OFFICE OF RESEARCH ADMINISTRATION NEWSLETTER | March 2007
(Volume VI, No. 9)
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OFFICE OF RESEARCH ADMINISTRATION NEWSLETTER | March 2007 |
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Compliance Training to be Held March 14 (OMB Circular A-133) The Office of Research Administration will host a training session for all researchers who have a federally funded or flow-through grant and all faculty and staff who work administratively with grant funds (e.g., PIs, department assistants, fiscal officers, etc.). Facilitated by Susan Eickhoff, Partner, KPMG (the University’s external auditor), the training will focus on UM-St. Louis' FY 2005 A-133 audit of federal grants and related compliance issues. The A-21 also will be discussed as it relates to the audit. By the end of the course, participants will be familiar with:
Keeping the Fruits of Research Close to Home in St. Louis Excerpted from the New York Times February 07, 2007 By ROBERT SHAROFF ST. LOUIS — In the late 1990s, Dr. William H. Danforth, chancellor emeritus of Washington University here, watched as a faculty member in the university’s engineering department tried to market an innovative device— a switch to speed transactions on the Internet — that had emerged out of a research project. “He tried for two years to get a company started in St. Louis and failed,” said Dr. Danforth, the older brother of John C. Danforth, the former United States senator. Giving up, the faculty member then moved to San Francisco, where he quickly found financial backers, office and research space and other kinds of assistance. In less than a year, the company was sold to Cisco Systems for $350 million. That experience, Dr. Danforth said, convinced him that something needed to be done to reorient the “We have great research here,” he said, “but we have not done so well with the commercialization of that science.” In 2001, Dr. Danforth — along with a number of other business and civic leaders — founded the Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences, a nonprofit group. The goal was to jump-start St. Louis’s nascent biotechnology industry by providing both new and mature companies with increased access to financing and up-to-date facilities. Dr. Danforth, a cardiologist, says that St. Louis is better positioned than many cities to capitalize on biotech because of the number of universities and other institutions in the area. The city also has a number of research sites run by large agricultural and pharmaceutical companies, like Monsanto and Pfizer. Over the last six years, the coalition has had some notable successes. On the financial side, the amount of biotech venture capital funds either invested or managed in St. Louis has climbed to $556 million. “We’ve gone from virtually nothing to having structured investments and investors in place,” said Robert T. Fraley, chief technology officer of Monsanto and a member of the coalition. Probably the most visible outgrowth of this effort, however, is the Center of Research, Technology and The district is controlled by a nonprofit consortium formed by Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis University, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the Missouri Botanical Garden, which are all within a few miles of the area. They all also conduct research in the area of life sciences. l
UMSL's George Gokel Honored by New Journal of Chemistry Read Complete Special Issue Introduction Online
Dr. George Gokel New Journal of Chemistry editors have produced a special 60th-birthday issue in honor of Dr. George Gokel, Distinguished Professor of Science and Associate Director of the Center for Molecular Electronics at UM-St. Louis, who served two 3-year terms on the editorial board of NJC including two years as the U.S. Associate Editor for the journal. The issue includes manuscripts from Gokel's peers, colleagues, co-workers and friends, according to NJC editors Jerry Atwood and Jonathan Steed, who also note in the issue's introduction that those received and the "alacrity with which the invitations to contribute have been accepted ... demonstrate very clearly the significance of his ongoing contribution to science." l
As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits Excerpted from the New York Times February 28, 2007 By PATRICIA COHEN Ever since the gross mistreatment of poor black men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to light three decades ago, the federal government has required ethics panels to protect people from being used as human lab rats in biomedical studies. Yet now, faculty and graduate students across the country increasingly complain that these panels have spun out of control, curtailing academic freedom and interfering with research in history, English and other subjects that poses virtually no danger to anyone. The panels, known as Institutional Review Boards, are required at all institutions that receive research money from any one of 17 federal agencies and are charged with signing off in advance on almost all studies that involve a living person, whether a former president of the United States or your own grandmother. This results, critics say, in unnecessary and sometimes absurd demands. Among the incidents cited in recent report by the American Association of University Professors are a review board asking a linguist studying a preliterate tribe to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form,” and a board forbidding a white student studying ethnicity to interview African-American Ph.D. students “because it might be traumatic for them.” “It drives historians crazy,” said Joshua Freeman, the director of the City University’s graduate history program. “It’s a medical model, it’s inappropriate and ignorant.” One student currently waiting for a board to approve his study of a strike in the 1970s, Mr. Freeman said, had to submit a list of questions he was going to ask workers and union officials, file signed consent forms, describe the locked location where he would keep all his notes, take a test to certify he understood the standards. Review boards, first created in 1974, were initially restricted to biomedical research. In 1981 the regulations were revised to cover all research that involves “human subjects” and is designed to contribute to “generalizable knowledge.” Yet precisely how to interpret these rules has largely been left to each review board — 5,564 in all. And while the regulations apply specifically to research that gets federal dollars, many colleges use Institutional Review Boards to monitor all research, no matter where the funds come from. This system of helter-skelter enforcement, critics say, has no meaningful oversight and no appeal process. Debbie S. Dougherty and Michael W. Kramer, two former members of a review board at the University of Missouri, Columbia, who wanted to study review boards, had to first get their own board’s O.K. Although they thought their project was exempt from board approval, the only entity authorized to make that decision is the board itself, and the only appeal if the researchers had rejected the ruling is also the board. Bernard A. Schwetz, director of the federal Office for Human Research Protections, which administers the regulations, acknowledges that the guidelines covering the boards’ actions have not been clear enough and says he intends to make public new proposed guidelines before the end of the year. Still, he said the priority is to protect human subjects and dismissed the notion that most nonmedical research carries few dangers. “Obviously the balance is very subtle,” he said. “I think it’s naïve to say there isn’t any risk.” But to many faculty and graduate students, review boards are like a blister that gets worse with every step. Those outside of the hard sciences say the legitimate concerns over ethics and safety are largely irrelevant to most of their research. l Read Complete Article Online
