[Source: The Arizona Republic] - Gov. Janet Napolitano's selection for a job in Washington, D.C., may be secure, but her vision of a research-based economy in Arizona is no sure thing.
Napolitano has been a key figure in the state's push to foster the biosciences since she became governor in 2003. She played a critical role in securing funding for the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and establishing Science Foundation Arizona.
But if she takes over the reins of the Homeland Security Department in Barack Obama's administration, she will leave Arizona as the state faces a $1.2 billion budget shortfall this year and the Legislature is poised to make sharp cuts.
Fiscal conservatives may see biotechnology programs as a ripe target, which is making many bioscience and research boosters nervous. They insist that cutting research programs now would be a mistake.
"If this economic downturn does anything, it shows we must diversify our economy," said John Murphy, president and chief executive officer of the Flinn Foundation in Phoenix. "The investments that have been made should be sustained."
The state's push to grow a bioscience economy has been ambitious.
Arizona and Phoenix combined have committed more than $1 billion to bioscience and research initiatives this decade.
A large chunk has paid for new research labs such as the TGen building in downtown Phoenix, the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University in Tempe and Bio5 Institute at the University of Arizona. The Legislature this year also approved a stimulus package that would provide $470 million to expand the campus of the UA College of Medicine, in partnership with ASU, in downtown Phoenix.
Science Foundation Arizona secured a $25 million annual commitment over five years from the state Legislature provided that it raises an equal amount from private donors.
The funding commitment is subject to review each year, and groups such as the Arizona Federation of Taxpayers have targeted the foundation for cuts in past years.
The nonprofit foundation uses the state money to fund grants for everything from science education in high school to new research projects that cement ties between university researchers and large corporations in Arizona.
William Harris, the foundation's chief executive officer, said the group already has secured its matching private funds for 2009 from a large base of donors. Harris realizes that Napolitano has been the foundation's prime backer, but he also has high hopes that successor Jan Brewer, a fiscal conservative, will support the foundation's goals of strengthening the state's economy through targeted investments in science and research.
"We have to control our own destiny and get out of this ditch we're in," said Harris, who modeled the foundation after a similar group he led in Ireland. "We do that by diversifying our economy and strengthening our education in Arizona."
Climate change
Napolitano's departure could also portend a major shift in policy for one of her biggest local priorities: climate change.
Environmental groups, elected officials and other political watchers say that a new Republican administration would likely significantly reduce Arizona's involvement in the Western Climate Initiative.
Napolitano was a founding member of the regional effort, which brings several Western states and a handful of Canadian provinces together to limit and reduce man-made greenhouse gases, among other things.
"As far as what I know about Jan Brewer, I would say she is probably not going to go along with (the WCI)," said Republican Rep. Ray Barnes, who serves as chairman of the House Environment Committee, adding that other priorities, such as dealing with the state's billion-dollar budget deficit, would likely be higher on the new governor's to-do list.
Education
Educators agree that Napolitano's most substantial contributions were providing free full-day kindergarten, allocating new money to rebuild dilapidated buildings on state university campuses and preventing cuts to existing education budgets.
With Napolitano's expected departure, some education leaders worry about keeping the gains made under her leadership, but many expect Brewer to be a similar, practical politician. Brewer has not been willing to talk about her role as governor or her education agenda.
"I'm sure Miss Brewer will have the best interests of the state at heart and a good agenda at all levels," said Fred Boice, president of the Arizona State Board of Regents, which oversees the state's three universities.
Showing posts with label Science Foundation Arizona. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science Foundation Arizona. Show all posts
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Science Foundation Arizona Invests to Increase Regional Biomedical Capacity
[Source: SFAz] - Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz), an Arizona nonprofit, private/public partnership helping strengthen the state's research infrastructure to spur new technology sector growth, awarded a $9 million investment grant to the Critical Path Institute (C-Path), a Tucson-based nonprofit coalition that works to streamline and accelerate the development of crucial drug therapies for major diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
C-Path was formed as part of the FDA's Critical Path Initiative of 2004 calling for safer and more rapid U.S. drug development. The organization is seeking to reduce the high failure rate of bringing lifesaving new drugs to market along with the billions in excess dollars spent each year in the current bottleneck process. Today, only 5 percent of new medicines entering clinical testing ever succeed; C-Path plans to lift that success rate to 95 percent saving significant dollars and lives.
Globally, the need for efficiently introducing new pharmaceuticals is urgent. "Without breakthroughs, we face a medical tsunami of healthcare costs posing immense economic and social threats," stated Dr. Raymond L. Woosley, C-Path's president and CEO. "In the United States alone, the cost of coping with one debilitating disease, Alzheimer's, is $170 billion and is projected in the near future to reach $1 trillion or 8 percent of today's total U.S. economy. C-Path acts as the neutral third party between the FDA, private industry and the public resulting in decreased time, costs, and failure rates in pharmaceutical product development."
In southern Arizona, the SFAz grant is expected to have a continued impact on the state's rise as a center for medical and pharmaceutical sector growth as industry collaborators are slated to match an additional $18 million over four years. Three of the fifteen companies that C-Path has partnered in this consortium including Roche Ventana, Sanofi-aventis and Merck - through its affiliate High Throughput Genomics - now have major research facilities in southern Arizona. In addition, C-Path has formed alliances that include nearly all the major drug corporations in the United States and Europe.
"This initiative is the first of its kind in the U.S. and represents a major strategic move in positioning Arizona to be highly competitive and of interest to the pharmaceutical community. With C-Path's success, the Tucson area, in particular, has potential to increase substantially its biomedical capacity with innovation, spin-off companies and a growing base of knowledge workers," added Dr. William C. Harris, president and CEO of SFAz."
(SFAz), established in 2006, supports communications technology, sustainable systems including renewable energies, and biomedical infrastructure development to capitalize on the state's growing research base by spurring business opportunities, attracting investment, and creating new technology sector growth.
Tim Bee, Arizona State Senate President summarized the impact of the grant, "C-Path is providing the infrastructure and scientific expertise to provide a faster and less expensive pathway to market for crucially important drugs. And, this benefits not only Arizonans and the state's economic diversity, but helps a lot of people in combating diseases around the world."
C-Path was formed as part of the FDA's Critical Path Initiative of 2004 calling for safer and more rapid U.S. drug development. The organization is seeking to reduce the high failure rate of bringing lifesaving new drugs to market along with the billions in excess dollars spent each year in the current bottleneck process. Today, only 5 percent of new medicines entering clinical testing ever succeed; C-Path plans to lift that success rate to 95 percent saving significant dollars and lives.
Globally, the need for efficiently introducing new pharmaceuticals is urgent. "Without breakthroughs, we face a medical tsunami of healthcare costs posing immense economic and social threats," stated Dr. Raymond L. Woosley, C-Path's president and CEO. "In the United States alone, the cost of coping with one debilitating disease, Alzheimer's, is $170 billion and is projected in the near future to reach $1 trillion or 8 percent of today's total U.S. economy. C-Path acts as the neutral third party between the FDA, private industry and the public resulting in decreased time, costs, and failure rates in pharmaceutical product development."
In southern Arizona, the SFAz grant is expected to have a continued impact on the state's rise as a center for medical and pharmaceutical sector growth as industry collaborators are slated to match an additional $18 million over four years. Three of the fifteen companies that C-Path has partnered in this consortium including Roche Ventana, Sanofi-aventis and Merck - through its affiliate High Throughput Genomics - now have major research facilities in southern Arizona. In addition, C-Path has formed alliances that include nearly all the major drug corporations in the United States and Europe.
"This initiative is the first of its kind in the U.S. and represents a major strategic move in positioning Arizona to be highly competitive and of interest to the pharmaceutical community. With C-Path's success, the Tucson area, in particular, has potential to increase substantially its biomedical capacity with innovation, spin-off companies and a growing base of knowledge workers," added Dr. William C. Harris, president and CEO of SFAz."
(SFAz), established in 2006, supports communications technology, sustainable systems including renewable energies, and biomedical infrastructure development to capitalize on the state's growing research base by spurring business opportunities, attracting investment, and creating new technology sector growth.
Tim Bee, Arizona State Senate President summarized the impact of the grant, "C-Path is providing the infrastructure and scientific expertise to provide a faster and less expensive pathway to market for crucially important drugs. And, this benefits not only Arizonans and the state's economic diversity, but helps a lot of people in combating diseases around the world."
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Science Foundation Arizona Invests to Increase Arizona Biomedical Capacity
[Source: BUSINESS WIRE] - The Critical Path Institute (C-Path), a Tucson-based nonprofit that works with the FDA and the biomedical industry to streamline the development of crucial new medicines, has been awarded a $9 million investment grant from Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz). These funds will result in better testing methods that accelerate the development of therapies for major diseases, including lung cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
C-Path was formed as part of the FDA's 2004 Critical Path Initiative that called for safer and more rapid U.S. medical product development. The organization is seeking to reduce the high failure rate in bringing lifesaving new drugs to market by improving the current slow and often unreliable process, thereby saving lives and billions of dollars each year. Today, even after extensive laboratory research, only 5 percent of new medicines that enter human testing ever reach the market. C-Path plans to lift that success rate to 95 percent and shorten the process to less than three years.
Globally, the need for efficiently introducing new pharmaceuticals is urgent. "Without breakthroughs, we face a medical tsunami of healthcare costs posing immense economic and social threats," stated Dr. Raymond L. Woosley, C-Path's president and CEO. "In the United States alone, the annual cost of caring for patients with just one disease, Alzheimer's, is $150 billion, a staggering figure that is projected to reach $1 trillion, or 8 percent of today's total U.S. economy. C-Path, acting as a neutral third party between the FDA and private industry, enables the sharing of knowledge that can decrease time, costs, and failure rates in pharmaceutical product development."
The SFAz grant is expected to have a continued impact on the state's rise as a center for biomedical and pharmaceutical sector growth. C-Path has formed partnerships that include nearly all the major drug corporations in the United States and Europe. Three of the 18 companies that C-Path is working with -- Roche's Ventana Medical Systems, sanofi-aventis and Merck (through its affiliate High Throughput Genomics) -- now have major research facilities in southern Arizona.
"C-Path is the first initiative of its kind, and represents a major strategic move in positioning Arizona to be highly competitive and of interest to the global pharmaceutical community. With C-Path's success, the Tucson area has the potential to increase substantially its biomedical capacity with innovation, spin-off companies and a growing base of knowledge workers," added Dr. William C. Harris,president and CEO of SFAz.
Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz) is a public/private partnership established in 2006 that supports communications technology, sustainable systems including renewable energies, and biomedical infrastructure development to capitalize on the state's growing research base by spurring business opportunities, attracting investment and creating new technology sector growth.
Critical Path Institute (C-Path), headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, was established in 2005 as a publicly funded, nonprofit research and education institute to enable and lead collaborations among scientists from the FDA, industry and academia. C-Path's mission is to help implement the FDA's Critical Path Initiative by developing faster, safer and smarter pathways to new medical products.
C-Path was formed as part of the FDA's 2004 Critical Path Initiative that called for safer and more rapid U.S. medical product development. The organization is seeking to reduce the high failure rate in bringing lifesaving new drugs to market by improving the current slow and often unreliable process, thereby saving lives and billions of dollars each year. Today, even after extensive laboratory research, only 5 percent of new medicines that enter human testing ever reach the market. C-Path plans to lift that success rate to 95 percent and shorten the process to less than three years.
Globally, the need for efficiently introducing new pharmaceuticals is urgent. "Without breakthroughs, we face a medical tsunami of healthcare costs posing immense economic and social threats," stated Dr. Raymond L. Woosley, C-Path's president and CEO. "In the United States alone, the annual cost of caring for patients with just one disease, Alzheimer's, is $150 billion, a staggering figure that is projected to reach $1 trillion, or 8 percent of today's total U.S. economy. C-Path, acting as a neutral third party between the FDA and private industry, enables the sharing of knowledge that can decrease time, costs, and failure rates in pharmaceutical product development."
The SFAz grant is expected to have a continued impact on the state's rise as a center for biomedical and pharmaceutical sector growth. C-Path has formed partnerships that include nearly all the major drug corporations in the United States and Europe. Three of the 18 companies that C-Path is working with -- Roche's Ventana Medical Systems, sanofi-aventis and Merck (through its affiliate High Throughput Genomics) -- now have major research facilities in southern Arizona.
"C-Path is the first initiative of its kind, and represents a major strategic move in positioning Arizona to be highly competitive and of interest to the global pharmaceutical community. With C-Path's success, the Tucson area has the potential to increase substantially its biomedical capacity with innovation, spin-off companies and a growing base of knowledge workers," added Dr. William C. Harris,president and CEO of SFAz.
Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz) is a public/private partnership established in 2006 that supports communications technology, sustainable systems including renewable energies, and biomedical infrastructure development to capitalize on the state's growing research base by spurring business opportunities, attracting investment and creating new technology sector growth.
Critical Path Institute (C-Path), headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, was established in 2005 as a publicly funded, nonprofit research and education institute to enable and lead collaborations among scientists from the FDA, industry and academia. C-Path's mission is to help implement the FDA's Critical Path Initiative by developing faster, safer and smarter pathways to new medical products.
Monday, November 3, 2008
C-Path to ease process for diagnostic-test OK
[Source: Dan Sullivan, ARIZONA DAILY STAR] - The Tucson-based Critical Path Institute is working to create a standard-setting body to evaluate the performance of diagnostic medical tests before their submission to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
This project has been approved by the C-Path board of directors, and initial funding for the project has come from a $2.16 million grant from Science Foundation Arizona. U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., has also backed appropriation of another $2 million in the 2009 fiscal year budget to supplement the grant from SFAz.
C-Path has hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to create a business plan for the new non-profit agency, and has received a federal trademark for its name, United States Diagnostic Standards.
This week, C-Path started approaching diagnostic companies to get commitments. The drug institute also is planning a new facility for the project and hiring employees.
To get a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it may take 15 years and $1 billion, but the process is well-defined, according to Dr. Raymond Woosley, the president and CEO of C-Path. However, there is no such pathway for diagnostic tests, he said.
Companies like Ventana Medical Systems, which markets tests for cancer, have had difficulties getting these tests through the FDA system, Woosley said.
United States Diagnostic Standards, or USDS, will help streamline the process, filling a national need to advance the field of personalized medicine — the evolving process of matching patients to specific treatments based on genetic data.
"We think this is a huge unmet need, and, by filling it, will create jobs in Arizona, but more importantly it will really break the logjam so that we can get personalized medicine available to people in a more reliable fashion," Woosley said.
Woosley pointed to institutions like United States Pharmacopeia (USP) and Underwriter Laboratories that have set standards in their industries and have seals of approval.
"We don't have an Underwriter Laboratories or USP for diagnostic tests," Woosley said. "So that's why we got a grant from SFAz to see if such an entity would be viable, and then start it in Arizona."
The new standards agency would take a product closer to final FDA approval by establishing performance standards for each test.
Initially, USDS is working closely with Ventana Medical Systems to establish standards for a diagnostic test the company has developed for lung cancer.
The business plan for United States Diagnostic Standards calls for a further $24 million in investment over the next five years for USDS to break even, Woosley said. He estimates it will be six to nine months before the facility is operating.
"It's not a business because if it started making a profit, people wouldn't value our seal of approval," he said.
The non-profit status of USDS and its neutrality are essential for companies and the FDA to trust the results it produces, according to Dr. Gary Greenburg, a program officer at SFAz.
Greenburg sees this new national lab as very important to Arizona because it will raise the profile of Arizona and Southern Arizona in the diagnostic and bioindustry community and hopefully spin off new technology as a result.
"SFAz believes that the USDS will also help attract high-wage professionals to Southern Arizona, as well as acting as a magnet to attract and foster diagnostic and biotechnology companies," Greenburg said in an e-mail.
This project has been approved by the C-Path board of directors, and initial funding for the project has come from a $2.16 million grant from Science Foundation Arizona. U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., has also backed appropriation of another $2 million in the 2009 fiscal year budget to supplement the grant from SFAz.
C-Path has hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to create a business plan for the new non-profit agency, and has received a federal trademark for its name, United States Diagnostic Standards.
