MichBio Member News

Oakland County Michigan's Medical Main Street life science initiative generated new investment of more than $9 million while creating almost 250 new jobs in its first full year.

The initiative, which focuses on growing the life science industry in Oakland County and southeast Michigan, helped five life science companies expand their footprints. The companies are:

A 10-hour detailed autism assessment typically costs $2,400 but more than 90 percent of the patients at the University of Michigan Autism and Communication Disorders Center receive it for free, thanks to federal research and stimulus support.

Center director Catherine Lord has expanded her staff from 30 to 45 people over the past year thanks to the added government support, as well as private donations, allowing her to hire new people to conduct research and evaluate a record 700 patients last year.

About 300 University of Michigan employees will be the first to move to U-M’s North Campus Research Complex (NCRC), the former Pfizer property purchased by the University in June 2009.
Several existing units have been notified they will move in the first phase of occupancy at the 30-building property that spans Huron Parkway south of Plymouth Road. These are units that support the University’s research community in multiple functions.
 

Michigan State University's College of Nursing has been awarded nearly $7.45 million in federal stimulus money to expand its research facilities and capacity in a new building.

The funding, from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources, will enable the relocation of the college's Nursing Research Center and faculty into the Bott Building for Nursing Education and Research. MSU is expected to break ground this summer on the Bott Building, adjacent to the Life Sciences building.

MSU celebrated the opening of MSU Technologies and MSU Business-Connect to the new SmartZone in East Lansing.  Click here to read more.

The University of Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China today launched two programs to jointly fund renewable energy and biomedical research projects involving investigators from both universities.

The goal of the renewable-energy program is to develop new technologies that reduce global carbon emissions and their impact on climate change. The biomedical collaboration will spur technological advances that improve human health.

"The research strengths of our two universities are quite complementary," said Stephen Forrest, U-M vice president for research.

In the heat of a football game, a player is tackled and pounded to the ground. His head takes a mighty sideways whack.  What happens next—a concussion or some other kind of traumatic brain injury—is rarely good.

BioSeek, LLC, a subsidiary of Asterand plc (LSE: ATD), a pioneer in the application of predictive human biology to drug discovery, and Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., an R&D-oriented global specialty pharmaceuticals company, announced today that they have signed a new multi-year drug discovery collaboration agreement.

GeneGo, Inc., a leading provider of software and databases for systems biology, today announced that the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI) has licensed its pathway analysis suite MetaCore and its database searching tool Eureka. The CTSI is based on a $25 million National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) and is a partnership between Indiana University, Purdue University, and the University of Notre Dame. GeneGo will embed its Eureka platform into the CTSI website for use by all CTSI researchers.

A Michigan State University researcher is among a team of scientists that have uncovered the mechanism by which the amount of beta-carotene, or provitamin A, is increased in corn, a finding that can help combat vitamin A deficiency and improve human health in the developing world.