Welcome to the biweekly electronic newsletter from Stanford Bio-X for members of the Bio-X Corporate Forum. Please contact us 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.

Seed Grant Program

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 4 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!

** Last Monday, February 25, 2013, Stanford Bio-X held its latest annual IIP Seed Grant Symposium at the Clark Center. It was attended by over 150 people, and the symposium included 8 podium presentations and 116 poster presentations. The podium talks represented research from a wide array of fields (such as gene delivery to interactive gaming in biology to tele-robotic systems to stem cells to hedgehog signal transductions and more), with each project exemplifying the Stanford Bio-X mission of crossing boundaries to bring about interdisciplinary research and solutions in the field of life bioscience. The talks will be posted online shortly for viewing. To view previously recorded talks, please go here.

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.

 


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, Stanford Bio-X has a total of 126 Bio-X Fellows, including the 18 newest Fellowship awardees announced at last year's BIO-X FELLOWS SYMPOSIUM. Currently, Bio-X is in its 10th call of applications and we look forward to continuing the support of our students' graduate training in interdisciplinary biosciences.

To view the numerous projects that have been awarded over the years, please click here.



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.

To date, 176 students have been awarded the opportunity to participate in the Bio-X Undergraduate Summer Research Program. Currently, Stanford Bio-X is in its 8th call for applications. This is eligible to Stanford students who wants to work in the labs of Bio-X affiliate faculty.

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

Stanford researchers develop tool for reading the minds of mice
Bio-X Affiliated Faculty Mark Schnitzer ~ Project also highlighted on NBC news

If you want to read a mouse's mind, it takes some fluorescent protein and a tiny microscope implanted in the rodent's head. Stanford scientists have demonstrated a technique for observing hundreds of neurons firing in the brain of a live mouse, in real time, and have linked that activity to long-term information storage. The unprecedented work could provide a useful tool for studying new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. The researchers first used a gene therapy approach to cause the mouse's neurons to express a green fluorescent protein that was engineered to be sensitive to the presence of calcium ions. When a neuron fires, the cell naturally floods with calcium ions. Calcium stimulates the protein, causing the entire cell to fluoresce bright green. A tiny microscope implanted just above the mouse's hippocampus – a part of the brain that is critical for spatial and episodic memory – captures the light of roughly 700 neurons. The microscope is connected to a camera chip, which sends a digital version of the image to a computer screen. The computer then displays near real-time video of the mouse's brain activity as a mouse runs around a small enclosure, which the researchers call an arena. The neuronal firings look like tiny green fireworks, randomly bursting against a black background, but the scientists have deciphered clear patterns in the chaos. "We can literally figure out where the mouse is in the arena by looking at these lights," said Mark Schnitzer, an associate professor of biology and of applied physics and the senior author on the paper, recently published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.


Discovery opens door to multipronged attack against common skin cancer, study shows
Bio-X Affiliated Faculty Anthony Oro

Hailed as a major step forward in the effort to develop targeted cancer therapies, a recently approved drug for the most common type of skin cancer has been a mixed blessing for patients. Although the initial response is usually dramatic, the tumors often recur as the cancer becomes resistant to treatment. Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a second way to block the activity of the signaling cascade, called the Hedgehog pathway, that is abnormally active in these cancers. The researchers hope the new approach may not only one day help patients with tumors that have become resistant to the first drug, vismodegib (marketed as Erivedge), but may also provide a novel combination therapy for newly diagnosed tumors that may be more effective than either treatment alone. “These new, highly targeted therapies work really well,” said dermatology professor Anthony Oro, MD, PhD, who was one of several Stanford researchers involved in the multiyear effort that brought vismodegib to market in 2012. “But this type of treatment is a race against evolution. Within a year, many of the tumors recur when the cancers become resistant to the inhibitor.” The effect on patients, particularly those with a severe condition called Gorlin syndrome, is a heartbreaking yo-yo as the tumors that cover most of their bodies disappear within weeks, but often recur in force. But Oro and his colleagues’ discovery of another, previously unknown component of the Hedgehog pathway — a component vital to its cancer-causing ability — could address this problem. Blocking the activity of this protein, called aPKC, can stop the growth in mice of transplanted skin tumors and tumor cells resistant to vismodegib. The finding, published Feb. 28 in Nature, may pave the way to a future in which cancers are treated with more than one specifically targeted drug.