This week, C-Path started approaching diagnostic companies to get commitments. The drug institute also is planning a new facility for the project and hiring employees.
To get a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it may take 15 years and $1 billion, but the process is well-defined, according to Dr. Raymond Woosley, the president and CEO of C-Path. However, there is no such pathway for diagnostic tests, he said.
Companies like Ventana Medical Systems, which markets tests for cancer, have had difficulties getting these tests through the FDA system, Woosley said.
United States Diagnostic Standards, or USDS, will help streamline the process, filling a national need to advance the field of personalized medicine — the evolving process of matching patients to specific treatments based on genetic data.
"We think this is a huge unmet need, and, by filling it, will create jobs in Arizona, but more importantly it will really break the logjam so that we can get personalized medicine available to people in a more reliable fashion," Woosley said.
Woosley pointed to institutions like United States Pharmacopeia (USP) and Underwriter Laboratories that have set standards in their industries and have seals of approval.
"We don't have an Underwriter Laboratories or USP for diagnostic tests," Woosley said. "So that's why we got a grant from SFAz to see if such an entity would be viable, and then start it in Arizona."
The new standards agency would take a product closer to final FDA approval by establishing performance standards for each test.
Initially, USDS is working closely with Ventana Medical Systems to establish standards for a diagnostic test the company has developed for lung cancer.
The business plan for United States Diagnostic Standards calls for a further $24 million in investment over the next five years for USDS to break even, Woosley said. He estimates it will be six to nine months before the facility is operating.
"It's not a business because if it started making a profit, people wouldn't value our seal of approval," he said.
The non-profit status of USDS and its neutrality are essential for companies and the FDA to trust the results it produces, according to Dr. Gary Greenburg, a program officer at SFAz.
Greenburg sees this new national lab as very important to Arizona because it will raise the profile of Arizona and Southern Arizona in the diagnostic and bioindustry community and hopefully spin off new technology as a result.
"SFAz believes that the USDS will also help attract high-wage professionals to Southern Arizona, as well as acting as a magnet to attract and foster diagnostic and biotechnology companies," Greenburg said in an e-mail.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Making Flies Sick Reveals New Role For Growth Factors In Immunity
[Source: ScienceDaily] - Salmonella infection is not a positive experience. However, by infecting the common laboratory fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster with a Salmonella strain known for causing humans intestinal grief, researchers in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University have shed light on some key cell regulatory processes – with broad implications for understanding embryonic development, immune function and congenital diseases in humans.
Associate Professor Stuart Newfeld and laboratory coordinator Joel Frandsen, along with colleagues in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Biodesign Institute at ASU, released their findings online on September 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Strong parallels exist in the regulation of immune system function in animals as diverse as flies, mice, and humans. Newfeld's own investigative connection between fly and human immune systems came about through his research with a well-studied family of proteins called Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMP).
"Bones and flies?" one might scoff. These proteins are named because of their involvement in the formation of bone and cartilage in humans; however, they have also been linked to many other aspects of early development and to essential cellular processes in virtually all animals.
One type of morphogenetic protein, intensively studied in fruit flies and the focus of the published study by the Newfeld group, is the growth factor Decapentaplegic (Dpp). Dpp acts as a hormonal signaling device, binding to cells and communicating, for instance, whether to divide or to stop growing or even to become a different type of cell.
Studies have shown that Dpp in the fruit fly and its counterparts in other animals have diverged little from one another in evolutionary time. Although there are tiny changes in the genes that code for this protein from animal to animal, the morphogenetic proteins are still structurally and functionally very similar – a testament to their crucial role as signaling devices in all animals, including humans.
"Dpp from flies has been shown to be completely functional in mammalian cells, and the human version of Dpp – BMP 2/4 – also works just fine when injected into flies," explains Newfeld.
Newfeld's research builds on earlier observations made by Aaron Johnson, then a graduate student in the Newfeld lab, now a postdoctoral fellow with University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Tex. Johnson first observed that fruit fly mutants that lacked the ability to generate Dpp protein in one tissue (at a particular time in embryonic development) suffered from excess cell growth in the neighboring tissue. The lack of communication between the tissues resulted in uncontrolled cell growth, in this case in the heart. "Dpp mutant flies have large hearts which are stiffer and beat inefficiently," says Newfeld.
Johnson went on to uncover Dpp's role in heart development. He discovered that when the embryo is nearly ready to hatch, Dpp signals tell heart cells to stop growing. These instructions also insure a proper boundary between the heart and surrounding muscle tissue.
While these were fundamentally exciting discoveries, Newfeld made them even more so when he extended Johnson's project. Since both the heart and the lymph glands in the fly originate from the same tissue (cardiogenic mesoderm), he postulated that when heart development goes awry in fruit fly Dpp mutants that the lymph glands might also be affected.
"One of the functions of the lymph gland in fruit flies is to produce blood cells," notes Newfeld. "This is in contrast to humans where the processes take place in our bone marrow."
With support from Science Foundation Arizona, Frandsen built on Johnson and Newfeld's early discoveries by looking into the mutant fruit fly's immune system and blood cells. He noticed that, in addition to excess cell growth during heart development, Dpp mutants also had an excess of plasmatocytes (blood cells involved in digesting small infectious particles) – an important clue that Dpp was affecting the regulation of the immune system of the flies.
Plasmatocytes are one of three types of immune cells that arise from hematopoietic stem cells – embryonic cells that only take on their adult roles based on signals they receive from signaling molecules, including Dpp. However, how Dpp might specifically function in blood cell formation remained a mystery, and required fresh thinking.
With help from School of Life Sciences Professor Roy Curtiss, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at the Biodesign Institute at ASU, and his technician Bronwyn Gunn, Frandsen and Newfeld developed a novel experimental approach. Rather than curing their fly patients, they sought instead to make the Dpp mutants sick, hoping the infection with Salmonella would provide a new avenue to study their immune system defects in greater detail.
"The problem with the traditional approaches to studying immunity is that we keep our flies in a pretty clean lab – they see few, if any, pesticides or parasites or anything they would need to defend themselves from," says Newfeld.
Getting flies sick wasn't trouble free, Frandsen says. At first, the fruit flies wouldn't eat the type of Salmonella that infects humans. But, with some clever cookery, a feeding technique was identified that led to Salmonella-infected flies. Once inside the flies, the Salmonella activated their immune systems. Newfeld points out that it was then that Frandsen made a key observation: Dpp mutant flies are unable to produce one type of immune cell that normal flies do in response to an attack by pathogens. This was the first piece of evidence that Dpp might regulate the options available to hematopoietic stem cells.
The lack of Dpp in fly mutants meant that their stem cells would only become plasmatocytes. The inability of Dpp mutant fruit flies to produce a particular immune cell type was not obvious under regular lab conditions. This type of defect is considered "cryptic"; a defect that is not immediately obvious because until the fly requires an immune response there is no way to know that something is wrong.
"Up to this point Dpp had not been implicated in hematopoiesis in flies," states Newfeld.
The discovery that Dpp plays a direct role in immune system regulation in flies may have some direct implications for humans, offering new insight into human diseases caused by mutations in bone morphogenetic proteins. Newfeld says too, that scientists who study these morphogenetic proteins in mammals (proteins very similar to Dpp) have known for some time that these proteins are involved in the hematopoietic stem cell growth in the bone marrow. The similarities between the two organisms are intriguing.
"These are exciting parallels; ones which can stimulate collaboration, provide inspiration and reveal new research directions relevant to the understanding of development and immune diseases," Newfeld notes.
Associate Professor Stuart Newfeld and laboratory coordinator Joel Frandsen, along with colleagues in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Biodesign Institute at ASU, released their findings online on September 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Strong parallels exist in the regulation of immune system function in animals as diverse as flies, mice, and humans. Newfeld's own investigative connection between fly and human immune systems came about through his research with a well-studied family of proteins called Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMP).
"Bones and flies?" one might scoff. These proteins are named because of their involvement in the formation of bone and cartilage in humans; however, they have also been linked to many other aspects of early development and to essential cellular processes in virtually all animals.
One type of morphogenetic protein, intensively studied in fruit flies and the focus of the published study by the Newfeld group, is the growth factor Decapentaplegic (Dpp). Dpp acts as a hormonal signaling device, binding to cells and communicating, for instance, whether to divide or to stop growing or even to become a different type of cell.
Studies have shown that Dpp in the fruit fly and its counterparts in other animals have diverged little from one another in evolutionary time. Although there are tiny changes in the genes that code for this protein from animal to animal, the morphogenetic proteins are still structurally and functionally very similar – a testament to their crucial role as signaling devices in all animals, including humans.
"Dpp from flies has been shown to be completely functional in mammalian cells, and the human version of Dpp – BMP 2/4 – also works just fine when injected into flies," explains Newfeld.
Newfeld's research builds on earlier observations made by Aaron Johnson, then a graduate student in the Newfeld lab, now a postdoctoral fellow with University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Tex. Johnson first observed that fruit fly mutants that lacked the ability to generate Dpp protein in one tissue (at a particular time in embryonic development) suffered from excess cell growth in the neighboring tissue. The lack of communication between the tissues resulted in uncontrolled cell growth, in this case in the heart. "Dpp mutant flies have large hearts which are stiffer and beat inefficiently," says Newfeld.
Johnson went on to uncover Dpp's role in heart development. He discovered that when the embryo is nearly ready to hatch, Dpp signals tell heart cells to stop growing. These instructions also insure a proper boundary between the heart and surrounding muscle tissue.
While these were fundamentally exciting discoveries, Newfeld made them even more so when he extended Johnson's project. Since both the heart and the lymph glands in the fly originate from the same tissue (cardiogenic mesoderm), he postulated that when heart development goes awry in fruit fly Dpp mutants that the lymph glands might also be affected.
"One of the functions of the lymph gland in fruit flies is to produce blood cells," notes Newfeld. "This is in contrast to humans where the processes take place in our bone marrow."
With support from Science Foundation Arizona, Frandsen built on Johnson and Newfeld's early discoveries by looking into the mutant fruit fly's immune system and blood cells. He noticed that, in addition to excess cell growth during heart development, Dpp mutants also had an excess of plasmatocytes (blood cells involved in digesting small infectious particles) – an important clue that Dpp was affecting the regulation of the immune system of the flies.
Plasmatocytes are one of three types of immune cells that arise from hematopoietic stem cells – embryonic cells that only take on their adult roles based on signals they receive from signaling molecules, including Dpp. However, how Dpp might specifically function in blood cell formation remained a mystery, and required fresh thinking.
With help from School of Life Sciences Professor Roy Curtiss, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at the Biodesign Institute at ASU, and his technician Bronwyn Gunn, Frandsen and Newfeld developed a novel experimental approach. Rather than curing their fly patients, they sought instead to make the Dpp mutants sick, hoping the infection with Salmonella would provide a new avenue to study their immune system defects in greater detail.
"The problem with the traditional approaches to studying immunity is that we keep our flies in a pretty clean lab – they see few, if any, pesticides or parasites or anything they would need to defend themselves from," says Newfeld.
Getting flies sick wasn't trouble free, Frandsen says. At first, the fruit flies wouldn't eat the type of Salmonella that infects humans. But, with some clever cookery, a feeding technique was identified that led to Salmonella-infected flies. Once inside the flies, the Salmonella activated their immune systems. Newfeld points out that it was then that Frandsen made a key observation: Dpp mutant flies are unable to produce one type of immune cell that normal flies do in response to an attack by pathogens. This was the first piece of evidence that Dpp might regulate the options available to hematopoietic stem cells.
The lack of Dpp in fly mutants meant that their stem cells would only become plasmatocytes. The inability of Dpp mutant fruit flies to produce a particular immune cell type was not obvious under regular lab conditions. This type of defect is considered "cryptic"; a defect that is not immediately obvious because until the fly requires an immune response there is no way to know that something is wrong.
"Up to this point Dpp had not been implicated in hematopoiesis in flies," states Newfeld.
The discovery that Dpp plays a direct role in immune system regulation in flies may have some direct implications for humans, offering new insight into human diseases caused by mutations in bone morphogenetic proteins. Newfeld says too, that scientists who study these morphogenetic proteins in mammals (proteins very similar to Dpp) have known for some time that these proteins are involved in the hematopoietic stem cell growth in the bone marrow. The similarities between the two organisms are intriguing.
"These are exciting parallels; ones which can stimulate collaboration, provide inspiration and reveal new research directions relevant to the understanding of development and immune diseases," Newfeld notes.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Arizona Public University Board Hopes To Double Research Spending by 2020
[Source: Alex Philippidis , BioRegion News] - The board that oversees Arizona’s public university system is looking to more than double its spending on research by 2020, as well as recruit more pace-setting researchers and steer more students into the life sciences and other science and math specialties.
These goals and others are included in a draft strategic plan under review by the Arizona Board of Regents, called 2020 Vision: The Arizona University System Long-Term Strategic Plan, 2008-2020, and available here.
Sandra Woodley, the Regents’ chief financial officer, told BioRegion News recently the draft plan will be amended to become a final plan that will undergird a more detailed study with specifics for carrying out the strategies outlined in 2020 Vision. The plan would take place across all three schools that comprise the state’s higher-education system — Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona.
“We have some additional work that we plan to do over the next couple of months to tweak it a little bit and add a few other components. We expect to finalize the plan likely in December,” Woodley said in a recent interview. “This particular component of our strategic plan is meant to provide the framework, the goals, the touchstones for the system out to 2020.
“The next step will be to drill down to the university level and to get down to specific strategies and specific targets for the universities,” both short- and long-term, over the next year to two years, Woodley said.
The strategic plan offers three goals for how much the state should spend to improve its research effort to one of national prominence. The highest, or gold standard, calls for boosting that spending to about $1.75 billion. The second-highest, or “silver,” sets a $1.65 billion goal, while the lowest or “bronze” standard sets a minimum target of just over $1.5 billion.
“Part of that has to do with getting more faculty members who are research oriented, who are able to bring in more grants. And part has to do with having additional state funding that will enable research infrastructure to be built, such as labs and research buildings to be able to attract these high-quality researchers,” Woodley said in an interview.
Given relatively flat federal spending on research grants over the past five years, Woodley said, “we feel that we will go back to the state and ask for some additional state funding to supplement the federal funding, in order to get us off the ramp on the research piece.”
The Regents have yet to decide how much additional funding to ask of the state, pending completion of a financial model and long-term financial projections for the entire Vision 2002 plan “probably by late November or early December,” she added.
Meeting the gold standard on research will be doable, Woodley said, if Arizona was to attract a new federally funded research and development laboratory. Such a facility would generate the largest percentage growth in research dollars for ASU, to $730 million under the gold standard, down to $655 million for silver and $536 million for the worst-case bronze scenario. That last number is expected to rise as part of a recalculation of the bronze research target in progress, and designed to reflect at least some improvement in the system between now and FY 2020, she said.
R. F. (Rick) Shangraw Jr., vice president for research and economic affairs at Arizona State University, told BRN the university system had no specific federal R&D lab in mind, but included the possibility in its projections to reflect the goal of beefing up research.
“For our research enterprise to continue to grow, and be successful in Arizona and particularly at ASU, we need to begin approaching and trying to be competitive for a large lab in Arizona,” Shangraw said in an interview. “It’s part of the strategy for how we move into [2020].”
Arizona’s state universities spent a combined $766 million on research in the 2006 fiscal year, the latest year for which figures are available from the Association of University Technology Managers. According to AUTM’s U.S. Licensing Activity Survey for FY 2006 report, released late last year and available here, UA accounted for the lion’s share of research spending at about $535.8 million, followed by just over $131.8 million for ASU.
UA spent 1.1 percent over the previous fiscal year, when it racked up $530.2 million, while ASU spending jumped 19.6 percent from the $110.2 million it recorded in FY 2005, according to AUTM’s licensing survey for that year, available here.
AUTM did not release research expense figures for individual universities in previous years.
Following the Roadmap
The Arizona university system’s rising research spending followed development of the state’s blueprint for growing its life sciences industries — the Arizona Bioscience Roadmap prepared for the Flinn Foundation, a key champion of the state’s life sciences effort, by the Battelle Memorial Institute, the global R&D and laboratory-management organization headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.
