Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health.