Bioscience

Delaware-based W.L. Gore & Associates received $30 million dollars December 2009 from Phoenix toward financing its $100 million medical campus to manufacture medical products located at 32212 N. North Valley Parkway. Jobs come for the expected eighteen hundred construction workers erecting the 100, 000-square-foot building through late 2011 when the facility is completed. The awarded bonds exemplify how federal stimulus monies under the Obama administration engage the private sector in the economic recovery of American communities.  

Bioscience

An NAU biology professor who has spent more than 40 years studying and teaching about animal behavior is receiving a lifetime achievement award.

Lee Drickamer is receiving the 2010 Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Award from the Animal Behavior Society for his research and contributions to understanding animal motivations.

Bioscience

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are part of a team that has sequenced the majority of the soybean genome, providing an unprecedented look into how this important legume crop converts four critical ingredients--sunlight, water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen--into protein and oil, the basic building blocks for many consumer products.

The research team from 18 federal, state, public and private organizations published their research today in the journal Nature.

Bioscience

The construction of a $100 million medical campus where new medical products are manufactured has been under way since August in north Phoenix.

W.L. Gore & Associates, a Delaware-based company also located in Flagstaff, is building at 32212 N. North Valley Parkway, near Interstate 17 and Carefree Highway. The business received $30 million in recovery-zone facility bonds from Phoenix in December to help finance the undertaking.

Bioscience

Arizona's push to grow the bioscience industry has paid off over the past two years with rapid job growth and new companies despite the difficult economy, a new report says.

Although Arizona has made progress on most goals outlined in the annual report by Ohio-based Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, the state's budget woes and lack of early-stage investment in startup companies are challenges that could slow bioscience growth and the high-wage jobs the industry delivers.

"We are making what I think is significant progress," said Marty Schultz, chairman of the Arizona Bioscience Roadmap steering committee.

Bioscience

Researchers for TGen Clinical Research Services at Scottsdale Healthcare (TCRS) have identified a way to predict which patients with small-cell lung cancer may be resistant to first-line chemotherapy.

The study, Tumor MicroRNA Biomarkers Associated with De Novo Chemoresistance in Small Cell Lung Cancer, will be presented today in San Diego at a joint conference of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC).

This breakthrough is critical since patients with small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) often do not get a second chance at therapies to combat this aggressive type of cancer.

Bioscience

TGen Drug Development (TD2) and Critical Outcome Technologies Inc. (COTI) announced today that they will work together to obtain approval of clinical trials for a promising new anti-cancer drug called COTI-2.

This easily synthesized small molecule compound was discovered and developed by COTI of London, Ontario, Canada. This working relationship resulted through the expanded relationship between Canadian companies and the Phoenix-based Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen).

TD2, TGen's Scottsdale-based drug-development subsidiary, will work with COTI to complete the Investigational New Drug (IND) enabling research necessary to gain U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of clinical trials, perhaps by the end of 2010, and eventually move the drug to market where it can benefit patients.

Bioscience

Researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and colleagues have identified the first genetic variant associated with aggressive prostate cancer, proving the concept that genetic information may one day be used in combination with other factors to guide treatment decisions.

The research is being reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bioscience

International research in the fields of thermal imaging, remote spectroscopy, medical imaging and astronomy has a home on the campus of the University of Arizona thanks to collaborations between researchers at the UA and two French universities.

University of Arizona President Robert N. Shelton met with representatives on Monday from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientific, or CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), to mark the inauguration of the CNRS International Associated Laboratory for Materials and Optics on the UA campus. 

Bioscience

A Pennsylvania company that makes wireless heart monitors has established a new office in Phoenix.

Conshohocken, Pa.-based CardioNet said the new Phoenix office, located at 2750 S. 18th Place, will initially employ 20 with plans to grow up to 50 positions based on the company's growth.

CardioNet established the Phoenix office to serve the company's West Coast business, said Russell Porges, vice president of manufacturing and distribution.