Research Texas - Fall 2008

RESEARCH TEXAS Fall 2008

ViaGen Texas company moves to forefront of cloning

Texas Tech Storm chasers gather whirlwind of data

Intellectual property Five steps to move in the right direction

Angel networks “Angel” funding spreads across the state

From the Editor

T

here’s a song from the 1980s called The Future’s So Bright I’ve Got To Wear Shades. The song, by a Texas band named Timbuk 3, is an ironic look at how we train people to build nuclear bombs. Since the nuclear threat seems a bit passé at present, the song may have lost some of its ironic edge. Maybe, with more and more Texas research focusing on so-called “clean” energy alternatives like wind energy and battery power, the future might be bright because the air might be a bit cleaner. That’s a pretty optimistic view, but there’s little doubt the state has picked up the challenge of energy research big time. Not that things in Texas are rolling along smoothly research-wise. The August report from the Governor’s Competitiveness Council made it clear the state has plenty of challenges, particularly in improving science and math education. And while some recent studies point out that Texas has plenty of room to improve itself in research and technology compared to other states, there is little doubt Texas remains committed to developing a wealth of research, development, education and product development. Among the examples in this issue: • The University of North Texas is looking at ways to make 911 emergency services safe in an Internet-connected world. • Texas Tech researchers are working at ways to more effectively combat bacterial infections. • A company has licensed technology from two Texas universities to bring to market. • A Texas company is making big strides in the world of cloning. • A Cedar Creek-startup has moved forward with energy storage technology that could change transportation. • Angel networks are springing up around the state to support start-up companies. • An archive at Southern Methodist University reveals the vast array of black film history. There’s plenty more between these covers. It might be time to get out those shades.

– Robert Francis Editor

2

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Inside Introduction

4

State continues investments as economy slows down

Publisher Banks Dishmon Editor Robert Francis Associate Editor Michael H. Price Managing Editor Crystal Forester Contributing Writers & Researchers Tonie Auer, Elizabeth Bassett, Betty Dillard, Aleshia Howe, Stephanie Patrick, Celestina Phillips, John-Laurent Tronche, Leslie Wimmer Director of Sales Sherry Suggs Advertising Executive Mary Schlegel Photographers Glen Ellman Jon P. Uzzel

Texas Tech ViaGen Texas company moves to forefront of cloning

University of Texas at Dallas, UT Southwestern Medical Center Emergent licenses technology for commercialization

University of North Texas Intellectual property

16

Five steps to move an organization in right direction

University of Texas at Arlington

18

New engineering, science developments

Texas Tech

22

Bacteriophage research may pay big dividends

Research Texas Update

26

EEStor, Scott & White

News and Notes

40

University of Texas, M.D. Anderson, HelioVolt

University of Texas at El Paso

Office Coordinator Maggie Franklin

Botanical Research Institute of Texas

42 44

Professor focuses on cancer, transplant rejection research

New building, new plans

University of North Texas

46

An investment in equipment

University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston Research Texas is a special publication of the Fort Worth Business Press. 3509 Hulen, No. 201 Fort Worth, TX 76107 (817) 336-8300 E-mail: [email protected] www.ResearchTexas.org THIS NEWSPAPER SUPPLEMENT/PROGRAM BOOK IS COPR. © AND TM 2008 BY THE Fort Worth Business Press; ALL WORLD RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRODUCTION OR USE, WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION, OF EDITORIAL OR GRAPHIC CONTENT IN ANY MANNER IS PROHIBITED BY LAW.

10 12 14

e911 researchers tackle VoIP

Production Brent Latimer Clayton Gardner

Vice President of Operations/ Human Resources Shevoyd Hamilton

6

Storm chasers gather whirlwind of data

Center for Translational Injury Research

Angel networks “Angel” funding spreads across the state

Southern Methodist University

50 52 54

Repository of black film history

Making connections

57

Contact information

Cover photo courtesy of ViaGen

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

3

BY

Robert Francis

Texas faces challenges in global economy force deficits in key industry segments such as energy, computer technology, advanced manufacturing technology, aerospace and defense. “In a competitive global economy, companies will locate where there is a constant stream of available human resources that can rapidly fill workforce needs,” the report stated. As Michael Williams, Texas Railroad Commissioner and chairman of the Governor’s Competitiveness Council, said regarding the report: “Even with our current strength, the council recognized several significant economic disconnects that will stunt our growth if they are not closed.” Those gaps include what is taught in Texas schools and what students need to know to meet future workplace demands, the need to further diversify the state’s energy portfolio and a transportation infrastructure that – Jeff Clark, AeA’s director of public policy for the southern region is ill-prepared to accommodate the ongoing population growth, Williams said. The report also calls for Texas to enact a research and development tax credit. That call Competitiveness Council in August, Texas public schools was supported by the AeA, formerly known as the must improve math and science education if the state is to American Electronics Association. remain competitive in the global economy. “AeA is particularly encouraged by the council’s recomThe 29-member council said state and education leadmendation that Texas enact a research and development ers must begin to work on a solution to expected worktax credit,” said Jeff Clark, AeA’s director of public polity

L

ooking at Texas from the main streets of Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, the state’s economic health would appear robust. Unlike most of the rest of the nation, Texas’ real estate – commercial and residential – is strong, financial institutions in the state appear immune from large losses and the state’s trump card – energy – is more in demand than ever. Make no mistake, though, plenty of challenges remain for the Lone Star State and many of those challenges center around research and technology. According to a report issued by the Governor’s

Texas is one of only six states without tax incentives to encourage research and development.

4

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

for the southern region. “Texas is one of only six states without tax incentives to encourage research and development. By moving quickly to act in this area, the legislature can send a critical message that Texas is not only open for business, but is also actively recruiting. Texas can use a tax credit to attract emerging technologies and those companies now doing the critical research that will yield economic opportunity in the years to come.” The council’s report is hardly the only one to indicate where Texas stands in the national and global economy. In April, the Milken Institute issued its second State Technology and Science Index. The report takes an inventory of the technology and science assets that can be leveraged to promote economic development in each state, factoring in 77 individual indicators that comprise five equally weighted major composites. Little surprise that Massachusetts retained its first place position, though its lead has diminished somewhat over the previous study. Texas has moved up three places in the ranking since 2004 when the last report was published. The latest report shows Texas ranks No. 20 in the nation following Vermont and North Carolina. Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado and Composite Index – Texas ranking vs. other states California took the top four spots. While the report compares states to each other, it also notes threats to states from Technology and Science Work Force – 8 abroad. As the report states: “Increasingly, the main threats to any Risk Capital and Entrepreneurial Infrastructure state’s position in the intangible economy Technology Concentration and Dynamism – 15 emanate from abroad – particularly from Research and Development – 29 China, India, Singapore and other developing countries in Asia. The Scandinavian Human Capital Investment – 44 countries are also rivals in particular hightech fields.” Source: Milken Institute Texas is not standing still, of course. Data from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office show that in fiscal year 2006, Texas residents were issued 6,345 patents and in fiscal year 2005 Texas residents filed 13,903 patent applications, ranking the state second in the nation in both categories behind California. In 2006, Texas was ranked third in the nation for academic research and development expenditures by state by the National Science Foundation with about $3.1 billion spent. Of course, Texas continues to make headlines in the energy realm. In July, T. Boone Pickens, announced a major energy policy proposal called the Pickens Plan. The plan promotes alternatives to oil, including natural gas, wind and solar. A major feature of the plan is replacing the 22 percent of its electricity that the United States gets from natural gas with wind energy, which would then allow that natural gas to provide 38 percent of the nation’s fuel for transportation and reduce its dependence on foreign oil. Part of the plan calls for research into creating more efficient wind energy transmission methods and finding ways to better utilize natural gas for transportation uses. Making that plan work will take lots of – what else – research and technology.

State Technology and Science Index 2008

FALL 08

– 12

RESEARCH TEXAS

5

Chasing Down Answers

photos courtesy of Texas Tech

6

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Texas Tech University has a storm chasing team, which consists of faculty and graduate students.

BY

Celestina Phillips

Texas Tech project seeks data on origins of tornadoes

W

hen severe weather sirens blare and storm warnings interrupt regularly scheduled TV programming, most of us quickly set up camp in the safety of our homes, leaving only to take a quick glimpse at the sky before hurrying back in to hear meteorologists’ reports. But for a small group of Texas Tech University faculty and students, dark clouds and damaging winds mean opportunity, and a chance to chase down answers. “When we’re in the field, we are looking for cues for tornado development,” said Chris Weiss, assistant professor of atmospheric science at Texas Tech. “It’s like trying to solve a crime case. Sometimes it works out, but when it doesn’t, you’re inspired. That’s why we’re in research.” Weiss is part of Texas Tech’s storm chasing team, a group that consists of faculty and graduates students from atmospheric science and wind science and engineering. Texas Tech is the first to offer a doctorate in wind science and engineering. Weiss specifically focuses on tornadogenesis, which is the actual formation of a tornado within a thunderstorm. He says it’s the “supercell” thunderstorms that create 90 percent to 95 percent of violent thunderstorms in this country. “We’ve gotten really good over the past few decades of predicting the development of supercell thunderstorms.” he said. “Supercells have a lot of rotation, but on a scale of five to 10 miles wide. My study is trying to bridge the gap between the larger scale rotation and the intense rotation of a tornado itself. It’s a very difficult problem.” While all supercells create an environment that technically should produce a tornado, a large portion do not, Weiss said. It’s learning about the supercell characteristics that do and do not create tornadoes that Texas Tech’s storm chasing team is after. Weiss said the best way to achieve this is to get out on the field and >

‘Stick Net’ probes are used to take measurements during storms.