Walter Plosila, a senior consultant to Battelle’s technology partnership practice, and principal author of the Roadmap, told BRN the Regents’ goals “will be a challenge, but not impossible.”
“Given the population increase in Arizona, and the student body increase, there’s no reason they can’t achieve a higher objective in terms of research spending,” Plosila said. “Certainly with Michael Crow at ASU and [Robert] Shelton at UA, you’ve got two leaders who really understand how important building the research enterprise is, as well as education and teaching are.”
As for the state university system’s performance in recent years, Plosila said in an interview, “they have been doing well in the last five years overall.
During that time, Arizona has increased its overall research dollars from the US National Institutes of Health by 11.6 percent. For the federal fiscal year that ended Sept 30, 2007, the last full year for which figures are available, Arizona won 483 grants totaling $170.9 million, up 6.3 percent from the $160.7 million in 467 grants awarded in federal FY 2006.
Over the past five years, Arizona’s NIH funding rose from $153.2 million in 453 grants in federal FY 2003. While that’s no mean feat during a period where NIH’s overall research funding has plateaued, the state can do even better, Plosila said.
“This is just reiterating the importance of seeking and securing outside dollars, because in fact that’s how you’re going to build a research base. You’re not going to do it on state money alone. No state could do that, let alone Arizona,” Plosila said.
Finding and keeping talented people in Arizona remains a challenge within the university system, and beyond. In August, Dietrich Stephan said he would leave his position as deputy director for discovery research and director of the neurogenomics division of the Translational Genomics Research Institute, or TGen, after five years. Stephan will move to the San Francisco Bay Area to run Navigenics, a developer of tests measuring patients’ genetic likelihood for several diseases.
Stephan told the Arizona Republic the move would help him and his company find venture capital more easily – a continuing challenge to Arizona, despite progress in recent years, Plosila said.
Several states have addressed the issue of attracting and retaining faculty entrepreneurs by emulating Georgia, which has recruited more than 60 top-tier researchers to the state’s universities since 1990 through its state-funded “Eminent Scholars” program, overseen by the public-private Georgia Research Alliance. Researchers are expected to demonstrate a track record of spinning out startup companies, and a willingness to bring their existing startups to Georgia and launch new ones in the Peachtree State.
Woodley said Arizona Regents were studying whether to follow a similar path and develop a program along the lines of Georgia’s Eminent Scholars program: “That’s one of the early discussions we have had. That is part of preliminary discussions that we’ve had that will play out over the next couple of years as we get more mature in our funding model projections and costing out the plan.”
According to GRA’s web site, the alliance has spent $467 million to draw the eminent scholars, but has more than recouped that cost by leveraging $2 billion in federal and private funding, creating more than 5,500 new science and technology jobs; and establishing more than 150 new companies. But a Georgia state Senator, Doug Stoner (D-Cobb County), has publicly questioned whether the eminent scholars program could suffer at least short-term following a report in the Atlanta Business Chronicle last month that the University of Georgia Foundation may have missed out on $222 million in royalties by negotiating a licensing deal with Allegran for the dry-eye prescription drug Restasis. The researcher who discovered the drug, Renee Kaswan, has sued the foundation and Allegran, claiming the deal cost her $100 million.
The notion of an eminent scholars program taking root in Arizona was among recommendations for propelling the state above third-tier status included in the state’s bioscience Roadmap: “Sufficient public sector funds for bricks-and-mortar investments, i.e., capital investments, are part of the gap to be filled; but, the gap is broader than that. It also means sufficient public sector operating funds to recruit and attract Eminent Scholars; to offer competitive recruitment packages for emerging young, talented, biosciences faculty; and to build core labs and facilities that are competitive with other academic health and university research centers across the country.”
The complete 166-page Roadmap can be read here.
Overall, the Roadmap recommended that Arizona focus on growing a small number of life-sci specialties by securing additional public and private funds, and by increasing collaboration among the three state universities. “Collaboration is still a very strong suit today in Arizona, much more than you find in the East Coast, but it’s easier said than done.
“I wouldn’t say we’ve reached Nirvana yet, but we certainly made some pretty good progress in the biosciences through collaboration,” Plosila added.
Increasing such collaboration is another recommendation in 2020 Vision, as is strengthening the state’s technology transfer effort. ASU took an important step in that direction last year when it named Augustine Cheng, a 23-year veteran of Columbia University’s successful Patent and Licensing Group, to achieve at least similar success as managing director of ASU’s tech-transfer arm Arizona Technology Enterprise [see BRN sister publication Biotech Transfer Week, June 11, 2007].
But Arizona retains a significant barrier against tech transfer: The state limits its universities to receiving royalties from the technologies they invent, not allowing them to have direct equity stakes in their startups. ASU has gotten around the rule, Plosila said, by establishing a foundation to oversee its tech transfer effort. Arizona voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have allowed a direct university role, only to see Utah and Oregon pass laws permitting it.
“It’s a relic of the Populism era of America west of the Mississippi. It was never intended to thwart tech transfer, but it ends up being an impediment. Just taking a royalty stream is not the best way to get a return on your investment. Being able to take both a royalty return and some equity is a much better way,” Plosila said.
Plosila said Arizona’s public university system would stand a better chance of transferring new technologies from colleges to the commercial realm – and holding on to top research talent — if they raised the pay of researchers to the levels of East Coast employers. That will require additional funding from the state government, he said.
“They aren’t competitive, salary-wise and otherwise, on star faculty. It’s important to building this bioscience research base that the universities can attract star researchers and research teams,” Plosila said. “The viewpoint of the Legislature in Arizona historically hasn’t been very strong for higher ed. That is changing.”
One example of that change, Plosila said, will benefit the state’s life sciences effort. Earlier this year, state lawmakers approved issuing $470 million in bonds to pay for two projects within the Phoenix Biomedical Campus:
The 309,000-square-foot Health Sciences Education Building, which will house classrooms, a simulation center, pre-clinical training suites, anatomy laboratories, a library, a learning resource center, and faculty offices in a facility designed to train students from all three state universities for careers in medicine, pharmacy nursing and allied health professions.
The 301,000-square-foot Arizona Biomedical Collaborative 2, which will house laboratories, offices and lab support space for about 50 principal investigators from UA, ASU, and NAU. The ABC2 is designed to carry out translational research in cancer, neuroscience, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, as well as support for research elsewhere on the campus, including the collaborative’s first facility, ABC1, and TGen.
The Board of Regents has said the projects are essential to not only completing the long-planned biomedical campus, but to growing the size of the UA College of Medicine-Phoenix, a collaboration with ASU, to 150 students from the current 48.
“This Vision report plus what the Legislature did in terms of additional dollars for facilities suggests that Arizona is turning around from an historically neutral or less than positive view of higher ed to realizing more and more that it’s an important part of the economic engine of the future,” Plosila said.
A Cost-Cutting Year
Bonding for expansion of the biomedical campus was an exception to the series of cost cuts hammered out by Arizona lawmakers and Gov. Janet Napolitano to eliminate the state’s $2 billion budget shortfall. Napolitano is a Democrat in her first term, while Republicans control both houses of the state Legislature.
The state university system and Regents’ board was not spared from cuts in the state’s current $9.98 billion budget for the fiscal year that started July 1. The system saw its funding chopped by $35.3 million, or 3.3 percent of the $1.08 billion it receives from the state general fund. It was the second funding reduction for the system in less than a year. In April, lawmakers trimmed $14.7 million from the universities and Regents’ board as part of an agreement to balance the FY ’08 budget following a funding shortfall blamed on the weak economy.
The cut was parceled out among the three public universities and Regents’ board. While the board fared best by losing $250,000, just 1.2 percent of its state funding this fiscal year, ASU bore the largest cut of $22.65 million, reflecting 4.7 percent of its state general funds in FY 2009.
Napolitano and lawmakers also agreed to cut other funds from state life sciences programs, including:
$10.5 million previously approved toward design work for the biomedical campus expansion. That money will instead come from the state’s capital budget.
$2.5 million, or 10 percent of the $25 million the state last year agreed to deposit into its Arizona 21st Century Competitive Initiative Fund for use by the nonprofit Science Foundation Arizona this fiscal year – part of a four-year, $100 million funding plan approved by lawmakers for SFAz last year. SFAz will receive the deferred money in FY 2011, for a total that year of $27.5 million.
Officials earlier this year also assisted SFAz by changing state law to count government investments and other cash equivalents toward the matching funds that must account for half the money it spends, with the rest coming from its state subsidy. Previously, the 50 percent had to come entirely from private sources.
This year, lawmakers also increased the individual and corporate income tax credits for R&D activity over an eight-year period – but cushioned the fiscal blow to the state by not allowing the additional credits to take effect until the 2010 calendar year. Details of the increase can be read in a legislative report summarizing the budget and available here. The additional credits are projected to cost the state $5.7 million during the first year.
Woodley told BRN another key purpose of the strategic planning effort will be to study and possibly change Arizona’s model for funding the university system. She said the Regents board expects it can fund Vision 2020 through a combination of state appropriations, productivity savings, and tuition revenue, with an eye to keeping that cost within reach of lower-income families.
“One of the things that we’re likely to try to incorporate into our funding policy is a way to provide incentives for degree production, and also specifically for targeted degree production. We may find a situation where our financial plans would link some incentive for the institutions, give them extra monetary incentive if they’re able to produce more [majors] in the high-demand fields. And those cost more to produce,” Woodley said.
“We think all of those things have to happen in order for us to get all the way to the gold standard. And we may not get all the way to the gold standard, though we hope we do,” Woodley added.
2020 Vision calls on the state to increase the number of bachelors’ degree graduates throughout the state university system by 2020, again by laying out “gold,” “silver,” and “bronze” standards. The gold or highest standard of 36,363 assumes “very significant” educational improvements in every sector and represents a doubling of the number of bachelors’ graduates from the 18,000 of 2000, a goal set by Napolitano in her State of the State address earlier this year. The silver standard assumes a less significant progress or 31,210 bachelors’ grads; while the bronze goal of 28,831 would reflect solely a projected increase in state population, with no change in graduation or retention rates.
To generate more graduates, the Arizona system is looking at three targets for boosting total undergraduate enrollment — from 100,000 in FY 2006 to a “gold” standard of 181,140; a “silver” standard of 149,230; and a “bronze” standard of 122,300.
Woodley said the gold standard “would mean adding over 80,000 students in the system over the next 12 years.” How many of those students would be life sciences majors has not yet been examined, but will be part of a later study phase aimed at projecting how many students pursue high-demand majors — from life-sci and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, programs; to healthcare and teaching.
Certainly it will take the better part of this year to try to focus on what our plans may be to try to provide incentives for the production of degrees in high-demand fields,” Woodley said.
The answer to that question, and similar numbers for other degrees, pale next to another bigger concern for the Regents to answer, she added: “What we have to do next is to determine what the capacity of the institutions is to be able to grow in their current framework, and what else may be needed.
“For example, we may decide as a system that we have to have additional campuses, or we need additional 2+2 programs [allowing students to complete a bachelors’ degree at a four-year state university after starting their first two years at a community college] to be able to bridge that gap. We may have to ramp up our distance learning capabilities to handle some of that volume online. It is likely to have to be a combination of all those things,” Woodley said.
One potential hurdle to implementation: Arizona’s community college system is decentralized, and not under Regents’ control. The state years ago abolished a governing board that oversaw those schools, leaving them to the direct control of their administrative staff and boards.
“Over a period of five to six years, we have to start to build the infrastructure. Those [projects] take several years to ramp up, to be able to make sure that we have the capacity to handle those students to reach those goals.”
The goal gibes with separate efforts by Arizona to increase its numbers of students in STEM programs from kindergarten through high school. In 2005, Napolitano created a “P-20 Council” charged with aligning the state’s various school systems, with STEM job training and increased enrollment in mind.
In June, P-20 approved 35 recommendations toward aligning and improving the state’s education systems, including creating new “hybrid” four-year schools incorporating joint community college-university programs; allowing community colleges to award some bachelor’s degrees; improving university campuses or “centers” by ensuring large-enough populations of working adults and other students to make them viable; and creating a new database linking an existing K-12 database with the state universities, as Alabama, Florida, and Texas have undertaken in recent years.
“If you do that at the K-12 levels, eventually you’ve got to have a higher education system that’s also responsive as you get more STEM students in the pipeline. The state is trying to align higher ed with K-12 efforts,” Plosila said.
To train all the additional science and math students, Napolitano and other state officials in July announced they were joining with a public-private group to create the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education Center. The center – to be housed at the downtown Phoenix offices of Science Foundation Arizona, the public-private group that links academic-industry collaborations – would also work to promote science and math education in students from pre-school grades through college.
Napolitano has named Darcy Renfro, her advisor on economic and higher education, to run the STEM center, which has secured funding for its first three years. Phoenix-based copper producer Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold has donated $1.5 million, while the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community has chipped in another $100,000.
These goals and others are included in a draft strategic plan under review by the Arizona Board of Regents, called 2020 Vision: The Arizona University System Long-Term Strategic Plan, 2008-2020, and available here.
Sandra Woodley, the Regents’ chief financial officer, told BioRegion News recently the draft plan will be amended to become a final plan that will undergird a more detailed study with specifics for carrying out the strategies outlined in 2020 Vision. The plan would take place across all three schools that comprise the state’s higher-education system — Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona.
“We have some additional work that we plan to do over the next couple of months to tweak it a little bit and add a few other components. We expect to finalize the plan likely in December,” Woodley said in a recent interview. “This particular component of our strategic plan is meant to provide the framework, the goals, the touchstones for the system out to 2020.
“The next step will be to drill down to the university level and to get down to specific strategies and specific targets for the universities,” both short- and long-term, over the next year to two years, Woodley said.
The strategic plan offers three goals for how much the state should spend to improve its research effort to one of national prominence. The highest, or gold standard, calls for boosting that spending to about $1.75 billion. The second-highest, or “silver,” sets a $1.65 billion goal, while the lowest or “bronze” standard sets a minimum target of just over $1.5 billion.
“Part of that has to do with getting more faculty members who are research oriented, who are able to bring in more grants. And part has to do with having additional state funding that will enable research infrastructure to be built, such as labs and research buildings to be able to attract these high-quality researchers,” Woodley said in an interview.
Given relatively flat federal spending on research grants over the past five years, Woodley said, “we feel that we will go back to the state and ask for some additional state funding to supplement the federal funding, in order to get us off the ramp on the research piece.”
The Regents have yet to decide how much additional funding to ask of the state, pending completion of a financial model and long-term financial projections for the entire Vision 2002 plan “probably by late November or early December,” she added.
Meeting the gold standard on research will be doable, Woodley said, if Arizona was to attract a new federally funded research and development laboratory. Such a facility would generate the largest percentage growth in research dollars for ASU, to $730 million under the gold standard, down to $655 million for silver and $536 million for the worst-case bronze scenario. That last number is expected to rise as part of a recalculation of the bronze research target in progress, and designed to reflect at least some improvement in the system between now and FY 2020, she said.
R. F. (Rick) Shangraw Jr., vice president for research and economic affairs at Arizona State University, told BRN the university system had no specific federal R&D lab in mind, but included the possibility in its projections to reflect the goal of beefing up research.
“For our research enterprise to continue to grow, and be successful in Arizona and particularly at ASU, we need to begin approaching and trying to be competitive for a large lab in Arizona,” Shangraw said in an interview. “It’s part of the strategy for how we move into [2020].”
Arizona’s state universities spent a combined $766 million on research in the 2006 fiscal year, the latest year for which figures are available from the Association of University Technology Managers. According to AUTM’s U.S. Licensing Activity Survey for FY 2006 report, released late last year and available here, UA accounted for the lion’s share of research spending at about $535.8 million, followed by just over $131.8 million for ASU.
UA spent 1.1 percent over the previous fiscal year, when it racked up $530.2 million, while ASU spending jumped 19.6 percent from the $110.2 million it recorded in FY 2005, according to AUTM’s licensing survey for that year, available here.
AUTM did not release research expense figures for individual universities in previous years.
