Science Market Update

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.

We’ve been writing a lot lately about real estate and the complexities of urban life science expansion.  In terms of ingenuity and multi-agency collaboration, Portland’s expansion into the South Waterfront area in order to expand Oregon Health & Science University’s capacity and facilitate collaboration with other Oregon universities is uniquely impressive. Recognizing long ago that OHSU’s location offered limited growth opportunity in terms of surrounding real estate, officials looked down the hill to Portland’s South Waterfront district, and at a derelict salvage yard in particular.  There was space there, between two bridges, but would it be a valuable expansion if researchers and students couldn’t get between the two campuses easily? How to convince the principal players that the locale would work?

Last year, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle acquired a newly-constructed 177,000 sf building adjacent to its campus on South Lake Union for $36Million.  The complicated business of moving all of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division (VIDD) labs and faculty from their current building(s) into the new space is scheduled for June of 2012.  While there will be an overall increase in lab square footage, the main advantages of the relocation involve building quality, location, and financial benefits.

You know there’s been a paradigm shift in the world when complicated biomolecular problems are solved by gamers, as in the recent, much-reported case of an AIDS protein solution worked out by Foldit players in a crowdsourcing research challenge posed by scientists at the University of Washington.  In the longrun, the most significant part of this remarkable story may be the experiment itself and the implications it has for the way we think about work and play, and how that might influence the way we approach future research challenges.  UW computer game scientists and biochemists developed the online game Foldit to see if non-scientist gamers could be taught enough science and engaged long enough to work out a scientific problem.  And it turns out they can. 

Despite 400 million years of evolutionary success, amphibians are dying out, thanks to habitat loss, increased levels of UV radiation, invasive species, climate change, emerging infectious diseases, and agricultural contaminants. These factors all make the frog's life and that of his fellow cold-blooded tetrapods harder and harder. Realistically, it's nearly impossible to address most of the factors contributing to his endangerment in the time frame needed to stave off extinction. 

The NIH has just announced that the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) consortium of seven US medical research institutions has received an additional $25M in funding for Phase II of a series of projects to study how genetic information in patients' medical records can be used to improve their care.  As genome sequencing becomes increasingly affordable and more widely done, translational research is needed to show physicians how they might respond to indicators of genetic predisposition to disease in their treatment programs.  The eMERGE network was formed in 2007 "to develop, disseminate, and apply approaches to research that combine DNA biorepositories with electronic medical record (EMR) systems for large-scale, high-throughput genetic research," according to the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) branch of the NIH.

If you're in a modern building with an HVAC system, you probably think of it as a controlled environment: air, relatively clean, either warm or cold depending on the setting, is pumped in for your respiratory benefit.  Yet hospitals and schools are some of the worst places to go if you don't want to get sick, even if you never touch a single surface.  That's because the air is full of trillions of microbes, and buildings (any buildings) host their own complex ecosystems which we're just now starting to study.  Researchers in this relatively new field include biologists as well as architects who are working together to understand the "built environment microbiome."  The University of Oregon's BIOBE Center (Biology and the Built Environment) is a hub for this research into what makes a building good for human health, or not. 

The NSF has just announced funding for a new program to establish four Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) with over $70M in grants.  One of the four universities chosen to participate in the program is the University of Washington, which will receive $18.5M over the next five years for its ERC for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (ERC/SNE).  Researchers will be designing and testing devices to restore or augment the body's capabilities for sensation and movement.  UW's Neurobotics Lab will take a lead in the ERC/SNE, along with biologists and scientists focused on human health.

The $62.5 million Linus Pauling Science Center on the corner of 29th and Campus Way in Corvallis, Oregon, is having its grand opening on Friday, October 14, 2011.  The new 105,000-square-foot building will house the Linus Pauling Institute, chemists from the College of Science, and contain classroom and laboratory space for students and researchers studying chemistry, biology, and the life sciences.  It is the largest donor-supported building project in the history of Oregon State University.  In addition to providing building funds, some 2,600 other donors have made gifts totaling more than $21 million to support the educational and research programs that will be housed in the building.