‘When we’re in the field, we are looking for cues for tornado development. It’s like trying to solve a crime case. Sometimes it works out, but when it doesn’t, you’re inspired. That’s why we’re in research.’ – Chris Weiss, Texas Tech University

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

7

The storm chasing team needs one hour to place all the sensors.

Texas Tech’s WISE Center will play a number of roles in the study, including developing wind loading profiles – or determining the wind pressure that turbines are likely to bear – and wind resource assessments.

8

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

get up close, take as many measurements as possible, and try to reconstruct the event at a later time. Measurements are taken in the field using “Stick-Net” probes, which were developed by Texas Tech students in 2005. Stick-Nets are versatile, rapidly deployable observing stations that collect high-resolution meteorological data. Named for their resemblance to a stick figure, Stick-Nets were designed to be deployed in large numbers in a short period of time by a small number of people. Tech’s storm chasing team aims to position these instruments ahead of the storm in question, allowing the storm to pass over them and therefore taking the measurements. “It’s tricky,” Weiss said. “We need about one hour of lead time to get all the sensors down. We are pretty good at predicting motion, but the storms have a mind of their own sometimes. They can sometimes deviate.” As the field coordinator, Weiss tries to predict the direction of the storm. When supercells begin to spin rapidly, the storm itself moves east, and then eventually south as it rotates faster, he said. Weiss looks at the storm’s previous motion, and attempts to draw a line to intercept it. The storm chasing team is broken up into four smaller teams that deploy at different stages, with one team saved for last minute adjustments.

“It’s almost like a chess game; moving the pawns, the rooks, and the bishops, trying to get the best sampling you possibly can,” he said. Texas Tech’s team also uses Doppler radar from a remote location to measure thunderstorms, which provides wider coverage, but is limited due to its inability to measure temperature and humidity. Doppler radar also only measures wind speed coming toward or away from it, similar to a police car using radar to measure speed, Weiss said. Texas Tech has a new radar that will be used in the field nest spring during a large project called VORTEX, or Verification of the Origin of Rotation and Tornadoes Experiments. The project will be a sequel to a large government project that took place in the mid-1990s. Weiss said much of what currently is known about tornadoes came from that first project, and that Tech has been proposing a second part for three or four years. Funding for VORTEX is largely internal, but also includes money from a national grant awarded to Texas Tech’s Wind Science and Engineering Center, Weiss said. Weiss describes his time in field as a combination of adrenalin and curiosity, saying it’s impossible not to be impressed with Mother Nature’s fury. He said diagramming dynamical equations on a black board is nothing compared to actually measuring an actual tornado in the field. While students are using the atmosphere as their laboratory during storm chases, the team also contributes greatly to real-world research, providing weather forecasters with pertinent, first-hand information that guides in issuing warnings. “The lead time for warnings is about 10 to 15 minutes at this point, which is good, but the main thing is notifying people that are outside and not near TVs, such as those at large events,” Weiss said. “There’s a gap in the physics that we need to understand. Once we figure out what those clues are, we will then develop methods to detect them. Then we can issue warnings a lot earlier to give people more time to take cover.” RT

Texas Tech’s Wind Science & Engineering Research Center Contributing to wind energy and safety After a Lubbock tornado caused 26 fatalities in 1970, the Wind Science and Engineering (WISE) Research Center at Texas Tech University was established to provide research, education and public service for “everything wind.” Offering the first-ever Wind Science and Engineering doctorate, WISE focuses on developing and promoting wind’s useful qualities while understanding its damaging effects. The center is currently involved in a major project that will aim to use wind power to desalinate drinking water for the city of Seminole, which is about 80 miles southwest of Lubbock. The partnership is the first of its kind in the United States. Seminole currently draws its drinking water from the rapidly depleting Ogallala Aquifer. The salty Santa Rosa Aquifer lies beneath the Ogallala, but pumping and desalinating water from it had been cost prohibitive. A $500,000 state grant from the Office of Rural Community Affairs (ORCA) Renewable Energy Demonstration Pilot Program will allow for the installation of a 50-kilowatt wind turbine that will provide power for a “reverse osmosis” plant that will be used to purify the water from the Santa Rosa Aquifer. The WISE Center will provide technical support for the two-year project, along with Tech’s Water Resources Center. Texas Tech has been planning the design and economics of the wind-driven groundwater desalination system for three years with the city of Seminole. Construction should begin on the new system in the fall. The WISE Center is also a part of the Lone Star Wind Alliance, a group of universities, organizations and companies studying the effectiveness of wind turbines. In June, the lead university in the alliance, the University of Houston completed an agreement with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to design, construct and operate a state-of-the-art wind turbine blade testing facility in Ingleside, Texas. Texas Tech’s WISE Center will play a number of roles in the study, including developing wind loading profiles – or determining the wind pressure that turbines are likely to bear – and wind resource assessments. Regarding public safety, the WISE Center also contributes greatly to the evolution of storm shelters. The Center is home to a debris impact testing lab that examines the strength of building materials using a wind cannon that can simulate intense flying debris. Materials tested include everything from stud walls with plywood to reinforced concrete walls. The National Storm Shelter Association (NSSA) recently began offering new construction guidelines for community safe rooms and residential shelters, a move that will increase public safety thanks in part to the testing done at the WISE Center. Ernst Kiesling, a professor of civil engineering at Texas Tech, serves the executive director of the NSSA, and has more than 30 years of materials testing experience. He is noted as helping to create the concept of above ground shelters in 1974, and for continually working toward shelter quality and standards development. One feature of the new NSSA guidelines increases minimum wind resistance requirements in materials. Kiesling said only recently have storm shelter standards come to the forefront of public awareness. – Celestina Phillips

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

9

Cloning continues growth Technology advances since Dolly

A

photos courtesy of viaGen

BY

Elizabeth Bassett

s bioresearch continues to expand at an exponential rate, one Texas company is galloping ahead when it comes to cloning.

It’s been more than a decade since Dolly was cloned in Scotland, and since then headlines about cloned deceased pets have become more common. Scientists use small scale cloning in laboratories to reproduce fragments of DNA and cell populations, and companies are cloning and banking the genes of larger animals. It’s not only an industry that turns out new organisms, but it can crank out a tidy profit as business grows. ViaGen Inc., based in Austin and founded in 2002, clones and banks animal DNA, particularly for horses, cattle and pigs. The first ViaGen foal was born in 2006, but now performance and breed associations are grappling with how to classify the animals, which are born of surrogate mothers but genetically identical to past animals. Parker County, a hotbed of horse activity in Texas and in the nation, was at the forefront of the changing equine world when it came to cloning. Tap-O-Lena, owned by Phil and Mary Ann Rapp and winner of more than $450,000 in National Cutting Horse Association events, was cloned and the foal, What’s On Tap, was born in 2006. Elaine Hall cloned her mare Royal Blue Boon, the all-time leading producer of cutting horses, and the foal Royal Blue Boon Too was also born in 2006 and could continue the genetic heritage that Royal Blue Boon was passing on to her offspring. Both horses were produced by ViaGen. ViaGen expected 14 cloned foals to be born out of 17 pregnancies that took, a company spokesperson said in April. However, the company would not confirm the total number of horses born as of August, citing client confidentiality. In April, the company said a total of 13 healthy horse clones have been produced by the company, and there are 200 horses that have been gene banked. Gregg Veneklasen, an equine veterinarian who specializes in reproductive health, started working with ViaGen in 2006 and transfers the cloned embryos into surrogate mares and delivers the foals. He said the pregnancy success rates today are about the same as for other embryo transfers and for normally conceived animals. “Our rates have improved immensely,” he said. Some embryos may be absorbed into the mare’s body and never come to term, and aborted pregnancies were also examined and found to be normal, Veneklasen said Those clones that have been born are developing normally, he said, and he has first-hand knowledge, not only as a vet but also as an owner. He has the clone of Lynx Melody, who was the only National

Viagen Inc., based in Austin, clones and banks animal DNA.

