Bridging the Gap: Using academic research to stimulate the economy

By Krystal Brown

The National Science Foundation (NSF) reports that the state of Utah spent $2.3 billion on research and development (R&D) for science and engineering in 2007.

Utah has a thriving academic research community which has generated a highly educated work force; however, its spending on R&D ranks 28^th in the nation with above average dependence on federal funding. The state is looking to bridge this divide between industry and academia in order to capitalize on existing strengths and grow the economy.

The Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) initiative, chaired by Dinesh Patel of Signal Peak Ventures, aims to use academic research to stimulate economic growth via start-up companies, patents, and eventually large companies.

Cynthia Burrows, Ph.D. and member of the USTAR governing authority, said that USTAR is meant “to bring in the rainmakers… researchers who know how to translate ideas into businesses.”

In its first five years, USTAR has brought 43 “rainmakers” to the University of Utah and Utah State University resulting in 194 patents and 17 start-up companies or industry partnerships. USTAR professor Rajesh Menon of the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Utah credits the reliable funding and collaborative culture fostered by USTAR with this initial success.

Professor Menon, who joined USTAR in 2009 after 10 years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), emphasized the difficulty in starting companies. There needs to be “a good ecosystem to help build companies” and USTAR is beginning to create that by injecting creativity and building research resources.

It will be years before this translates to a significant number of industry jobs as bridging the gap between business and academia is no small feat.

Cynthia Burrows explained this disconnect through the origination of the modern university from ancient monasteries. Traditionally, monks were sequestered with their scholarly work in order to investigate life’s basic questions, whether it be “what a star is or how to grow better peas.” The motivation for this work was knowledge.

Although today’s universities are far more complex, research of fundamental importance is rewarded by continued federal funding and academic accolade. Consequently, basic research accounted for 75 percent of the work done at universities and colleges in 2008 according to the NSF. Conversely, motivation for better products at lower cost resulted in 95 percent of research done in industry in 2008 being applied or development.

While this divide between applied and basic research is the norm, schools like MIT and Stanford have a proven history of applying academic research. According to Professor Menon, these schools break down departmental boundaries. “That’s the future. That’s where you get the most interesting research,” He said.

USTAR has begun to do just this by hiring faculty in a range of departments including bioengineering, chemistry, and psychiatry at both the University of Utah and Utah State University. Both schools boast new USTAR buildings where research labs are grouped by interest rather than department.

James L. Sorenson Molecular Biotechnology Building at the University of Utah (photo courtesy of USTAR)

According to Professor Menon, the initial success of USTAR has states like Nevada looking to it as a model for their own research structure.

With the creative research base being fairly well established in this first phase of USTAR, Cynthia Burrows said she’d like to see a shift in focus to nurture the existing researchers and further encourage collaboration. With this, USTAR could cultivate the ecosystem necessary to grow the economy from homegrown ideas.

University of Utah Isotope Facility Draws International Interest

University of Utah Isotope Facility Draws International Interest

By Allison Chan

We have all learned that an isotope is a form of an element with a different number of neutrons and the same number of protons. While isotopes may have seemed a dry topic in high school chemistry, they are in fact an incredibly valuable tool for research in disciplines spanning from anthropology to atmospheric science. 

Unbeknownst to many, a world-class isotope ratio analysis facility is housed here at the University of Utah.

The Stable Isotope Ratio Facility for Environmental Research (SIRFER) was started in 1986 and has since been providing sample analysis for departments around campus and around the world. 

SIRFER is a re-charge facility, meaning that there is a fee charged for each sample that is run.  The revenue from samples is used to maintain the day-to-day operations of the facility. SIRFER has the capability of analyzing stable isotope ratios of carbon (C), hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), nitrogen (N), and sulfur (S) from organic solids, water samples, or trace gases. 

But the real question is, why are isotopes useful? 

Stable isotopes can be used to track the movement of materials through a system, whether from an individual plant or an entire ecosystem. For example, ecologists used isotopic analysis following the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. By examining how the isotopic composition of microorganisms was changing, they were able to determine to what extent they were picking up the isotopic signature of the oil.

