Science Market Update

Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) recently received $245,115 in new NIH science research funding for a study of the effectiveness of two drugs commonly used to restore heart function in cardiac arrest victims. Researchers will be determining whether the drugs Amiodarone and Lidocaine actually improve cardiac arrest patients' chance of survival, and if so which is more effective. These drugs are both used to restore the loss of rhythmic and regular heartbeats that is a common cause of cardiac arrest, though their overall effectiveness at improving survival among patients has not been well documented. Typically first responders pick one or the other, but their decisions are not based on hard comparative evidence of the drugs' benefits.

Construction began four years ago on Mt. Sinai New York's new 550,000sf Hess Center for Science and Medicine on E. 102nd St., between Madison and Fifth Avenues in East Harlem. Originally due for completion this fall, the new opening date has been pushed into spring of 2013. The 13-storey building is a major advance in the medical institute's larger plan of integrating its clinical and research areas through a strong translational medicine program. Basic research facilities will include wet and dry bench labs, animal facilities, and computer-supported research spaces. There will be lounges, meeting and education rooms, and other open, interactive spaces to encourage collaboration through daily contact. The half million square feet will add to, not replace, Mount Sinai School of Medicine's overall facility space. They have already begun recruiting and hiring new faculty researchers. 

Sometimes it makes more sense to start from scratch and get it right than to try and retrofit and modernize older lab buildings. That's just what Ohio State University in Columbus decided to do for its Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry Building (CBEC). The new 225,000 gsf lab building broke ground last month and will replace 4 older facilities that had deferred maintenance and lacked proper floor-to-floor height, structural dimensions, and environmental stability. The New Koffolt Laboratories will be LEED-certifiable (possibly Silver) and will constitute a substantial upgrade with their science wet labs, computational research spaces, shared core laboratories, instructional spaces, and offices. The $126M project is due to be completed in September 2014.

A vital part of academic research is networking, and one of the ways researchers share their work is at professional conferences. Universities and departments sponsor these conferences where groundbreaking papers are given (usually long before publishing) and colleagues from around the world share insights. The University of California Los Angeles has world-class scientists and other thinkers in its ranks, and Los Angeles seems a natural hub for gathering great minds for this important mode of networking. Unfortunately, UCLA has lacked meeting facilities on par with the caliber of its faculty and research labs. That is about to be remedied, thanks to a commitment by the UC Regents and a generous donor pledge to build a new conference center with a 250-bed hotel right on campus and near existing facilities. According to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block:

There's been a lot of promising news lately on the HIV/AIDS drug and treatment front, and more scientific solutions are being developed in labs every day.  Bringing new vaccine and drug treatments to fruition has been challenging, though, as test animals such as mice do not have immune systems that are similar enough to ours to predict what would really happen in a human model. Now, at bio science research labs at the Ragon Institute in Boston, scientists have overcome that obstacle by engineering a mouse with what is essentially a human immune system. The Ragon study just published in Science Translational Medicine successfully demonstrated that these "humanized mice" do in fact respond like a human does when infected with HIV. This is a big step towards developing and testing new vaccines in the lab.

Construction has begun on a new research building at the University of Oregon, which will house new lab space for the Oregon Research Institute. The expansion of Oregon Research lab space is an important step for this growing institute, which is by far the largest and top funded independent research center in Oregon.

Remember the character of Pigpen in the comic strip Peanuts? He walked around within a cloud of dust and dirt. Well, according to University of California Davis microbiologist Jonathan Eisen, we all live within our own aura of microbes --10 times as many microbial cells as human cells!--and that's probably a very good thing for our health. It sounds counterintuitive at first, but not all microbes are bad. We've come to realize intestinal biota are good for digestion and colon health (among other things), but the outside of our bodies is also host to vast colonies of microbes that are increasingly proving to be vital cohorts of our immune system.

 The University of Colorado already has a terrific medical program at its Anschutz Medical Campus. This April we talked about their groundbreaking efforts against multiple sclerosis. Now, Anschutz Medical is waging war on one of America's greatest enemies: obesity.

Research scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have discovered five rare mutations in an “autism susceptibility gene” that seem to increase the risk of developing an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in boys.  According to an article on Medical Xpress, the number of children diagnosed with autism has recently increased to 1 in 100, so the research now is more relevant than ever.

Oregon State University recently opened a new nutritional sciences building with the help of a record donation from philanthropists Bob and Charlee Moore, founders of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods (photo courtesy of Oregonlive). The new facility was named the Moore Family Center for Whole Grain Foods, Nutrition and Preventive Health in their honor.

