Welcome to the biweekly electronic newsletter from Stanford Bio-X for members of the Bio-X Corporate Forum. Please contact Dr. Hanwei Li, the Bio-X Corporate Forum Liaison if you would like to be added or removed from this distribution list, or if you have any questions about Stanford Bio-X or Stanford University.

Highlights

** On October 9, 2013, Bio-X celebrated the 10th Anniversary of the James H. Clark Center, the hub of Bio-X. Check out CLARK CENTER @ 10X as well as the Bio-X Timeline over the last 15 years!!

** Check out the article by Stanford President John Hennessy in the Nov/Dec 2013 issue of the Stanford Magazine on Bio-X and the Clark Center, "A Cauldron of Innovation".


Seed Grants

**SAVE THE DATE: The next Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initatives Seed Grants Program Symposium is taking place on Wednesday, August 27, 2014 in the Clark Center Auditorium from 1-4 pm, followed by a poster session of various research within the Bio-X community during the reception in the Courtyard. Go below to EVENTS or click here to view the entire agenda with 8 oral presentations on awarded Bio-X Seed Grant projects.

**UPDATE: Bio-X has closed the 7th RFP for its IIP Seed Grants, and review of the 141 Letters of Intent is underway!

SEED GRANTS FOR SUCCESS - Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program (IIP)

The Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program represents a key Stanford Initiative to address challenges in human health. The IIP awards approximately $3 million every other year in the form of two-year grants averaging about $150,000 each. From its inception in 2000 through the fifth round in 2010, the program has provided critical early-stage funding to 114 different interdisciplinary projects, involving collaborations from over 300 faculty members, and creating over 450 teams from five different Stanford schools. From just the first 5 rounds, the IIP awards have resulted in a 10-fold-plus return on investment, as well as hundreds of publications, dozens of patents filed, and most importantly, the acceleration of scientific discovery and innovation.

In 2012, Stanford Bio-X selected 23 new seed grant projects as the winners of the 6th round. Please go here to view the list of awardees, along with the titles of their projects and the abstracts of the research. Competition was intense as the awardees were chosen from 118 Letters of Intent (LOIs). Selection criteria included innovation, high-reward, and interdisciplinary collaboration. (To view the 114 other IIP projects that have been funded from the first 5 rounds, please click here.) In addition, SANOFI has also funded 4 new Bio-X IIP Seed Grant projects from round 6!

We are cultivating and are highly successful in building meaningful collaborations with numerous corporate colleagues. New collaborations through our seed grant projects are highly encouraged. To learn about how to get involved, please contact Dr. Hanwei Li or Dr. Heideh Fattaey.


IIP Seed Grants-Related Events

** On Monday, March 3, 2014, Bio-X had a Poster Session, featuring 105 different posters from research by all scientists within the Stanford Bio-X community. Over 250 people attended the session, which allowed for an excellent venue to discuss science and research with colleagues from both academia and industry.

** On Monday, August 26, 2013, Bio-X had its second annual IIP Symposium of the year at the Clark Center, which highlights projects that exemplify the Stanford Bio-X mission of crossing boundaries to bring about interdisciplinary research and solutions in the field of life bioscience. The symposium was a huge success with over 300 people attending this event, which included 8 oral presentations and 136 poster presentations. Recorded talks from the symposium will be uploaded soon. If you'd like to view the talks for previous symposia through the years, please click here.


Fellowships

**UPDATE: Bio-X has recently announced its 19 new fellows for the 10th year of the Bio-X Fellowships!!

BIO-X FELLOWSHIPS

Every year, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars of Bio-X affiliated faculty are highly encouraged to apply for the Bio-X Fellowships, which are awarded to research projects that are interdisciplinary and utilize the technologies of different fields to solve different biological questions. Students are encouraged to work collaboratively with professors of different departments, thus creating cross-disciplinary relationships among the different Stanford schools. Our fellows have conducted exciting research, resulting in publications in high-impact journals and have been offered excellent positions in industry and academia.

To date, with the 19 new awardees, Stanford Bio-X has a total of 174 Fellows.

You can view the numerous Fellowship projects that have been awarded over the years as well as oral presentations from previous symposiums here.


