The network could transform the future of medical discovery, diagnosis and treatment.

A National Academy of Sciences committee co-chaired by UC San Francisco Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, M.D., M.P.H., recommends the creation of a Google maps-like data network that could transform the future of medical discovery, diagnosis and treatment.

The so-called “Knowledge Network” would integrate the wealth of data emerging on the molecular basis of disease with information on environmental factors and patients’ electronic medical records, with the goal of developing more diagnostics and treatments tailored to individual patients — known as “precision medicine.”

The development of this broadly accessible data network would allow scientists to share emerging research findings faster, thereby accelerating the development of tailored treatments. It also would allow clinicians to make more informed decisions about treatments. It would reduce health care costs and ultimately improve care.

The report, titled “Toward Precision Medicine: Building a Knowledge Network for Biomedical Research and a New Taxonomy of Disease,” (PDF) is the result of a one-year study conducted at the special request of Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Keith Yamamoto, Ph.D., vice chancellor for research at UCSF who served on the National Academy of Sciences committee, considers the proposal “the most important National Academy of Sciences Framework Analysis since that advisory body recommended that the United States go forward with the Human Genome Project.”

The task of the committee, which also included Bernard Lo, M.D., UCSF professor of medicine and director of the Program in Medical Ethics, was to propose a strategy for incorporating molecular data into the current classifications of diseases — going beyond descriptions that are today generally defined broadly by organs and symptoms — thus creating a “new taxonomy” of disease.

But the committee went further, proposing an infrastructure in which the patient would be the lynchpin of a health care system where findings from the laboratory would inform patient care, and individuals’ responses to treatment would inform basic research.

The Knowledge Network would be centered on a dynamic, interactive data repository, or “Information Commons,” that, like Google maps, would link layers ofdata to reveal information. The layers – environmental exposures, signs and symptoms, genetics, epigenetics, microbial exposures and othertypes of patient data – would be linked to data on individual patients. Data would be continuously refreshed with new basic and clinical research results and patient outcomes.

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Campus academic leaders — including in health — plan for a new era of innovation.

As UC San Diego enters its 51^st year—a new era of innovation—the campus senior academic leaders have created bold strategic plans to identify research areas of strength and spark interdisciplinary collaboration among its world-class faculty. In a wide-ranging videotaped conversation at the Seuss Library in the Faculty Club on Oct. 25, Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Suresh Subramani, Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences and School of Medicine Dean David Brenner and Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences and Scripps Institution of Oceanography Director Tony Haymet shared their vision for the next decade and beyond.

“We have fewer academic departments and divisional structures than many other top universities. That means fewer of the usual barriers to integrated research,” Subramani said. “The campus has always been collaborative and interdisciplinary, and I’d like to see more and more of these interdivisional activities taking place.”

“At UC San Diego, we have a critical mass of really talented people who are highly collaborative and collegial,” Brenner said. Haymet added: “We have to count our blessings that we ended up in a little enclave north of San Diego. We offer the kind of collaborative environment that early career people love to be in.”

“UC San Diego is a research powerhouse with limitless potential,” said Subramani. “The challenge is to maintain our excellence, reputation and access despite the declining state contributions to the University of California budget and an unstable state, national and global economy. We absolutely will not compromise on quality.”

Aggressive faculty hiring plans have been initiated by Academic Affairs, Health Sciences and Marine Sciences to ensure UC San Diego’s prominence.

Through brainstorming sessions with the academic deans, Subramani developed a three-year hiring plan to recruit 125 to 130 new faculty with roughly one-fourth to be in quantitative/systems biology; a design center or design institute; and energy, particularly alternative sources of energy and sustainability. These areas were identified as “transformative research themes” for the divisions to pursue over the next 10 to 15 years.

In Health Sciences, Brenner launched a similar planning initiative for the recruitment efforts of approximately 50 new faculty hires per year.  “The clinical plans say that there are three areas of growth that would be exciting for us and for San Diego: cardiovascular disease, oncology and advanced surgery. We’re specifically going to recruit key thought leaders in those areas as we make UC San Diego the medical destination in those areas.”

