Science Market Update

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is doing very well launching bioscience startups and attracting young entrepreneurs to set up shop near the sprawling campus on Lake Mendota. The University Research Park is so popular there's a huge Phase II addition several years in the planning and due to break ground any day. Funding for university spinoffs, like the NIH's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants, are helping to fuel Madison's bioscience economy too, as a team from the Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering just proved in securing $362,489 towards developing its novel advanced biomaterials for wound healing and surgical applications.

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.

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.”