By Mick Jensen

What if we were able to cure asthma, cancer and diabetes, to prevent obesity and Alzheimer’s Disease? What if we could reduce the environmental impact of agriculture while producing food crops tailored to human nutritional needs?

These two questions relay the tremendous sense of excitement gripping life scientists across campus.

The pioneering Institute for Biomedical Science and Biotechnology (IBSB) will bring together groups of faculty and students from the College of Science, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Medicine, the College of Pharmacy, and the College of Engineering and Mines into a single facility, where they will interact, discover, analyze, and invent together. The combined expertise from disciplines normally housed separately will spark ideas and novel solutions that might not otherwise develop.

IBSB co-directors Vicki Chandler and Fernando Martinez say the institute has been enhanced by the infusion of money from by the Technology and Research Initiative Fund. TRIF was created thanks to the largesse of the voters of Arizona who passed Proposition 301 in 2000, setting the stage for enhanced education at all levels across the state. TRIF is the University of Arizona’s share of money from Proposition 301.

Martinez, director of the Arizona Respiratory Center within the College of Medicine, says that IBSB has spent $9.6 million allocated from TRIF over the last two years. The figures showed that 51 percent of the money has gone to tenured or tenure track faculty hires and retention packages. Another 12 percent has been spent on research faculty hires. Each hire or appointment is designed to build on current program strengths at UA or to create programs that will complement and support existing research efforts.

Nineteen percent of the TRIF money, or about $1.8 million, has provided new instrumentation and upgrades in proteomics and genomics research technologies and salaries for staff to run the equipment. These core facilities support investigators from all corners of the UA community as well as industrial scientists and other collaborators from the private sector.

Investments in people and equipment are designed to generate significant increases in research funding. Over the next 10-20 years it is expected that the Institute will enable an increase of $100 million per year in federally funded life sciences research.

Co-director Vicki Chandler, a Regents’ Professor of plant sciences in the College of Agriculture, says the IBSB building will house 300 faculty, research scientists and support staff. The UA cleared the area where it will be located and held a groundbreaking ceremony in November 2003.

While this new research facility is important to the UA community, Chandler notes that IBSB initiatives will extend far beyond the building and the research programs within it. Those initiatives include funds to support graduate students engaged in interdisciplinary research programs. Six fellowships will be awarded in the amount of $22,000 per year plus tuition, registration fees and health insurance. Awards will be granted on a competitive basis for one year, starting in January 2004, with potential renewal for a second year.

Chandler says the fellowships are recognition of the important role that graduate students play in the research process. “The program helps us to accomplish our mission of fostering interdisciplinary research in the life sciences,” she says. “And increasing the numbers of highly qualified life science graduates will support the growth of bioindustry in Arizona.”

The IBSB also is paying off on a promise to attract new, outstanding faculty to campus. After recruiting internationally recognized plant scientist Rod Wing, and biophysicist Michael Hogan before the passage of Proposition 301 in 2000, efforts to bring other key faculty and researchers on board continued in earnest.

Two outstanding examples of hires made possible through TRIF are Cari Soderlund, who is investigating plant genomes, and Paul Haynes, who joined as director of proteomics in June 2003. Haynes says he came for the same reasons as Soderlund: good people doing good science. Says Haynes, “I’ve been impressed with everyone I’ve met.”

Soderlund’s work with University of Arizona plant scientist Rod Wing, then at Clemson University, was instrumental in her coming to UA as one of the IBSB’s first hires. “The opportunity to work with others at UA was also appealing. There are a lot of good biologists here,” she says.

One of Soderlund’s current projects involves rice blast disease. Rice is the most important food crop on the planet. The disease is a major threat and is caused by a particular pathogen, a fungus. Soderlund and her colleagues are investigating the interactions between the rice plant and the pathogen, and how the plant defends itself against infection.

“What we learn will not apply just to this one problem. I assume that we’ll find similarities in host-pathogen interactions in other organisms, certainly plants, maybe even humans,” says Soderlund. “All living systems share many of the same genes and genetic mechanisms.”

The next step for Soderlund is to build a stronger computational biology group at UA, starting with a master’s program that would partner the departments of plant sciences and computer science. The idea has plenty of supporters.

“I am extremely optimistic that we can get a strong bioinformatics program going here, one that will attract strong people. I wouldn’t be wasting my time if I didn’t think so.”

Haynes is an expert in the collection of technologies that make up proteomics, the science that identifies exactly which proteins are present in a specific cell or tissue sample. Today it is the cutting edge, but Haynes is already looking ahead.

“A lot of my background is in glycobiology – sugars. There’s a whole lot of technology waiting to be developed there.” Haynes says analysis of sugar changes might open up new avenues in the study of disease states.

“Now we look for protein changes caused by disease states like cancer,” says Haynes. “But there are probably just as many sugar-related changes associated with a disease state.” While differences in protein expression between healthy tissue and diseased tissue can be subtle and difficult to detect, Haynes believes that close examination of sugar changes might reveal more obvious differences.

“This is a big research area to be developed and I’d like to be involved,” he says.

IBSB was created to foster such multidisciplinary research to improve agriculture, human nutrition and health. It also will partner with others at the University, in the Tucson community and the state of Arizona to promote economic development.

Collaboration is the key, because answers to the biggest questions in the life sciences today are pursued at the intersections of disciplines. Biochemists, neuroscientists, respiratory scientists, medicinal chemists, cancer researchers, plant scientists all are examining the workings of genes and protein systems as the key to fundamental breakthroughs. This new knowledge will lead to new methods to detect and treat cancer and other complex diseases or new strains of food crops able to withstand difficult environmental conditions.