How do we prevent, treat and cure the myriad diseases we face? How do we create more resilient crops, nutritious foods and new sources of fuel? How do we address the many environmental problems that surround us today?
Support for research collaborations among Bio 5-affiliated faculty who address these questions is key to Bio 5’s nine-year success. These 200-plus faculty members come from eight UA colleges and represent more than 50 departments and units across campus. Our 2009/2010 accomplishments include:
 Bio 5 brings together researchers from five key scientific disciplines. Joe Pangburn photo |
Bio 5 administers the new institute, which will connect clinical scientists in the colleges of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, science, engineering, agriculture, law, and management. The institute complements and extends major efforts in biomedicine and biotechnology that Arizona voters funded in 2000, including the formation of the Bio 5 Institute.
• iPlant Collaborative. This $50 million National Science Foundation-funded national center that is administered through Bio 5 announced in April the release of the first versions of the iPlant Discovery Environments. iPlant is creating a cyberinfrastructure (CI) for the plant science research community. One key CI aspect is the Discovery Environment, which provides a modern, common Web interface and computational platform to expose the computing, data, and application resources. The new Discovery Environment will provide access not only to tools built by the collaborative, but to many community-contributed tools as well via future access to APIs and software developers toolkits.
This first Discovery Environment will facilitate research in one of two grand challenge areas chosen by the iPlant Board of Directors: Assembling the Tree of Life for the green plant species. Knowledge of evolutionary relationships is fundamental to biology, yielding new insights across the plant sciences, from comparative genomics and molecular evolution, to plant development, to the study of adaptation, speciation, community assembly, and ecosystem functioning.
• Drug Discovery and Development. In October 2009, NIH awarded a $7.5 million grant to the UA and Translational Genomics Research Institute to fund a drug discovery and development center that puts renewed focus on the role of medicinal chemistry. The two-year grant, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is enabling rapid establishment of both key expertise and infrastructure in the field by assembling a translational medicinal chemistry team capable of designing and selecting bona fide drug candidates to respond quickly and efficiently when needed. Bio 5 member Christopher Hulme, an associate professor at the UA College of Pharmacy, is a principal investigator for the project and leads the center’s medicinal chemistry efforts.
The new center is aligned with the goals of both the NIH and the Arizona Bioscience roadmaps, to promote the growth of local biotech by enabling discovery of early stage molecular probes, suitable for accelerated translation into effective, disease-modifying drugs.
• Arizona Center for the Biology of Complex Diseases (ABCD). Funded in 2010 with a two-year, $958,544 NIH grant, ABCD is leading a study to identify traits that increase or decrease a person’s susceptibility to asthma. This effort could some day lead to treatments —administered as early as in the womb — to prevent asthma and other diseases from occurring in people who have a tendency to get them. Donata Vercelli, a BIO5 member and associate director of the Arizona Respiratory Center in the College of Medicine, directs ABCD.
Deciphering complex diseases such as asthma is not within reach of individual disciplines, but rather requires a concerted interdisciplinary effort. ABCD brings together complex disease-oriented scientists who excel in environmental studies, immunological and clinical phenotyping, genetic epidemiology, population genetics, epigenetics, functional genomics in human and animal models, and development; and provides an interface that catalyzes discussions, promotes unconventional thinking and seeks to establish new experimental and conceptual paradigms.
• National Biofuels Consortium. UA researchers are part of a national consortium that received a U.S. Department of Energy grant this year totaling more than $44 million to bring more sustainable and economically sound algae-based biofuels to market. Kimberly Ogden, a chemical and environmental engineering professor, serves as the UA’s principal investigator. The UA’s contribution is multifaceted, involving a range of individuals focusing on water usage and quality issues, biology, reactor design and other topics, including Bio 5 members and College of Agriculture and Life sciences professors Judith Brown, Department of Plant Sciences; Joel Cuello, Department of Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering; Leslie Gunatilaka, Arid Lands Studies; Istvan Molnar, Arid Lands Studies; and Mark Riley, head of the Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Department. The late Arizona Research Labs director Michael Cusanovich contributed as well.
• Arizona Center on Aging (ACOA). Five UA scientists led by ACOA Co-Director and BIO5 member Dr. Janko Nikolich-Žugich, were 2010 presenters at the American Aging Association’s national meeting. The interdisciplinary group represents the ACOA and Department of Immunobiology in the College of Medicine; the Department of Psychology in the School of Mind, Brain and Behavior in the College of Science; the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, and the Bio 5 Institute. ACOA advances the scientific study of aging; expanding opportunities for education and clinical training in gerontology, geriatrics and long-term care; and promoting the welfare of aging persons and their families through clinical and community services and public policy.
• Supporting UA Life Sciences Research Infrastructure. The UA’s shared, state-of-the-art research infrastructure is one of the ways UA scientists reduce costs while staying ahead of the curve in their respective research programs. Called core facilities, they make available the very latest in specific expertise and technology to UA scientists, and in some cases, academic and industry scientists statewide, nationally and internationally. Bio 5 significantly supported the development of this infrastructure, including statistics, mouse models, and proteomics.
• Supporting Economic Develop-ment. Bio 5-affiliated faculty launched four start-up companies in the past two years. All four engaged professional management and received a variety of funding over the last year and a half. bioVidria received $591,750 from Tucson-based angel investors; Cancer Prevention Pharmaceuticals raised $2.5 million from its founders and other investors including the Phoenix-based Translational Accelerator, or Trac, fund as the lead investor; Valley Fever Solutions received a $3 million NIH grant to continue the commercialization of nikkomycin Z (NikZ), a potentially curative therapy for Valley Fever; and Luceome received $180,886 in NIH funding for the development of its KinaseSeeker technology.
Biz Facts1657 E. Helen St. on the UA campus
Bio 5 Institute
http://bio5.org/
(520) 626-2465
Contact Dr. Fernando D. Martinez, director of the Bio 5 Institute, at fernando@arc.arizona.edu
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