The Health Sciences faculty identified drug discovery/drug design, computational chemistry/systems biology and bioengineering/biomedical research as areas with opportunities to be the best. “We recognize that the collaboration with Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the general campus will present incredible opportunities to be the best in a few selected areas. For example, in drug discovery, there are incredible strengths in discovery from the ocean,” Brenner said.

At Scripps Institution of Oceanography, faculty-hiring decisions will focus on both collaboration and the initiatives identified through a recent faculty review process. In the coming months, Scripps will finalize its plans for new hires. “My colleagues and I think of three circles of collaboration, and we’re trying to craft our workforce to meet the exciting opportunities that those collaborations provide,” Haymet said. The first circle of collaboration is within Scripps with its faculty and researchers. The second circle is among the community of CleanTech San Diego, and the third is with the county and internationally. “Discoveries and knowledge gained at UC San Diego have been exported off campus. I think our campus can do more in that area,” he said.

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UC Santa Cruz researchers awarded for research that has potential to improve human health.

(From left) Nicholas Shikuma, Kelly Peach and Walter Bray, UC Santa Cruz

A team of UC Santa Cruz researchers searching for drugs to fight cholera won the Deloitte QB3 Award for Innovation, presented by representatives of QB3 and Deloitte Thursday (Oct. 27) at a ceremony at UC San Francisco Mission Bay.

The team — graduate students Kelly Peach and Nicholas Shikuma, with research specialist Walter Bray — developed a high-throughput screening method to identify drugs that prevent Vibrio cholerae, the cholera pathogen, from forming biofilms: thin, tough sheets in which bacteria are shielded from antibiotics.

Biofilms are also a source of infection following operations to implant medical devices, and the team’s method could equally be applied to screen for drugs that disrupt other bacteria.

The $10,000 Award for Innovation, given to a graduate student, postdoc, staff scientist or team working in QB3 laboratories at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UCSF, recognizes research that has the potential to improve human health.

The competition began in June when QB3 faculty nominated 38 candidates. By September, a jury panel drawn from industry, venture capital, academia and the media had narrowed the field to five. QB3 then invited the entire Berkeley, UCSF and Santa Cruz campus communities to vote, “American Idol” style, for the ultimate winner. (San Francisco Business Times reporter Ron Leuty covered the competition.) Santa Cruz featured its team in a news article on its website, while on Twitter, the universities (and the Gladstone Institutes) waged a sporadic battle for votes. In the end more than 1500 votes were cast—over half of them for the Santa Cruz team.

In a paper published this year in the journal Molecular Biosystems, the Santa Cruz team explained that biofilms are involved in over 60 percent of bacterial infections in humans. Bacteria often lie dormant in biofilms, encased in material that protects them from a host’s immune response — or drugs. Most antibiotics target cells that are actively dividing, so bacteria in a biofilm can sit out a course of treatment and emerge later to multiply. Drugs that disrupt biofilms make bacteria more vulnerable. Ideally, disruptors would be used in “cocktails” with antibiotics to kill free-floating bacteria.

Cholera remains a major Third World pathogen; an outbreak following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti sickened half a million and killed over 5,000. Biofilms are crucial to the virulence of V. cholerae, but no therapeutics exist to disrupt them. In a step toward solving this problem, Bray, Peach, Shikuma, and colleagues developed a technique to grow cholera biofilms in 384-well plates, and an automated method that uses fluorescence microscopy to measure how much biofilm is present in each well. Theirs is the first reported technique in the scientific literature to use images to analyze V. cholerae biofilms.

In a demonstration run, from a relatively small library of 3080 compounds, the team identified 29 compounds that disrupt cholera biofilm without killing the cells. The 29 compounds are “leads” — starting points for a company to test and refine into an actual drug therapy through many rounds of screens and clinical trials.

The work brought together scientists in three QB3 labs at UC Santa Cruz: those of Roger Linington, Scott Lokey and Fitnat Yildiz. Nadine Gassner, currently the grant program administrator at QB3-Santa Cruz, also contributed.