Brad Erkkila, manager of SIRFER, is in charge of running the samples that are sent into the lab and maintaining the instruments. Samples are run against quality control standards in order to ensure good data. In this way, although he does not always know the source of the samples he is analyzing, he can still evaluate whether the instrument is functioning properly and if he is getting correct results.  

Erkkila finds the most exciting part of his job is developing new methods by which to run samples.

The facility that he runs, tries to meet the analysis needs of the faculty members on campus, so sometimes that means having to change the way in which a particular instrument is calibrated or how a sample is treated.

As new technologies become available, SIRFER is continually striving to provide the most up-to-date analysis methods. However, in addition to providing quality isotope analysis, SIRFER is also interested in education and outreach. 

Employees at SIRFER have worked with junior high and high school students through the Salt Lake Center for Science Education. One recent project has been helping high school students on a science fair project to analyze the diet of hawks by examining the stable isotope composition of their feathers. The project was recently selected to continue on to the international science competition. 

Perhaps the biggest educational endeavor that SIRFER undertakes each year is running an intensive two-week long summer course called “IsoCamp.” Graduate students and post-docs from universities across the U.S. and internationally apply for a spot in this highly selective course. About 80-100 students apply, but only 25-30 students gain admission into the course. 

Students in the course have varied academic backgrounds and come from many different departments. 

Danielle Marias, a first-year graduate student in the Forestry department at Oregon State University, is one of the students who will be participating in this summer’s Isocamp.  She explained, “I wanted to come to IsoCamp because it is a unique opportunity to learn about such a versatile tool in ecology and collaborate with and meet others who are also using isotopes in their research. Also, Isocamp's lab portion is appealing to me because OSU’s isotope course does not offer that.”

 

Olivia Miller, a graduate student in the geology department at the University of Utah, corroborates Marias’ excitement to meet new people who share an interest in stable isotopes.

Another geology student at the U, Glynis Jehle, said, “I'd like to know more about what my results mean in terms of ecology and paleoecology, which is basically what this class involves--how to interpret the different isotopic signatures environmental materials give.”

Students in the course will receive lectures from a wide range of experts who use isotopes in their research. The diversity of speakers provides students with a comprehensive perspective of the ways in which isotopic research has been employed. In addition to the lecture portion of the course, students also get the opportunity to spend time working with the instruments in the SIRFER lab. 

They will get hands on experience with the entire process of sample analysis including sample collection, preparation, and interpretation of results.  Importantly, the close-knit community fostered by the IsoCamp course encourages future collaborations among students.  

SIRFER’s commitment to quality isotope analysis, education, and outreach has introduced a diverse group of people to the world of isotope research and has provided the infrastructure needed for today’s researchers to analyze samples with the most up-to-date technologies.

While the SIRFER lab may seem an unassuming space, they are quietly churning out world-class isotopic analysis everyday.  

Inside the SIRFER lab.

Brad Erkkil, SIRFER lab manager.

What Do Women Really Think? Profiles of Female Scientists at the University of Utah

What Do Women Really Think? Profiles of Female Scientists at the University of Utah

By Kirstin Roundy

In the science, technology, engineering and mathematical (STEM) fields, career progression is similar to the steps of a ladder; you have to climb the lower steps if you want to advance to the top. However, according to statistics from the National Science Foundation (NSF), most female scientists don’t make it to the top of the academic ladder. Although women represent 41 percent of awarded STEM doctoral degrees, female scientists occupy only 28 percent of full-time professor positions.

In an academic setting, the basic steps of the ladder are undergraduate student, graduate student, post-doctoral fellow, assistant professor and professor. This series of articles profiles female scientists, at various points in their careers, striving to climb the ladder in the Department of Pathology at the University of Utah.

Janis Weis – Professor

In the eyes of the NSF, Janis Weis is one of the survivors, a female scientist who was able to make it through the gauntlet of an academic scientific career. Weis, however, doesn’t see it as such a miraculous feat.