Following the Roadmap
The Arizona university system’s rising research spending followed development of the state’s blueprint for growing its life sciences industries — the Arizona Bioscience Roadmap prepared for the Flinn Foundation, a key champion of the state’s life sciences effort, by the Battelle Memorial Institute, the global R&D and laboratory-management organization headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.
Walter Plosila, a senior consultant to Battelle’s technology partnership practice, and principal author of the Roadmap, told BRN the Regents’ goals “will be a challenge, but not impossible.”
“Given the population increase in Arizona, and the student body increase, there’s no reason they can’t achieve a higher objective in terms of research spending,” Plosila said. “Certainly with Michael Crow at ASU and [Robert] Shelton at UA, you’ve got two leaders who really understand how important building the research enterprise is, as well as education and teaching are.”
As for the state university system’s performance in recent years, Plosila said in an interview, “they have been doing well in the last five years overall.
During that time, Arizona has increased its overall research dollars from the US National Institutes of Health by 11.6 percent. For the federal fiscal year that ended Sept 30, 2007, the last full year for which figures are available, Arizona won 483 grants totaling $170.9 million, up 6.3 percent from the $160.7 million in 467 grants awarded in federal FY 2006.
Over the past five years, Arizona’s NIH funding rose from $153.2 million in 453 grants in federal FY 2003. While that’s no mean feat during a period where NIH’s overall research funding has plateaued, the state can do even better, Plosila said.
“This is just reiterating the importance of seeking and securing outside dollars, because in fact that’s how you’re going to build a research base. You’re not going to do it on state money alone. No state could do that, let alone Arizona,” Plosila said.
Finding and keeping talented people in Arizona remains a challenge within the university system, and beyond. In August, Dietrich Stephan said he would leave his position as deputy director for discovery research and director of the neurogenomics division of the Translational Genomics Research Institute, or TGen, after five years. Stephan will move to the San Francisco Bay Area to run Navigenics, a developer of tests measuring patients’ genetic likelihood for several diseases.
Stephan told the Arizona Republic the move would help him and his company find venture capital more easily – a continuing challenge to Arizona, despite progress in recent years, Plosila said.
Several states have addressed the issue of attracting and retaining faculty entrepreneurs by emulating Georgia, which has recruited more than 60 top-tier researchers to the state’s universities since 1990 through its state-funded “Eminent Scholars” program, overseen by the public-private Georgia Research Alliance. Researchers are expected to demonstrate a track record of spinning out startup companies, and a willingness to bring their existing startups to Georgia and launch new ones in the Peachtree State.
Woodley said Arizona Regents were studying whether to follow a similar path and develop a program along the lines of Georgia’s Eminent Scholars program: “That’s one of the early discussions we have had. That is part of preliminary discussions that we’ve had that will play out over the next couple of years as we get more mature in our funding model projections and costing out the plan.”
According to GRA’s web site, the alliance has spent $467 million to draw the eminent scholars, but has more than recouped that cost by leveraging $2 billion in federal and private funding, creating more than 5,500 new science and technology jobs; and establishing more than 150 new companies. But a Georgia state Senator, Doug Stoner (D-Cobb County), has publicly questioned whether the eminent scholars program could suffer at least short-term following a report in the Atlanta Business Chronicle last month that the University of Georgia Foundation may have missed out on $222 million in royalties by negotiating a licensing deal with Allegran for the dry-eye prescription drug Restasis. The researcher who discovered the drug, Renee Kaswan, has sued the foundation and Allegran, claiming the deal cost her $100 million.
The notion of an eminent scholars program taking root in Arizona was among recommendations for propelling the state above third-tier status included in the state’s bioscience Roadmap: “Sufficient public sector funds for bricks-and-mortar investments, i.e., capital investments, are part of the gap to be filled; but, the gap is broader than that. It also means sufficient public sector operating funds to recruit and attract Eminent Scholars; to offer competitive recruitment packages for emerging young, talented, biosciences faculty; and to build core labs and facilities that are competitive with other academic health and university research centers across the country.”
The complete 166-page Roadmap can be read here.
Overall, the Roadmap recommended that Arizona focus on growing a small number of life-sci specialties by securing additional public and private funds, and by increasing collaboration among the three state universities. “Collaboration is still a very strong suit today in Arizona, much more than you find in the East Coast, but it’s easier said than done.
“I wouldn’t say we’ve reached Nirvana yet, but we certainly made some pretty good progress in the biosciences through collaboration,” Plosila added.
Increasing such collaboration is another recommendation in 2020 Vision, as is strengthening the state’s technology transfer effort. ASU took an important step in that direction last year when it named Augustine Cheng, a 23-year veteran of Columbia University’s successful Patent and Licensing Group, to achieve at least similar success as managing director of ASU’s tech-transfer arm Arizona Technology Enterprise [see BRN sister publication Biotech Transfer Week, June 11, 2007].
But Arizona retains a significant barrier against tech transfer: The state limits its universities to receiving royalties from the technologies they invent, not allowing them to have direct equity stakes in their startups. ASU has gotten around the rule, Plosila said, by establishing a foundation to oversee its tech transfer effort. Arizona voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have allowed a direct university role, only to see Utah and Oregon pass laws permitting it.
“It’s a relic of the Populism era of America west of the Mississippi. It was never intended to thwart tech transfer, but it ends up being an impediment. Just taking a royalty stream is not the best way to get a return on your investment. Being able to take both a royalty return and some equity is a much better way,” Plosila said.
Plosila said Arizona’s public university system would stand a better chance of transferring new technologies from colleges to the commercial realm – and holding on to top research talent — if they raised the pay of researchers to the levels of East Coast employers. That will require additional funding from the state government, he said.
“They aren’t competitive, salary-wise and otherwise, on star faculty. It’s important to building this bioscience research base that the universities can attract star researchers and research teams,” Plosila said. “The viewpoint of the Legislature in Arizona historically hasn’t been very strong for higher ed. That is changing.”
One example of that change, Plosila said, will benefit the state’s life sciences effort. Earlier this year, state lawmakers approved issuing $470 million in bonds to pay for two projects within the Phoenix Biomedical Campus:
The 309,000-square-foot Health Sciences Education Building, which will house classrooms, a simulation center, pre-clinical training suites, anatomy laboratories, a library, a learning resource center, and faculty offices in a facility designed to train students from all three state universities for careers in medicine, pharmacy nursing and allied health professions.
The 301,000-square-foot Arizona Biomedical Collaborative 2, which will house laboratories, offices and lab support space for about 50 principal investigators from UA, ASU, and NAU. The ABC2 is designed to carry out translational research in cancer, neuroscience, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, as well as support for research elsewhere on the campus, including the collaborative’s first facility, ABC1, and TGen.
The Board of Regents has said the projects are essential to not only completing the long-planned biomedical campus, but to growing the size of the UA College of Medicine-Phoenix, a collaboration with ASU, to 150 students from the current 48.
“This Vision report plus what the Legislature did in terms of additional dollars for facilities suggests that Arizona is turning around from an historically neutral or less than positive view of higher ed to realizing more and more that it’s an important part of the economic engine of the future,” Plosila said.
A Cost-Cutting Year
Bonding for expansion of the biomedical campus was an exception to the series of cost cuts hammered out by Arizona lawmakers and Gov. Janet Napolitano to eliminate the state’s $2 billion budget shortfall. Napolitano is a Democrat in her first term, while Republicans control both houses of the state Legislature.
The state university system and Regents’ board was not spared from cuts in the state’s current $9.98 billion budget for the fiscal year that started July 1. The system saw its funding chopped by $35.3 million, or 3.3 percent of the $1.08 billion it receives from the state general fund. It was the second funding reduction for the system in less than a year. In April, lawmakers trimmed $14.7 million from the universities and Regents’ board as part of an agreement to balance the FY ’08 budget following a funding shortfall blamed on the weak economy.
The cut was parceled out among the three public universities and Regents’ board. While the board fared best by losing $250,000, just 1.2 percent of its state funding this fiscal year, ASU bore the largest cut of $22.65 million, reflecting 4.7 percent of its state general funds in FY 2009.
Napolitano and lawmakers also agreed to cut other funds from state life sciences programs, including:
$10.5 million previously approved toward design work for the biomedical campus expansion. That money will instead come from the state’s capital budget.
$2.5 million, or 10 percent of the $25 million the state last year agreed to deposit into its Arizona 21st Century Competitive Initiative Fund for use by the nonprofit Science Foundation Arizona this fiscal year – part of a four-year, $100 million funding plan approved by lawmakers for SFAz last year. SFAz will receive the deferred money in FY 2011, for a total that year of $27.5 million.
Officials earlier this year also assisted SFAz by changing state law to count government investments and other cash equivalents toward the matching funds that must account for half the money it spends, with the rest coming from its state subsidy. Previously, the 50 percent had to come entirely from private sources.
This year, lawmakers also increased the individual and corporate income tax credits for R&D activity over an eight-year period – but cushioned the fiscal blow to the state by not allowing the additional credits to take effect until the 2010 calendar year. Details of the increase can be read in a legislative report summarizing the budget and available here. The additional credits are projected to cost the state $5.7 million during the first year.
Woodley told BRN another key purpose of the strategic planning effort will be to study and possibly change Arizona’s model for funding the university system. She said the Regents board expects it can fund Vision 2020 through a combination of state appropriations, productivity savings, and tuition revenue, with an eye to keeping that cost within reach of lower-income families.
“One of the things that we’re likely to try to incorporate into our funding policy is a way to provide incentives for degree production, and also specifically for targeted degree production. We may find a situation where our financial plans would link some incentive for the institutions, give them extra monetary incentive if they’re able to produce more [majors] in the high-demand fields. And those cost more to produce,” Woodley said.
“We think all of those things have to happen in order for us to get all the way to the gold standard. And we may not get all the way to the gold standard, though we hope we do,” Woodley added.
2020 Vision calls on the state to increase the number of bachelors’ degree graduates throughout the state university system by 2020, again by laying out “gold,” “silver,” and “bronze” standards. The gold or highest standard of 36,363 assumes “very significant” educational improvements in every sector and represents a doubling of the number of bachelors’ graduates from the 18,000 of 2000, a goal set by Napolitano in her State of the State address earlier this year. The silver standard assumes a less significant progress or 31,210 bachelors’ grads; while the bronze goal of 28,831 would reflect solely a projected increase in state population, with no change in graduation or retention rates.
To generate more graduates, the Arizona system is looking at three targets for boosting total undergraduate enrollment — from 100,000 in FY 2006 to a “gold” standard of 181,140; a “silver” standard of 149,230; and a “bronze” standard of 122,300.
Woodley said the gold standard “would mean adding over 80,000 students in the system over the next 12 years.” How many of those students would be life sciences majors has not yet been examined, but will be part of a later study phase aimed at projecting how many students pursue high-demand majors — from life-sci and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, programs; to healthcare and teaching.
Certainly it will take the better part of this year to try to focus on what our plans may be to try to provide incentives for the production of degrees in high-demand fields,” Woodley said.
The answer to that question, and similar numbers for other degrees, pale next to another bigger concern for the Regents to answer, she added: “What we have to do next is to determine what the capacity of the institutions is to be able to grow in their current framework, and what else may be needed.
“For example, we may decide as a system that we have to have additional campuses, or we need additional 2+2 programs [allowing students to complete a bachelors’ degree at a four-year state university after starting their first two years at a community college] to be able to bridge that gap. We may have to ramp up our distance learning capabilities to handle some of that volume online. It is likely to have to be a combination of all those things,” Woodley said.
One potential hurdle to implementation: Arizona’s community college system is decentralized, and not under Regents’ control. The state years ago abolished a governing board that oversaw those schools, leaving them to the direct control of their administrative staff and boards.
“Over a period of five to six years, we have to start to build the infrastructure. Those [projects] take several years to ramp up, to be able to make sure that we have the capacity to handle those students to reach those goals.”
The goal gibes with separate efforts by Arizona to increase its numbers of students in STEM programs from kindergarten through high school. In 2005, Napolitano created a “P-20 Council” charged with aligning the state’s various school systems, with STEM job training and increased enrollment in mind.
In June, P-20 approved 35 recommendations toward aligning and improving the state’s education systems, including creating new “hybrid” four-year schools incorporating joint community college-university programs; allowing community colleges to award some bachelor’s degrees; improving university campuses or “centers” by ensuring large-enough populations of working adults and other students to make them viable; and creating a new database linking an existing K-12 database with the state universities, as Alabama, Florida, and Texas have undertaken in recent years.
“If you do that at the K-12 levels, eventually you’ve got to have a higher education system that’s also responsive as you get more STEM students in the pipeline. The state is trying to align higher ed with K-12 efforts,” Plosila said.
To train all the additional science and math students, Napolitano and other state officials in July announced they were joining with a public-private group to create the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education Center. The center – to be housed at the downtown Phoenix offices of Science Foundation Arizona, the public-private group that links academic-industry collaborations – would also work to promote science and math education in students from pre-school grades through college.
Napolitano has named Darcy Renfro, her advisor on economic and higher education, to run the STEM center, which has secured funding for its first three years. Phoenix-based copper producer Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold has donated $1.5 million, while the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community has chipped in another $100,000.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Biotech firms plant roots in Tucson area to lure top talent
[Source: Ken Alltucker, The Arizona Republic] - A key goal among Phoenix bioscience interests is to create a cluster of research companies that offer high-wage jobs and discover important breakthroughs.
That idea is that a critical mass of companies located near one another would draw batches of smart, talented workers who seek out those employers for challenging and lucrative careers. Such an achievement would spur the type of wealth and innovation that could drive the region's economy.
But some biotech observers believe such a cluster may be emerging in Arizona, just 90 miles south of the Valley in the growing southern Arizona bedroom community of Oro Valley.
The freshest evidence of that is Ventana Medical Systems' recent purchase of a 17-acre site next to its existing campus. About six months after Swiss drug giant Roche plunked down $3.4 billion to purchase Ventana, the company acquired a large chunk with an eye toward a major expansion of its tissue-diagnostics business.
Ventana isn't the only company that has planted its biotech roots in the Tucson suburb. French drugmaker sanofi-aventis is building a new research lab in the same technology park where Ventana is headquartered, and the small-but-growing tech firm Integrated Biomolecule Corp. also is expanding its workforce.
All companies have ties to the University of Arizona, and all the companies have big growth plans.
"This is a good model of what you want to happen in Phoenix and Flagstaff," Walt Plosila, a senior adviser to Ohio-based Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, said of the emerging Oro Valley cluster.
Science Foundation Arizona President and Chief Executive Officer William Harris also has taken note. The foundation's charge is to improve the state's science and technology initiatives through strategic investments in companies and education.
"It shows how you can diversify the economy," Harris said.
Similar efforts are under way to foster such bioscience growth in the Phoenix area.
The state of Arizona and city of Phoenix has invested tens of millions on a downtown biomedical hub anchored by the Translational Genomics Research Institute and a new medical school. And Arizona State University's five-year-old Biodesign Institute is beginning to churn out companies in research areas as alternative energy.
But Plosila and others believe that the Phoenix-area's growing biotech scene has not reached a critical mass of private bioscience companies yet that rivals such clusters as San Diego, San Francisco or Boston.
Phoenix and Flagstaff have made some biotech niches, particularly in medical-device manufacturing. The keys to attracting more research jobs and company clusters are sustained, targeted investment to nurture good ideas and attract private capital.
"It is sort of the entrepreneurial hotbed of Arizona in terms of research and development," Plosila said of Oro Valley.
University of Arizona roots
Ventana, in particular, shows the potential for one idea to have a major impact on the community, Harris said.
Dr. Thomas Grogan, a UA pathology professor, started the company in the mid-1980s over his frustration with the accuracy of cancer tests. He developed his own testing methods, arranged findings and built a company that went public in 1996 until its purchase by Roche this year.
"It's the genius of one person who created an idea that has been purchased by Roche and has created a lot of wealth," Harris said.
Today, Ventana employs about 900. About 600 research and development, executive, administrative and manufacturing positions are at the company's headquarters, and the company has 165 positions it plans to fill, spokeswoman Alana Bolton said.
The company has not laid out detailed plans for its expansion other than to say Roche's global business and international ties are expected to generate more jobs in Oro Valley.