Four other finalists were in the running:

• Jonathan Galazka, a UC Berkeley graduate student, for engineering a strain of yeast that digests two types of sugar, thus speeding our path to biofuels and improving our access to clean, reliable, and affordable energy sources

• Patrick Goodwill, Ph.D. , a UC Berkeley research associate, for a magnetic particle imaging technique that could enable real-time angiography without radiation or iodine tracer

• Ellen Yeh, M.D., Ph.D., a resident fellow at UCSF, for identifying a potential drug target in the malaria parasite

• Daniel Zwilling, Ph.D., a postdoc, and Lily Huang, a research assistant, both at UCSF and the Gladstone Institutes, for discovering a potential treatment to slow neural breakdown in Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases.

Collaboration has resulted in five initial projects for therapies to treat cancer, other maladies.

Jeffrey Bluestone, UC San Francisco

An 11-month-old partnership between UC San Francisco and Pfizer Inc., aimed at rapidly moving new therapies into human clinical trials, has selected its first projects for funding and joint development. Teams from the university and Pfizer will work together on experimental therapies developed by UCSF scientists with a goal of testing them in people with five hard-to-treat, often deadly conditions, including lung and prostate cancer.

Three to five additional projects from university researchers will be selected after a second round of proposals, due Nov. 4, are evaluated. Details on the proposal process and how to submit the initial two- to three-page preproposal can be found at http://officeofresearch.ucsf.edu/ITA/CTI, or email ita@ucsf.edu with questions.

As part of the unique collaboration, Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, will not only provide funding for the selected researchers, but has set up its own laboratory space next to UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. Scientists at the Pfizer lab, the Center for Therapeutic Innovation, will work directly with each of the UCSF teams.

“At UCSF, we are absolutely focused on finding new ways to turn the groundbreaking research of our scientists into therapies that benefit patients and the public,’’ said Jeffrey Bluestone, Ph.D., UCSF’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “Our work with Pfizer epitomizes our approach to building innovative, collaborative partnerships with industry.”

The Pfizer and UCSF researchers can visit each other’s labs, conduct experiments together and participate in joint team meetings, said Stephanie Robertson, Ph.D., who oversees the collaboration for the UCSF Office of Innovation, Technologies & Alliances with colleague Tuhin Sinha, Ph.D., alliance manager of the ITA.

“The proximity is key,” Robertson said. “People can literally walk across the street. That was a big reason for Pfizer locating right here.’’

As the cost of developing new drugs has skyrocketed — reaching $1.8 billion per approved drug, according to some recent research — drug companies have been searching for ways to lower the cost. Since they often spend years or months developing testing tools geared to the biology they’re interested in, the UCSF-Pfizer collaboration offers a way to jump-start that process by linking with academic researchers who know the biology and have already developed the tools.

“We are truly excited to work in this partnership with leading experts from UCSF to understand more about the mechanisms that drive diseases with high unmet medical need,” said Anthony Coyle, vice president and head of Pfizer’s Global Centers for Therapeutic Innovation. “By understanding the mechanisms underlying inflammatory diseases, cardiovascular disease and oncology, we can design better molecules to treat the right patients.”

Pfizer will have the right to commercialize the drugs and UCSF will earn milestone payments as the therapies advance through different stages of testing, as well as royalties from sales of approved therapies. This collaborative structure also provides the university the potential for a bigger return than it would normally receive when licensing out an early-stage technology.

“Best of all, it allows the scientists to be involved in turning research they’ve worked on for years into something that could actually be used to treat patients,” Robertson said.

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New UC Santa Barbara center brings together research and teaching in biology, engineering and physical sciences.

Frank Doyle (left) and Samir Mitragotri, UC Santa Barbara

A new center at UC Santa Barbara has the development of an artificial pancreas in its sights, as well as new biomaterials, new tools for the detection and diagnosis of disease, and new mechanisms for drug delivery, among other cutting-edge scientific developments.

UC Santa Barbara’s new Center for BioEngineering (CBE), proposed by Frank Doyle, associate dean of research in the College of Engineering, was approved earlier this year by the Academic Senate. The center is a locus of research and teaching — at the interface of biology, engineering and physical sciences — that is already producing results that benefit industry and medicine. Research at the CBE is yielding important advances in the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of common and devastating diseases such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and macular degeneration.

CBE builds on UC Santa Barbara’s interdisciplinary strengths in biophysics, biomaterials, biomolecular discovery and systems biology, which allow for fundamental scientific discoveries to be transitioned to applications in medicine and biotechnology.