Systems biologists have finished a comprehensive computer model of metabolism, providing an invaluable tool for drug discovery and disease research. Excerpted from MIT's Technology Review February 06, 2007 By KATHERINE BOURZAC Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have constructed the first complete computer model of human metabolism. Available free on the Web, the model is a major step forward in the fledging field of systems biology, and it will help researchers uncover new drug pathways and understand the molecular basis of cancer and other diseases. Metabolism is the sum of all chemical reactions involved in breaking down the nutrients in food into energy and using them as the raw materials for making everything the body needs, from hormones like insulin to the lipids that make up cell membranes. The computer model of metabolism, constructed by researchers in the lab of Bernhard Palsson, professor of bioengineering, connects all such known chemical reactions in the body to every human gene. Similar models of metabolism in microbes such as yeast and E. coil -- including several generated by Palsson's lab -- are enabling researchers to engineer organisms that more efficiently produce products like ethanol and antimalarial drugs. (See "Watching Bacteria Evolve in the Lab" and "Engineered Microbes Boost Ethanol.") But, says Aviv Regev, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, MA, "a high-quality model of metabolism in humans has been elusive." The new model includes every known gene and every metabolic reaction Palsson's group uncovered in an extensive search of the scientific literature. A given gene in the database is associated with its protein product, which might be associated with a number of metabolic reactions, which are associated with other reactions, which are associated with nutritional inputs like glucose and the output of energy or a product like melatonin. Palsson calls the model "a mathematical representation of all this data." The online database will be updated continuously. l Read Complete Article Online
Tighter Controls Needed for Nanotechnology, Says UN Report February 05 , 2007 Excerpted from MIT Technology Review By Associated Press NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- The U.N. called Monday (02/05/07) for tighter regulation on technology to change or create materials at the atomic and molecular level, a process being used to develop new drugs, foods and other commercial products.
The report was released on the opening day of the Global Ministerial Environment Forum, which brought nearly 100 environmental ministers and deputy ministers to Nairobi for the annual conference. ''This is a phenomenally rapidly expanding technology, but as yet we do not know what we are releasing into the atmosphere,'' Steiner told journalists, adding that there are no regulations in place specifically to monitor nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is technology on the scale of a billionth of a meter, or about one 80,000th of the width of a human hair: the scale of atoms and molecules. l Read Complete Article Online
FY 2005 AUTM U.S. Licensing Survey Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) Download Licensing Survey (PDF) SUMMARY (from http://www.autm.net) The report includes stories about academic breakthroughs in terrorism prevention, pollution control, education advancement and disease diagnosis and treatment, and how technology transfer professionals assist researchers’ in bringing these new products and services to market, for the benefit of society and the economy. With statistical contributions from more than 228 respondents, the Survey is the most comprehensive report of its kind. Highlights from the U.S. 2005 Licensing Survey include:
Patents: Waiting for a First Office Action The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently released numbers on their application examination process, giving us a chance to look at the average time lag just to get an initial response. But first, some background. Patent applications filed with the USPTO are examined by a particular group of examiners who look at all inventions within a given technology field. However, an application typically does not reach an examiner for six months after filing. Upon receipt of an application, the examiner reviews the application, particularly the claims, and then conducts a patentability search by looking at prior patents and publications. The examiner then prepares a critique of the application -- an "Office Action" -- in which prior patents and publications, along with other objections to the application (e.g. formalities of the application, rejection of claims, etc.), are listed. Now, for the numbers. Working from numbers on patent examination recently released by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Dennis Crouch, of Counsel at McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP, created a table of the average delay until a first office action is mailed from the USPTO after a patent application is filed. (http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2007/02/how_long_do_i_w.html) The numbers reflect an average for each technology center as it operates today, but do not necessarily reflect corresponding delays for applications filed today. The information contained in the chart below is set up as follows: The 3.8 year delay in Electronic Commerce (TC 3620) means that the applications receiving first office actions during the past three months were filed 3.8 years ago on average.
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| The Office of Research Administration supports and advocates research and technology transfer by faculty, graduate students and staff. The ORA provides services in conjunction with external and internal sources of funding for research, along with services related to commercializing discoveries through technology transfer. The goal of this newsletter is to inform the campus community of grants received, to highlight the accomplishments of our faculty, graduate students and staff, and to share with you a calendar of important events and deadlines. Please direct any comments or questions regarding the newsletter to Tamara Wilgers (wilgerst@umsl.edu). | University of Missouri- Fax: 314-516-6759 |
