The new BioFrontiers Institute will be a melting pot of collaborative efforts to understand and improve human health. Soup brought to you by Flickr user Charles Haynes, CC license.
On September 13, the University of Colorado Board of Regents approved creation of the Biofrontiers Institute, a multidisciplinary research and teaching center on the?CU Boulder Campus for the study of technologies that will help us understand and improve human health.
By bringing together basic researchers including chemists, computational biologists, and physicists with computer scientists, engineers and a host of translational medicine researchers, many of whom are members of the University of Colorado Cancer Center, the institute hopes to create a melting pot ripe for the emergence of discoveries and therapies that are greater than the sum of its parts.
?One of the benefits of this institute is that on the Boulder campus, we have disciplines that don?t exist at the Anschutz campus, and vice versa ? and the same is true with CSU and the other partners,? says Leslie Leinwand, investigator at the CU Cancer Center and chief scientific officer of the BioFrontiers Institute.
For example, Leinwand tells the following story:
?I had an enterprising MD/PhD student who wanted to work in my heart lab, but on cancer,? she says. ?It?s kind of a problem ?cause we don?t really work on cancer, but I told her that if she could tie her project to the heart, I was all for it. So we started thinking about cancer and what happens to cancer patients? muscles ? they lose muscle mass. And we wondered what happens to their hearts. It turns out we couldn?t find much of anything about it.?
So Leinwand and her grad student called Paul Bunn, MD,? investigator at the CU Cancer Center and the James Dudley chair in cancer research at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and said, ?Paul what happens to people?s hearts when they get cancer?? Leinwand says.
Bunn confirmed that little work had been done in this area. ?So we said, ?why don?t we find out if mice lose heart muscle with cancer??? Leinwand says. Leinwand and her grad student worked with animal models of colon cancer at the CU Cancer Center to discover that, yes, when mice contract cancer, they lose ?massive amounts? of heart muscle.
This is how collaboration fosters discovery.
And as in this case of Bunn, Leinwand, and her grad student, discovery at the new BioFrontiers Institute isn?t expected to flow from the top, down. In fact, the new institute hopes to have 100 undergrads working in its labs, whose locations will be intermixed without regard to discipline or field in hopes that this mixing will create interdisciplinary collaboration. For example, a new undergraduate major in computational biology will combine the fields of mathematics, statistics, computer science and biology.
?The idea is to break down the silos between departments,? says Natalie Ahn, CU Cancer Center investigator, professor of biochemistry and associate director of the BioFrontiers Institute.
Ahn explains that within most academic departments, hiring tends to be conservative. ?When a fly geneticist retires they want to hire another fly geneticist,? Ahn says (adding with a chuckle that she means no offense to her good friends who are fly geneticists).
?It?s hard to work at the cutting edge because there?s risk,? Ahn continues. ?The BioFrontiers Institute doesn?t hire a person into a department. We look for top notch scientists and hire them into the institute as a whole. They might be between departments and thus less bound by this conservatism.?
?We believe our connections will be strengthened by this institute. What we want to promote is new relationships,? says Leinwand.
Even in this age of instant communications, the BioFrontiers Institute knows there?s something in the power of being right next door.
* The BioFrontiers Institute will be housed in the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building on the CU Boulder campus, scheduled to open in early 2012. The Institute will be directed by Nobel Laureate chemist Tom Cech.
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