Janis Weis

“You just have to say ‘Well, this is what I want to do, this is my passion,’” Weis stated. “And then go through and do it.”

For Weis, her scientific career began like many others, with her formal education. “I took a microbiology class that I just really loved,” she said. “I thought it was really cool. I had a great Intro to Micro teacher.”

Weis also received guidance from an unexpected source. “I was taking all the science classes but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” she said. “My mother had a friend who had been a nurse and, as a probably 50 year old woman, she went to graduate school and got a PhD and was doing research. I went into the lab to visit her and she told me ‘Molecular Biology.’ I said, ‘Oh, this is a vision. This is something I can do.’”

This moment of inspiration led Weis to complete a bachelor’s degree in microbiology.

After completing her bachelor’s degree, she decided to go on to graduate school after spending her summer break in a research lab.

“I was supposed to be reading papers and then talking to the mentor about the things that I read, and I knew I was not the one to just sit and do the experiments,” Weis said. “I had to be designing the experiments. I had to be planning the experiments. I knew very early on from that experience that I had to go to graduate school.”

After graduating with doctoral degree in microbiology, Weis continued her pursuit of an academic scientific career. For her that choice of careers was a natural extension of the work that she had been doing.

“All of my role models were my professors. And so that seemed like that’s what you wanted to do,” Weis stated. “I also saw it as an opportunity to have so much more control over my life, to choose where I wanted to live.”

Weis’ scientific interests have remained true to the subject that inspired her in the first place. “I like thinking about host/pathogen interactions. From the very beginning, it’s the bugs that make it exciting. That’s the thing that I think is interesting,” she said.

Her laboratory currently studies the development of Lyme arthritis. “We’re interested in how Borrelia burgdorferi causes arthritis and we’re interested in it because not everybody who gets infected gets arthritis. So we are interested in understanding how the bacterium causes arthritis and how the host regulates the response,” Weis stated. “If we can understand what regulates Lyme arthritis, we may get insights for other inflammatory diseases.”

With regards to the NSF statistics, Weis’ career has overlapped with the increase in the number of women pursuing scientific careers.

“There were lots of women in my program in undergraduate…but when I went to graduate school, I was the only woman in my class. Things were just opening up,” she said.  “[But] I knew what I wanted to do…If I got sidetracked, it wouldn’t have worked.” 

Weis also dealt with making the decision of when to start a family while still progressing in her scientific career. “Then we had kids. And that definitely is a sidestep. But I had a six year grant before we had children,” she said. “And definitely that was a very difficult time. It’s just really difficult to have kids, to have children.  But you just do it.” 

However, she also points out the need for continued vigilance if one wants to have a scientific career and a family.

“The science moves on. If you’re not there to do it, then either somebody else steps in to do it or your competitors catch up with you,” Weis stated. “Those are just things that you have to decide. ‘Well, my job is important to me, my family is important to me so I’m going to do it all.’”

As for the success rates of students and post-docs in her own laboratory, Weis said that “for the most part, the women have been just as successful as the men at getting through.” Also, Weis has failed to see a female scientist be hired at the University of Utah and not achieve a tenured faculty position.

For Weis, the issue is not the difference between the number of male and female scientists at an institution. The problem is having enough funding available for individuals who wish to pursue scientific careers.

“We’re hesitant to encourage anybody to enter science right now when everybody is so worried about funding,” she said. “So I guess one thing to encourage people to do, as a scientist, is to engage the public in the importance of science to continue the support.” 

Drug Delivery Design: Industry versus Academia

By Krystal Brown

How often do you take ibuprofen? How often do you think about how it works to provide relief?

As a common over-the-counter drug, ibuprofen inhibits cyclo-oxygenase enzymes in tissues to diminish their inflammatory response. Though ibuprofen has been used for more than 50 years to ease pain and stiffness, it would be worthless without an effective delivery system. Oral drug delivery provides a convenient method of drug administration whose ease promotes patient comfort and compliance.