10

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Cutting Horse Association Futurity Champion to ever foal another Futurity Champion. Lynx Melody Too has a lot of the same physical and personality characteristics that made Lynx Melody so unique, he said. “They seem like they’re older than they are — people might laugh at us and say it’s not possible, but anyone who’s been around her at all says it’s very special, very unique and she has a lot of the same personality,” he said. Advances since Dolly Irina Polejaeva, chief scientific officer of ViaGen, said cloning has advanced in every aspect since Dolly the sheep was cloned. “A National Academy of Sciences review found that the health and well being of somatic cell clones approximated those of normal individuals as they advance into juvenile stage,” she said. “They are physiologically, immunologically and behaviorally normal.” Now that it’s been several years since ViaGen produced its first commercially cloned horse, business is growing and horse owners are better educated about what the process entails. “People are beginning to see us as a familiar face,” said Candace Dobson, marketing associate for the company. Dobson said ViaGen is currently producing at top capacity and opened a facility in Canada this year. The company expects to produce 50 to 100 equine clones this year, she said. Cloning is still a relatively new technology, and so it remains an expensive procedure. The total cost of cloning a horse is $150,000, Dobson said. Ten percent is due to initiate the contract, and another 10 percent is due when a mare is 120 days pregnant. The final 80 percent is paid when the foal has been delivered healthy and is 60 days old and checked by a veterinarian. For those wanting to preserve the genes of their animal, perhaps in hopes that the cloning process will become easier and cheaper, there is a $1,500 initial fee for gene banking, Dobson said. Genes will be stored as long as a client wants, and the rate is $150 a year. While cloning has some negative connotations — it has been debated how healthy clones are through their life spans and if it narrows the gene pool — Dobson said cloning offers benefits that can’t be found through natural reproduction. For example, animals that can’t reproduce, like geldings or older mares, can pass on their genetics through a clone, which can then have offspring, she said. She pointed to Charmayne James, who cloned her barrel racing gelding Scamper. “Here’s a horse that has proved to be an amazing performer, and his genetics would otherwise be lost, and we have the chance to bring him back and see if he would have superior genes,” Dobson said. By making those genes available to future offspring the clone will have, cloning is actually helping to broaden the larger gene pool, she said. Horses also gestate for about 11 months, therefore a mare can only have one foal a year. Compared with the dozens of foals a stallion can sire per year, mares have a modest impact on horse genetics. By cloning a mare and then having the clone reproduce, the mare’s genetics can infiltrate the gene pool more, Dobson said. Registration issues While clones are becoming more popular, many breed organizations will not accept clones for registration. The Jockey Club, for example, which tracks Thoroughbreds, will not register foals produced by artificial insemination, cloning or embryo transfer. The American Quarter Horse Association membership passed Rule 227(a) in 2004, which says that horses produced by any cloning process are not eligible for registration. “[It] is reasonably apparent that the existing science of and experience with cloning was not sufficient to satisfy AQHA’s members that cloning

The first ViaGen foal was born in 2006.

advances the fundamental purpose for which AQHA exists – to protect the welfare and integrity of the American Quarter Horse,” said Tom Persechino, senior director of marketing for the association. Persechino said the staff is gathering more information to understand the technical, legal and moral aspects of cloned horses, though, and Dobson said ViaGen has communicated with the association and presented information to the organization. The National Cutting Horse Association does not currently have any regulations barring clones from competing in the association’s events, said Jeff Hooper, executive director of the NCHA. He said the organization has a cloning policy task force that continually gathers information from experts and members. “They’re still in the process of defining what if any policy we would have,” he said. Hooper said that at the moment there are many opinions on how cloned horses would perform but little data, given that Royal Blue Boon Too and What’s On Tap are only 2 years old. Additionally, environmental factors in the womb, as well as training, riders and cattle reactions, can affect a performance, he said. “I don’t think just because a great horse was cloned would necessarily mean the cloned animal would carry the same performance capabilities that the original horse did,” he said. The issue of how to responsibly work clones into horse breeding and performance communities will be something that will evolve over time, just as the technology and industry mature. For maturing cloned horses, at the moment, they are more like other normal horses than different. “The ones that are on the ground are very healthy — you can’t see any difference,” Veneklasen said. “If you put them on a piece of paper, you can’t tell that they’re any different.” RT

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

11

Emergent funds life science ventures

BY

Stephanie Patrick

UT-Dallas, UT Southwestern latest partners

12

I

ntrigued by technology advances brewing in colleges and universities and convinced America’s economic future relies on harnessing its knowledge-based assets, Emergent Technologies Inc. has gone where many venture capital firms fear to invest: into the slow-moving, often-expensive and high-stakes world of life sciences. “You hear a lot of people talk about finding ways to maintain our greatness as a country and our competitive edge in the world, yet there’s very little effort spent on actually commercializing this early stage technology,” said Thomas Harlan, Emergent’s president and CEO. “My feeling is, the reason that happens is because most companies have become risk adverse to doing all the required research and development efforts, which are necessary to get early stage technology ready for market; it takes a lot of time and money to transition something from science to a useful product or service.” For many years, that meant the 19-year-old Austin-based company, originally a consulting firm, looked north and funded technologies coming out of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in the late 1990s. Initially, six companies were chosen and Emergent continues to work with five of them. Those companies’ products range from immunology tools for diagnostics, drug and vaccine development and high-yield protein production to biopolymers used in formulations for such things as wound healing, cosmetics, osteoarthritis and ophthalmology. But, as the life sciences industry in Texas has matured and its academic institutions take active roles in the commercialization of their technologies, Emergent focuses closer to home. As of 2008, Emergent has launched 17 biotechnology, biopharmaceutical and nanotechnology companies in total, including 11 in Texas. Emergent has distributed roughly half of its current $27 million fund, its fourth fund. Among the Texas companies receiving funds are MHC Biologics, based on Texas Tech University Pharmacy School’s research of immunology tools aimed at treating breast cancer, and Reveal Sciences, a new personal care company that uses technology from the University of Texas at Austin to provide tailored color changes for consumer products and personalized skin and hair analysis for the cosmetics and personal/home care industries. Another company, Receptor Logic, uses technology discovered at Texas Tech University and widely is considered Abilene’s first biotechnology company. Receptor Logic received a $2 million investment from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund in June, the first Abilene company to receive the investment.

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

“Most academic institutions, until recently, focused on what they consider to be their primary missions – education and primary research,” Harlan said. “Commercialization is outside their primary mission scope, but, I think, what’s happening now is that universities are becoming more crunched for revenue, endowment and research money, so they are looking for successful commercialization of their work.” Gregory Pogue, president of Receptor Logic, said Emergent helps manage Receptor Logic’s intellectual property, finance, human resources, business planning, strategic marketing and relationship-building with the state, as well as partnerships with market leaders. “With the support of ETI [Emergent], Receptor Logic has made substantial progress in a very short period of time,” said Pogue in a written statement. “Now, with the TETF investment we can continue our rapid development pace and fulfill our business strategy.” Earlier this year, Receptor Logic also announced a licensing and research agreement with Sanofi Pasteur, known as a world leader in vaccine development. The announcement of a licensing agreement with a global leader attracted considerable attention, both nationally and internationally, from the media, biotech scientists and industry partners. When addressing the state’s Senate Higher Education Subcommittee in July at the Senate Finance Higher Education Joint Subcommittee Hearing, Harlan said, “Texas universitytechnology commercialization is a significant community, state and national economic asset. We encourage academic leaders to engage in technology transfer and commercialization; and for state policymakers to make a priority the support and incentives needed to address current issues, so that a greater number of Texas universities and research institutions can participate. “That way, our state and its citizens can reap the full benefits of successful technology commercialization.” Texas is home to more than 900 traditional biotechnology, biomedical research, business and government consortia, medical manufacturing companies, and world-class universities and research facilities, according to a recent report by the Office of the Governor Economic Development & Tourism. Tom Kowalski, president of Austin-based Texas Healthcare & Bioscience Institute, said Emergent is one of the few venture capital firms in the state that understands the potential of life sciences. “That will hopefully allow our companies to grow, mature and stay in Texas, which is important,” Kowalski said. Harlan said Emergent’s success, in part, is because the compa-

You hear a lot of people talk about finding ways to maintain our greatness as a country and our competitive edge in the world, yet there’s very little effort spent on actually commercializing this early stage technology. – Thomas Harlan, Emergent Technologies president and CEO

Thomas Harlan is the CEO and president of Emergent Technologies.

ny also partners with existing, well-established biotech, pharmaceutical and nanotechnology firms to share the risks and expenses associated with developing, distributing and marketing the products. However, Emergent and its partners are selective; of the 380 technologies considered at OU, only six received funding. “Our potential partners are looking for at least $500 million per year in potential revenue from the application we codevelop with them,” Harlan said. Smaller applications are often not worth pursuing because a small application and a large one often take the same effort in development and launch cost, he said. Sometimes there are ancillary applications that partners will pursue to get some revenue flowing while waiting on the home run application to complete development and launch, but these must have at least $25 million to $100 million in revenue potential. It’s mostly the pharma-clinical approval applications that have to show huge upside potential to justify Emergent’s investment and warrant an adequate return. Although each application has to show potential, it may be years after clinical approval that the partner is seeing such financial success, Harlan said. “Our partners have us under confidentiality agreements and we are not allowed to disclose what their revenue is from our applications, but most all partnerships are proceeding as expected through the various development milestones and are on track for launch,” he said. Harlan also declined to disclose Emergent’s financials. Emergent also has begun funding research still in academic settings. The company bestowed its first Opportunity Texas Proofof-Concept award to researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas for work on the StoneMag Kidney Stone Magnetic Retrieval System, which locates and eradicates small fragments of kidney

stones that remain in a person after a stone has been fragmented with sound waves. Market potential was a top criterion for selecting the award winners, and the invention is expected to be a major player in the urology-device market. “Since we have become active in Texas, we see that some campuses have a more proactive attitude toward commercialization than others and we wanted to give back to the academic community and help raise the visibility of good work being done in the universities,” Harlan said. The award offers a check for $25,000 and another $25,000 for technology commercialization services that Emergent can provide. Bruce Gnade, vice president for research at UTD and a professor of materials science and engineering and chemistry, and Dr. Jeffrey Cadeddu, an associate professor of urology at Southwestern, collaborated with co-inventors Dr. Margaret Pearle of UT Southwestern, and Stacey McLeroy, a UT-Dallas materials science and engineering doctoral student, on the device. Emergent has funded at least one company a year, but plans to focus more on its R&D laboratory space in the firm’s new 23,000-square-foot headquarters in Austin, growing its existing companies, raising their profiles in the international market and possibly selling some of its older companies. However, Harlan said the company won’t pass up a possibly lucrative technology. “There’s a lot of wonderful research being done in our universities and research centers,” he said. “All we need to do is find them, give them the funding they need and help them reach the marketplace.” RT