University expansion is never uncomplicated, especially in an urban environment where density is high, real estate is ultra-expensive, and development is intensely regulated. Yet new buildings do go up in places like New York City if you have the drive, wealth, and reputation of an institution like Columbia University, which is currently constructing not only new buildings but an entirely new campus to expand its academic and research programs. In addition to the original Morningside Heights location and the Medical School campus in Washington Heights, Columbia has purchased and is building a new campus in the "Manhattanville" neighborhood, stretching from 125th Street to 133rd Street in West Harlem.

[Award-winning, ultramodern and unique Sanford Consortium lab research building]

Medical research building construction is underway at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with high hopes for top level research once the three stages of this project have all been completed. The goal for this project, which together will be called the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research (WIMR), "is to create a new kind of, almost revolutionary, model for how we do medical research," said Dr. Robert Golden, dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham has been awarded a $7 million research grant to continue its leadership in pioneering clinical trials in the treatment of neurofibromatosis 1 and 2 and schwannomatosis, all rare genetic diseases. According to the Birmingham Business Journal, the circumstances of these diseases lead to non-cancerous tumors forming on the nerves and potentially causing blindness, hearing loss, learning disabilities, pain or deformity.

Biomedical science researchers have worked tirelessly at the University of California, Riverside since the discovery of a crucial link involving mice, humans, and Alzheimer's disease. Back in 2006, UCR researchers, in a collaborative effort with the University of South Florida, discovered an interesting connection between the immune system and Alzheimer's disease while experimenting on lab mice. Professor Douglas Ethell, the assistant professor of Biomedical Sciences at UCR, along with the USF's own Professor Gary Arendash of the Johnnie B. Byrd Institute, was instrumental in this find. 

New research at Texas Medical Center is underway at the newly opened  Neurological Sleep Medicine Center in the Memorial Hermann Hospital.  This progress is taking place amidst the tireless construction and restless activity of downtown Houston.

In 1962, the Seattle World's Fair was held in the northwestern capital city. The legacy of that event goes well beyond the iconic Seattle Space Needle (right) and is explored in a panoply of summer and fall educational and entertainment festivities celebrating the 50th Anniversary. One of the "Next50" happenings is an interactive exhibit to highlight the role of Washington State's life science research innovations in addressing global health challenges. If space exploration was the governing dream of the near future in the 1960's, our generation's overriding fascination may be with possibilties inherent in life science research discoveries and their applications for transforming the health of millions of people worldwide in order to lead fuller, longer lives.

How is it that a prominent Rockefeller University professor and director of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior is sought out by a fashion magazine one month, the New York Magazine the next, and a CBS interview just last week? Dr. Leslie Vosshall studies the mechanism of scent recognition in humans on the one hand, and attraction to humans by mosquitos on the other. We still know so little about smell, and even less about why an insect like the mosquito hones in on one of us more often than another, but the Vosshall Lab is adding insight to the genetic basis of olfactory recognition. Given that mosquitos are a global vector for disease, including right here in the U.S., Vosshall's research aims to find out what it is about a particular one of us that excites the little bug to such raptures. If we know that, perhaps we can intervene productively to keep them at bay. As for the fashion magazine (Elle Canada), they wanted an expert on scent to comment on designers' and retailers' new fad for marketing their products with a scent component.

It's summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and in most places that means mosquitos are out for our blood, which wouldn't be much to give up if it weren't for the itchy -- and in many parts of the world, deadly -- package that the tiny insect leaves behind. Plasmodium falciparum is the human malaria pathogen that kills over a million people annually around the world (largely infants, young children and pregnant women, most of them in Africa). One approach to combatting the spread of the disease is to genetically engineer a mosquito that cannot transmit the parasite and yet is able to reproduce with mosquitos that do, in order to infiltrate and alter the population overall to become one that is benign (except for the itching).

ARCHITECT'S RENDERING OF NEW PROTON BEAM THERAPY FACILITY IN ROCHESTER, MINN.(Courtesy of mayoclinic.org)

The first construction of an image by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMRI) by Dr. Paul Lauterbur took place at the University at Stony Brook thirty years ago, and the Stony Brook Chemistry professor went on to win the 2003 Nobel Prize for his work. So it's fitting that another breakthrough in MRI technology is also taking place at the Long Island research university, this time by biomedical engineer Balaji Sitharaman, right, and his team, who have developed a potentially safer and more cost effective MRI contrast agent for improved disease diagnosis and detection. The agent is graphene-based rather than gadolinium-based, and the success of the advanced agent is documented in a recent PLoS ONE article.

Protein research at Michigan State University has lead to the development of a new protein structure which could neutralize flu viruses during an epidemic. The team of international researchers working on the project were lead by Tim Whitehead, assistant professor of materials science and chemical engineering at MSU (image courtesy of MSU).