**UPDATE: The 9th annual Bio-X USRP is currently underway with this year's 65 new awardees!!

BIO-X UNDERGRADUATE SUMMER RESEARCH PROGRAM

The Bio-X Undergraduate Summer Research Program supports undergraduate research training through an award designed to support interdisciplinary undergraduate summer research projects. The program is an invaluable opportunity for students to conduct hands-on research, learn how to carry out experiments in the laboratory, and develop the skills to read and analyze scientific literature. This program is eligible to Stanford students who want to work in the labs of Bio-X affiliated faculty.

To date, with 65 new awardees from 154 applications this year, 306 students have been awarded the opportunity to participate in the Bio-X Undergraduate Summer Research Program.

Participating undergraduates are also required to present poster presentations on the research that they've conducted during the program. Please click here for title lists of past posters that our undergraduates have presented.

Many fruitful collaborations and relationships have been established with industry through fellowships. Please contact Dr. Hanwei Li or Dr. Heideh Fattaey if you'd like to learn more about how to get involved with these fellowship programs.


News

Researchers invent nanotech microchip to diagnose type-1 diabetes
Bio-X Affiliated Faculty Brian Feldman and Hongjie Dai
Bio-X SIGF Fellow Bo Zhang

An inexpensive, portable, microchip-based test for diagnosing type-1 diabetes could improve patient care worldwide and help researchers better understand the disease, according to the device’s inventors at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Described in a paper published online July 13 in Nature Medicine, the test employs nanotechnology to detect type-1 diabetes outside hospital settings. The handheld microchips distinguish between the two main forms of diabetes mellitus, which are both characterized by high blood-sugar levels but have different causes and treatments. Until now, making the distinction has required a slow, expensive test available only in sophisticated health-care settings. The researchers are seeking Food and Drug Administration approval of the device. “With the new test, not only do we anticipate being able to diagnose diabetes more efficiently and more broadly, we will also understand diabetes better — both the natural history and how new therapies impact the body,” said Brian Feldman, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatric endocrinology and the Bechtel Endowed Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine. Feldman, the senior author of the paper, is also a pediatric endocrinologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford.


Drew Endy discusses what bioengineers should be vibrating about
Bio-X Affiliated Faculty Drew Endy

In a talk at TEDx Stanford, Drew Endy, associate professor of bioengineering talks about the potential of bioengineering and the challenge of deciding how to use it. Endy is a member of the faculty of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. His research teams pioneered the redesign of genomes and invented the transcriptor, a simple DNA element that allows living cells to implement Boolean logic. In 2013, President Barack Obama recognized Endy for his work with the BioBricks Foundation to bootstrap a free-touse language for programming life. He has been working with designers, social scientists and others to transcend the industrialization of nature, recently co-authoring Synthetic Aesthetics (MIT Press, 2014).


Stanford team aims to improve storage in batteries used in cellphones, iPods, more
Bio-X Affiliated Faculty Yi Cui

Tucked in a small laboratory at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a team of engineers and scientists from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) is making and testing new types of lithium-ion batteries. Their goal: move beyond today's lithium-ion to create a battery five times better than those we use now. Lithium-ion batteries work by moving lithium ions back and forth between two electrodes, called the cathode and anode (familiar to most as the "+" and "-" sides of a battery). Charging forces the ions into the anode, storing energy to power a wide range of devices. Discharging moves the ions back to the cathode. The maximum amount of lithium absorbed by the electrodes determines a battery’s storage capacity. The lab at SLAC is led by Yi Cui, an associate professor of Materials Science and Engineering at SLAC, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR). Cui believes one key to creating a better battery is making the cathode of sulfur instead of today’s lithium-cobalt oxide.


Stanford engineers envision an electronic switch just three atoms thick
Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Evan Reed

Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Those instructions were once printed on punch cards that fed data to mainframe computers. Today’s smart phones process more data, but they still weren’t built for being shoved into back pockets. In the quest to build gadgets that can survive such abuse, engineers have been testing electronic systems based on new materials that are both flexible and switchable – that is, capable of toggling between two electrical states: on-off, one-zero, the binary commands that can program all things digital. Now three Stanford researchers believe that they’ve discovered just such a flexible, switchable material. It is a crystal that can form a paper-like sheet just three atoms thick. Computer simulations show that this crystalline lattice has the remarkable ability to behave like a switch: it can be mechanically pulled and pushed, back and forth, between two different atomic structures – one that conducts electricity well, the other that does not. “Think of it like flicking a light switch on and off,” says Karel-Alexander Duerloo, a Stanford Engineering graduate student and first author of an article in Nature Communications. So far this discovery only exists as a simulation. But co-author and team leader Evan Reed, an assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering, hopes this work will inspire experimental scientists to fabricate this super-thin crystal and use it to create electronic and other devices that would be as light and flexible as fibers.