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

13

UNT professor gets 911 call

BY

Tonie Auer

Researchers are working to make VoIP calls safe and secure in emergency situations

14

W

hen someone calls 911 in an emergency, they know help is on the way; unless they’re calling from an Internetbased phone known as VoIP or Voice-over-Internet protocol. In those situations, the call could from a user who lives in Dallas, but it is physically in New York City when the call is made. The potential for deadly delays in response times resulting from these Internet-based phone calls inspired Ram Dantu, an associate professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering at the University of North Texas in Denton, to begin research to overhaul the 911 infrastructure to effectively handle this emerging technology. “The telephone on your desk is based on a public switched telephone network (PSTN), which is a 25-year-old technology,” Dantu said. “VoIP is the new technology of telephone on the Internet and it is now being deployed.” AT&T, Vonage and several other providers are offering the service, but one of the main problems is that while 911 service is being offered, these phones work on the Internet, which makes finding a person difficult, he said. VoIP is tied to an Internet address rather than a physical location. “You can be in New York, but logged into Dallas,” he explained. “If you call 911, everything is encrypted, so it is difficult to find where you are. You can be in Singapore and dialing in to the

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Dallas network. That is one of the difficulty factors associated with the technology.” Within the next decade, Internet-based phone services are likely to replace the traditional system that connects callers through wire lines, Dantu said. “This issue affects everyone,” Dantu said. “When you call 911, they must be able to find you.” Other research The 911 service is just one aspect of Dantu’s research. Another concern relates to the public safety answering points (PSAPs). “If they are moved from today’s technology to Internet-based technology, how will you stop some of the security problems that we have in existing Internet devices?” Dantu questioned. “Wireless service is susceptible to service attacks and other problems associated with the Internet.” A third piece of his research focuses on developing 911 technologies for the deaf and hearing impaired. “If they want to dial 911, they have to use a voice phone,” he said. “But, we’re seeing how video phones can be used to communicate on 911 calls.” Finally, Dantu is also working on neighborhood notification, a reverse 911 system in which a governmental body can notify a region of people about an emergency quickly.

You can be in New York, but logged in to Dallas. If you call 911, everything is encrypted, so it is difficult to find where you are.

photo courtesy of UNT

– Ram Dantu, University of North Texas

Ram Dantu, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at UNT, is researching the overhaul of the 911 infrastructure to effectively handle this emerging technology.

“All of this is critical infrastructure,” Dantu said. “We know it must be updated.” Dantu has been working for about 18 months on his projects. He has received two grants from the National Science Foundation, totaling more than $1 million for UNT alone. One grant funds Dantu’s research on the creation of a platform for future research and experimentation of next generation 911 services. The work will be collaboration among UNT, Columbia University and Texas A&M University, with UNT assuming the role as project leader. The entire grant is $1.34 million, and UNT’s portion is $650,000. Dantu received a second grant for $400,000, which will include additional research on emergency communications, including securing 911 call centers from outside attacks that would tie up all available lines; ensuring available service during large-scale emergencies, providing neighborhood notifications and enhancing 911 services for the deaf and hearingimpaired through video phones and instant messaging. “These two projects are on a four-year time frame,” Dantu said. “It takes a long time to migrate or, in other words, for this technology to move to the next technology. It will take five to 10 years to implement, so we’re trying to address these issues before the technology becomes more widespread” UNT’s research will be timely and important to the country, said Allison Mankin, program director for the division of computer and network systems at the National Science Foundation. According to Dantu, less than 2 percent of U.S. residents are using VoIP currently, but those numbers are increasing. As the market for VoIP increases, the new technology needs to be ready for deployment, Dantu said. “The bottom line is E-911 is here, but it’s not well,” Mankin said. “This project is going to bring great insight into some pressing and challenging problems.” RT

Emergency networks calling 911 over VoIP In July, President George W. Bush signed the New and Emerging Technologies 911 Improvement Act of 2008. The legislation states users making phone calls using VoIP to 911 numbers will have the same access and protections as other 911 technologies. Fifty percent of American counties and parishes do not have enhanced 911 capabilities, according to the National Emergency Number Association, based in Arlington, Va. To ensure that all communities are able to take advantage of the next-generation 911 network based on Internet Protocols, or IP, the law requires a study to identify mechanisms and timetables for developing next generation 911 capabilities. The study also will incorporate altitude information and identify technical solutions to address multistory buildings where identifying the building address is not sufficient for the system to work, according to the NENA. – Robert Francis

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

15

BY

Brian K. Yost

Five steps to managing intellectual property W

hat percentage of your company’s assets is made up of intellectual property? Before answering, consider the various forms of intellectual property/patents that may include mechanical inventions; processes and designs; trademarks that readily identify your company, such as a color, slogan, symbol, logo or even a sound; copyrights, including original Web pages, brochures and sales literature; and trade secrets comprised of competitively advantageous information, such as customer buying preferences and proprietary manufacturing processes. Whether you work for a large or small company, the chances are your answer to my question may be “more than half.” Twenty years ago, things were quite different. Intellectual property, or IP, made up a significantly smaller portion of most companies’ assets. This change has largely resulted from an increased awareness of the value of intellectual property. Because of the growing significance of intellectual property rights, it is more important than ever for companies to develop a sound approach to managing these assets.

The following five steps should get your company moving in the right direction: Step 1- Get a handle on your IP Do you really know the nature and extent of your company’s intellectual property? As an initial step, here are a few simple questions to help get a handle on your assets. Does the company own any interest in any patents, trademarks or copyrights? If so, are these rights still valid? How is the company using, or monetizing its intellectual property interests? Does the company have trademark registrations for the company’s name, logos and products? Does the company have any secrets or proprietary information regarding manufacturing processes, customer information and/or formulas that give the company a competitive advantage? How much are the company’s intellectual property interests worth? How does the company protect its IP?

Twenty years ago, things were quite different. Intellectual property…made up a significantly smaller portion of most companies’ assets. This change has largely resulted from an increased awareness of the value of intellectual property.

16

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Step 2- Plan the form in which you will hold your IP Consider the best form for your company to hold its IP. For example, if your company’s existence is based upon a secret process, consider the implications of a competitor obtaining a patent on this process. Such a competitor could potentially exclude your company from using its own process. Conversely, consider that in order to obtain a patent, you must provide a full disclosure of your invention. What will such a disclosure do to your competitive advantage? By fully understanding your invention, your competitor may potentially gain information that allows it to design around your patent and compete in ways it otherwise could not. If your company manufactures an article that has a distinct design characteristic, consider that these characteristics, depending upon the nature of the article, may be protected by a trademark, a design patent or a copyright. There may be advantages and disadvantages in holding intellectual property in each of these forms. For example, a design patent only has a 14-year term. A trademark, however, potentially has a perpetual existence. Step 3 - Plan how you will use your IP Intellectual property rights are rights that may be licensed, assigned or retained. Is your company in the best position to exploit its IP rights? Are there others that are in a better position to extract the full value from your IP? For example, do you have the manufacturing and distribution wherewithal to fully enjoy the full benefits of the patent? Has the company considered what will happen once the patent expires? Step 4 - Monetize your IP If your company is not capable of exploiting the full value from its IP, consider licensing the rights to someone who can. Licenses can be narrowly tailored to allow only a portion of the full rights to be used. For example, a common license restriction may involve only the license to use the product in a specified geographic territory. If your company has valuable patents it is currently not utilizing or is underutilizing, consider selling the patents. Patents are auctioned in much the same way Christie’s auctions fine art. Such auctions offer buying and selling opportunities for companies considering broadening or constricting their patent holdings.

Brian K. Yost

Step 5 - Protect your IP A company must be vigilant in protecting its IP. Intellectual property rights offer the power to exclude, rather than the right to use. Therefore, by way of a few examples, a company making counterfeits of your products should be challenged, a company that uses a logo that is likely to cause confusion with your company’s products should be confronted, a competitor that copies your promotional brochures, layouts and other copyrighted works should be stopped, company employees should agree to maintain trade secrets in the strictest confidence and exemployees should be prohibited from divulging such secrets. If you take the time to have your company do the “Texas Five Step,” you will find the company’s business objectives will be clarified, its competitive position will be enhanced and the bottom line will look a lot more inviting. RT Brian K. Yost is a shareholder with Decker, Jones McMackin, McClane, Hall & Bates P.C. in Fort Worth.

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

17

The University of Texas-Arlington College of Engineering will be welcoming several new research labs during the next few semesters.

