Biofrontiers Banner


January/February 2013
With January and February blazing by, we are happy to be taking the time to give you some of our latest news from the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado. 

Winter has been a busy and productive time for BioFrontiers faculty. Below are just a few of the stories, and our website has even more. You can visit us anytime online here.
BioFrontiers scientist tackles childhood heart disease

 

BioFrontiers Chief Scientific Officer Leslie Leinwand, has been studying the motor protein, myosin, for 25 years. This important protein is responsible for making muscles contract, including one vital muscle: your heart. 

 

Myosin drives heart muscle contraction, and when this protein is mutated, it has devastating effects on the cardiovascular system. There are more than 300 known mutations in myosin, many of which cause a disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

 

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the most common genetic heart disease, occurring in 1 in 500 individuals, and it is the leading cause of sudden death in young people. In hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the heart muscle becomes thickened in parts, forcing the heart to work overtime pumping blood throughout the body.

 

Many adults manage this disease successfully by avoiding
strenuous, competitive exercise and using a pacemaker. Children with this disease don't have as many options as adults.

 

"Pediatric patients have a much more difficult time with this disease," says Leinwand. "Some of the myosin protein mutations appear only in infants and young children, and these cause a version of the disease that is much more aggressive. Heart transplants are difficult at this age, but without them these patients have about a 40 percent mortality rate."

 

There are 1,000 to 5,000 new cases of pediatric hypertrophic cardiomyopathy diagnosed each year. The pediatric disease is relatively rare, with twelve children diagnosed out of every million, and the majority of patients are diagnosed before their first birthdays. Beyond the clear genetic causes, the other causes of the disease in children are not well understood and research on the subject is sparse. Fewer than 25 percent of these childhood cases have an identifiable cause, despite standardized and rigorous testing.

 

Leinwand recently won a $45,837 grant from the Children's Cardiomyopathy Foundation (CCF) to study the differences in the myosin mutations in adult and pediatric populations. She also plans to look at the effects of a small molecule drug on the pediatric versions of the protein in a test tube. This drug has promise for treating adults with heart failure.

 
"We would like to get beyond just treating the symptoms, and I believe we have the potential to treat the root cause of this disease," says Leinwand. "If we can focus on preventing the heart muscles from thickening in the first place, we can get away from pacemakers and transplants, and have more success in giving these young patients a better chance in living with this disease."
Sequencing facility keeps biotech research dollars in Colorado

Shortly after the Human Genome Project provided the first full genetic sequencing of the human genome, sequencing emerged as a tremendous opportunity to positively affect human health and wellness. As sequencing technology improved, shipment of U.S. sequencing business overseas has become more common for many researchers and companies wanting lower costs. But, not all sequencing work travels abroad and local companies are discovering that they can get better and timelier results by partnering with local university research institutes.

 

"Sequencing projects go overseas because of cost considerations, but I think companies are finding that the choices are limited, and their offerings are not really flexible enough to support novel ideas," says Dr. Jim Huntley, who is the director of the Next-generation Sequencing Facility at the University of Colorado's BioFrontiers Institute. "We specialize in non-traditional sequencing applications. These are high-risk applications that some facilities are not comfortable doing. Here, we have expertise and knowledge to develop risky applications that the biotech industry relies on for commercialization activities."

 

Lafayette-based Dharmacon, a wholly owned subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific, worked with Huntley on their latest product release: shRNA screening libraries that are a tool for drug discovery and development. The Thermo Scientific Decode Pooled Lentiviral shRNA Screening Libraries are expected to help researchers and scientists analyze genetic responses to drugs or environmental conditions. Huntley assisted Thermo Fisher Scientific's researchers to adapt the libraries to support high-throughput, next-generation sequencing platforms, which will lower the expense of screening gene function and allow for more rapid screening of novel drugs and therapeutics.

 

"I see what we're doing as a business model for biotech companies, large and small," says Huntley, who is seeing an increase in requests coming into his lab from outside the academic community. "Capital expenditure on rapidly evolving technologies used for research is a huge barrier for small and mid-sized businesses. Working with us gives these companies access to cutting-edge research equipment without substantial overhead. Partnering with biotech companies also allows us to deliver on our promise to the state to support commercialization efforts and strengthen the biotech industry in Colorado."

 

A portion of the equipment in Huntley's lab was paid for through a Bioscience Discovery and Evaluation Grant created by Colorado's Office of Economic Development and International Trade to help researchers get bioscience inventions out of their labs and into the biotech industry. Since 2007, more than 130 of these grants have been awarded to scientists and engineers at Colorado research institutions, and have resulted in 34 new companies and 302 direct jobs.

 

"Our sequencing facility is definitely a connection point between academia and the biotech industry in our state.  This is a connection that people are now becoming aware of," says Huntley. "When biotech and university researchers come together in one place, everybody wins."

