WHAT YOU SAW IN THE NEWS: Pacific Standard Magazine published the following cover story in September 2013: The Social Life of Genes “Your DNA is not a blueprint. Day by day, week by week, your genes are in a conversation with your surroundings. Your neighbors, your family, your feelings of loneliness: They don’t just get under your skin, they get into the control rooms of your cells. Inside the new…
The National Institutes of Health announced $45 million in grants to support several research groups that are focused on Alzheimer's prevention. ISB's Price Lab will be working with the University of Florida to use systems biology to identify new therapeutic targets in the innate immune system. The systems approach, which ISB pioneered, allows scientists to integrate and analyze disparate data (genome, gene expression, pathology) in order to find the molecular…
WHAT YOU HEARD IN THE NEWS: NPR aired this story (on Sept. 5) about research just published in the journal Nature Genetics suggesting that tuberculosis may have existed more than 70,000 years ago. Tuberculosis Hitched a Ride When Early Humans Left Africa ‘ “The old, traditional view was that tuberculosis emerged during the Neolithic transition when people started to domesticate animals and develop agriculture, which started about 10,000 years ago,”…
ISB will collaborate with Seattle BioMed and ETH Zurich on a $16.6 million tuberculosis grant from the National Institutes of Health. Seattle BioMed issued this press release today: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SEATTLE, AUG. 15 — Seattle BioMed has been awarded a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, that will take a comprehensive systems approach to the problem of tuberculosis…
Dr. Lee Hood believes that ISB scientists are missionaries who are spreading the power of systems biology. He is always on the road and today (June 24) he’s in Lyon, France, to attend the EISBM Symposium 2013 to give a talk on P4 medicine. Prior to arriving in Lyon, Lee was in Jerusalem to give a talk at the Israeli Presidential Conference, which drew world leaders such as Bill Clinton…
By Hsiao-Ching Chou LUXEMBOURG JOURNAL, June 12, 2013 – At the 17th-century Neumünster Abbey, the cultural heart of Luxembourg City, a small group of some of the world’s most cutting-edge scientists gathered on June 10-11, 2013, for a symposium to discuss the future of medicine and healthcare. The consensus was clear: Achieving the greatest advances requires “no-box” thinking, cross-disciplinary teamwork and, as ISB president, Dr. Lee Hood, likes to say,…
ISB is co-hosting a scientific symposium with Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine in Luxembourg City on June 10-11. Here are some scenes from Luxembourg pre-symposium. The full set of images can be found at this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/90930918@N08/sets/72157634024779425/
Our Dr. Lee Hood is a guest mentor for The Wall Street Journal's Accelerators blog. In this post, he shares how nonprofit organizations can borrow the entrepreneurial and audacious-goal-oriented spirit of startups to be successful – in addition to remaining true to their missions. An excerpt: …achieving your vision requires determined optimism, the will to never give up, a missionary passion for the concept (to convince the skeptics), a willingness…
Ilya Shmulevich, PhD, shares this message about our hosting a TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) steering committee meeting at ISB. In the video below, Ilya explains the purpose of the meeting and chats briefly about “pan-cancer” – the effort to find commonalities among multiple cancers. Related content: Read about ISB’s role in TCGA as a Genome Data Analysis Center and about the most recent collaborative paper on endometrial cancer, which…
By Dana Riley Black, Director of ISB’s Center for Inquiry Science Healthcare continues to be listed as a “high-demand” field, meaning there continue to be significant and projected employment opportunities in the field. A recent employment gap analysis by Washington State released on April 3 suggests a projected deficit of 472 healthcare jobs filled annually in the state (see: http://www.wtb.wa.gov/HighDemandFields.asp). As a result, many middle and high schools are turning…
What will the next decade hold for brain science? At ISB’s 12th Annual International Symposium: Systems Biology and the Brain, which took place on April 14-15, we began exploring this question. With the announcement in January about the European Commission awarding $1.29 billion to The Human Brain Project (based in Switzerland) and the news in February that the Obama administration would be announcing a $3 billion plan to support the…
Dr. Brady Bernard, Andrea Eakin, and Dr. Ilya Shmulevich, of The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), were awarded first prize and will split $70,000 for their winning entry researching more than 25 different types of cancers and thousands of patients to gain insight into the biological networks that are disrupted or altered within a given cancer type and to identify potentially potent approved drugs that could be repurposed for the…
What You Saw in the News: On Feb. 18, The New York Times published a front-page story headlined “Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain.” (Download PDF: ObamaNYTBrainMap.) While the administration has not formally announced this brain mapping project, the NYT was able to gather enough details from scientists involved in planning the project to publish a report. Participating government agencies and private foundations include the…
Figure depicting cross-disciplinary collaborations among lab groups and usage of technologies housed in ISB’s core facilities. In August, ISB learned that our National Center for Systems Biology was renewed for $13.7 million over the next five years. This is no small feat given that only two National Centers were funded in this round and that there’s fierce competition for diminishing government grants. Here’s how your tax dollars are being put…
Juan Caballero, a post doctoral fellow in Dr. Lee Hood’s group, answered an open call through InnoCentive for a solution to combat Citrus Greening Disease, which affects about 18 percent of citrus trees in Florida. He was awarded $10,000 for designing the right RNAi to control the viral disease.
In May, ISB welcomed Dr. Robert Lipshutz as our Senior Vice President for Strategic Partnerships and Chief Business Officer. Rob came to us after having spent 19 years as an executive at Affymetrix, which develops genetic analysis technology. Rob has a PhD in mathematics and is looking forward to helping ISB expand our reach.
This article by Larry Cheek in the March 18, 2012, New York Times describes the trend of creating open office spaces to encourage creativity, movement and collaboration. The idea is that people need different types of spaces to allow for the full potential of different kinds of work. A one-size-fits-all philosophy doesn't function in this day and age when technology and customer service – and healthcare and science where ISB is concerned…