"We will be the hub and center for tissue-based diagnostics for cancer," Bolton said. "We will grow and get bigger."
Among the major pharmaceutical companies, Roche has been the most aggressive in pursuing the personalized drugs based on a person's genetic makeup.
"The reason why Roche bought Ventana is because they recognize personalized medicine will only come from having the expertise that Ventana has," said Ray Woosley, president and chief executive officer of the Tucson-based Critical Path Institute, a non-profit group that works with federal regulators and biotech companies to speed the approval process for pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
On the heels of its Ventana acquisition, Roche is seeking to further bolster its biotech business with an attempt to purchase South San Francisco-based Genentech. Genentech has rebuffed Roche's initial offer of $89 per share but has appointed a special committee that will consider subsequent offers.
Roche largely plans to keep Ventana's operations and culture in tact. One sign of that is that Ventana CEO Christopher Gleeson has retained his position. Bolton declined to say how many people left the company after the merger.
More expansion
Sanofi-aventis is another pharmaceutical company that is investing millions in Oro Valley. The drugmaker is building a $60 million research lab slated to open in June. The company now employs 60 chemists, biologists and other staff. The new facility has the capacity for 108 workers, but the company has no firm timeline on when those positions will be filled, spokeswoman Janet Metz said.
Sanofi-aventis has recruited scientists from UA as well as attracted talent from out of state. "They (Oro Valley) seem to be building the new biotech hub, and that's where we wanted to be," Metz said.
Robert Green has seen the growth of Oro Valley's biotech sector since relocating his company to the town in 2004. His company, Integrated Biomolecule Corp., provides services such as analytical testing and product development for pharmaceutical companies.
"It was a town that clearly said they would like us to be here and like us to help build a biotech cluster," said Green, who founded the company in his garage and later worked from UA's science and technology park before locating to Oro Valley.
He said Oro Valley has a wide range of housing prices and quality schools, two factors that help draw employees.
"For years, we were an outpost in Oro Valley with clients out of state," Green said. "Now that is switching. We have a lot of support with companies in the state. All of this clustering activity contributes to that."
Representatives of the region's main economic development group, Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities, said years of investment in UA is beginning to pay off for Southern Arizona.
TREO counts more 100 biotech companies employing more than 2,000 non-hospital workers in the Tucson-Oro valley region.
"The investment in the university system is paying huge economic dividends for us now," said David Welsh, TREO's senior vice president for strategic partnerships.
Oro Valley Mayor Paul Loomis said large employers such as Ventana benefit the town more than just economically. The company supports a half marathon and cultural groups such as the Greater Oro Valley Arts Council.
"They are the flagship of our biotech community," Loomis said.
That idea is that a critical mass of companies located near one another would draw batches of smart, talented workers who seek out those employers for challenging and lucrative careers. Such an achievement would spur the type of wealth and innovation that could drive the region's economy.
But some biotech observers believe such a cluster may be emerging in Arizona, just 90 miles south of the Valley in the growing southern Arizona bedroom community of Oro Valley.
The freshest evidence of that is Ventana Medical Systems' recent purchase of a 17-acre site next to its existing campus. About six months after Swiss drug giant Roche plunked down $3.4 billion to purchase Ventana, the company acquired a large chunk with an eye toward a major expansion of its tissue-diagnostics business.
Ventana isn't the only company that has planted its biotech roots in the Tucson suburb. French drugmaker sanofi-aventis is building a new research lab in the same technology park where Ventana is headquartered, and the small-but-growing tech firm Integrated Biomolecule Corp. also is expanding its workforce.
All companies have ties to the University of Arizona, and all the companies have big growth plans.
"This is a good model of what you want to happen in Phoenix and Flagstaff," Walt Plosila, a senior adviser to Ohio-based Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, said of the emerging Oro Valley cluster.
Science Foundation Arizona President and Chief Executive Officer William Harris also has taken note. The foundation's charge is to improve the state's science and technology initiatives through strategic investments in companies and education.
"It shows how you can diversify the economy," Harris said.
Similar efforts are under way to foster such bioscience growth in the Phoenix area.
The state of Arizona and city of Phoenix has invested tens of millions on a downtown biomedical hub anchored by the Translational Genomics Research Institute and a new medical school. And Arizona State University's five-year-old Biodesign Institute is beginning to churn out companies in research areas as alternative energy.
But Plosila and others believe that the Phoenix-area's growing biotech scene has not reached a critical mass of private bioscience companies yet that rivals such clusters as San Diego, San Francisco or Boston.
Phoenix and Flagstaff have made some biotech niches, particularly in medical-device manufacturing. The keys to attracting more research jobs and company clusters are sustained, targeted investment to nurture good ideas and attract private capital.
"It is sort of the entrepreneurial hotbed of Arizona in terms of research and development," Plosila said of Oro Valley.
University of Arizona roots
Ventana, in particular, shows the potential for one idea to have a major impact on the community, Harris said.
Dr. Thomas Grogan, a UA pathology professor, started the company in the mid-1980s over his frustration with the accuracy of cancer tests. He developed his own testing methods, arranged findings and built a company that went public in 1996 until its purchase by Roche this year.
"It's the genius of one person who created an idea that has been purchased by Roche and has created a lot of wealth," Harris said.
Today, Ventana employs about 900. About 600 research and development, executive, administrative and manufacturing positions are at the company's headquarters, and the company has 165 positions it plans to fill, spokeswoman Alana Bolton said.
The company has not laid out detailed plans for its expansion other than to say Roche's global business and international ties are expected to generate more jobs in Oro Valley.
"We will be the hub and center for tissue-based diagnostics for cancer," Bolton said. "We will grow and get bigger."
Among the major pharmaceutical companies, Roche has been the most aggressive in pursuing the personalized drugs based on a person's genetic makeup.
"The reason why Roche bought Ventana is because they recognize personalized medicine will only come from having the expertise that Ventana has," said Ray Woosley, president and chief executive officer of the Tucson-based Critical Path Institute, a non-profit group that works with federal regulators and biotech companies to speed the approval process for pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
On the heels of its Ventana acquisition, Roche is seeking to further bolster its biotech business with an attempt to purchase South San Francisco-based Genentech. Genentech has rebuffed Roche's initial offer of $89 per share but has appointed a special committee that will consider subsequent offers.
Roche largely plans to keep Ventana's operations and culture in tact. One sign of that is that Ventana CEO Christopher Gleeson has retained his position. Bolton declined to say how many people left the company after the merger.
More expansion
Sanofi-aventis is another pharmaceutical company that is investing millions in Oro Valley. The drugmaker is building a $60 million research lab slated to open in June. The company now employs 60 chemists, biologists and other staff. The new facility has the capacity for 108 workers, but the company has no firm timeline on when those positions will be filled, spokeswoman Janet Metz said.
Sanofi-aventis has recruited scientists from UA as well as attracted talent from out of state. "They (Oro Valley) seem to be building the new biotech hub, and that's where we wanted to be," Metz said.
Robert Green has seen the growth of Oro Valley's biotech sector since relocating his company to the town in 2004. His company, Integrated Biomolecule Corp., provides services such as analytical testing and product development for pharmaceutical companies.
"It was a town that clearly said they would like us to be here and like us to help build a biotech cluster," said Green, who founded the company in his garage and later worked from UA's science and technology park before locating to Oro Valley.
He said Oro Valley has a wide range of housing prices and quality schools, two factors that help draw employees.
"For years, we were an outpost in Oro Valley with clients out of state," Green said. "Now that is switching. We have a lot of support with companies in the state. All of this clustering activity contributes to that."
Representatives of the region's main economic development group, Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities, said years of investment in UA is beginning to pay off for Southern Arizona.
TREO counts more 100 biotech companies employing more than 2,000 non-hospital workers in the Tucson-Oro valley region.
"The investment in the university system is paying huge economic dividends for us now," said David Welsh, TREO's senior vice president for strategic partnerships.
Oro Valley Mayor Paul Loomis said large employers such as Ventana benefit the town more than just economically. The company supports a half marathon and cultural groups such as the Greater Oro Valley Arts Council.
"They are the flagship of our biotech community," Loomis said.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Science Foundation Arizona fellowships attract and support NAU research
[Source: Inside NAU] - Science Foundation Arizona is investing in Graduate Research Fellowships at Northern Arizona University to help the state build a world-class science and engineering infrastructure.
This is the second year the foundation is funding fellowship programs at the three state universities. The fellowships are to ensure there is a pipeline of researchers to become leaders in advancing the state's competitive research capacity in information technology, sustainable systems and biomedical research.
The foundation is providing NAU $900,000 to fund 10 two-year fellowships to support student graduate researchers. The fellowships cover research costs, expenses and full tuition up to $40,000 annually.
More good news for NAU is that the foundation has doubled its funding from last year and has broadened the program's eligibility beyond the doctoral level to include master's degree students in engineering.
"Extending the fellowship eligibility to master's level students in engineering reflects the program's purpose—to develop innovative thinkers who can create new ideas, new products and even new companies for Arizona," said Laura Huenneke, vice president for Research.
She noted that Science Foundation Arizona's interests in sustainability, bioscience and technology development complement NAU's areas of research and that "the timing of the fellowships is perfect." "The fellowships are really drawing attention to our new Master of Science in Engineering Program, focused on sustainable technologies and advanced materials and design," Huenneke said. "As a university, we've been very selective about developing graduate programs that fit closely with our research strengths, and the foundation's interests match our areas of focus very well."
These new research fellows join seven doctoral-level fellows, selected last year by the foundation to support research in biological sciences and in forestry.
According to Debra Larson, associate dean for the College of Engineering, Forestry and Natural Sciences, the fellowships plant the seeds to grow the science skills needed to meet the state's growing economic and technology challenges.
"These fellowships not only attract and support quality students from around the world, they assist our faculty in getting projects up and running and contribute a great deal to the research," Larson said.
For example, Jeff Leid, an associate professor in biology and associate director for NAU's Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics, is collaborating with graduate research fellow Emily Cope, who received her undergraduate degree at NAU. She is working with Leid to pursue fundamental answers associated with chronic sinus infections, which affect up to a fourth of the U.S. population.
"It is highly likely that her work in my laboratory will dramatically and directly impact patient health across the country," Leid said. "Without the strong support from Science Foundation Arizona, much of this work would be unattainable."
This is the second year the foundation is funding fellowship programs at the three state universities. The fellowships are to ensure there is a pipeline of researchers to become leaders in advancing the state's competitive research capacity in information technology, sustainable systems and biomedical research.
The foundation is providing NAU $900,000 to fund 10 two-year fellowships to support student graduate researchers. The fellowships cover research costs, expenses and full tuition up to $40,000 annually.
More good news for NAU is that the foundation has doubled its funding from last year and has broadened the program's eligibility beyond the doctoral level to include master's degree students in engineering.
"Extending the fellowship eligibility to master's level students in engineering reflects the program's purpose—to develop innovative thinkers who can create new ideas, new products and even new companies for Arizona," said Laura Huenneke, vice president for Research.
She noted that Science Foundation Arizona's interests in sustainability, bioscience and technology development complement NAU's areas of research and that "the timing of the fellowships is perfect." "The fellowships are really drawing attention to our new Master of Science in Engineering Program, focused on sustainable technologies and advanced materials and design," Huenneke said. "As a university, we've been very selective about developing graduate programs that fit closely with our research strengths, and the foundation's interests match our areas of focus very well."
These new research fellows join seven doctoral-level fellows, selected last year by the foundation to support research in biological sciences and in forestry.
According to Debra Larson, associate dean for the College of Engineering, Forestry and Natural Sciences, the fellowships plant the seeds to grow the science skills needed to meet the state's growing economic and technology challenges.
"These fellowships not only attract and support quality students from around the world, they assist our faculty in getting projects up and running and contribute a great deal to the research," Larson said.
For example, Jeff Leid, an associate professor in biology and associate director for NAU's Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics, is collaborating with graduate research fellow Emily Cope, who received her undergraduate degree at NAU. She is working with Leid to pursue fundamental answers associated with chronic sinus infections, which affect up to a fourth of the U.S. population.
"It is highly likely that her work in my laboratory will dramatically and directly impact patient health across the country," Leid said. "Without the strong support from Science Foundation Arizona, much of this work would be unattainable."
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
GOVERNOR ANNOUNCES ARIZONA STEM EDUCATION CENTER
[Source: Office of the Governor, www.azgovernor.gov] - Governor Janet Napolitano today announced the new Arizona STEM Education Center, which will help Arizona expand its focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education to successfully prepare our children to lead in today’s competitive global economy.
“The new education center will help make certain that Arizona cultivates the skills needed to thrive in today’s global marketplace,” Governor Napolitano said. “Increasing science, technology, engineering and math education is critical to our students’ and state’s future.”
A public-private partnership with initial funding from Freeport-McMoRan Cooper & Gold and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the Center aims to increase STEM teacher recruitment, training and retention; improve STEM skills in P-12 students, and boost the number of students entering higher education and graduating with degrees in STEM disciplines.
To accomplish this, the Center will work with stakeholders throughout the state to provide our students with an engaging and effective STEM education.
The Center is a collaboration among the Governor’s office, Science Foundation Arizona, the P-20 Council, the Arizona State Board of Education, tribal communities, Arizona universities, community colleges, and business and philanthropic initiatives. It will be housed within Science Foundation Arizona, which was established to build and strengthen Arizona’s scientific, engineering and medical competitiveness.
Darcy Renfro will serve as executive director of the Center. Currently the Governor’s policy adviser for higher education, innovation and the economy, Renfro previously served as the assistant deputy director of the Arizona Department of Commerce, in the area of Workforce Development and practiced law at the Arizona-based law firm of Fennemore Craig.
Building off of the Governor’s education priorities and her National Governors Association initiative, Innovation America, the Center’s efforts will support the Arizona State Board of Education’s new high school graduation requirements and increased academic standards, particularly in math and science. In anticipation of the upcoming increased demand for STEM teachers in Arizona, the Center will also support best practices in recruiting, training and retaining STEM teachers.
The Center will be funded independently, with both private and philanthropic funds.
“The new education center will help make certain that Arizona cultivates the skills needed to thrive in today’s global marketplace,” Governor Napolitano said. “Increasing science, technology, engineering and math education is critical to our students’ and state’s future.”
A public-private partnership with initial funding from Freeport-McMoRan Cooper & Gold and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the Center aims to increase STEM teacher recruitment, training and retention; improve STEM skills in P-12 students, and boost the number of students entering higher education and graduating with degrees in STEM disciplines.
To accomplish this, the Center will work with stakeholders throughout the state to provide our students with an engaging and effective STEM education.
The Center is a collaboration among the Governor’s office, Science Foundation Arizona, the P-20 Council, the Arizona State Board of Education, tribal communities, Arizona universities, community colleges, and business and philanthropic initiatives. It will be housed within Science Foundation Arizona, which was established to build and strengthen Arizona’s scientific, engineering and medical competitiveness.
Darcy Renfro will serve as executive director of the Center. Currently the Governor’s policy adviser for higher education, innovation and the economy, Renfro previously served as the assistant deputy director of the Arizona Department of Commerce, in the area of Workforce Development and practiced law at the Arizona-based law firm of Fennemore Craig.
Building off of the Governor’s education priorities and her National Governors Association initiative, Innovation America, the Center’s efforts will support the Arizona State Board of Education’s new high school graduation requirements and increased academic standards, particularly in math and science. In anticipation of the upcoming increased demand for STEM teachers in Arizona, the Center will also support best practices in recruiting, training and retaining STEM teachers.
The Center will be funded independently, with both private and philanthropic funds.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
R&D Tax credit expansion, SFAz funding passes with state budget
[Source, Ty Young, East Valley Living] - Albeit by a slim margin, the Arizona House of Representatives approved the fiscal 2009 state budget sent by the Senate. Included in that measure was the technology communitiy’s long-sought-after research and development tax credit increase and continued funding of Science Foundation Arizona and other technology programs.
To put it lightly, the technology community is overjoyed, said Steve Zylstra, president and chief executive of the Arizona Technology Council.
“R&D is the key to future high-tech competitiveness,” he said. “By focusing renewed attention and resources on research, this bill will ensure that Arizona remains a leader in cutting-edge technology.”
