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KansasBio Sponsors K-INBRE Symposium Scientific Poster Session

KansasBio will again sponsor the poster session at the annual K-INBRE Symposium on January 14th, 2012. The top ten student posters will be awarded $100 each, made possible by the support of KansasBio.

“We are very grateful for the generosity of KansasBio,” said Doug Wright, Ph.D., Director of K-INBRE. “With their continued support, the K-INBRE is able to recognize and reward talented young scientists that are being trained in the state of Kansas.”

The poster session is one component of the 2-day Symposium, which provides an opportunity for students to present their original research to their peers. The Symposium exposes students to critical components for academic success; including the preparation of research findings for public presentation, improving public speaking skills, and the ability explain their research to their peers. Additionally, they are encouraged to explore the research of other students and learn about their research experiences. KansasBio will provide three poster session judges to score posters with three K-INBRE judges. The judges will review the abstracts of each poster and then listen to a 2-minute summary from each student presenter. The top ten posters will be identified for the monetary awards.

“KansasBio is proud to support the K-INBRE poster competition again this year. This event encourages promising new investigators who strengthen Kansas' ability to compete for NIH and other federal research funds,” said Angela Kreps, President of KansasBio.

KansasBio is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2004 by the Kansas Technology Enterprise Corporation and the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute with the mission of representing the biosciences in Kansas. They are the Kansas affiliate of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), and their focus is to attract and retain leaders, companies, and funding for bioscience.

Drs. Hiroshi Nishimune, Paige Geiger and John Stanford

Researchers share equipment, space and ideas to fight ALS

Three scientists at the University of Kansas Medical Center are combining their expertise to better understand the mechanism of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Hiroshi Nishimune, PhD, Paige Geiger, PhD, and John Stanford, PhD, collaborate on efforts to provide earlier diagnosis of and better treatment for the now fatal motor neuron disease.

Nishimune, Geiger and Stanford are seeking a $250,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund an initial two years of research on ALS. Additional project funding has come from the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute, a Kansas IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (K-INBRE) Faculty Scholar Award to Stanford and K-INBRE starter funding for Nishimune’s and Geiger’s labs.

Stanford, an associate professor, wanted to study ALS because he had a way to measure bulbar symptoms, which affect face and tongue muscles, in animal models.

“Bulbar symptoms are a common presentation for ALS, and they interfere with eating, speech and respiration,” Stanford says. “My work is mostly behavioral, and I needed collaborators who work on muscles, which is Paige’s specialty, and the neuromuscular interface, which is what Hiroshi does.”

Loss of muscle strength is a component of ALS, so the researchers want to track when that starts in the progression of the disease.

“The slurring of speech might be the first thing you notice,” says Geiger, an assistant professor, “but there could be molecular changes in the muscle that occur earlier that are not detectable in human tests at this point.”

Although ALS is a neurodegenerative disease, it “seems to start at the muscle and work its way back to the spinal cord or brain,” Stanford says.

If the researchers can figure out which proteins in certain muscle fibers are affected first by the disease, then KU’s expertise in drug development could be tapped to come up with effective treatments.

 

 

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