According to Professor David Grainger, chair of the department of pharmaceutics and pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Utah, 86 percent of drugs on the market are taken orally, mainly relying on drug dissolution in the stomach or upper intestine and then passive absorption through cell membranes to enter the bloodstream. Using long-established methods, several chemical and physical drug benchmarks are used to predict whether a drug will be efficiently absorbed orally.

Due to their long history of use, little fundamental research is currently done on oral delivery methods; consequently, many standard measurement methods for oral drug delivery, dosing and uptake, have remained largely unchanged.

Professor Grainger stated that researchers competing for federal grants are expected to focus on new, cutting edge delivery methods. Oral delivery vehicles and drug delivery strategies are often considered low innovation, often not supported by federal monies, leaving academia without research and training mechanisms in an area of high priority with the pharma industry. 

One way around this is to develop new methodologies that improve current standard measurement capabilities.

One such standard, the partition coefficient, estimates how well a drug molecule will insert into cell membranes by measuring its equilibrium partitioning in solution between immiscible bulk phase water and octanol. Despite widespread use of this water/octanol model, its significant divergence from cell membrane properties makes the corresponding partition coefficient a purely correlative measure, often only one of several variables determining a drug’s cell entry potential. 

Dr. Grainger cited this “poor correlation between drug in vitro properties and in vivo efficacy” as a major problem for applying basic research tools to actual drug delivery design. Synthetic lipid bilayers are a superior cell membrane model to the water/octanol system and can be customized to incorporate different types and ratios of lipids, cholesterol, proteins, and ligand molecules for modeling drug uptake. 

Despite many desirable properties, the challenges associated with studying such lipid membrane interfaces have led to the continued preference of the water/octanol system in pharmaceutical industry; however, research in the Professor John Conboy group in the department of chemistry at the University of Utah aims to change that. 

Recently, Trang Nguyen of the Conboy group has demonstrated the use of deep ultraviolet–visible sum-frequency generation (UV-vis SFG) to measure the partition coefficients of several drug molecules, including ibuprofen, in lipid bilayers.

As a coherent laser technique, UV-vis SFG has an inherent surface sensitivity and utilizes the native electronic transitions of the molecule of interest. This allows the drug partitioning into lipid bilayers to be monitored without chemical modification and with low limits of detection—two major obstacles in studying these interfaces. This enables a kind of retrofit to existing drug delivery designs seeking cell membrane absorption, allowing researchers to evaluate possible drug molecules in screens with more biologically relevant information.

With this, the Conboy group has provided a new method for assaying one property long-recognized as important to oral drug delivery efficacy. Nonetheless, the pharmaceutical field is changing to offer more significant challenges to delivering new drug classes. Ten years ago, most of the top 10 drugs on the market were small molecules taken orally; however, Professor Grainger says that by 2014, eight of the top 10 drugs on the market are predicted to be proteins—biologic drugs currently incapable of effective oral delivery and thus delivered via injection.

Since many of these drug activities will still involve cell membrane penetration, the lipid bilayer model can still offer valuable information. Additionally, biologics are expensive and often suffer from stability and shelf-life issues. Their interactions with lipid membranes could offer hints for new methods to stabilize and preserve the protein-based drugs in their formulations using membranes. 

Researchers in the Conboy group have already used UV-vis SFG to quantify protein-ligand interactions in model bilayers. This is an example of how fundamental research methods may continue to have relevance to the developing pharmaceutical industry.

What Do Women Really Think?

Profiles of Female Scientists at the University of Utah

By Kirstin Roundy

In the science, technology, engineering and mathematical (STEM) fields, career progression is similar to the steps of a ladder; you have to climb the lower steps if you want to advance to the top. However, according to statistics from the National Science Foundation (NSF), most female scientists don’t make it to the top of the academic ladder. Although women represent 41 percent of awarded STEM doctoral degrees, female scientists occupy only 28 percent of full-time professor positions.

In an academic setting, the basic steps of the ladder are undergraduate student, graduate student, post-doctoral fellow, assistant professor and professor. This series of articles profiles female scientists, at various points in their careers, striving to climb the ladder in the Department of Pathology at the University of Utah.