Originally a legislative bill approved by the House that stalled in the Senate, the R&D tax credit extension is being hailed as Arizona’s latest attempt to keep itself in the discussion for future technology-based economic development.
In 2009, companies spending less that $2.5 million will receive a 22 percent credit, up from 20 percent. Companies spending more than $2.5 million will receive a $600,000base credit, up from the $500,000 from the first R&D credit. Also, for those companies, they will receive and additional 13 percent for R&D expenditures above $2.5 million. That is an increase from the 11 percent on the books.
Initially, the tax credit for companies spending less than $2.5 million in research-based activities would increase to 24 percent, while companies spending more would receive a $750,000 credit plus an additional 15 percent. Through various amendments, the figures were drawn down.
Regardless, local technology sector representatives said in increase is necessary to keep pace with other states, especially California, New Mexico, New York and Texas. All of those states are still far ahead of Arizona in terms of R&D tax credits and way ahead in terms of companies currently headquartered and doing work in their borders.
“Innovation doesn’t just happen. It requires leadership and an environment that fosters creativity,” said Jason Bagley, Government Affairs manager, Intel Corp.. “Arizona’s policy leaders are demonstrating their commitment to investing in innovation by supporting the enhanced Research and Development Tax Credit.
Choosing to compete encourages growth of high-wage, knowledge-economy jobs and leads to greater prosperity for Arizona’s future.”
The House passed the $9.9 billion budget budget June 26 evening by a 31-29 vote. The Senate passed its budget to the House at 5:30 a.m. after an all-night session. Gov. Janet Napolitano is expected to sign the budget, thus opening the door to fiscal 2009.
Science Foundation Arizona was targeted by some lawmakers as a potential budget cut. The non-profit organization receives $25 million each year to fund science and technology-based research ventures in the state. The allotment must be matched by private industry in order for the funds to be given to SFAz.
The new budget also preserved funding for the Arizona Job Training Fund and the Greater e-Learning Association (GAZeL), considered necessities for the technology community to prosper.
With the R&D credit now on the books, many technology companies are hoping it will bring new growth to its continuously growing sector. In a time where money is tight for both businesses and residents, keeping an eye on the future is very important, said Steve Turcotte, president of Advanced Ceramics Manufacturing in Tucson.
“With rising fuel prices and a tightening economy, there is no better time to have R&D tax credits available,” he said. “Innovation leads to both job creation and long-term revenue growth for both small and large companies. If we stop innovating, we’ll lose our competitive edge.”
To put it lightly, the technology community is overjoyed, said Steve Zylstra, president and chief executive of the Arizona Technology Council.
“R&D is the key to future high-tech competitiveness,” he said. “By focusing renewed attention and resources on research, this bill will ensure that Arizona remains a leader in cutting-edge technology.”
Originally a legislative bill approved by the House that stalled in the Senate, the R&D tax credit extension is being hailed as Arizona’s latest attempt to keep itself in the discussion for future technology-based economic development.
In 2009, companies spending less that $2.5 million will receive a 22 percent credit, up from 20 percent. Companies spending more than $2.5 million will receive a $600,000base credit, up from the $500,000 from the first R&D credit. Also, for those companies, they will receive and additional 13 percent for R&D expenditures above $2.5 million. That is an increase from the 11 percent on the books.
Initially, the tax credit for companies spending less than $2.5 million in research-based activities would increase to 24 percent, while companies spending more would receive a $750,000 credit plus an additional 15 percent. Through various amendments, the figures were drawn down.
Regardless, local technology sector representatives said in increase is necessary to keep pace with other states, especially California, New Mexico, New York and Texas. All of those states are still far ahead of Arizona in terms of R&D tax credits and way ahead in terms of companies currently headquartered and doing work in their borders.
“Innovation doesn’t just happen. It requires leadership and an environment that fosters creativity,” said Jason Bagley, Government Affairs manager, Intel Corp.. “Arizona’s policy leaders are demonstrating their commitment to investing in innovation by supporting the enhanced Research and Development Tax Credit.
Choosing to compete encourages growth of high-wage, knowledge-economy jobs and leads to greater prosperity for Arizona’s future.”
The House passed the $9.9 billion budget budget June 26 evening by a 31-29 vote. The Senate passed its budget to the House at 5:30 a.m. after an all-night session. Gov. Janet Napolitano is expected to sign the budget, thus opening the door to fiscal 2009.
Science Foundation Arizona was targeted by some lawmakers as a potential budget cut. The non-profit organization receives $25 million each year to fund science and technology-based research ventures in the state. The allotment must be matched by private industry in order for the funds to be given to SFAz.
The new budget also preserved funding for the Arizona Job Training Fund and the Greater e-Learning Association (GAZeL), considered necessities for the technology community to prosper.
With the R&D credit now on the books, many technology companies are hoping it will bring new growth to its continuously growing sector. In a time where money is tight for both businesses and residents, keeping an eye on the future is very important, said Steve Turcotte, president of Advanced Ceramics Manufacturing in Tucson.
“With rising fuel prices and a tightening economy, there is no better time to have R&D tax credits available,” he said. “Innovation leads to both job creation and long-term revenue growth for both small and large companies. If we stop innovating, we’ll lose our competitive edge.”
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
States push biotech research funding
[Source: Ken Alltucker, The Arizona Republic] - One day after signing a $1 billion biotech initiative for his state, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick on Tuesday said it is critical for states to commit funding during tough economic times to build and sustain a research-based economy.
Patrick said it takes "political will and courage to make those long-term commitments" and to show scientists around the globe that a region is serious about funding research.
"I know the world is small, change is constant and competition is fierce. People come from all over the world to replicate the advantage we have," said Patrick, who co-billed a keynote discussion at the Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual convention on how state governments can foster biotech research
Patrick shared the stage with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, whose state spearheaded an effort to recruit the prestigious Scripps Research Institute to Florida in 2004. Florida's biotech efforts are often compared to Arizona's bioscience goals because both states sought to jump-start their economies by luring a major research institution.
In addition to speaking at the conference, Patrick was named the BIO 2008 governor of the year, which recognizes a state leader's vision and support of the biosciences industry. Patrick assumed the award from last year's winner, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano.
The Massachusetts bill comes at a time when Arizona and other state governments are grappling with sharp budget deficits and considering cuts to research, among other areas.
Arizona bioscience leaders have urged state lawmakers to preserve funding for projects such as the biomedical campus in downtown Phoenix and Science Foundation Arizona.
They say it is important for Arizona to foster growth of research and other white-collar jobs to diversify the state's economy and avoid the type of economic slump Arizona now faces due to its real-estate woes.
Patrick said that Massachusetts has a long history of innovation and therefore maintains an edge over other states seeking to grow science jobs. That is in part due to the state's highly educated workforce and prestigious universities, such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He said his state's funding commitment, in part, is a defensive measure to ensure Massachusetts universities, companies and research institutes retain top scientists and biotech companies.
Bush echoed Patrick's call for sustained funding. Florida committed more than $300 million in federal economic-development funds to land Scripps in 2004, a move that was deemed controversial at the time.
Like Arizona, Florida once had little in the way of existing biotech companies, when it landed the biomedical research institute Scripps Florida, a division of La Jolla, Calif.-based Scripps.
Arizona and the city of Phoenix committed millions for a state-of-the-art research lab and startup costs for the Translational Genomics Research Institute, also known as TGen.
Bush said Florida's decision has paid big economic dividends with a cluster of biotech companies and research institutes settling there.
Other West Coast research institutes have followed Scripps to Florida, including Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, SRI International and Burnham Institute for Medical Research.
Large pharmaceutical companies have taken notice, too, with Merck & Co. establishing a for-profit research venture with H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute of Tampa.
The state now boasts nearly 600 biotech, pharmaceutical and medical-device companies.
He said the decision to commit such a large amount of up-front money helped the state avoid cost-cutting that often occurs during slumping economic times.
Reach the reporter at ken.alltucker@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8285.
Patrick said it takes "political will and courage to make those long-term commitments" and to show scientists around the globe that a region is serious about funding research.
"I know the world is small, change is constant and competition is fierce. People come from all over the world to replicate the advantage we have," said Patrick, who co-billed a keynote discussion at the Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual convention on how state governments can foster biotech research
Patrick shared the stage with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, whose state spearheaded an effort to recruit the prestigious Scripps Research Institute to Florida in 2004. Florida's biotech efforts are often compared to Arizona's bioscience goals because both states sought to jump-start their economies by luring a major research institution.
In addition to speaking at the conference, Patrick was named the BIO 2008 governor of the year, which recognizes a state leader's vision and support of the biosciences industry. Patrick assumed the award from last year's winner, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano.
The Massachusetts bill comes at a time when Arizona and other state governments are grappling with sharp budget deficits and considering cuts to research, among other areas.
Arizona bioscience leaders have urged state lawmakers to preserve funding for projects such as the biomedical campus in downtown Phoenix and Science Foundation Arizona.
They say it is important for Arizona to foster growth of research and other white-collar jobs to diversify the state's economy and avoid the type of economic slump Arizona now faces due to its real-estate woes.
Patrick said that Massachusetts has a long history of innovation and therefore maintains an edge over other states seeking to grow science jobs. That is in part due to the state's highly educated workforce and prestigious universities, such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He said his state's funding commitment, in part, is a defensive measure to ensure Massachusetts universities, companies and research institutes retain top scientists and biotech companies.
Bush echoed Patrick's call for sustained funding. Florida committed more than $300 million in federal economic-development funds to land Scripps in 2004, a move that was deemed controversial at the time.
Like Arizona, Florida once had little in the way of existing biotech companies, when it landed the biomedical research institute Scripps Florida, a division of La Jolla, Calif.-based Scripps.
Arizona and the city of Phoenix committed millions for a state-of-the-art research lab and startup costs for the Translational Genomics Research Institute, also known as TGen.
Bush said Florida's decision has paid big economic dividends with a cluster of biotech companies and research institutes settling there.
Other West Coast research institutes have followed Scripps to Florida, including Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, SRI International and Burnham Institute for Medical Research.
Large pharmaceutical companies have taken notice, too, with Merck & Co. establishing a for-profit research venture with H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute of Tampa.
The state now boasts nearly 600 biotech, pharmaceutical and medical-device companies.
He said the decision to commit such a large amount of up-front money helped the state avoid cost-cutting that often occurs during slumping economic times.
Reach the reporter at ken.alltucker@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8285.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Algae's bright future
[Source: The Arizona Republic , Ryan Randazzo] - Many farmers keep a scarecrow handy, but Michael Bellefeuille has more to worry about than crows feeding on his unique crop.
The Casa Grande researcher and farmer begins his days scanning algae samples under a microscope to ensure his slimy harvest is safe from euglenoids, the microscopic invertebrates that kick around with a whiplike flagellum to eat whatever is in sight.
With record fuel prices, everyone from Chevron to British energy company BP is studying how to make fuel from quick-growing algae. Bellefeuille works for Phoenix-based XL Renewables Inc, which is taking a slightly different strategy by growing algae that can be sold to make animal feed, biodiesel and food oils, rather than strictly focus on biofuel.
"Our focus is to just economically produce this as a crop," President Ben Cloud said. "We see this as an emerging crop to compete with soybeans and corn."
XL Renewables has a small test facility in Casa Grande at Withrow Dairy, and officials plan to open 40 acres of 18-inch-deep algae troughs this fall to demonstrate their farming technology.
Wastewater from the dairy cattle will be used to grow the algae, which can then be used as a food supplement for the cattle, Cloud said. Algae also can be used to feed pigs, poultry and fish, he said.
About 77 percent of the algae's mass can be used in animal feeds. An additional 13 percent is oil that can be converted to biodiesel, and the remaining 10 percent can be sold as fatty acids used in human and animal food supplements.
Cloud estimates it will cost $300 per ton of algae for water, nutrients and labor, but if he can find markets for all the products, he could earn as much as $600 to $800 per ton.
He also figures he has to produce 10 tons of algae per acre per year to profit.
Biodiesel plant on hold
XL Renewables formed in 2006 to develop an algae-growing facility and biodiesel refinery in Vicksburg, about 100 miles west of Phoenix off Interstate 10.
But the company has been unable to get financing for that refinery and, instead, is focusing on growing algae and selling it to others who would make the final products, Cloud said, adding that he still plans to develop 2,400 acres of algae troughs at the Vicksburg location after opening the test facility in Casa Grande.
Growing algae in exposed ponds that allow evaporation would seem a water-intensive crop for the desert, but Cloud and Bellefeuille hope to use partially treated wastewater or other non-drinkable water, and said that, even with evaporation, they expect algae to use less water per acre than cotton or alfalfa.
"We can locate it with marginal farmland with very poor water quality," Cloud said. "That's where algae fits. It's not something you put on prime farmland."
That's part of his sales pitch because he not only wants to be in the growing business, he wants to sell the trough technology to other farmers to start their own algae crops.
An energy expert from Arizona State University familiar with XL Renewables' work said the concept shows potential because it looks at other uses for algae.
"Many of the models (for growing algae) use a very select strain of algae that is high in oil, and they are careful not to get contamination (with other algae strains)," said Mark Edwards, a professor of marketing and sustainability. "XL's model is very promising."
Edwards recently wrote a book titled Green Algae Strategy, in which he proposes algae as a solution for world food and fuel shortages.
"Arizona will probably be Algae Central," he said. "We have sunshine, temperate weather, not a whole lot of freezes, brine water underground that can't be used for crops, lots of cheap desert land. We have exactly what the industry needs."
Laser-leveled troughs
Much of the research on algae fuel has focused on how to keep it growing at the highest rate. XL officials think they have found a solution.
XL's troughs are laser-leveled and aerated to stimulate growth. The algae can be filtered from the water as it flows through the troughs.
"When you are continually harvesting it, you really are giving it room to grow," said Bellefeuille, who studied algae and biofuel at ASU before landing a job at XL after graduating.
XL officials recognize the traits in algae that have attracted ASU researchers and several major companies around the globe to the possibility of growing it for biofuel.
"It's highly adaptable," Bellefeuille said. "The next generation learns from the one before it. And every six to 12 hours it replicates."
That trait makes it possible to take a strain of alga that doesn't grow well at 100 degrees and raise it so that it thrives at that temperature, he said. It also could allow XL to grow different strains in different seasons.
Growing algae like a traditional crop has brought about some strange ideas.
Among the more bizarre plans at XL Renewables is lighting that keeps algae thriving after sundown. The company plans to test lights on the 40 acres of troughs being developed in Casa Grande.
Because the technology is proprietary, Cloud did not want to disclose the light source but said that it is not energy-intensive such as the lights greenhouses sometimes use. He also said it does not cut into the revenue estimates for algae troughs.
"It glows," Cloud said. "People will see fields glowing at night."
Algae interest
Nationally, well-known energy companies are researching algae, including:
Chevron Corp., which announced in January it was partnering with San Francisco Bay Area company Solazyme to make biodiesel from algae. Chevron already had announced it was working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on algae biofuel.
Royal Dutch Shell, which announced in November it would build a test facility in Hawaii with HR Biopetroleum Inc., focused on using seawater to grow algae.
Local endeavors
Arizona also is seeing lots of algae research, including:
Arizona State University researchers are growing bacteria to make diesel-engine fuel. The project is a partnership with the energy company BP and Science Foundation Arizona. Researchers are building "photobioreactors" to grow the bacteria, hoping to prove that the bacteria can be raised on a commercial scale.
Arizona Public Service Co. has had some success working with GreenFuel Technologies Corp. of Massachusetts, "feeding" the carbon dioxide from a natural-gas power plant to algae for biodiesel.
Scottsdale-based PetroSun Inc., a gas- and oil-drilling company, announced in February that it formed a joint venture with Gilbert-based Optimum Biofuels to build an algae biorefinery near Coolidge. PetroSun also has announced plans to open similar plants in Louisiana, Texas and Central America.
Amereco Biofuels Corp., which has a small project in the far West Valley using recycled restaurant cooking oil, is researching various strains of algae for biodiesel.
The Casa Grande researcher and farmer begins his days scanning algae samples under a microscope to ensure his slimy harvest is safe from euglenoids, the microscopic invertebrates that kick around with a whiplike flagellum to eat whatever is in sight.