UT-Arlington growing engineering projects

BY

Aleshia Howe

New buildings emphasize research, technology

18

A

s part of a statewide emphasis on science and technology, many universities are increasing funding and resources for their engineering programs, but leaders at the University of Texas at Arlington are breaking new ground in the area – quite literally. The university’s fourth College of Engineering project, a planned $116 million Engineering Research Complex, is set to break ground in September and bring a whirlwind of change to the growing program. “This expansion will provide intermediate growth space for the College of Engineering,” said Bill Carroll, dean of engineering. “Once the Engineering Research Building is occupied, more space in the Engineering Lab Building will be available to meet the requirements of our research and

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

teaching activities.” UT-Arlington currently is renovating its Engineering Lab Building and adding a third floor, with fully equipped labs. The total space added to the college will top 38,000 square feet. Across the campus, the Civil Engineering Lab Building, on Mitchell Street, is open for Fall 2008 students, offering a new 25,000-square-foot lab where students can conduct stress tests points of all things built. UT-Arlington also has joined with UT Southwestern to put four UT-Arlington labs, called the Optical Medical Imaging Labs, on Southwestern’s campus. The UT System Board of Regents also has approved $25 million toward the construction of the Center for Structural Engineering Research, a planned 80,000-square-foot >

UT-Arlington Engineering Lab Building
Scheduled for completion in the summer of 2009, the $22 million expansion of the Engineering Laboratory Building will provide an additional 27,000 square feet of space through the addition of a third floor. New laboratories and offices will be occupied by several College of Engineering departments: Bioengineering, Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering. An additional 11,000 square feet of space on the first floor will be remodeled following the relocation of current civil engineering labs to the new Civil Engineering Lab Building on the west side of the campus. The additional space will be renovated for bioengineering, industrial and materials science labs.

 Civil Engineering Lab Building Situated on the west side of the UT-Arlington campus, the new $9.8 million Civil Engineering Lab Building will replace labs formerly located in the Engineering Lab Building. Scheduled for completion in late summer of 2008, the 25,000-square-foot facility will house areas for the study of asphalt/pavement, construction engineering, materials/structures, and geoenvironmental and geotechnical systems. In addition, the lab will be leased out to businesses in the area that have similar needs. Research projects between the University and the private sector also will take place.

UT-Arlington Engineering Research Complex
UT-Arlington is set to break ground on its Engineering Research Complex on Sept. 26. Scheduled for occupancy in January 2011, the $116 million facility will provide about 230,000 square feet of space for research and teaching labs, classrooms, offices, conference rooms and support areas. This new facility will house the College of Engineering’s Computer Science & Engineering and Bioengineering departments, plus numerous laboratories and offices for the College of Science. The south wing of the building will contain teaching and research laboratories for both the College of Science and the Bioengineering Department. A bridge joins the building with the new, third floor of the existing Engineering Laboratory Building. The design of the Engineering Research Building incorporates several energy-saving features, including light-reflecting and green roof surfaces, window designs and shading that increase the use of ambient light and also reduce heat transfer, the capture and storage of rain and condensate water for landscaping use, the integration of recycled building materials and other factors that will allow the facility to achieve LEED Silver certification.

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

19

Structural Engineering Research  The UT System Board of Regents has approved $25 million toward the construction of the Center for Structural Engineering Research. The proposed center will contain 40,000 square feet of conference, classroom, office and shop areas and 40,000 square feet of research space. The research area will contain the largest reaction floor and wall in the nation and feature state-of-the art equipment and instrumentation. Because of its large research area, the center will be capable of studying full-scale bridge and building components, aircraft wings and other structural elements. The center will enable UT-Arlington to compete with top national and international universities and research institutes for state, federal and industry research opportunities and grants. The center will be located at the northeast corner of Interstate 30 and MacArthur Boulevard, about 11 miles from the UT-Arlington main campus, and operated by the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department. Land for the center has been secured and construction will begin as soon as additional funding is secured to achieve the estimated $35 million cost of the facility.

building. Additional funds currently are being raised for the construction of this research building. By far the largest addition to UT-Arlington’s College of Engineering, the planned Engineering Research Building will offer students and faculty 230,000 square feet of new space. Slated to hold the university’s College of Engineering Computer Science and Bioengineering departments, the building will also house labs for the College of Science. Nur Yazdani, professor and chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering, said his department’s enrollment has seen a dramatic jump since 2000 and the expansion is a much-needed one. “It gives us the opportunity to establish some new research labs of national significance for example, the structural testing of bridge components, asphalt testing and landfill and foundation testing,” Yazdani said. “It’s something that will be very useful in terms of meeting students’ needs and enhancing the program.” The UT-Arlington College of Engineering currently offers eight baccalaureate programs, 14 Master’s and 10 doctorates. It is the third largest engineering college in Texas – following only UT-Austin and Texas A&M University – with about 3,400 students. About 150 full-time and 20 part-time faculty members work in the program – 23 of which are Fellows of Graduate students and faculty can work side-by-side in the new UT-Arlington/ UT Southwestern imaging labs.

20

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

 UT-Arlington/UT Southwestern Optical Medical Imaging Labs in the Bill and Rita Clements Imaging Building UT-Arlington and UT Southwestern partnered to bring the Optical Medical Imaging Labs online. Four labs on UT Southwestern’s campus will be available for students this semester in the Bill and Rita Clements Imaging Building. Most of the work the UT-Arlington researchers will be doing at and in conjunction with UT Southwestern centers on new methods in imaging such as taking pictures of the human body to detect cancer.

professional societies. Roger Tuttle, director of public relations for the UTArlington College of Engineering, said enrollments for the college were 3,400 in 2007, steadily rising after the drastic decrease that followed Sept. 11, after which the federal government tightened visas for international students. The program, he said, is growing steadily and making up ground since then. In a competitive field, UT-Arlington is hoping to secure more patent items, which benefits the university with licensing money. Tuttle said the new developments will bring more attention to the college, improve teaching and research capability and create a reputation for “a quality program,” he said. Tuttle said students fresh out of the university’s civil engineering labs are being heavily recruited thanks to aging infrastructure throughout the country. “As the country’s infrastructure continues to age, sewer systems, bridges, roadways are in need of repairs and civil engineering students are highly sought after,” Tuttle said. Yazdani said students are not the only ones excited to see the new buildings and labs go up. “These are state-of-the-art facilities – staff is excited,” he said. “And it will give space to our grad students, which will hopefully be useful in them getting more grants.” RT The imaging labs offer state-of-the-art research equipment.

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

21

Bacteriophage research aims at better diagnosis

BY

Tonie Auer

Texas Tech uses viruses that infect bacteria for detection

W

hether testing blood samples for specific proteins or monitoring drinking water for harmful substances, research is under way at Texas Tech University to develop a sensor that uses bacteriophages to do those tasks more efficiently and effectively. The innovative biomedical or environmental sensors are based on engineered bacteriophages viruses that infect bacteria. They are commonly used in genetics and also are applied therapeutically to combat infection. The Texas Tech research project focuses on using genetically-modified phages to create fast, inexpensive diagnostic sensors capable of performing an assortment of tasks. The bacteriophage research is led by Joe Fralick, professor of microbiology and immunology at Texas Tech Health Science Center; Jordan Berg, professor of mechanical engineering at Tech; and Sergey Nikishin, associate professor of electrical engineering at Tech.

Bacteriophages, ubiquitous in nature, kill individual strains and species of bacteria. The specificity of bacteriophages allows targeting of harmful bacteria without compromising the viability of other beneficial microflora. Originally identified in 1917, bacteriophages or “bacteria eaters” are environmentally friendly, biodegradable and have no effect on non-target organisms, plants, animals or humans, according to most researchers. In this project, genetically-modified phages will be used to create fast, inexpensive diagnostic sensors capable of performing an assortment of tasks, including testing blood samples for specific proteins or other biomarkers and monitoring drinking water for harmful substances or organisms, Berg said. The goal of the project is to demonstrate proof-of-principle of an innovative real-time electronic biosensor capable of detecting >

The power of this detector is the versatility of the phage. Using a phage display library, we can identify small peptides that bind specific analytes with high affinity and specificity. – Joe Fralick, Texas Tech Health Science Center

22

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

f al

t

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

23

Protein coat Sheath

Core Cell wall

The structure of a typical bacteriophage.

virtually any analyte for which a peptide ligand can be developed, Berg explained. “These include enzymes, toxins, spores, pathogens, viruses, small molecules such as glucose and other biological agents,” he said. “The sensor will retain the high specificity of antibody-antigen based immunosensors, but eliminate some of the serious problems associated with the use of antibodies, including limited lifetime under field conditions, and the complex indirect schemes sometimes used to detect antibody-antigen binding.” Berg said he and Fralick anticipate that the sensor will be robust, inexpensive to produce and will have a long shelf life without special storage requirements. The proposed effort is based on a solid base of

24

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

preliminary results. In the pair’s research funding application, they state: “Specifically, we have developed a bipolar filamentous M13 display phage 900 to 1200 nm long, with a six-histidine tag at both ends that binds Ni with very high affinity and specificity. We have fabricated a chip consisting of Ni electrodes, allowing self-assembly of the electrode-phage system. “Small Peptide ligands may be added to the major capsid protein that forms the filamentous body of the M13 phage through genetic modification. These ligands can be designed to bind essentially any target analyte with high affinity and specificity. We have demonstrated this procedure in previous work, including use of cholera toxin

