The event, sponsored by the College of Medicine – Phoenix's Research Office, displayed the work of grant awardees from the Flinn Foundation, Valley Research Partnership (VRP) and Arizona Biomedical Research Centre. Dr. Jennifer Barton, Director of the UA BIO5 Institute, was the keynote speaker. She presented “Technology and Biology Advances: Enabling Progress toward Early Detection of Ovarian Cancer.”
BIO5's Dr. Roberta Diaz Brinton, an internationally recognized expert on Alzheimer’s disease and Inaugural Director of the Center for Innovation in Brain Science at UAHS, has received a five-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health Institute on Aging. With the funding, Brinton will develop a unique training program to cultivate a diverse pool of highly trained scientists from diverse fields who can effectively address the nation’s Alzheimer’s research needs.
Dr. Gene Alexander, UA Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and BIO5 member, is researching the use of neuroimaging, or brain scans, to investigate who is likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.
Women tend to have more youthful brains than their male counterparts — at least when it comes to metabolism. The finding is "great news for many women," says BIO5's Dr. Roberta Diaz Brinton, the Director of the UA Center for Innovation in Brain Science, but she cautions that even though women's brain metabolism is higher overall, some women's brains experience a dramatic metabolic decline around menopause, leaving them vulnerable to Alzheimer's.
Imaging and genomic technologies have dramatically increased the amount of information generated and used to make clinical decisions for diseases like Alzheimer's. “There is an untapped opportunity to leverage existing data from longitudinal cohorts, from the postmortem human brain, and from clinical trials to help the field advance our shared goals more effectively than we otherwise could,” said BIO5 member Dr. Eric Reiman, Executive Director of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute.
Dr. Ted Trouard, BIO5 member and UA Professor of Biomedical Engineering, is leading a project to find how MRI technology can collect data faster and get higher resolution images. He says the research can help doctors make better diagnoses, evaluate therapies, and investigate progressions of disease.
For the first time, scientists have detected a DNA structure inside living human cells that looks more like a four-stranded knot than the elegant double helix we know from biology textbooks. Dr. Laurence Hurley, a BIO5 member and professor of medical chemistry at the UA who was not involved with the study, said the new paper is important for chemical biology and molecular therapeutics.
UA ecologist and BIO5 member Dr. Tyson Swetnam led an interdisciplinary team of U.S. researchers to discover that mountain forests are better at storing carbon than forests found on flat land.
Dr. Judith Su, an assistant professor of optical sciences and biomedical engineering at the University of Arizona, talks about her path to STEM, her top tips for success in the field, and turning points in her career.