Events

Neurology & Neurosciences
July 25, 2014, 8 am - 9 am
LKSC Rm 130, Stanford, CA
"Women and Epilepsy"
Speaker: Kimford Meador, MD
Pathology
August 12, 2014, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Alway, M-106, Stanford, CA
"Computational Pathology for Systematic and Integrative Analyses of Carcinogenesis"
Speaker: Andrew Beck, MD, PhD, Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Symposium

Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Clark Center Auditorium
Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program grant awardees will give fifteen-minute presentations at the symposium. A poster session will be held during a post symposium reception, where students involved in interdisciplinary research will present their work.

1:00pm
Introduction

1:10pm
Biomarkers of the Social Deficits of Children with Autism
KAREN PARKER (Psychiatry)
Antonio Hardan (Psychiatry)
Joshua Elias (Chemical & System Biology)
Sonia Partap(Neurology)

1:30pm
Pluridirectional High-energy Agile Scanning Electron Radiotherapy (PHASER): A Novel Design for Radiation Treatment of Cancer
PETER MAXIM (Radiation Oncology)
Billy Loo (Radiation Oncology)
Sami Tantawi (SLAC)

1:50pm
Visualizing the Molecular Processes of the Retina in Living Subjects
ADAM DE LA ZERDA (Structural Biology)
Mark Blumenkranz (Ophthalmology)

2:10pm
Single Molecule and High-Resolution Imaging of Developmental Signal Transducers
W.E. MOERNER (Chemistry)
Matthew Scott (Developmental Biology)

2:30pm
Developing Biomimetic Hydrogels to Enhance Pluripotent Stem Cell-based Therapy for Smooth Muscle Tissue Repair
FAN YANG (Orthopaedic Surgery)
Renee Reijo Pera (Obstetrics and Gynecology)
Bertha Chen (Obstetrics and Gynecology)

2:50pm
Real-time Measurements of Biological Interactions using Multiplexed Peptide Arrays on Silicon Wafer
PJ UTZ (Medicine)
Shan Xiang Wang (Electrical Engineering)

3:10pm
Engineering the Outside of the Cell from Within: Cytoskeletal Control of Cell Wall Structure and Mechanics
KC HUANG (Bioengineering)
Wolf Frommer (Biology)
David Ehrhardt (Plant Biology)

3:30pm
Probing the Active Mechanics of Hair Cells - Faster than the Speed of Hearing
BETH PRUITT (Mechanical Engineering)
Tony Ricci (Otolaryngology)

3:50pm
Closing comments

4:00pm
Reception and poster session

Resources

Stanford University
Stanford Bio-X
Bio-X Seed Grants
The Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program (IIP) provides seed funding for high-risk, high-reward, collaborative projects across the university, and have been highly successful in fostering transformative research.
Office of Technology and Licensing "Techfinder"
Search the OTL Technology Portal to find technologies available for licensing from Stanford.
Stanford Center for Professional Development
- Take advantage of your FREE membership!
- Take online graduate courses in engineering, leadership and management, bioscience, and more.
- Register for free webinars and seminars, and gets discounts on courses.
Stanford Biodesign Video Tutorials on how FDA approves medical devices
A series of video briefs recently produced by the Stanford Biodesign Program teaches innovators how to get a medical device approved for use in the United States. This free, online library of 60 videos provides detailed information on the Food and Drug Administration regulatory process, short case studies and advice on interacting with the FDA.

To learn more about Stanford Bio-X or Stanford University, please contact Dr. Hanwei Li, the Bio-X Corporate Forum Liaison, at 650-725-1523 or lhanwei1@stanford.edu, or Dr. Heideh Fattaey, the Executive Director of Bio-X Operations and Programs, at 650-799-1608 or hfattaey@stanford.edu.

Release Date: 
July 23, 2014