“UC Santa Barbara is very proud to be the home of the new Center for BioEngineering,” said Chancellor Henry T. Yang. “The creation of the CBE marks a major step forward for our campus. In this highly interdisciplinary field, UCSB is already at the forefront. Our new center will consolidate our position and support groundbreaking research aimed at finding innovative solutions for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease.”

Samir Mitragotri, the founding director of the center and professor of chemical engineering, emphasizes the importance of CBE as a “home” for bioengineering on campus, since bioengineering is already an area of research in many of UC Santa Barbara’s centers, institutes, departments and colleges.

“I expect that the center will enable opportunities in terms of new fundamental understanding of disease mechanisms, and research at the interface of physical sciences, engineering sciences, medicine and biology,” said Mitragotri. “That includes understanding and development of new technologies to either diagnose or treat a disease.”

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Technology, energy and health care luminaries paint picture of future at forum.

The Atlantic magazine joined forces last week with UC San Diego Extension and acclaimed innovators on the West Coast for an inaugural forum that drew CEOs, venture capitalists, philanthropists and journalists to premiere venues in La Jolla, including the University of California, San Diego.

The first in what is planned to be a series of events called “The Atlantic Meets the Pacific” began Monday evening at the Seaside Forum at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where 300 guests gathered to hear an exchange between The Atlantic National Correspondent James Fallows and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors Elon Musk.

The three-day conference — which follows in the tradition of The Atlantic’s prestigious Aspen Ideas Festival and the Washington Ideas Forum — included subsequent interviews and panel discussions with luminaries from the worlds of energy, technology and healthcare, including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, spiritual guru Deepak Chopra and Will Wright, designer of one of the most successful computer games of all time.

[Related: View programs from the forum on UCTV]

The event was the brainchild of Associate Vice Chancellor of Public Programs and Dean of Extension Mary Walshok, who felt the time was right for UC San Diego and La Jolla to create a world-class conference series. At the same time, The Atlantic was looking to stake out a position on the West Coast, much as it did in Colorado with the Aspen Festival.

So, it’s no surprise that UC San Diego had its fingerprints all over the program. Attendees got an inside look at Scripps, the UCSD Moores Cancer Center, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) for an evening of technology demos and entertainment. Calit2 Director Larry Smarr was a featured panelist, as was Steven Mayfield, director of UCSD’s San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, and Susan Shirk, a professor of International and Pacific Studies and director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

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Self-templating assembly process could be used to manufacture materials with tunable properties.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have turned a benign virus into an engineering tool for assembling structures that mimic collagen, one of the most important structural proteins in nature. The process they developed could eventually be used to manufacture materials with tunable optical, biomedical and mechanical properties.

The researchers, led by Seung-Wuk Lee, UC Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering and faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, describe their “self-templating material assembly” process in Thursday’s (Oct. 20) issue of the journal Nature.

“We took our inspiration from nature,” said Lee. “Nature has a unique ability to create functional materials from very basic building blocks. We found a way to mimic the formation of diverse, complex structures from helical macromolecules, such as collagen, chitin and cellulose, which are the primary building blocks for a wide array of functional materials in animals and plants.”

For instance, a number of blue-skinned animals, including the mandrill monkey, derive its coloring not from pigment, but from the specific scattering of light formed when thin fibers of collagen are bundled, twisted and layered in its skin.

In contrast, aligning collagen in a perpendicular, grid-like pattern creates transparency, and is the basis of corneal tissue. And corkscrew-shaped fibers, mineralized after interacting with calcium and phosphate, can generate the hardest parts of our body: bones and teeth.

“The basic building block for all of these functional materials — corneas, skin and teeth — is exactly the same. It’s collagen,” said Lee. “I was mesmerized when I saw the brilliant skin color and sharp teeth of blue-faced monkeys at the San Francisco Zoo. It is stunning that the way the collagen fibers are aligned, twisted and shaped determine their optical and mechanical functions. What had not been well understood, however, is how such a simple building block can create such complicated structures with diverse functions.”

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Project aimed at harnessing next-generation DNA sequencing and analysis.

Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego, have been awarded a three-year, $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a Kepler Scientific Workflow System module. Researchers will develop new tools to help manage ever-growing data sets used in next-generation DNA sequencing.

“Next-generation DNA sequencing is now creating such a large amount of sequence data that it is overwhelming current computational tools and resources,” said Ilkay Altintas, director of the Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies (SWAT) Lab within SDSC’s Cyberinfrastructure Research, Education And Development (CI-RED) group, and Principal Investigator for the project. “New computational techniques and efficient implementation mechanisms for this data-intensive workload are needed to enable rapid analysis of these next-generation sequence data.”

The project receiving the NSF award is called Advances in Biological Informatics Development: bioKepler: A Comprehensive Bioinformatics Scientific Workflow Module for Distributed Analysis of Large-Scale Biological Data. Bioinformatics refers to a field of science that combines biology, information technology, computers and statistical techniques to create research-driven solutions such as customized medications and treatments to help prevent disease, three-dimensional models of genomes and proteins, and advanced agricultural technologies.

“The enormous growth in data-intensive research means that as these data sets get larger, moving data over the network becomes more complicated, error-prone and costly to maintain,” said Altintas, who also serves as SDSC’s deputy coordinator for research.

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UC Irvine cardiovascular researchers create tiny, functional blood vessels.

Steven George, UC Irvine

Imagine being able to create a blood supply for engineered body tissue as a way to test experimental drugs, rather than having to try them out in actual humans.

That’s exactly what UC Irvine biomedical engineering professor Steven George, director of the Edwards Lifesciences Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Technology, and his team are doing. Using cells from discarded umbilical cord blood, they’ve been growing tiny capillaries, barely visible to the naked eye. And now they have figured out how to send liquid similar to blood flowing through those networks. This “micro tissue” promises to be more realistic than traditional methods of determining whether a treatment will work in people and what the side effects might be.

“The public knows how expensive it is to develop a drug and knows about the lengthy clinical trials,” George says. “The pharmaceutical industry is looking for faster, better ways of predicting how a new substance will work. What’s frustrating for companies is they’ll think they have a promising drug because it worked in flat, petri-dish models, but then when they do an expensive human trial, it fails. Our system potentially changes that, because we’re replicating a variety of human cells in three dimensions that have their own blood supplies.”

Micro tissue is among a variety of products that George and other Lifesciences Center faculty are exploring to help both the public and major corporations. Their research will be on display Thursday (Oct. 20), at an invitation-only event for biomedical firms. Cutting-edge surgical and imaging equipment, emerging cardiovascular designs and other work will be highlighted. More than three dozen companies have signed up to attend.

“The main focus of our first-ever industry open house is to stimulate collaboration between the center and the private sector,” George says. “Given the tight federal and state budgets, this has become a much higher priority.”

The center, as its name suggests, already has one powerful private partner. Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences’ philanthropic arm gave $5 million to create the campus research facility, which opened in 2009. Chairman and CEO Mike Mussallem, who will speak at the event, says theirs is exactly the sort of collaboration needed to keep lifesaving studies and products moving.

“This center brings together a unique mixture of academia, industry and medicine right here in our backyard to explore new ideas, expand research and develop talented minds who share our mission of helping people suffering from the world’s greatest killer: cardiovascular disease,” he says. “We believe this partnership will not only help us advance heart care but also strengthen our local community.”

Mussallem is a national advocate for innovative, cost-effective policies to make state-of-the-art medical technologies more widely available. A trustee of the UC Irvine Foundation, he is a winner of this year’s UCI Medal.

The industry open house will also feature research on safer coatings for stents and heart valves, how continued stress on cells affects disease, a less invasive heart valve, and an artery imaging probe that could identify damaged blood vessels.

In addition, company representatives will have a chance to hear firsthand from young engineers and scientists at the center about their work.

Among them will be postdoctoral fellow Monica Moya, who was the first to successfully track flow through the blood tissue she and others built with George. Moya and graduate students Claire Robertson and David Tran tucked heart muscle cells inside the micro tissue and made them “beat” like those in a normal organ. They have also successfully injected adrenaline to make the cells beat faster, just as the heart races from adrenalin when someone is nervous.