(CT) as an analyte. Our working hypothesis is that conductance changes associated with reduction in charge mobility due to the binding of the analyte to the capsid protein will be detectable and quantifiable, providing the basis for a real-time amperometric sensor.” In other words, the project is an interdisciplinary research effort to customize the phage proteins to a number of compounds and stimuli and integrate them with more traditional micro-electronics, Berg said. “For instance, there are applications for environmental monitoring such as water safety where the military is also a potential user,” Berg said. “The phage functions in an aqueous environment so you can envision applications to almost any aqueous system. There are biomedical applications as well in which you can expose a drop of blood and it would work on substances you might find in human blood. Anything with a marker that the phage can be selected to identify.” Fralick will direct the development of bipolar phage targeted toward specific analytes, in this case. Fralick has extensive experience with display phage technology, including demonstration of Ni-binding phage, and demonstration of phage with CT-binding motifs. At Texas Tech, research will focus on sensor development and tests. Berg and Nikishin both have extensive credentials in microfabricated sensors, photodetectors and microfluidic systems. The phage is like a thread that is 1,000 nanometers long and six nanometers to eight nanometers in diameter, Berg said. It is used like a wire in a circuit. The rest of the circuit is built out of metal and dielectrics and other materials that you normally associate with microcircuitry, he said. “We want to incorporate Joes’s phage into a circuit that Sergey and I will construct,” he continued. “The idea is to build a sensor in which the phage can be engineered by Joe to respond to one of a huge number of possible substances. For example, Joe has engineered a phage that will bind to cholera toxin. In this case, you put the phage into a circuit and when it binds with the cholera toxin, the changes in the phage will be detected by the rest of the circuit. When they change, you know you’ve got cholera toxin in the sample.” “The power of this detector is the versatility of the phage,” Fralick said. “Using a phage display library, we can identify small peptides that bind specific analytes with high affinity and specificity. We can then incorporate these peptides on the surface of the phage electrode such that the binding of the analyte will change the electrical properties of the phage wire thus enabling the detection of that particular analyte.” Fralick said it is relatively simple to incorporate a particular peptide into the phage electrode (capsid protein) for the detection of a specific analyte. Currently, the researchers are learning that the binding of the phage to the metal surface has been challenging. “It is quite interesting,” Berg said. “The preparation of the electrode surface for the genetically modified phage turns out to have a lot of room for innovation. But, it is going very well and it may turn out to have a broader interest than just this system.” The proposal earned the project a $218,856 award from Texas Tech’s Research Collaboration Grant program. Now in its second year, the program provides incentives for scientists at the two universities to collaborate on research projects. The program grew out of discussions between the Texas Tech Board of Regents and university administrators on how to increase research. “We are unique in that we have a research university and a health sciences center located on the same campus,” said Chancellor Kent Hance, in a release. “These grants will further encourage large, multidisciplinary projects that have the potential to introduce new areas of academic collaboration between the two universities.” Proposals for the grant was judged by a panel of external experts and funds awarded based on the project’s likelihood of generating major extramural funding from sources such as the National Science Foundation. Most of the funding will be used to pay for equipment, fabrication and students or postdoctoral students to conduct research, Borg said. The internal funding is for 18 months. RT

Bacteriophage research and development in Texas Texas A&M University is involved in several bacteriophage projects. Researchers at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., are collaborating with researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture at Texas A&M University to increase food safety by reducing the populations of E. coli in sheep and cattle using bacteriophages. The goal of the research is to increase understanding of the complex predator-prey relationship between bacteria (the prey) and bacteriophages (the viral predator). Texas A&M also is working with Phage Biocontrol LLC, conducting research that focuses on using phages as a natural biocide to mitigate industrial problems of corrosion and fouling in pipelines. Working also with INTEC Engineering Partnership LTD of Houston, Phage hopes to harness phages to combat bacteria causing pipeline corrosion and reservoir souring in the oil and gas industry.

– Robert Francis

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

25

Research Texas Update

BY

Robert Francis

Scott & White research moves forward

26

I

n June, Scott & White’s Cancer Research Institute (CRI) announced the launch of the first clinical trials on humans of an agent that targets Cutaneous T cell Lymphoma. While rare, Cutaneous T cell Lymphoma afflicts some 6,000 Americans each year. This study of the agent called A-dmDT390-bisFV is aimed at those patients who have “not responded to existing treatments,” said Dr. Arthur Frankel, director of Scott & White’s CRI. “Our research focuses on a niche for rare disease that no one else is going after.” The Phase I Clinical trial seeks to determine the highest dose and the best way to administer this investigational agent without serious side effects. An investigational agent is one that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. “While there is no guarantee that the subject in a trial will be cured, there is every reason to believe they could help themselves, and undoubtedly down the road they will help others with the same disease,” Frankel said. In addition, if the agent proves effective, Frankel said he believes it may extend to the treatment of diabetes, multiple sclerosis and Lupus. Clinical trials are critical to the development of new drugs, involving years of research and testing before the drugs, or agents, can be used in humans. Frankel, a pioneer in the use of deadly bacterial toxins to kill specific cancer molecules, said the drug works like a missile that will only hit its intended target. “It attaches and explodes into the T cell,” Frankel said. The “bomb” is a toxic mixture containing diphtheria, which was re-engineered by Frankel and his team to kill only the tumor. The fact that Scott & White’s relatively new CRI was chosen to test the A-dmDT390-bisFV fusion protein is significant. “The Scott & White CRI is unique because the clinicians who run new drug trials work together under the same roof with the scientists who developed the drug and tested the drug for FDA approval,” said David M. Neville Jr., chief of the section on biophysical chemistry in the laboratory of molecular biology at the National Institute of Mental Health. Scott & White’s ability to take a drug from the bench, or laboratory, to the bedside, or patient, is a key to developing effective cancer treatments, he said. “The constant interplay between scientists and clinicians leads to better trial designs and the flexibility to suggest alterations in trial protocols before trial completion, benefiting both patients and researchers,” said Neville.

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

photo courtesy of Scott and White

In other cancer research projects at the CRI, in April, Scott & White began recruiting patients with recurring prostate cancer to participate in a clinical trial that uses a PSA (prostate specific antigen) activated chemical injected into the prostate that attaches to prostate cancer cells and causes cell death. “This is an important and exciting step in this process,” said Dr. Scott Coffield, the principal investigator, a urologist and professor of surgery at Scott & White. “We are trying to determine if this agent is effective in destroying cancer cells in the prostate using varying doses of the agent, which has demonstrated safety in an earlier trial.” In February, Coffield presented the results of the Phase 1 study of the treatment indicating that PRX302 is safe and well-tolerated while demonstrating encouraging signs of therapeutic activity. Protox Therapeutics Inc., a Vancouver, British Columnbia-based company, developed the drug and has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to proceed with a Phase II clinical trial. According to Protox officials, PRX302, as the agent is currently called, is injected into the prostate where it turns into a potent cellkilling toxin when it comes in contact with PSA-producing cells. The purpose of this study is to determine therapeutic activity of different concentrations of PRX302 at increasing volumes as well as the safety and tolerance among study subjects after injection into the prostate. The study is expected to enroll 30 subjects. The Cancer Research Institute at Scott & White was established in 2005 to bring new cancer-fighting therapies from the laboratory bench to the patient’s bedside in less time than it takes using traditional processes. The institute is housed in 17,000 square feet within Temple’s Health and Bioscience District, and includes laboratories and a drug manufacturing facility. Research Texas profiled Frankel and Scott & White’s CRI plans in the Spring 2007 issue.

photo courtesy of Zenn Motors

Research Texas Update

Zenn’s EEStor-powered vehicle may utilize a different design.

BY

Robert Francis

EEStor powering up after reaching key milestone

I

n July, energy-storage startup EEStor Inc. announced that a third-party has certified that the company’s manufacturing processes can make materials at high-enough grades to meet the company’s performance goals. Cedar Park-based EEStor has been relatively quiet, save for a few dribbles of information that have leaked out via its Toronto-based partner Zenn Motor Co. and investor Lockheed Martin Corp. until it announced the production milestone. The announcement that a third-party has certified the company has manufactured materials that meet certification milestones for crystallization, chemical purity and particle-size consistency moves the company closer to building commercial applications of its energy-storage technology, according to company officials and investment partners like Zenn. “[The] announcement bodes well for EEStor’s completion of its third-party verified permittivity milestone and is a very strong affirmation of our investment in and the rapid progress of our business plan,” said Ian Clifford, CEO of Zenn. “Energy storage has always been the Achilles’ heel to the mass adoption of electric vehicles and EEStor technology is the ‘better battery’ that the world has been waiting for. Every

technology and industry reliant on electrical energy storage will potentially benefit from this.” EEStor claims that its system, called an electrical energy storage unit (EESU), will have three times the energy density of the top lithium-ion batteries available currently. The company also says its EESU will be safer, last longer and have the ability to recharge in a shorter period of time than other available systems. But many have questioned EEStor’s claims saying that the high voltages required would cause the materials used to break down. Zenn Motors hopes to introduce an EESU-powered vehicle by the fall of 2009. Lockheed Martin wants to use the storage units in rugged packs that will power a variety of military and security equipment. Other investors in EEStor include venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. EEStor’s founders have a solid track record. Founders Richard D. Weir and Carl Nelson worked on several groundbreaking disk-storage technology projects at IBM Corp. in the 1990s. The company remains quiet – its Web site has yet to appear – but the latest news from the startup is keeping many eyes on the small Cedar Park company. Research Texas profiled EEStor in its spring 2008 issue.