Now hear this: Researchers identify forerunners of inner-ear cells that enable hearing
Medicine Faculty Alan Cheng and Roel Nusse

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a group of progenitor cells in the inner ear that can become the sensory hair cells and adjacent supporting cells that enable hearing. Studying these progenitor cells could someday lead to discoveries that help millions of Americans suffering from hearing loss due to damaged or impaired sensory hair cells. “It’s well known that, in mammals, these specialized sensory cells don’t regenerate after damage,” said Alan Cheng, MD, assistant professor of otolaryngology. (In contrast, birds and fish are much better equipped: They can regain their sensory cells after trauma caused by noise or certain drugs.) “Identifying the progenitor cells, and the cues that trigger them to become sensory cells, will allow us to better understand not just how the inner ear develops, but also how to devise new ways to treat hearing loss and deafness.” The research was published online Feb. 26 in Development. Cheng is the senior author. Former medical student Taha Jan, MD, and postdoctoral scholar Renjie Chai, PhD, share lead authorship of the study. Roel Nusse, PhD, a professor of developmental biology, is a co-senior author of the research.


Quantity of sugar in food supply linked to diabetes rates, researcher says
Bio-X Affiliated Faculty Sanjay Basu

Does eating too much sugar cause diabetes? For years, scientists have said “not exactly.” Eating too much of any food, including sugar, can cause you to gain weight; it’s the resulting obesity that predisposes people to diabetes, according to the prevailing theory. But now the results of a large epidemiological study suggest sugar may also have a direct, independent link to diabetes. Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-San Francisco examined data on sugar availability and diabetes rates from 175 countries over the past decade. After accounting for obesity and a large array of other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates, independent of obesity rates. Their study was published Feb. 27 in PLOS ONE. “It was quite a surprise,” said Sanjay Basu, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and the study’s lead author. The research was conducted while Basu was a medical resident at UCSF. The study provides the first large-scale, population-based evidence for the idea that not all calories are equal from a diabetes-risk standpoint, Basu said. “We’re not diminishing the importance of obesity at all, but these data suggest that at a population level there are additional factors that contribute to diabetes risk besides obesity and total calorie intake, and that sugar appears to play a prominent role.”

 


Events

Bio-X Frontier in Interdisciplinary Biosciences
March 7, 2013, 3:15 pm - 4:15 pm
Clark Center Auditorium, Stanford, CA
"Computational Approaches to Genomic Medicine"
Speaker: Jill P. Mesirov, PhD, Associate Director and Chief Informatics Officer, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Cardiovascular Institute
March 12, 2013, 12 pm - 1 pm
LKSC Bldg, 2nd Floor, Paul Berg Hall, Stanford, CA
"Towards Whole-Cell Models of Health and Disease"
Speaker: Markus Covert, PhD, Bioengineering, Stanford University
Nanobiotechnology Seminar Series
March 14, 2013, 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Munzer Auditorium, Stanford, CA
"Novel Autoantibodies May Predict Human and Chicken Ovarian Cancer"
Speaker: Judith Luborsky, PhD, Rush University
Pediatrics
March 14, 2013, 3 pm - 4 pm
Beckman Center, Munzer Auditorium, Stanford, CA
Frontiers in Gene and Molecular Therapies - "The structure, mechanism, application and combination of TAL effectors and homing endonucleases for gene targeting"
Speaker: Barry Stoddard, PhD, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, University of Washington

 


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: 
March 04, 2013