Research round-up (old)

What happens when founders stick around companies?

Biotechnology is a failed 30-year experiment, says Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano. For most of its existence, income has been nonexistent - the total for public companies broke zero for the first time in 2002 and hit total operating income of about $2.5 billion on just over $35 billion in sales in 2004, Pisano observes in his book Science Business (Harvard Business School Press, Nov 2006). Remove Amgen from the picture, and income dips below zero. Pisano says he think

Are women patenting as much as men?

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences will award $13 million to four centers over four years, or up to $944,000 annually per center, to create innovative therapies for wound healing. The centers in total will include 36 investigators at eight universities and medical institutions and are aimed at drawing together interdisciplinary teams. "A major goal is to set up a framework to establish larger centers in the future," says Gregg Semenza at Johns Hopkins University in

With no absence of fanfare, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus has finally opened its doors. It is now looking for life scientists with backgrounds in mathematics, computer science, optical physics and chemistry in addition to biology - to walk through them. The institute's focus is on two main areas of research: understanding the brain's information-processing system and developing technologies for creating and interpreting biological images. "It's a hig

Industry has long questioned the feasibility of drugs mass-produced by transgenic animals, but recent first-time approvals by the European Commission and the US Food and Drug Administration suggest concerns are subsiding. The first transgenic drug approved in Europe, ATryn, is recombinant human antithrombin, an anticlotting protein secreted into the milk of transgenic goats developed by GTC Biotherapeutics in Framingham, Mass. Biotechnology analyst Philip Nadeau at Cowen and Com

The Sbarro family brought their pizza-making know-how to the United States, set up shop, and grew their fast food franchise nationally and then throughout the world. The Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO), initially funded by the Sbarro family, seems to be emulating this model, only with scientific research. Antonio Giordano, director of the Center of Biotechnology at Temple University as well as the SHRO-funded Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine (IC

If you?re looking to welcome postdocs into a company or lab, a copy of the sixth edition of How to Write And Publish A Scientific Paper (Greewood Press, 2006) is a good place to start. It acknowledges two ongoing and mutually supporting trends in science -broadening internationalism and digitizing of publishing - while delivering the basics to give a leg up for getting a paper published. It may even help new recruits become better scientists. "Writing is not really separate from the p

In 2002, Sebastian Velez, now a graduate student in evolutionary biology at Harvard University, won an award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) that enabled him to attend a conference where he met "the big names in evolution" such as Stephen Jay Gould and Francisco Ayala. "The AIBS award is what sparked my career," says Velez. The AIBS is again offering grants of $1,000 to undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented minorities to present their work

Manufacturer's online tool lets you custom design a lentiviral vector

Configure your own lab chair online

New stain may work where others don't

Surprise: study finds good cross-platform comparability

New reagents designed to make liposomal transfection more versatile and efficient

The National Academy of Sciences is organizing a new committee to periodically update voluntary guidelines it issued last year (http://nap.edu/catalog/11278.html?onpi_newsdoc02162006) on human embryonic stem cell research. A call by several scientific organizations and individual scientists prompted the decision, according to Bill Kearney, spokesperson for the Academy. The committee, under the auspices of the organization's National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, will be suppor

Credit: © PHOTODISC" /> Credit: © PHOTODISC A new collaborative between the US Food and Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will bring scientific rigor and validation to biomarker research, say the agencies. The Oncology Biomarker Qualification Initiative (OBQI; www.fda.gov/oc/mous/domestic/FDA-NCI-CMS.html) will be "a partnership between these three agencies to really for the first time collectively think about how we creat

New York State researchers would like to jump on the bandwagon for state- supported embyonic stem cell research. The heads of 17 New York universities and institutions with substantial biomedical research programs released a white paper (www.rochester.edu/news/pdfs/stemcellwhitepaper.pdf) in February that makes a scientific and economic case for the state to fund such research. The document, urges Albany legislators to pass two stem cell funding bills that would allocate $300 million and $125

While the question of bioethics has been receiving increased attention at business schools and within the scientific community, a new program at Harvard Law School seeks to match a study of ethics directly with the question of law. The recently opened Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics (www.law.harvard.edu/programs/petrie-flom) will promote research to address healthcare policy, biotech patent law, the bioethics of reproductive technologies, and other a

Credit: Photo: © Sam Ogden" /> Credit: Photo: © Sam OgdenKnown not only for her ability as a researcher but also for her skill at explaining to both her colleagues and the public what she does, Susan Lindquist was recently awarded Sigma Xi's recognition for outstanding science and science communication, the 2006 William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement. The prize brings further recognition for Lindquist, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Whitehead In