UTB-TSC receives biomedical research grant
Brownsville Herald - 31-Mar-2008
The School of Health Sciences at UTB-TSC has received a four-year grant totaling $1.03 million to continue a program to motivate and train Hispanics to become biomedical research scientists. See complete article.
Nearly $500 million available for biotech companies
Austin Business Journal - 28-Mar-2008
In an increasingly rough economic environment, it's rare to find a room full of unbridled optimism -- but that's exactly how the atmosphere was at the Bio Greater Austin Council's Bio Bash event in early March, when the heavy hitters of Central Texas' life sciences industries gathered to make note of the region's growth in those industries. Nor is that optimism misplaced, says Isaac Barchas, director of the University of Texas' IC2 Institute: in the last several months nearly $500 million in venture capital funds targeting life sciences have closed or are in the works in Central Texas. See complete article
Satellite campus to help develop new businesses
Brownsville Herald - 25-Mar-2008
A satellite campus of the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texsa Southmost College will include office space available for rent to start-up businesses, officials said Monday.
Officials said they will use a $300,000 federal grant to develop a business incubator project at the UTB-TSC satellite campus that is set to break ground here next month. See complete article.
Next generation of 'smart' drugs
Houston scientists find innovative ways to trick body's defenses, target tumors
Houston Chronicle - 16 - Mar - 08 Just 1 percent of the typical cancer drug that enters the body ends up in its intended target, a tumor. The rest is either whacked by the body's defenses or allowed to go on a rampage destroying healthy tissue. As most cancer patients will attest, this traditional system of treatment is inefficient — at best. But as scientists have deepened their understanding of the intricate workings inside the body's cells, they have begun developing "smart" drugs that ferry medicine directly to the doorstep of cancer cells. Now, hundreds of these promising new therapies are approaching clinical trials, and a few are in advanced testing and nearing use in patients. Beyond these breakthroughs, yet another generation of even smarter drugs is under development, researchers say. Among the latter is a drug developed in Houston that uses a two-stage approach to deliver its payload, much as NASA's Apollo launches used multiple stages rather than a single rocket to put men on the moon. See complete article.
In Texas, Small Is Big
Fiscal Notes 10 Mar 2008 Nanotech in Texas A scientific and technological revolution promises to produce the biggest changes in our daily lives since the rise of computer technology. The revolution is nanotechnology, which is expected to have a trillion-dollar impact on the world economy within a few years. And Texas is in the forefront of the research and development needed to fulfill its promise. Nanotech is not a single science or engineering discipline, but an approach that involves - and is changing - many fields of knowledge. According to Rice University, a world leader in the field, nanotech involves understanding, manipulating and building structures from individual atoms and molecules - structures in the range of one to 1,000 nanometers in size. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide. See complete article
UTEP office helps enhance technology, secure border El Paso Times - 10 Mar 2008 Creating a virtual fence to protect the nation's Southwest border has been a challenging project -- politicians criticizing it as an ineffectual "shortcut" and civil liberties groups branding it as an invasion of privacy. Jose Riojas -- retired brigadier general and former Joint Task Force-North commander -- sees opportunities. "I've had conversations with (the lead contractor on the project) for many months," he said last week. The conversations "are very informal, sharing ideas among professionals." Riojas is now head of the University of Texas at El Paso's Office of Strategic Initiatives, which is positioning itself to become a leader in creating solutions to border and homeland security challenges. With grants of $1 million or more from the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department, the office already has received some recognition for its efforts. See complete article.
UT gets $17 million grant from nuclear weapons agencyAustin American-Statesman 08 March 2008 The University of Texas and four other universities will receive $17 million each during a five-year period to conduct research in the emerging field of predictive science for the federal agency that oversees nuclear weapons. UT and the other schools — the California Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Purdue University and Stanford University — won't be working with such weapons. Rather, they will develop computer models, software and analytical methods for addressing problems in physics and engineering similar to those encountered with nuclear arms. Researchers at UT, for example, will focus on the high temperatures, turbulence and other physical processes encountered when a spacecraft re-enters Earth's atmosphere. "Much of the physics is the same" as what a ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead would encounter during re-entry, said J. Tinsley Oden, director of UT's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. See complete article
New UTSA program to jump-start inventions
UTSAToday - 5 Mar 2008 As part of its mission to move UTSA technologies from the benchtop to the marketplace, the UTSA Office of the Vice President for Research and South Texas Technology Management (STTM) have announced the creation of a new internal funding program to advance UTSA discoveries toward commercialization. Roadrunner Proof of Concept, or POCRR, will provide short-term grants of up to $25,000 beginning this spring. "The first Roadrunner POC proposal deadline is April 15, 2008. STTM will select and award the funds shortly thereafter," said Robert W. Gracy, UTSA vice president for research. See complete article
Nanomedicine System Engineered To Enhance Therapeutic Effects Of Injectable Drugs
Science Daily - 3 Mar 2008 A proof-of-concept study on a new multistage delivery system (MDS) for imaging and therapeutic applications has been proposed in Nature Nanotechnology in an article authored by Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D., of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. This discovery could go a long way toward making injectable drugs more effective. "This is next generation nanomedicine," said Ferrari, the senior author. "Now, we're engineering sophisticated nanostructures to elude the body's natural defenses, locate tumors and other diseased cells, and release a payload of therapeutics, contrasting agents, or both over a controlled period. It's the difference between riding a bicycle and a motorcycle." Nanotechnology offers new and powerful tools to design and to engineer novel drug delivery systems and to predict how they will work once inside the body. See complete article.