With record fuel prices, everyone from Chevron to British energy company BP is studying how to make fuel from quick-growing algae. Bellefeuille works for Phoenix-based XL Renewables Inc, which is taking a slightly different strategy by growing algae that can be sold to make animal feed, biodiesel and food oils, rather than strictly focus on biofuel.
"Our focus is to just economically produce this as a crop," President Ben Cloud said. "We see this as an emerging crop to compete with soybeans and corn."
XL Renewables has a small test facility in Casa Grande at Withrow Dairy, and officials plan to open 40 acres of 18-inch-deep algae troughs this fall to demonstrate their farming technology.
Wastewater from the dairy cattle will be used to grow the algae, which can then be used as a food supplement for the cattle, Cloud said. Algae also can be used to feed pigs, poultry and fish, he said.
About 77 percent of the algae's mass can be used in animal feeds. An additional 13 percent is oil that can be converted to biodiesel, and the remaining 10 percent can be sold as fatty acids used in human and animal food supplements.
Cloud estimates it will cost $300 per ton of algae for water, nutrients and labor, but if he can find markets for all the products, he could earn as much as $600 to $800 per ton.
He also figures he has to produce 10 tons of algae per acre per year to profit.
Biodiesel plant on hold
XL Renewables formed in 2006 to develop an algae-growing facility and biodiesel refinery in Vicksburg, about 100 miles west of Phoenix off Interstate 10.
But the company has been unable to get financing for that refinery and, instead, is focusing on growing algae and selling it to others who would make the final products, Cloud said, adding that he still plans to develop 2,400 acres of algae troughs at the Vicksburg location after opening the test facility in Casa Grande.
Growing algae in exposed ponds that allow evaporation would seem a water-intensive crop for the desert, but Cloud and Bellefeuille hope to use partially treated wastewater or other non-drinkable water, and said that, even with evaporation, they expect algae to use less water per acre than cotton or alfalfa.
"We can locate it with marginal farmland with very poor water quality," Cloud said. "That's where algae fits. It's not something you put on prime farmland."
That's part of his sales pitch because he not only wants to be in the growing business, he wants to sell the trough technology to other farmers to start their own algae crops.
An energy expert from Arizona State University familiar with XL Renewables' work said the concept shows potential because it looks at other uses for algae.
"Many of the models (for growing algae) use a very select strain of algae that is high in oil, and they are careful not to get contamination (with other algae strains)," said Mark Edwards, a professor of marketing and sustainability. "XL's model is very promising."
Edwards recently wrote a book titled Green Algae Strategy, in which he proposes algae as a solution for world food and fuel shortages.
"Arizona will probably be Algae Central," he said. "We have sunshine, temperate weather, not a whole lot of freezes, brine water underground that can't be used for crops, lots of cheap desert land. We have exactly what the industry needs."
Laser-leveled troughs
Much of the research on algae fuel has focused on how to keep it growing at the highest rate. XL officials think they have found a solution.
XL's troughs are laser-leveled and aerated to stimulate growth. The algae can be filtered from the water as it flows through the troughs.
"When you are continually harvesting it, you really are giving it room to grow," said Bellefeuille, who studied algae and biofuel at ASU before landing a job at XL after graduating.
XL officials recognize the traits in algae that have attracted ASU researchers and several major companies around the globe to the possibility of growing it for biofuel.
"It's highly adaptable," Bellefeuille said. "The next generation learns from the one before it. And every six to 12 hours it replicates."
That trait makes it possible to take a strain of alga that doesn't grow well at 100 degrees and raise it so that it thrives at that temperature, he said. It also could allow XL to grow different strains in different seasons.
Growing algae like a traditional crop has brought about some strange ideas.
Among the more bizarre plans at XL Renewables is lighting that keeps algae thriving after sundown. The company plans to test lights on the 40 acres of troughs being developed in Casa Grande.
Because the technology is proprietary, Cloud did not want to disclose the light source but said that it is not energy-intensive such as the lights greenhouses sometimes use. He also said it does not cut into the revenue estimates for algae troughs.
"It glows," Cloud said. "People will see fields glowing at night."
Algae interest
Nationally, well-known energy companies are researching algae, including:
Chevron Corp., which announced in January it was partnering with San Francisco Bay Area company Solazyme to make biodiesel from algae. Chevron already had announced it was working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on algae biofuel.
Royal Dutch Shell, which announced in November it would build a test facility in Hawaii with HR Biopetroleum Inc., focused on using seawater to grow algae.
Local endeavors
Arizona also is seeing lots of algae research, including:
Arizona State University researchers are growing bacteria to make diesel-engine fuel. The project is a partnership with the energy company BP and Science Foundation Arizona. Researchers are building "photobioreactors" to grow the bacteria, hoping to prove that the bacteria can be raised on a commercial scale.
Arizona Public Service Co. has had some success working with GreenFuel Technologies Corp. of Massachusetts, "feeding" the carbon dioxide from a natural-gas power plant to algae for biodiesel.
Scottsdale-based PetroSun Inc., a gas- and oil-drilling company, announced in February that it formed a joint venture with Gilbert-based Optimum Biofuels to build an algae biorefinery near Coolidge. PetroSun also has announced plans to open similar plants in Louisiana, Texas and Central America.
Amereco Biofuels Corp., which has a small project in the far West Valley using recycled restaurant cooking oil, is researching various strains of algae for biodiesel.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Biosensing Nanodevice To Revolutionize Health Screenings
[Source: ScienceDaily] — One day soon a biosensing nanodevice developed by Arizona State University researcher Wayne Frasch may eliminate long lines at airport security checkpoints and revolutionize health screenings for diseases like anthrax, cancer and antibiotic resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
Even more incredible than the device itself, is that it is based on the world's tiniest rotary motor: a biological engine measured on the order of molecules.
Frasch works with the enzyme F1-adenosine triphosphatase, better known as F1- ATPase. This enzyme, only 10 to 12 nanometers in diameter, has an axle that spins and produces torque. This tiny wonder is part of a complex of proteins key to creating energy in all living things, including photosynthesis in plants. F1-ATPase breaks down adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to adenosine diphospahte (ADP), releasing energy. Previous studies of its structure and characteristics have been the source of two Nobel Prizes awarded in 1979 and 1997.
It was through his own detailed study of the rotational mechanism of the F1-ATPase, which operates like a three-cylinder Mazda rotary motor, that Frasch conceived of a way to take this tiny biological powerhouse and couple it with science applications outside of the human body.
An article authored by Frasch and his colleagues in the ASU School of Life Sciences details the technology that would allow this. Their publication "Single-molecule detection of DNA via sequence-specific links between F1-ATPase motors and gold nanorod sensors" was recently published in the journal Lab on a Chip, and featured in the online journal Chemical Biology.
What Frasch and his colleagues show is that the enzyme can be armed with an optical probe (gold nanorod) and manipulated to emit a signal when it detects a single molecule of target DNA. This is achieved by anchoring a quiescent F1-ATPase motor to a surface. A single strand of a reference biotinylated DNA molecule is then attached to its axle. The marker protein, biotin, on the DNA is known to bind specifically and tightly to the glycoprotein avidin, so an avidin-coated gold nanorod is then added. The avidin-nanorod attaches to the biotinylated DNA strand and forms a stable complex.
When a test solution containing a target piece of DNA is added, this DNA binds to the single complementary reference strand attached to the F1-ATPase. The DNA complex, suspended between the nanorod and the axle, forms a stiff bridge. Once ATP is added to the test solution, the F1-ATPase axle spins, and with it, the attached (now double-stranded) DNA and nanorod. The whirling nano-sized device emits a pulsing red signal that can then be detected with a microscope.
According to Frasch, the rotation discriminates fully assembled nanodevices from nonspecifically bound nanorods, resulting in a sensitivity limit of one zeptomole (600 molecules). Simply put, if it's not moving and flashing, it simply isn't relevant.
Moreover, Frasch says, "Studies with the F1-ATPase in my laboratory show that since it can detect single DNA molecules, it far exceeds the detection limits of conventional PCR [polymerase chain reaction] technology."
Such a detection instrument based on the F1-ATPase enzyme would also be "faster and more portable," he adds.
With support from Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz), Frasch will transfer his work from the bench to biotech, through establishment of a local company that utilizes the nano-sized F1-ATPase to produce a DNA detection instrument.
A prototype of the DNA detector is already in development. It is roughly the size of a small tissue box. Sampling would be as simple as taking a swab from an infected wound or a piece of baggage, dissolving it in a solution and placing a drop on a slide bearing reference F1-ATPases and their nanorods. Once in the instrument, red blinking signals emitted by rotating nanorods would let a computer know there's trouble, literally, in a flash.
SFAz funding has also enabled Frasch to extend the method to do protein detection at the single molecule level. This is novel because, unlike DNA, proteins can not be amplified artificially to improve the chances of detection.
"Rapid and sensitive biosensing of nucleic acids and proteins is vital for the identification of pathogenic agents of biomedical and bioterrorist importance," notes Frasch, who is also with the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "It also provides a new avenue through which to analyze genotypes and forensic evidence."
Adapted from materials provided by Arizona State University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Even more incredible than the device itself, is that it is based on the world's tiniest rotary motor: a biological engine measured on the order of molecules.
Frasch works with the enzyme F1-adenosine triphosphatase, better known as F1- ATPase. This enzyme, only 10 to 12 nanometers in diameter, has an axle that spins and produces torque. This tiny wonder is part of a complex of proteins key to creating energy in all living things, including photosynthesis in plants. F1-ATPase breaks down adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to adenosine diphospahte (ADP), releasing energy. Previous studies of its structure and characteristics have been the source of two Nobel Prizes awarded in 1979 and 1997.
It was through his own detailed study of the rotational mechanism of the F1-ATPase, which operates like a three-cylinder Mazda rotary motor, that Frasch conceived of a way to take this tiny biological powerhouse and couple it with science applications outside of the human body.
An article authored by Frasch and his colleagues in the ASU School of Life Sciences details the technology that would allow this. Their publication "Single-molecule detection of DNA via sequence-specific links between F1-ATPase motors and gold nanorod sensors" was recently published in the journal Lab on a Chip, and featured in the online journal Chemical Biology.
What Frasch and his colleagues show is that the enzyme can be armed with an optical probe (gold nanorod) and manipulated to emit a signal when it detects a single molecule of target DNA. This is achieved by anchoring a quiescent F1-ATPase motor to a surface. A single strand of a reference biotinylated DNA molecule is then attached to its axle. The marker protein, biotin, on the DNA is known to bind specifically and tightly to the glycoprotein avidin, so an avidin-coated gold nanorod is then added. The avidin-nanorod attaches to the biotinylated DNA strand and forms a stable complex.
When a test solution containing a target piece of DNA is added, this DNA binds to the single complementary reference strand attached to the F1-ATPase. The DNA complex, suspended between the nanorod and the axle, forms a stiff bridge. Once ATP is added to the test solution, the F1-ATPase axle spins, and with it, the attached (now double-stranded) DNA and nanorod. The whirling nano-sized device emits a pulsing red signal that can then be detected with a microscope.
According to Frasch, the rotation discriminates fully assembled nanodevices from nonspecifically bound nanorods, resulting in a sensitivity limit of one zeptomole (600 molecules). Simply put, if it's not moving and flashing, it simply isn't relevant.
Moreover, Frasch says, "Studies with the F1-ATPase in my laboratory show that since it can detect single DNA molecules, it far exceeds the detection limits of conventional PCR [polymerase chain reaction] technology."
Such a detection instrument based on the F1-ATPase enzyme would also be "faster and more portable," he adds.
With support from Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz), Frasch will transfer his work from the bench to biotech, through establishment of a local company that utilizes the nano-sized F1-ATPase to produce a DNA detection instrument.
A prototype of the DNA detector is already in development. It is roughly the size of a small tissue box. Sampling would be as simple as taking a swab from an infected wound or a piece of baggage, dissolving it in a solution and placing a drop on a slide bearing reference F1-ATPases and their nanorods. Once in the instrument, red blinking signals emitted by rotating nanorods would let a computer know there's trouble, literally, in a flash.
SFAz funding has also enabled Frasch to extend the method to do protein detection at the single molecule level. This is novel because, unlike DNA, proteins can not be amplified artificially to improve the chances of detection.
"Rapid and sensitive biosensing of nucleic acids and proteins is vital for the identification of pathogenic agents of biomedical and bioterrorist importance," notes Frasch, who is also with the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "It also provides a new avenue through which to analyze genotypes and forensic evidence."
Adapted from materials provided by Arizona State University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
UA-led research team awarded $50M to solve plant biology's grand challenges
[Source: Johnny Cruz, University of Arizona] - The National Science Foundation has awarded a University of Arizona–led team $50 million dollars to create a global center and computer cyberinfrastructure within which to answer plant biology's grand challenge questions, which no single research entity in the world currently has the capacity to address. The project will unite plant scientists, computer scientists and information scientists from around the world for the first time ever to provide answers to questions of global importance and advance all of these fields.
The five-year project, dubbed the iPlant Collaborative, potentially is renewable for a second five years for a total of $100 million. “This global center is going to change the way we do science,” says UA plant sciences professor and BIO5 member Richard Jorgensen, who is the lead investigator and director of the iPlant Collaborative. “We’re bringing many different types of scientists together who rarely had opportunities to talk to one another before. In so doing, we’ll create the kind of multidisciplinary environment that is necessary to crack the toughest problems in modern biology. ”Other institutions working with the UA include Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, Arizona State University, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and Purdue University. The project’s board of directors will be chaired by Robert Last, from Michigan State University.
About 79 percent of the grant will stay at the UA, with CSHL receiving approximately 16 percent, ASU four percent, and UNCW and Purdue a combined one percent.
UA participants in the iPlant Collaborative include BIO5, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Department of Plant Sciences; the College of Science’s Departments of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; the Eller College of Management’s Department of Management Information Systems; the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; the Arizona Research Lab’s Biotechnology Computing Facility; and University Information Technology Services.
The iPlant center will be located in the UA’s BIO5 Institute in Tucson and will be administered by BIO5, the UA’s premier biotechnology center. BIO5 was founded to encourage collaboration across scientific disciplines, accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and develop innovative solutions to society’s most complex biological challenges. “The iPlant team,” said Joann Roskoski, executive officer of the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences, “has a compelling vision for an organization by, for and of the community that will bring to bear the power of cyberinfrastructure to enable scientists everywhere to take on some of the most important questions in plant science.”
The iPlant Collaborative will create both a physical center and a virtual computing space where researchers can communicate and work together as they share, analyze and manipulate data, all while seeking answers to plant biology’s greatest unsolved mysteries – its grand-challenge questions.
Solving grand challenges is crucial, Jorgensen says, because plants affect every aspect of our lives. “Everything’s connected,” he explains. “As our climate changes and our environment changes we need to have a deep understanding of the biology of plants from the molecular to the ecosystem level in order to understand and mitigate the problems that will arise – to adapt as best we can and to focus our efforts on saving the organisms and ecosystems that are most important to save.”
The collaborative is designed so that any research team from any consortium of institutions or disciplines can propose a grand-challenge question. iPlant will facilitate the identification of such questions by the plant biology community (two to four the first year) and develop the iPlant cyberinfrastructure to help scientists answer those questions.
The cyberinfrastructure and the researchers will rely heavily on computational thinking, a form of problem-solving that assigns computers the jobs they’re most efficient at, and in doing so frees up humans to spend more time on the creative tasks that humans do best. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure will serve as a model for solving problems in fields outside of plant biology, too.
One feature of iPlant that will be developed is the ability to map the full expanse of plant biology research in much the way that Google Earth physically maps our planet. Like users of Google Earth, users of iPlant may one day be able to “zoom” in and out among various levels of plant biology, from the molecular to the organismic to the ecosystem level. For example, a researcher might “zoom in” to analyze the carbon fixed, oxygen produced and water utilized by individual leaves, then “zoom out” to analyze how all of these might affect large-scale changes in ecosystems and how that could in turn affect air quality and climate. Because collaboration among disciplines is central to iPlant’s mission, the cyberinfrastructure also will have a strong social networking component for both facilitating communication among researchers from different fields as they work and for researching the effectiveness of social networking in iPlant and in the plant and computer and information sciences generally.
