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.
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Tags: University of California Davis, Diabetes, Southwest, California, University of California, Autism, BioResearch Product Faire Event, BRPF, Sacramento Campus
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.
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Tags: Bioresearch, UOr, Northwest, New research facilities, University of Oregon, BioResearch Product Faire Event, OR, innovative solution, Eugene, new construction, construction
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.
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Tags: University of Michigan, Midwest, Bioresearch, cancer research, nanotechnology, genome research, genomic medicine, 2012, Ann Arbor, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Funding, Research Funding, Conference, MI, science event, scientific conference, science current event, scientific events, UMich, Cancer Center, science research funding
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.
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Tags: CA, cell biology, Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Southwest, 2012, Berkeley, BioResearch Product Faire Event, National Lab, UC Berkeley, UCBerk, scientific instruments
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.
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Tags: CA, 2013, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, genomic research, Southwest, 2012, Berkeley, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Funding, Genomics, NIH, biotech solutions, NSF, National Lab, UC Berkeley, UCBerk
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.
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Tags: Utah, gene patenting, DNA Sequencing, genome research, genomic medicine, Southwest, Life science branding, Genomics, Life Science Research Market, Univ of Utah
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.
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Tags: Washington DC, Northeast, Medical Research, Event, current science event, scientific conference, scientific conferences
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%.
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Tags: New research facilities, Alabama, University of Alabama Birmingham, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Funding, Birmingham, Southern Region
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.
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Tags: University of California San Diego, New research facilities, Southwest, California, San Diego, UCSD, UC San Diego, California Research Conference, La Jolla, Biotechnology Vendor Showcase, new construction, BVS
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.
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Tags: Midwest, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, university research park, Funding, chemistry researchers, innovative solution, chemical supply, laboratory chemicals, NSF, lab chemical