Heydon Kaddas – Undergraduate Student

How does a scientist become a scientist?

Heydon Kaddas

For individuals striving to correct the deficiency of female scientists in STEM fields, this is the ultimate question. This ‘How To’ guide is based on the educational training of Heydon Kaddas, an undergraduate student at the University of Utah, majoring in biology. The following are Kaddas’ steps of the “How To” guide.

Step One – Identify individuals with an inclination for science

For Kaddas, her interest in science was an extension of her innate talents and abilities.

“I think I’m a ‘How does this work?’ kind of person,” Kaddas stated. “I like knowing how things work; I like knowing there’s a logical order to this.”

Step Two – While young, encourage and develop that interest through teacher and parental support

Kaddas credits much of her science interest to that of her parents.

“My mom was all about science when I was little. She would get little chemistry sets, like making volcanoes in your kitchen,” Kaddas said. “My parents are really outdoorsy so we were always hiking…my mom would [ask] ‘Do you know what plant this is? Do you know what bird this is?’

Kaddas also credits her interest in science to her time in junior high school.

“When I got to junior high, I had an amazing teacher…she was really experiment driven…I think that’s the thing that has been really big for me is more like the experimental side of things… when you see real experiments that’s a lot more interesting,” she said.

“She was a really cool teacher, too, because after school, she was endlessly there. And you could just come in after school and she would [say], ‘Well, I have this experiment kit. Want to do it?’,” Kaddas said.

Step Three – During college, continue encouraging students while finding ways to make science applicable to them

When Kaddas was 18, she was diagnosed with Raynaud’s Phenomenom. This disorder is characterized by a loss of blood flow to the hands and feet, resulting in color changes of the skin. Kaddas became educated about her own condition while doing research for a class assignment.

“When I was in my freshman Biology 101 class, we were talking about having to pick something to do a report on and I didn’t know what to do a report on. So they [the professors] said ‘Think about things [conditions] you have’,” stated Kaddas.

“After my presentation, my professor came up to me and said, ‘That was really cool. Do you know anything [more] about that?’ and I said, ‘Not really.’ So I went and did a bunch of reading on NIH (National Institutes of Health) and found out that there’s a whole bunch of connective tissue disorder syndromes and a bunch of inflammatory autoimmune disorders for both;[for] people who have them, there’s a really high percentage of those people who have Raynaud’s.” she said.

By learning more about her own condition, Kaddas developed a greater desire to attend graduate school.  Kaddas’ professor further encouraged her to think about a career in research, specifically focusing on the study of autoimmune disorders. This encouragement, and knowing that there is a link between Raynaud’s Phenomenom and rheumatoid arthritis from her own research, led Kaddas to do undergraduate research in a lyme arthritis laboratory on campus.

Step Four – Retention

Kaddas plans to continue her education after taking a year sabbatical.

“I do have a game plan. I’m going to take a year off because I didn’t take any breaks during school. So I’m going to take a year off, probably work as a lab tech if I can find a lab tech job and then I’m going to apply for grad school in an immunology program,” she said.

Kaddas has noticed that the culture in Utah plays a large part in the retention of females in science. Many females in Utah value either being a mother or having a career, however, few recognize they can do both.

“I know a lot of girls who are graduating this year and I know a lot of girls who are pregnant,” she said. “They’ve told me, ‘Yeah, I have a degree in biology but I’m not going to do anything with it.’ But that is something I’ve noticed, a lot of my friends are like ‘Oh well, I’m getting married now’ or ‘I’m pregnant now and I’m not going on to grad school. I’m done with school.’”

“I think it depends on how you’re raised a lot, too. That is a factor. I have friends who are LDS (Latter Day Saint) and I’m LDS and I don’t want kids for a long time. I want to get my career started. That’s an important thing to me, having my PhD is a really important thing,” she said.

Kaddas is an anomaly in the Utah culture because she realizes she can be both a mother and still have a career in science.

“I know people who are really, really smart and they’re going to have a science degree and they’re going to do nothing with it. I can’t imagine doing that,” she said.