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

27

>>

N E X T- G E N E R AT I O N B I O P L A S T I C S

P O LY M E R M E C H A N I C A L A N D

UNT Researchers

Discover

R H E O L O G Y L A B O R AT O R Y

Nandika D’Souza directs the Polymer Mechanical and Rheology Laboratory at UNT, supervising six graduate students and two

New Ways to Create

undergraduates from UNT’s Texas Academy

Eco-friendly Plastics

of Mathematics and Science. D’Souza and her team research a variety of topics affecting the development of the next generation of bioplastics, including nanostructured polymers and failure analysis.

BY

U

sally bell

The lab, part of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is in Discovery Park, UNT’s nearly 290-acre research park located about four miles north of campus. D’Souza, a recognized expert in polymer nanocomposites, has been an inves-

N

tigator on more than $2 million in research funding at UNT.

Nandika D’Souza, associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of North Texas, envisions a future where conventional plastics are replaced with “bioplastics.” These materials — made using corn, bacterial microorganisms or natural fibers such as jute, hemp and kenaf — would look, behave, feel and perform like petroleum-based plastics but also decompose harmlessly and relatively quickly. The move to these more eco-conscious materials would reduce the need for plastics made with increasingly scarce and expensive petroleum. Those plastics, which take hundreds of years to degrade, lead to clogged landfills and perpetuate a national reliance on foreign oil.

To learn more about D’Souza’s work, visit www.unt.edu/untresearch.

A Work In Progress

A goal of D’Souza’s research into bioplastic packaging materials is the creation of new products that match or surpass the performance of conventional plastics, cardboard, paper coatings and foams. Biocoatings for the paper packaging in items such as military-grade Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs), for example, could lead to longer product shelf life while also breaking down in a month or so under high-temperature composting. Or they would decompose naturally within a year in standard landfills, leaving only carbon and hydrogen — basically soil. “This is an important step as we aim to create even stronger, more efficient, cost-effective and environmentally friendly products,” D’Souza says. “We already are working to develop bio-engineered products that are structurally sound enough to use as biodegradable packaging but also can be used in medical and building materials. These products are based on completely renewable resources. “This means in the future we could have materials that wouldn’t consume more landfill space, while enhancing our agricultural base, which would help farmers thrive.”

Corn, bacterial microorganisms and natural fibers such as jute, hemp and kenaf are among the ingredients Nandika D’Souza uses to make eco-conscious bioplastics.

28

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Angilee Wilkerson

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

29

Scott Bauer

Nandika D'Souza,

left, works with graduate student Koffi Leonard Dagnon to extrude biopolymers in UNT's Polymer Mechanical and Rheology Laboratory, where D’Souza is researching the development of the next generation of bioplastics.

The potential impact of D’Souza’s work extends far beyond environmental and agricultural benefits. The materials also may have biomedical applications, such as in tissue engineering or in the creation of biopolymer arterial stents that use ibuprofen as a functionalizing agent, which she worked on with engineering students Sunny Ogbomo and Koffi Leonard Dagnon. “I am getting rewarding experience by being involved in Dr. D’Souza’s lab. I call it ‘green research work’ due to its increased environmental concerns,” says Dagnon, a Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering who has worked in the lab as a research assistant since fall 2006. “If I were not at UNT, I would not be exposed to the university’s new and unique instrumentation, such as the Leistritz twin screw extruder for biopolymer blending, the high-resolution scanning electron microscope or the transmission microscope.”

Developing New Materials European companies lead bioplastics research today, and the focus is bridging long polymer chains and various starches with vegetable oils and other natural molecules. (A polymer is a natural or synthetic compound of large molecules made of chemically bonded smaller molecules.) So far, the results are suitable mostly for shopping bags and other flexible films. The limitation of films, of course, is that they are thin and

30

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

stretchy. While that’s fine for a bag, it certainly doesn’t work where rigidity is required, in products such as boxes, for example. That’s where D’Souza — who is interested in harnessing a material’s underlying physics and chemistry — comes in. “I like having an effect on life. It’s a challenge,” she says. “And I love the fact that there’s still a struggle on shelf-life issues that I can help solve.” D’Souza is building on the European work, using Italian polymer pellets as a base. She mixes the pellets with other biodegradable polymers and then measures the biomechanical properties that result. “Our approach,” she says, “is to bring in different materials to retain the biodegradability but enhance the stiffness.” D’Souza works at the almost inconceivable scale of nanometers — one-billionth of a meter. A human hair, by contrast, is immense at 100,000 nanometers wide. Starting with the polymer pellets, D’Souza adds various nanometer-sized particles, specifically carbohydrate chains called polysaccharides, or other biopolymers that don’t dissolve in water, plus a tiny amount of clay. Clay, she points out, has 10 times the stiffness of conventional plastic at the microscopic level at which she works. When a nanostructured wall is formed within the polymer, water and gas permeability is lowered, increasing shelf life. One of her early successes has been developing a way to reduce the amount of clay added from about 30 percent of the new bio-

material’s weight to just 1 to 2 percent by swelling it in a chemical bath that weakens the bonds between its nanometer-thin structural plates. “I have an engineering approach,” she says. “I’m looking at properties. I study stiffness. I look at architectures. I tend not to have a viewpoint partial to any particular materials or solutions.”

Better MRE Packaging, Foam

Scott Bauer

D’Souza’s work is supported by various federal grants, led by one from the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center. NSRDEC wants to reduce waste left behind after military operations, so it is funding up to $40,000 annually for three years to develop biodegradable fiberboard and paper coatings used for soldiers’ MRE packaging containers. The military’s goal is to have biodegradable and compostable MRE fiberboard containers that are lighter but still meet performance requirements. “Annually, there are more than 40 million MREs procured by the military with about 14,000 tons of MRE packaging waste each year,” says Jo Ann Ratto, the principal investigator at NSRDEC on the “Lightweight and Compostable Military Packaging” project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program. “This coupled with the rising costs of disposal has dramatically increased the need to investigate alternative materials to combat ration packaging waste. “Dr. D’Souza’s expertise and innovation in polymer nanocomposites first led us to work with her on MRE food packaging, and she has proved to be a collaborator on whom I can trust and rely. She is dedicated to her students and her research.” NSRDEC also funds a three-year grant to investigate biodegradable packaging foams that could potentially be disposed of in the marine environment. This research is in support of the U.S. Navy’s Waste Reduction Afloat Protects the Sea (WRAPS) program. The foams are made with supercritical carbon dioxide (a gas that flows like a liquid). Unlike conventional foam manufacturing processes that release harmful chemicals such as ammonia, the carbon dioxide supercritical foam technology is considered environmentally benign, D’Souza says. She is confident about the ultimate success of her projects and says that she hasn’t encountered technical obstacles so much as difficulty finding the time and resources to do the work.

International Support D’Souza plans to look to her peers for support. She is convinced that scientists in other disciplines and from the developing world can be the best partners in helping turn good ideas into usable technology, and she is working to develop the research partnerships to do this. The kenaf fibers she’s been using to create another new breed of bioplastics that also have improved structural properties come

from the greenhouse of Kent Chapman, professor of biological sciences and director of UNT’s Center for Plant Lipid Research. “I think the futuristic lab requires interdisciplinary collaboration,” says D’Souza, adding that kenaf-based products might include a fiberglass substitute, paper items or canvasses. Medical applications in collagen and cornea prostheses form the basis of her partnership with Dan Dimitrijevich, director of the Laboratories of Human Cell and Tissue Engineering at the Cardiovascular Research Institute of the UNT Health Science Center at Fort Worth. And D’Souza isn’t stopping at UNT. She is reaching out to researchers in other countries to help her solve the challenges she encounters in her lab such as the need for additional plant-derived materials to test and use in the creation of new bioplastics. For the last two years, she has been partnering with Lucia H. Innocentini-Mei, a chemical engineer in the School of Chemical Engineering at the State University of Campinas-UNICAMP in Brazil, to obtain a bacteria-based product that can be used to create a potentially environmentally friendly substitute for traditional plastics such as polyethylene and polystyrene. “Collaborating with other researchers is key to solving some of these global issues,” D’Souza says. In developing countries researchers learn to be “creative with what they have” because the money just isn’t there to import chemicals, she says. “They have experience synthesizing the chemicals from local resources, but they don’t have the instrumentation we (in Western nations) have to measure the results.”

A Bright Future D’Souza thinks she is perhaps two years from achieving her goals in developing paper biocoatings. However, she expects to have preliminary testing results soon for the degradation of supercritical foams in oceans. While she hopes that some of her first products will be in commercial production within a few years, D’Souza knows adoption may be slow initially because bioplastics will cost 20 to 30 percent more than conventional plastics. But she doesn’t expect that drawback to remain. “I believe the cost of today’s oil-based solutions will go up so much that bioplastics will be economically viable,” she says. So bioplastics would not only reduce landfill clogging and lessen reliance on foreign oil, they also would be cost effective in the reasonably foreseeable future — a perfect environmental trifecta. “In the past, bio-products had been inferior and performed worse than products made from fossil fuel-based materials. But that is no longer the case,” D’Souza says. “We are making progress. “The mechanical properties of these new bioplastics are holding up — they are structurally sound, can perform at the same high level and do not cause the same damage to our environment.” R

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

31

Texas State Universit y-San Marco s

Water for the future The Department of Biology at Texas State University-San Marcos prepares students to manage water systems for sustainable use he San Marcos Springs, located on the Texas State University-San Marcos campus, are the secondlargest artesian springs in the western United States and the home to eight endangered species. Texas State sits atop the Edwards Aquifer, which supplies the water to the springs, making it an ideal place to study aquatic resources and develop ways to preserve Earth’s most precious resource. “We have a tradition with our aquatic biology (now aquatic resources) master’s program, which we started in the late 1960s,” says Joe Tomasso, PhD, chair of Texas State’s Department of Biology.

