BMATE.COM TO BE INC


3 ACES Awards Recognises Europe’s Innovators


Academic entrepreneurs were recognised in the third annual ACES awards, held in Zurich on 3 February 2011 and awarded by the Science|Business Innovation Board. For university spin-outs, the awards are open to entrepreneurs in the European Union and countries affiliated with European Union’s 7th Framework Programme for research, including Israel and Russia.


Winners included Sabine Bahn and Chris Lowe at the University of Cambridge, UK, co-founders of Psynova Neurotech Ltd, who took the Lifescience Award for developing novel biomarkers that can help improve the diagnosis of psychiatric illnesses. With a portfolio of 20 patent families, its first product, VeriPsych, is the first and only blood test to aid psychiatrists in the diagnosis of recent-onset schizophrenia.


Carlos Ludlow and Howard Chase, (University of Cambridge, UK), won the Materials/Chemistry prize; founders of Enval Ltd,


they are commercialising technologies that can recover clean aluminium from packaging waste. Yoram Valent (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) won the GE Smart Grid Award for GridON, a spin-out commercialising an innovative Fault Current Limiter for use on electricity grids. Christian Voegeli (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) and founder of Dybuster won the ICT Award for developing therapy software for learning disabilities; and the Fast Start Award for companies formed in the past year went to Mirasense AG founder Samuel Mueller (ETH Zurich), for Scandit, a barcode-based social shopping application for smart phones.


Kristo Ovaska, an MBA student (Aalto University, Finland), received the judges’ Bridge Award for individuals who have exceeded in promoting entrepreneurship, technology transfer and a culture of innovation in Europe. He founded Venture Garage, which has given rise to 50 campus start-ups.


Aalto’s TO FIND OUT MORE CIRCLE NO. Laboratory Up and Running


Specialists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) are in the starting blocks with an ambitious objective to develop a routine test for gene doping in time for the London Olympic Games in 2012. With the completion of the new Laboratory for Molecular Exercise Physiology on the JGU campus in January 2011, they are now ready to start working on this and other projects.


Professor Perikles Simon, specialist in sports medicine and neuroscientist, came to Mainz University in 2009 as director of the Division of Sports Medicine, Prevention, and Rehabilitation. Working in close collaboration with his former colleagues in Tübingen, Simon developed a test that uses conventional blood samples to provide conclusive proof of gene doping. The process was presented in September 2010, and applications have been submitted for the relevant international patents. There was previously no practicable method that could be used to determine whether an athlete had undergone doping using EPO or other genes. Over the year 2011, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) will be contributing more than half a million US dollars to the project to develop a routine test for gene doping, which may be available in time for the next Olympic Games.


The new laboratory will increasingly be focusing on aspects of customised diagnostics and treatment, an approach that takes individual personal circumstances into account when it comes to tailoring exercise to the demands of mass and professional sports


7


Winners of Sequencer Grants Program Announced


Life Technologies Corporation has announced Dr Angel Carracedo and Dr Mark Pallen as the winners of the European Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGMTM) Sequencer Grants Program. Each scientist will receive an Ion PGM which will give their labs sequencing capabilities on a level prevalent in large, core sequencing centers. Ion


Torrent has also awarded three


runners-up an Ion PGM sequencer to support their exceptional proposals. Dr Carracedo, Director of the Galician Foundation of Genomic Medicine in Spain, was awarded the grant for his proposal to create a fast and affordable method for genetic screening of research samples from newborns. “Up to now newborn genetic screening efforts have been limited by high cost, slow run times and limited throughput of existing sequencing technology,” said Carracedo. “Our research will be focused on developing a newborn screening based on Ion amplicon sequencing for Cistic fibrosis, Wilson disease, Hurles-Scheie disease and other congenital metabolic diseases.” Dr Pallen, Professor of Microbial Genomics at the University of Birmingham, was awarded the grant for his proposal to identify, profile and type the healthcare-associated bacterial pathogens in hospital environments. “The excessive run times and high costs of previous sequencing methods have severely limited the real-time use of sequencing in environmental microbiology settings,” said Pallen. “The Ion PGM is already an order of magnitude cheaper and quicker with a performance enabled by years of compounded Moore’s law. The ability to deliver cheap same-day results is essential to enable timely interventions in outbreak management.”