Recent papers by our faculty 

The Non-Coding B2 RNA Binds to the DNA Cleft and Active-Site Region of RNA Polymerase II (J Mol Biol) - Natalie Ahn

Side population cells from human melanoma tumors reveal diverse mechanisms for chemoresistance (J Invest Dermatol) - Natalie Ahn

Bioorthogonal Click Chemistry: An Indispensable Tool to Create Multifaceted Cell Culture Scaffolds (ACS Macro Lett.) - Kristi Anseth

Three-dimensional hMSC motility within peptide-functionalized PEG-based hydrogels of varying adhesivity and crosslinking density (Acta Biomater) - Kristi Anseth

Finding the end: recruitment of telomerase to telomeres (Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol) - Tom Cech

How large should whales be? (PLoS One) - Aaron Clauset

Genome-wide maps of polyadenylation reveal dynamic mRNA 3'-end formation in mammalian cell lineages (RNA) - Robin Dowell

Widespread Colonization of the Lung by Tropheryma whipplei in HIV infection (Am J Respir Crit Care Med) - Rob Knight

A PGC-1alpha Isoform Induced by Resistance Training Regulates Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy (Cell) - Leslie Leinwand

Hibernating squirrel muscle activates the endurance exercise pathway despite prolonged immobilization (Exp Neurol) - Leslie Leinwand

Events
Upcoming Event
s

BioFrontiers Seminar
Ben Lehner 
Centre for Genomic Regulation
March 12, 4:00 pm
JSCBB-Butcher Audi. (A115)
 
BioFrontiers Special Seminar
Amy Wesolowski
Carnegie Mellon University
March 13, 4:00 pm
JSCBB-Linfield Room (A400)
 
BioFrontiers Seminar
David Botstein
Princeton University
March 19, 4:00 pm
JSCBB-Butcher Audi. (A115)
 
BioFrontiers Special Seminar
Pieter Dorrestein
UCSD
April 2, 4:00 pm
JSCBB-Butcher Audi. (A115)
 
BioFrontiers Seminar
Jonathan Pritchard
University of Chicago
April 9, 4:00 pm
JSCBB - Butcher Audi. (A115)
 
BioFrontiers Seminar
Bob Austin
Princeton University
May 14, 4:00 pm
JSCBB - Butcher Audi. (A115)
IQ Biology Blog: Interdisciplinary on Steroids
by: Ryan Langendorf
 

At my last mentoring committee meeting, after discussing the tug-of-war that the Environmental Studies and IQ Biology programs have been playing with my schedule, Dr. Brett Melbourne paused and quietly commented that my life is "interdisciplinarity on steroids!" We all laughed, but sometimes I lose sight of how many worlds I inhabit. Most graduate students are like horses at a racetrack: blinders on, charging ahead singularly. I am lucky enough to have found myself in not one, but two programs that span disciplines in meaningful ways.

Ryan tends to a tranquilized bear during field work.

So what is a day of interdisciplinarity on steroids like? Well, imagine being crowded into a small, overly warm basement classroom debating the role scientists ought to play in society and politics with perspectives ranging from philosophical justifications to legislative ideologies to scientific uncertainty. Then, the clock strikes 1:30. You grab your things, dash out of the room, sprint up the stairs, tear across the quad, zigzag past oncoming traffic, catch the bus pulling out, stampede over to the new biotech building on east campus, run up the stairs, yank open the door, slide next to your classmates and start in on a presentation explaining how Fourier transforms are used in x-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. Just another Tuesday afternoon.

 

Definitely hyperbolic, but that cross-campus dash I made last semester happened not only every Tuesday but almost daily as I bumped into people or switched homework gears or met up with PIs and students for research meetings. I would never trade my life at CU for a more traditional graduate career, but making connections between the disparate areas of my life can be a career on its own. Sometimes I like to imagine people carrying spools of string everywhere they go. I'm not sure how my path through life would appear to an eagle passing by, but I like to imagine it would zigzag around the campus connecting seemingly unrelated buildings in interesting ways. Read more

 
Recent Awards

Don Elliman, BioFrontiers board member, was selected as chancellor of the University of Colorado Denver | Anschutz Medical Campus.

Tom King, President and CEO of Alexza Pharmaceuticals and BioFrontiers board member, recently announced that the company received FDA approval for its ADASUVE Inhalation Powder for the acute treatment of agitation associated with schizophrenia or Bipolar I disorder in adults.

BIoFrontiers Associate Director, Kristi Anseth, received the 2012 Materials Research Society's Mid-Career Award. 

BioFrontiers faculty member, Hubert Yin was selected for funding by the CO-Pilot Program of the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. The project is titled: "Optimizing Small Molecule Inhibitors of the TLR3 as Potential Atherosclerosis Drug Candidates."

BioFrontiers faculty member, Aaron Clauset was awarded $1.06 million from the Santa Fe Institute for work on "Statistical Interference for Detecting Structures and Anomalies in Networks."
More about BioFrontiers
There are many ways to get involved with the BioFrontiers Institute:
More information?
You can read all of our BioFrontiers Newsletters
Follow us on Twitter!
@biofrontiers or visit: 
Join Our Mailing List