Science Market Update

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is a branch of the NIH, and they administer the ENCODE project, which stands for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. Established in 2003, the goal of ENCODE is to create a comprehensive catalog of functional genomic elements. Towards that end, they have just awarded a further $10.5M in grants to 10 research institutions with investigators working in three main areas:

Discovery of Functional Elements

Providing lab equipment for the research marketplace is a fine dance between having the right solution for the researchers needs, (fit); communicating the capabilities and limitations of the equipment (education); and establishing that the product will do what is promised and that the company building the product will stand behind its product (trust).

The National Eye Institute (NEI) has just awarded a major grant to a team of three scientists from the Scripps Institute and the University of California San Diego to develop a novel treatment for diabetic retinopathy and other forms of macular degeneration. The optical research investigators are:

Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medical College, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center are not only neighbors along Manhattan's East River Drive, they're research collaborators in the Tri-Institutional Stem Cell Initiative (Tri-SCI). Established in 2005 with a gift from the Starr Foundation, that same charitable organization has just committed another $50M to stem cell research at the three adjacent campuses. In addition to funding researchers and laboratory equipment, Tri-SCI provides support for 3 research core facilities for the derivation, characterization and maintenance of current and new human embryonic stem cell lines.

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.

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.

Are you looking for a little more attention for your lab products?  Strong visual aids and great graphics can dramatically impact the outcome while exhibiting at an event.  The image below is from one of our Biotechnology Vendor Showcase™ events, presents a great example of how using strong visuals can draw researchers to an exhibit space.  Notice the eyes on the poster are positioned at approximate eye level to the viewer.  In addition to this, the company builds on the trust theme with the over-head title.  Knowing your audience always helps.  Take a moment to think about  who might stop to look twice at a young child's face... What would make your target audience stop in their tracks?

For those of you who don't know us well, we are a small family owned business with a drive to help those in the research industry get ahead. Like other small family owed businesses, our resources are often more limited than our vision, and like other entrepreneuriall businesses,  that doesn't stop us from trying to make things work better, faster, and easier whenever we can.  In this business, technology is our friend. 

University of Cincinnati cancer researchers made progress by developing a new chemotherapy delivery agent that could significantly reduce the side effects experienced by patients.  Although chemotherapy is one of the most effective ways of treating cancer and has improved the recovery possibilities for many patients, it also causes many of those treated to experience severe side effects.

The Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building on the East Campus of the University of Colorado Boulder is already welcoming researchers to their new labs and offices, and on April 26 there will be an official dedication ceremony for the 330,000sf innovative life science facility. While the university is still waiting for state funding to construct a fifth wing for teaching space, the current building is scheduled to be fully occupied by June. As we reported in a widely-read earlier blog on this much-anticipated research complex, one of the key tenants will be the Biofrontiers Institute, formerly the CIMB. Joining them are the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Division of Biochemistry.

The 29th Semiannual Los Angeles Biotechnology Vendor Showase™ Event (BVS) at UCLA on April 5th, 2012 was a success with close to 600 researchers looking at a wide variety of new products.  Attendees had the opportunity to investigate the latest technology, enjoy a free catered lunch, and take fun Science Ninja photos!

Protein researcher Christopher Jaroniec, associate professor of chemistry at Ohio State University (image courtesy of OSU), has developed a new form of laboratory imaging equipment that can can construct 3D models of protein structures.

If you watch the evening news in Northern California, it's not unusual to hear the results of studies being done at Sacramento's UC Davis Medical Center campus, especially if those results are raising eyebrows. But an autism study out of the M.I.N.D. Institute at UCDMC has gone national recently, appearing on dozens of media outlets, as well as in Monday's issue of the journal Pediatrics.  The news? Research study results showing a corellation between a mother's obesity during pregnancy and increased risk for autism in her child. More specifically, women with metabolic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and hypertension were 1.6 times more likely to have children with autism spectrum disorders than healthy women.

The University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus has long been a leader in understanding Multiple Sclerosis (MS) with numerous clinical trials and essential basic research. Now the University plans to create the translational Research Laboratory at the Rocky Mountain MS Center, which will transform its investigation into treatment for the disease that will directly benefit patients.

The University of Oregon is poised to celebrate completion of Phase II building construction on its Lokey Science Complex on the Eugene campus this fall with the opening of the $65M Lewis Integrative Science Building. The 100,000sf science building will have fully one-third of its space devoted to labs and will be home to strategic research clusters related to the human brain, molecular biology, nanotechnology, and solar energy. It will bring together researchers from across the spectrum of brain research from cognitive development to rehabilitation as well as molecular biologists studying cancer and stem cells and materials scientists working in green nanotechnology and solar energy. The Lewis Building is expected to earn LEED platinum certification, and it will be the most expensive science facility ever built at the University of Oregon. The fundraising effort is nearing completion and labs will be filling with new equipment and supplies soon in preparation for the fall move-in.

There's been a lot of news coming out of Chicago this week from the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). Two announcements concerning prostate cancer research are especially worth broadcasting. An Ann Arbor pathologist, Arul M. Chinnaiyan, of the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, will be leading a "dream team" of specialists from 5 of the top cancer research institutes in the world in a $10M, 3-year research project titled “Precision Therapy for Advanced Prostate Cancer.” The funding comes from AACR partner, Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), and the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF). Heading up the team with Dr. Chinnaiyan is Dr. Charles L. Sawyers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

The smooth and efficient functioning of any system necessarily requires a mechanism for recognizing and removing components that have served their purpose and are no longer needed, in order to make way for ones that are.  It's waste disposal, and at the cellular level it's the important activity of proteasomes that maintain cellular health by identifying and degrading proteins that have been targeted as obsolete or damaged. (To put this in perspective, consider that at any given moment a human cell typically contains about 100,000 different proteins.) This housekeeping function of proteasomes is critical to a broad range of vital biochemical processes, including transcription, DNA repair, and the immune defense system. Since the proteasome process was only first described in 2004 (by Nobel Prize-winning chemists), our understanding of its mechanics has been limited.

The 1000 Genomes Project is an international genomic research and data collection effort that has produced "a deep catalog of human genetic variation" for public research use. Now, thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the White House's recently-announced Big Data Research and Development Initiative, the 1000 Genomes data is available gratis on the AWS cloud.  In reality, there are over 1700 genome profiles in the demographically-diverse study, and all that data takes up about 200 terabytes of memory, according to a New York Times article on the cloud bonanza. So even though researchers could download the data free to their own computers from 1000 Genomes directly before, it's something you really don't want to do, even if you have that kind of memory (re: 200TB).  Instead, you'll likely be better off accessing the data through AMS and paying them to crunch numbers for you, which probably explains why AWS has decided to engage in this bit of philanthropy.  Future profit, plus their preeminence as a computational resource in the brave new world of Big Data.

Bioscience researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota are taking a trip all the way to Mt. Everest to study the effects of high altitude on the bodies of climbers.

Last year in a blog of ours on the future of genome sequencing we referenced a July appeals court ruling that protected Utah's Myriad Genetics' patent on two genes known to be indicators of breast cancer risk.  Now, in a recent Supreme Court ruling on that same case, the previous ruling has been overturned and the case returned to the lower court for rehearing.  This decision follows another important high court ruling on the patentability of genes: Mayo vs. Prometheus Labs (San Diego), which also just ruled against a company's right to hold patents on human genes, and which was quoted as a precedent in the latest Myriad judgement.