TO FIND OUT MORE CIRCLE NO. Credit: Thomas Hartman


and especially to the stringent requirements of therapeutic applications. To this end, JGU's Sports Medicine and the University Medical Center Mainz are planning close collaboration - starting in projects on colon cancer, autoimmune disorders, and psychological disorders. "Exercise increases levels of free circulating DNA in the blood - a circumstance that may help us or improve diagnostics," explained Professor Simon. The participating researchers hope that they will not only be able to improve the reliability of diagnostic tests for primary disorders, but also to better adapt adjuvant sport and exercise therapy concepts to the needs of individual patients."


TO FIND OUT MORE CIRCLE NO. Deep-Sea Vents Discovered


Scientists aboard the Royal Research Ship James Cook have discovered a new set of deep-sea volcanic vents in the chilly waters of the Southern Ocean. The discovery is the fourth made by the research team in three years, which suggests that deep-sea vents may be more common in our oceans than previously thought.


Using an underwater camera system, the researchers saw slender mineral spires three metres tall, with shimmering hot water gushing from their peaks, and gossamer-like white mats of bacteria coating their sides. The vents are at a depth of 520 metres in a newly-discovered seafloor crater close to the South Sandwich Islands, a remote group of islands around 500


kilometres south-east of South Georgia.


"When we caught the first glimpse of the vents, the excitement was almost overwhelming," said Leigh Marsh, a University of Southampton PhD student who was on scientific watch at the time of the discovery.


Deep-sea vents are hot springs on the seafloor, where mineral-rich water nourishes lush colonies of microbes and deep-sea animals. In the three decades since scientists first encountered vents in the Pacific, around 250 have been discovered worldwide. Most have been found on a chain of undersea volcanoes called the mid-ocean ridge, however, and very few are known in the Antarctic.


Scientists Compare AIM Results


Current interest in the use of Abbreviated Impactor Measurement (AIM) was clear at the recent EPAG (European Pharmaceutical Aerosol Group) sponsored workshop at Drug Delivery to the Lungs 21, where presenters from a number of leading pharmaceutical companies shared experimental data comparing AIM results.


Aerodynamic particle size distribution is a routine measurement for all inhaled products using full resolution cascade impaction. AIM reduces measurement times by focusing on the fine particle fraction - typically the sub-5 micron portion of the dose that is considered to deposit deep in the lung - and has the potential to accelerate information gathering, especially for rapid


screening in R&D and routine QC.


Pharmaceutical industry presenters shared data comparing AIM results with those obtained using full resolution impaction. There was broad consensus that good agreement is achievable with the FSI and FSA, two of the commercially available systems discussed (from Copley Scientific) for nebulisers and metered dose inhalers. Data on dry powder inhalers (DPI) suggest further research is needed in this area. Every company reported significant savings in analytical time with AIM, some also reporting reduced solvent consumption.


The workshop concluded with a wide ranging discussion of the


results and the way forward, covering: the need to better understand the kinetics of DPI testing; the likely attitude of the regulators and the criticality of this in AIM uptake; and the requirement for further studies to support the validity of the technique, including information on the performance of the Twin Impinger (an AIM-type instrument already approved for use by the European Pharmacopoeia).


The AIM conversation will continue through the year with further events planned at IPAC-RS (29th – 31st March, Maryland, US), RDD 2011 (3rd – 6th May, Berlin, Germany) and ISAM (18th – 22nd June, Rotterdam, Holland).


LUDED IN OUR NEXT ISSUE, SEND ALL YOUR RESEARCH AND EVENTS NEWS STORIES TO HEATHER@INTLA TO FIND OUT MORE CIRCLE NO. 12


"We're finding deep-sea vents more rapidly than ever before," said expedition leader Professor Paul Tyler of the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science, which is based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. “And we're finding some in places other than at mid-ocean ridges, where most have been seen before."


By studying the new vents, the team hope to understand more about the distribution and evolution of life in the deep ocean, the role that deep-sea vents play in controlling the chemistry of the oceans, and the diversity of microbes that thrive in different conditions beneath the waves.


TO FIND OUT MORE CIRCLE NO. 11 9 IOP meetings - UK


The 38th IOP Annual Conference on Plasma Physics 2011 North Berwick. April 4 – April 7 (Plasma Physicists from all disciplines invited.)


IOP Nuclear and Particle Physics Divisional Conference University of Glasgow. April 4 – April 7


Meeting of The Nuclear Physics, High Energy Particle Physics, Gravitational Physics, Astroparticle Physics and Particle Accelerators and Beams Groups.


ISSC-18 Interdisciplinary Surface Science Conference.


University of Warwick. April 4 – April 7 Microscopy of Semiconducting Materials 2011 (MSM-XVII) Churchill College, Cambridge April 4 – April 7


TO FIND OUT MORE CIRCLE NO. 10 8


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60