All iPlant projects will have K–12, undergraduate and graduate education components as well, which are co-funded by NSF, BIO5 and Science Foundation Arizona. Students, teachers and the public will all have access to iPlant’s resources and data, as well as to educational tools designed to help them understand that data and develop inquiry-based learning modules for K–12, undergraduate and graduate science education. “The learning activities that will evolve from the iPlant collaborative will bring the challenges of real-world problem-solving and discovery to the classroom for both students and teachers. Science Foundation Arizona’s investment will ensure that Arizona students are engaged from day one,” says William C. Harris, president and CEO of Science Foundation Arizona.
BIO5 Director Vicki Chandler, also a principal investigator, explains, “Because of the Internet and cyberinfrastructure, this is the first time in the history of science that everyone can access the same data at the same time using the same tools as the researchers generating that data. The exciting challenge is to produce tools that students and teachers can readily access.” Each proposed grand-challenge question will have practical applications and societal implications. For a field like plant biology, those implications are many and far-reaching. “Human existence on this planet is absolutely dependent on plants,” Chandler says. “Our houses, our food, our atmosphere – everything about the quality of human life depends on plants.”
Welcome News to Arizona LeadersThe award – one of the largest NSF grants ever to an Arizona entity – came as welcome news to Arizona’s leaders, who have been working to build the state’s bioscience capacities in research and economic development. “Today’s announcement is proof that our investment in higher education is paying off,” Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano said at an Arizona state capitol news conference. “Arizona’s future lies in innovation in areas like the biosciences, and we are tremendously proud that the National Science Foundation has chosen Arizona to chart a new course in plant science research.”
“This is the sort of big return on investment that the UA has promised the State of Arizona since the BIO5 Institute was opened and housed with critical state investments,” said UA President Robert N. Shelton. “BIO5 is ideally suited to house the iPlant Collaborative. Its work will span scientific disciplines and bring together plant biologists of all kinds to examine plant life across its entire continuum, from individual plant cells to entire ecosystems.”
“This remarkable grant recognizes the great work being done every day by the researchers and students of The University of Arizona, particularly in the field of bioscience research. The UA has emerged as a leader in bioscience research and education, and I appreciate the National Science Foundation for recognizing their capabilities. Their achievement under this grant will benefit the people of Southern Arizona as well as all Americans,” says Congressman Raul Grijalva.
CONTACTS:
Deborah Daun, BIO5 (520-626-2059; Cell: 520-247-7440; ddaun@email.arizona.edu)
Johnny Cruz, UANews, (520-621-1879; Cell: 520-307-3362; cruzj@email.arizona.edu)
Lisa Joy Zgorski, National Science Foundation, (703-292-8311; lisajoy@nsf.gov)
The five-year project, dubbed the iPlant Collaborative, potentially is renewable for a second five years for a total of $100 million. “This global center is going to change the way we do science,” says UA plant sciences professor and BIO5 member Richard Jorgensen, who is the lead investigator and director of the iPlant Collaborative. “We’re bringing many different types of scientists together who rarely had opportunities to talk to one another before. In so doing, we’ll create the kind of multidisciplinary environment that is necessary to crack the toughest problems in modern biology. ”Other institutions working with the UA include Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, Arizona State University, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and Purdue University. The project’s board of directors will be chaired by Robert Last, from Michigan State University.
About 79 percent of the grant will stay at the UA, with CSHL receiving approximately 16 percent, ASU four percent, and UNCW and Purdue a combined one percent.
UA participants in the iPlant Collaborative include BIO5, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Department of Plant Sciences; the College of Science’s Departments of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; the Eller College of Management’s Department of Management Information Systems; the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; the Arizona Research Lab’s Biotechnology Computing Facility; and University Information Technology Services.
The iPlant center will be located in the UA’s BIO5 Institute in Tucson and will be administered by BIO5, the UA’s premier biotechnology center. BIO5 was founded to encourage collaboration across scientific disciplines, accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and develop innovative solutions to society’s most complex biological challenges. “The iPlant team,” said Joann Roskoski, executive officer of the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences, “has a compelling vision for an organization by, for and of the community that will bring to bear the power of cyberinfrastructure to enable scientists everywhere to take on some of the most important questions in plant science.”
The iPlant Collaborative will create both a physical center and a virtual computing space where researchers can communicate and work together as they share, analyze and manipulate data, all while seeking answers to plant biology’s greatest unsolved mysteries – its grand-challenge questions.
Solving grand challenges is crucial, Jorgensen says, because plants affect every aspect of our lives. “Everything’s connected,” he explains. “As our climate changes and our environment changes we need to have a deep understanding of the biology of plants from the molecular to the ecosystem level in order to understand and mitigate the problems that will arise – to adapt as best we can and to focus our efforts on saving the organisms and ecosystems that are most important to save.”
The collaborative is designed so that any research team from any consortium of institutions or disciplines can propose a grand-challenge question. iPlant will facilitate the identification of such questions by the plant biology community (two to four the first year) and develop the iPlant cyberinfrastructure to help scientists answer those questions.
The cyberinfrastructure and the researchers will rely heavily on computational thinking, a form of problem-solving that assigns computers the jobs they’re most efficient at, and in doing so frees up humans to spend more time on the creative tasks that humans do best. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure will serve as a model for solving problems in fields outside of plant biology, too.
One feature of iPlant that will be developed is the ability to map the full expanse of plant biology research in much the way that Google Earth physically maps our planet. Like users of Google Earth, users of iPlant may one day be able to “zoom” in and out among various levels of plant biology, from the molecular to the organismic to the ecosystem level. For example, a researcher might “zoom in” to analyze the carbon fixed, oxygen produced and water utilized by individual leaves, then “zoom out” to analyze how all of these might affect large-scale changes in ecosystems and how that could in turn affect air quality and climate. Because collaboration among disciplines is central to iPlant’s mission, the cyberinfrastructure also will have a strong social networking component for both facilitating communication among researchers from different fields as they work and for researching the effectiveness of social networking in iPlant and in the plant and computer and information sciences generally.
All iPlant projects will have K–12, undergraduate and graduate education components as well, which are co-funded by NSF, BIO5 and Science Foundation Arizona. Students, teachers and the public will all have access to iPlant’s resources and data, as well as to educational tools designed to help them understand that data and develop inquiry-based learning modules for K–12, undergraduate and graduate science education. “The learning activities that will evolve from the iPlant collaborative will bring the challenges of real-world problem-solving and discovery to the classroom for both students and teachers. Science Foundation Arizona’s investment will ensure that Arizona students are engaged from day one,” says William C. Harris, president and CEO of Science Foundation Arizona.
BIO5 Director Vicki Chandler, also a principal investigator, explains, “Because of the Internet and cyberinfrastructure, this is the first time in the history of science that everyone can access the same data at the same time using the same tools as the researchers generating that data. The exciting challenge is to produce tools that students and teachers can readily access.” Each proposed grand-challenge question will have practical applications and societal implications. For a field like plant biology, those implications are many and far-reaching. “Human existence on this planet is absolutely dependent on plants,” Chandler says. “Our houses, our food, our atmosphere – everything about the quality of human life depends on plants.”
Welcome News to Arizona LeadersThe award – one of the largest NSF grants ever to an Arizona entity – came as welcome news to Arizona’s leaders, who have been working to build the state’s bioscience capacities in research and economic development. “Today’s announcement is proof that our investment in higher education is paying off,” Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano said at an Arizona state capitol news conference. “Arizona’s future lies in innovation in areas like the biosciences, and we are tremendously proud that the National Science Foundation has chosen Arizona to chart a new course in plant science research.”
“This is the sort of big return on investment that the UA has promised the State of Arizona since the BIO5 Institute was opened and housed with critical state investments,” said UA President Robert N. Shelton. “BIO5 is ideally suited to house the iPlant Collaborative. Its work will span scientific disciplines and bring together plant biologists of all kinds to examine plant life across its entire continuum, from individual plant cells to entire ecosystems.”
“This remarkable grant recognizes the great work being done every day by the researchers and students of The University of Arizona, particularly in the field of bioscience research. The UA has emerged as a leader in bioscience research and education, and I appreciate the National Science Foundation for recognizing their capabilities. Their achievement under this grant will benefit the people of Southern Arizona as well as all Americans,” says Congressman Raul Grijalva.
CONTACTS:
Deborah Daun, BIO5 (520-626-2059; Cell: 520-247-7440; ddaun@email.arizona.edu)
Johnny Cruz, UANews, (520-621-1879; Cell: 520-307-3362; cruzj@email.arizona.edu)
Lisa Joy Zgorski, National Science Foundation, (703-292-8311; lisajoy@nsf.gov)
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Deadline nears for SFAz's Competitive Advantage Award program
The proposal deadline for the Competitive Advantage Award (CAA) program of Science Foundation Arizona is January 16. Grants will support investigators in Arizona research-performing institutions in three areas: sustainability, information and communication technologies, and biosciences. CAA awards are intended to lead to more federal, foundation, and industrial investments in Arizona research and researchers. The program's Request for Proposals is accessible here.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
UA plant scientist and HTG receive $2.17 million SFAz SRG grant
[Source: Deborah Daun, Bio5] – A collaboration between University of Arizona (UA) Plant Sciences Professor and BIO5 member David Galbraith, PhD, and High Throughput Genomics (HTG), a Tucson-based company providing gene expression assay technology and services for the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry, was awarded a two-year $2,171,550 Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz) Strategic Research Group (SRG) grant. SRG grants seed partnerships between researchers from the research-performing institutions and industry in strategic areas. Each SRG proposal defines how investigators manage and/or exploit intellectual property to the advantage of Arizona. SFAz will provide $1 million for the first year of the grant, and based on the achievements of specific milestones, an additional $1 million for the second year. The $171,550 is designated for a UA institutional allowance.
The HTG/Galbraith-BIO5 collaboration—Chemical Genomics and Translational Research Center (CGTR)—also is receiving in-kind funding from HTG and the UA/BIO5, potentially bringing the funding total to $6 million over two years. “I am delighted to have the opportunity to build this unique public-private sector partnership. Establishment of the CGTR should lead to important advances that could result in considerable economic benefits to the Tucson area and to the state of Arizona,” said Dr. Galbraith.
The CGTR—led jointly by Dr. Galbraith and HTG Chief Scientific Officer Bruce Seligmann, PhD—will be based in BIO5’s new Thomas W. Keating Bioresearch Building on The University of Arizona campus. The center will expand and develop HTG's quantitative Nuclease Protection Assay (qNPA™) platform into a high density microarray to improve the quality and speed of biomarker and target identification, validation and subsequent screening and optimization of agricultural and pharmaceutical compounds. This advanced technology helps scientists identify changes in normal gene expression, such as abnormalities caused by disease as well as beneficial and adverse changes in gene activity caused by drugs. “The utilization of qNPA™ as the assay to quantitatively and precisely measure gene expression by high-density arrays from any type of sample, including fixed tissues, will bring a new level of enabling performance to this platform,” says Dr. Seligmann.
The qNPA™ platform will be validated and applied to a diverse set of BIO5 projects conducted by UA faculty. One project focuses on identifying agricultural chemicals that will reduce the cost of producing ethanol for biofuels. Other projects will adapt and apply the qNPA platform to identify molecular changes that occur when cells become cancerous. Subsequently, this information will provide critical insights to allow new cancer drugs to be designed and rapidly tested, and new prognostic assays to accurately predict personal response to drug therapies.
HTG will commercialize identified biomarkers and high density array products developed by the CGTR for the qNPA™ platform and the UA will commercialize biomarkers and new technologies for other than the qNPA™ platform. "The CGTR exemplifies the role BIO5 plays in engaging the strengths of the academic and industrial communities by applying cutting-edge technology to tackle real world problems in agriculture and medicine," says BIO5 Director Vicki Chandler, PhD.
The HTG/Galbraith-BIO5 collaboration—Chemical Genomics and Translational Research Center (CGTR)—also is receiving in-kind funding from HTG and the UA/BIO5, potentially bringing the funding total to $6 million over two years. “I am delighted to have the opportunity to build this unique public-private sector partnership. Establishment of the CGTR should lead to important advances that could result in considerable economic benefits to the Tucson area and to the state of Arizona,” said Dr. Galbraith.
The CGTR—led jointly by Dr. Galbraith and HTG Chief Scientific Officer Bruce Seligmann, PhD—will be based in BIO5’s new Thomas W. Keating Bioresearch Building on The University of Arizona campus. The center will expand and develop HTG's quantitative Nuclease Protection Assay (qNPA™) platform into a high density microarray to improve the quality and speed of biomarker and target identification, validation and subsequent screening and optimization of agricultural and pharmaceutical compounds. This advanced technology helps scientists identify changes in normal gene expression, such as abnormalities caused by disease as well as beneficial and adverse changes in gene activity caused by drugs. “The utilization of qNPA™ as the assay to quantitatively and precisely measure gene expression by high-density arrays from any type of sample, including fixed tissues, will bring a new level of enabling performance to this platform,” says Dr. Seligmann.
The qNPA™ platform will be validated and applied to a diverse set of BIO5 projects conducted by UA faculty. One project focuses on identifying agricultural chemicals that will reduce the cost of producing ethanol for biofuels. Other projects will adapt and apply the qNPA platform to identify molecular changes that occur when cells become cancerous. Subsequently, this information will provide critical insights to allow new cancer drugs to be designed and rapidly tested, and new prognostic assays to accurately predict personal response to drug therapies.
HTG will commercialize identified biomarkers and high density array products developed by the CGTR for the qNPA™ platform and the UA will commercialize biomarkers and new technologies for other than the qNPA™ platform. "The CGTR exemplifies the role BIO5 plays in engaging the strengths of the academic and industrial communities by applying cutting-edge technology to tackle real world problems in agriculture and medicine," says BIO5 Director Vicki Chandler, PhD.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
SFAz investments promote brain diagnostics, solar technology
[Source: The Business Journal of Phoenix] -- Science Foundation Arizona selected eight research proposals out of 44 submissions to receive $2 million designed to advance the technologies to the point of commercialization. Researchers receiving funding are:
- Nasser Peyhgambarian, a professor in the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, who is working to introduce ultra-low voltage hybrid polymer/sol-gel electro-optic modulators and switches as the next-generation of broadband. Peyghambarian also is working to commercialize a miniaturized fiber-optic sensor used in non-invasive real time monitoring of brain activity.
- David Lynch of UA's Department of Materials Science and Engineering is developing technology to reduce the cost of manufacturing solar-grade silicon while reducing pollution.
- Dominic McGrath, professor in the Department of Chemistry at UA, is developing a disposable infusion pump for pain management IV therapy, drug and fluid delivery and insulin therapy for Medipacs, a Tucson biotech facility.
- Qiang Hu, professor in the Department of Applied Biological Sciences at Arizona State University Polytechnic, is working on a project to increase the productivity and reduce production costs of Astaxanthin, an antioxidant for humans and color additive in foods like meat and fish -- a project that could lead to creation of a manufacturing plant in Arizona.
- John Kouvetakis, professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at ASU is looking to find an improved, cost-effective and sustainable method for producing high-brightness and energy-efficient lighting and solar applications.
- Wayne Frasch, a professor in the School of Life Sciences at ASU is working on molecular detection technology that rapidly tests and diagnoses pathogens such as anthrax, E-coli, cancer, forensics, STDs, avian flu and hospital-acquired infections.
- Trevor Thornton, director of ASU's Center for Solid State Electronics Research, plans to introduce a cost-effective option for companies that require high-voltage, high-speed integrated circuits in partnership with Honeywell.
The investments are part of the 2007 Small Business Catalytic program, designed to create a catalyst for technology development, company formation and high-tech job creation in Arizona.
"The research funded by our Small Business Catalytic program has great commercialization potential, a key component in Arizona's efforts to grow an economy rooted in knowledge and innovation," said William C. Harris, president and CEO of SFAz. "These projects will bring new patents to Arizona researchers with the ultimate goal of forming spin-off companies that create new jobs for Arizonans."
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