Their project was supported by a $1 million challenge grant from the National Institutes of Health via American Recovery & Reinvestment Act stimulus money. The team is now eagerly seeking new funding to test possible heart and cancer treatments with the micro tissue.

“It was really hard to figure out how to get something to flow, but we did it,” Moya says. “It’s so cool.”

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UC BRAID is “paradigm-changing initiative.”

Steven Dubinett, UCLA

Envision UCLA medical researchers and their colleagues at other campuses seamlessly collaborating in clinical studies and fast-tracking their discoveries to advanced drugs, treatments and cures for disease — a vision that, at UC, has too often been hindered by organizational complexities.

Streamlining medical research is the goal of the University of California Biomedical Research Acceleration, Integration, and Development (UC BRAID) program, launched last year as a partnership between the UC Office of the President and the Clinical and Translational Science centers at UC’s five medical campuses. Bringing together expertise from UCLA and its sister campuses — UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC San Diego and UCSF — the initiative will capitalize on the power of collaboration and technology to catalyze change and reduce barriers to biomedical research.

“UC BRAID is a paradigm-changing initiative for the entire UC system,” said Dr. Steven Dubinett, UCLA associate vice chancellor for research, director of the university’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine.

The translation of laboratory discoveries to clinical interventions, Dubinett said, generally has a very long timeline. He cited a recent study showing that it can take as long as 17 years to develop a new drug and get it to patients.

To expedite this process, UC BRAID has established working groups to address challenges that UC’s medical campuses share. These include cumbersome, inconsistent and time-consuming procedures for managing research grants and contracts, as well as the impact of increased regulation and decreased funding around the discovery and development of drugs and devices.

“We expect that (UC BRAID’s) efforts will lead to policy changes and perhaps new infrastructure across UC that will be beneficial for both the university and individual researchers,” said Dubinett.

Among solutions currently being pursued are master contracting, reciprocity for human studies approvals and a UC-wide research database.

Master contracting

Traditionally, research contracts have been established at the UC campus with which a researcher is affiliated, with collaborations between researchers at multiple UC campuses requiring multiple contracts. Taking a new approach, UC BRAID is developing a master contracting system that simplifies systemwide research. Already, several master clinical trial agreements have been made with major pharmaceutical companies using a new UC-wide, standardized template and a consolidated processing center at UC San Diego.

Reciprocity for human studies approvals

Obtaining approval to conduct research involving human subjects, which includes most clinical trials for new medical treatments, is a vital process conducted via the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at each UC medical campus — at UCLA, for example, the IRB process is administered by the Office of the Human Research Protection Program. While appropriate approvals are critical, research collaborations across campuses have required campus-by-campus IRB approvals. UC BRAID is initiating an online, systemwide IRB registry with the ultimate goal of creating a single approval process to cover research at all UCs.

UC-wide research database

This past September saw the launch of the new UC Research Exchange (UC ReX) consortium, which is planning the first-ever, cross-campus searchable database of patient-level study data from all medical centers. The project, implemented through UC BRAID, is funded with a five-year, $5 million-dollar grant from UCOP.

UC ReX will unite all five medical centers’ research data repositories, which contain clinical data on more than 12 million patients. Investigators will be able to search this database — accessible only through a strict approval process — “to better understand major diseases across large populations,” said Dubinett. “They can also draw upon this large pool of patients to identify those who might benefit from participating in potentially life-saving research.”

Currently, he noted, researchers at individual UC campus sometimes find it difficult to find patients in sufficient numbers who meet the requirements for a particular study — for example, a research study on a promising new drug for treating lung cancer may be effective in only 4% of patients with lung cancer who have a specific mutation in their tumor. Evaluating these new therapies would not be possible at an individual academic medical center.

“UC ReX will revolutionize the clinical and translational research process,” Dubinett said, adding that when the shared repository is completed, “it will be the most sophisticated system of its kind in the world.”

UC BRAID will also facilitate the linking of clinical trial networks, which for the first time offers patients access to cutting-edge therapies across the UC health system.

By bringing together UC medical center leaders and stakeholders to identify common challenges and systemwide solutions, UC BRAID better enables researchers to fulfill their responsibilities “not only to scientific discovery but to patient care, but to having an impact on our patients and our communities,” said Dubinett. By refining UC’s research process, he said, “What we do in terms of investigation and discovery today will be the cutting edge of clinical care and advance the health of our communities in the future.”

For more information, visit the UC BRAID website.

BioAMS will provide faster analysis for medical and other biological research.

Avi Thomas adjusts the bioAMS instrument.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently received $3 million from the National Institutes of Health to acquire a new biomedical accelerator mass spectrometry (bioAMS) instrument.

The instrument will provide faster analysis for medical and other biological research.

Historically, no matter what form a biological sample started out in, it had to be converted to graphite before being analyzed in an accelerator. The traditional AMS technology required operation by experts in disciplines far removed from medical fields, unforgiving special chemistries to prepare samples for analysis and extensive time required for that sample preparation – all factors that have impacted its utility for clinical researchers.

However, in recent years, Lab investments have allowed researchers to develop an interface that would handle liquid samples and bypass the graphitization process. The new bioAMS instrument will couple with this transformational technological development to rapidly and cheaply perform biomedical human subject tracer studies and body burden assessment addressing important questions in nutrition, toxicology, pharmacology, drug development and comparative medicine.

The instrument also will support LLNL’s biological detection and medical countermeasures programs. Examples of applications include dating of cancer stem cells, developing individualized patient therapies and rapid testing of new therapeutics against infectious agents.

“AMS fills a special niche in the biomedical field because it can measure very low concentrations of drugs with extreme accuracy, and that’s important for helping to understand how biology works. However, its real utility hasn’t been fully utilized because of a variety of difficulties,” said Ken Turteltaub, principal investigator (PI) of the NIH award and leader of the Lab’s bioAMS efforts. “This new technology really moves AMS to the next level.”

“In addition,” said Ted Ognibene, co-PI of the NIH award, “the new instrument will shrink the standard sample size from half a milligram down to sub microgram levels. This drastically reduced sample size will allow researchers to better match the biological requirements of the experiment with the analytical capabilities of the instrument and open new fields of scientific inquiry that were previously closed with the graphitization approach.”

These technological advances were driven by the specific needs of the biomedical community, according to Graham Bench, director of the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS). LLNL’s National Resource for Biomedical Accelerator Mass Spectrometry works with more than 60 entities around the world on various studies.

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Previously inaccessible target sites may be reached for diagnosis and treatment using this material.

Adah Almutairi, UC San Diego

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed what they believe to be the first polymeric material that is sensitive to biologically benign levels of near infrared (NRI) irradiation, enabling the material to disassemble in a highly controlled fashion. The study represents a significant milestone in the area of light-sensitive material for non-invasive medical and biological applications.  Their work is published on line this week in the journal Macromolecules.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the only polymeric material specifically designed to break down in to small fragments in response to very low levels of NIR irradiation,” said Adah Almutairi, Ph.D., assistant professor at the UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and director of the Laboratory of Bioresponsive Materials at UC San Diego. “The material was also shown to be well-tolerated in cells before and after irradiation.  We think there is great potential for use in human patients, allowing previously inaccessible targets sites to be reached for both treatment and diagnosis.”

The properties of so-called “smart” polymeric materials – either synthetic or natural – respond readily to small changes in their environment.  They are, therefore, the focus of widespread research to develop tools for such uses as tissue engineering, implants, wound-healing, drug delivery and biosensors.

NIR light can penetrate up to 10 cm into tissue with less damage, absorption and scattering than visible light, and can be remotely applied with high spatial and temporal precision. Most other light-degradable materials that have been developed to date can be difficult to clear from the body, and only a handful of organic materials respond to high-power NIR light.  Until now, none were able to respond to low-level, thus safer, NIR light – which causes less photodamage to tissue and cells.

The UC San Diego researchers stated that further studies are warranted to improve the sensitivity of these smart polymeric materials to NIR, and they are currently pursuing several synthetic and engineering strategies to improve design of such biomaterials.

Additional researchers include Nadezda Fomina, Cathryn L. McFearin, Marleen Sermsakdi, and José M. Morachis, Skaggs School of Pharmacy, Department of NanoEngineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Sciences Programs, UC San Diego.

Funding was provided by an NIH Directors New Innovator Award and King Abdul Aziz City of Science and Technology support.