T

32

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

by Am y Francis co

“We have alumni all over the state in state agencies and river authorities. However, our goal is a national reputation in aquatic resources, and we’re working toward that now that we also have the River Systems Institute and the aquatic resources PhD program.” A Sustainable Education Texas State launched its PhD program in aquatic resources in 2003. Although it’s housed in the Department of Biology, it’s a multidisciplinary program.

Texas State professor Walter Rast, PhD, an author and world-renowned speaker on issues relating to the sustainability of water resources, helped create the doctoral program. After serving for seven years as deputy director of the Water Branch of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, Rast knows the importance of educating students and others not only in the science of water, but also in the human factors that can so greatly impact the world’s water systems. “All the water science in the world isn’t enough if you don’t also consider the socioeconomic issues associated with

www.txstate.edu

A member of The Texas State University System

human use of water systems, including such issues as institutions, policies, laws, finances and public participation,” Rast says. “Although the science can tell us where the water is, how much there is, and what its quality is, it is the socioeconomic factors that determine how humans actually use the water.” To prepare students to be knowledgeable not only of the science of water systems but also the socioeconomic factors that affect them, the Department of Biology’s aquatic resources doctoral students are not limited to the study of aquatic biology. They have the opportunity to learn from faculty in Texas State’s geography, political science, agriculture, chemistry, sociology, health and finance programs as well. “It’s a multidisciplinary approach,” Tomasso says. “I cannot think of another program like ours.” The Impact of Flowing Waters Texas State’s PhD program got a boost with Project Flowing Waters, a five-year program supported by $2.4 million in grants — one of only a few such grants awarded by the National Science Foundation each year and one from the Texas Pioneer Foundation. Through the program, 10 doctoral students from Texas State’s aquatic resources and environmental geography programs will conduct scientific research and partner with teachers in San Marcos-area public schools to teach lessons that offer students the opportunity for hands-on experience with science. “This was a huge score for us,” says Tim Bonner, PhD, director of Texas State’s master’s program in aquatic resources and of the Aquatic Station, a facility specially designed to support aquatic research. He, along with fellow biology professors Julie Westerlund and Weston Nowlin and geography professor Rich Earl, will lead Project Flowing Waters. “We’re a relatively new PhD program, and this has allowed us to almost double the salaries that we can pay our PhD students. That helps us attract quality students to the program. We want the cream of the crop.” Only 10 assistantships are available in Flowing Waters, so competition will

Tim Bonner, director of Texas State’s master’s program in aquatic resources, conducts field research with his students. Established in the late 1960s, the master’s program has produced alumni who now work in state agencies and river authorities across Texas and has given Texas State a reputation for offering quality aquatic-related programs.

be tough. “We want to attract the best students,” Bonner says. “It’s a competitive process; we want the most productive and energetic students.” Saving the Rio Grande Many graduate students and faculty, as well as the River Systems Institute at Texas State, are involved in the Rio Grande Initiative, a partnership with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the Environmental Protection Agency, Sul Ross University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has already provided more than $5 million to support their research. “I’ve never seen a river that’s been so studied and so modeled, and yet that’s still in such a mess [as the Rio Grande],” says Rast, who was integral to the launch of the Rio Grande Initiative. According to the River Systems Institute at Texas State, the Rio Grande actually stopped flowing into the Gulf of Mexico in March 2001 due to “the culmination of several years of extreme drought along the border.” The River Systems Institute is leading efforts to establish a central clearinghouse for information and ongoing activities throughout the Rio Grande basin. It is also working with Sul Ross and other universities to gather data on groundwater usage, water quality and quantity, biological integrity, and land use. The goal is to develop and apply a holistic manage-

ment approach for sustainable water use within the Rio Grande basin. Rast says the project involves many faculty and students from the Department of Biology as well as faculty and students from Texas State’s geography and other departments. “Most of my doctoral students are involved in one way or another in Rio Grande issues,” Rast says. “One of my students, for example, is looking at how you use surface waters in rivers and lakes, along with groundwater, in a conjunctive manner, as a means of sustaining both water sources.” That type of research, along with a wide range of other water-related projects at Texas State, has great potential for impacting the future of water systems in Texas and beyond. “The research that is coming out of this department right now is something that will benefit future generations,” Bonner says. “It comes down to the issue of sustainability. How much will the environment take with humans living on it and making a living off the land? What we’re working on now is preservation for ourselves, as well as for future generations.”

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

33

UNT Health Science Center 34

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Banking on brain research to cure dementia A

lzheimer’s disease. HIV-related dementia. Parkinson’s disease. These are some of the most feared and most researched afflictions in the world. Many top researchers have studied patients who suffer from one of these neurodegenerative disorders and tested various treatments and preventive practices in lab animals. However, primates are the only animals who appear to suffer from these neurodegenerative diseases, and it’s difficult to study human brains. “Although animal models are available to study dementing illnesses, there are limitations,” said Anuja Ghorpade, PhD, vice chairman and professor of cell biology and genetics and co-director of the Brain Bank at the University of North Texas (UNT) Health Science Center at Fort Worth. “In the simplest of terms, a mouse is not a human. Thus, to determine the features of human dementia, the study of human brains is of great importance. Comparing human brain tissue donated by patients with demen-

UNT Health Science Center tia to those of non-demented individuals is the only way that the molecular basis of these devastating illnesses can be understood.” To address the need for more studies of the human brain, the UNT Health Science Center has brought two leading researchers, Ghorpade and Rosalie Uht, MD and PhD, on board to join Janice Knebl, DO and endowed chair for Aging and Alzheimer’s study, and James Simpkins, PhD and chairman of Pharmacology and Neuroscience and director of the Institute for Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Research. These top researchers are working to establish a program that will allow people to donate their brains to research at the UNT Health Science Center after they die. There will be no costs or compensation for donating, except the satisfaction of knowing that one could be contributing to the understanding and treatment of these diseases in the future.

Comparing human brain tissue donated by patients with dementia to those of nondemented individuals is the only way that the molecular basis of these devastating illnesses can be understood. – Dr. Anuja Ghorpade

Deciding to donate one’s body can be a very simple or a very complicated decision. The brain is included as part of a general autopsy, unless specified otherwise. Conversely, an autopsy may be restricted to the brain only. In either case, specific paperwork must be filed by the individual or family prior to or immediately following death. And time is of the essence in retrieving brain tissue. When a body is “donated to science,” it is preserved by various processes. These processes often destroy the key aspects of the brain that need to be studied. In order to preserve the brain, it must be retrieved quickly and prepared for analysis. That’s where Uht, a board-certified neuropathologist and professor at the Pharmacology and Neuroscience department comes in. With the help of Kathleen Borgmann, the Brain Bank manager, who will be on call 24/7 to accept donation calls, Uht will ensure appropriate brain tissue recovery and processing. This around-the-clock coverage will permit collection of high-quality tissue through established processes in compliance with state and federal guidelines at several local hospitals. In the case of HIV-related dementia, neurons and microglia will be analyzed by Ghorpade and her team. In the case of Alzheimer’s disease or normal-aged patients, tissue will be available to members of the Institute of Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Research, one of the Health Institutes of Texas being spearheaded by the UNT Health Science Center. Tissue from patients known to have exhibited symptoms of dementia from HIV, Alzheimer’s or other neurodegenerative processes, as well as tissue from symptomfree individuals, will be needed for analysis. A unique contribution of this brain bank will be the systematic acquisition of brains from age-matched individuals. Without the ability to compare brains from demented to non-demented people, the pathogenesis of dementing illnesses will never be truly understood.

Dr. Anuja Ghorpade

See Brain Research on next page

Dr. Rosalie Uht

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

35

UNT Health Science Center

New partnership means hope for kids with cancer I

n June, W. Paul Bowman, MD, senior pediatric hematologist/oncologist and chairman of the Leukemia & Lymphoma program at Cook Children’s Medical Center (TCOM), was named department chair of pediatrics for the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine at the University of North Texas (UNT) Health Science Center, bringing his expertise in pediatric oncology to Fort Worth’s premiere research center. This exciting new collaboration between the exemplary care provided by Cook Children’s Medical Center and the state-of-the-art research capabilities of the UNT Health Science Center extends the depth of care and research that both Cook Children’s and the Health Science Center provide, especially in Bowman’s area of expertise, pediatric leukemia and neuroblastoma. “This partnership will allow the pediatric oncologists at Cook Children’s to use new drug and therapy discoveries immediately,” Bowman said. “We already are working with leaders in molecular biology and immunology at UNTHSC to identify opportunities for collaboration in pediatric cancer research. A major initiative will be enhancing the understanding and treatment of children with highrisk neuroblastoma.” Currently, Cook Children’s sees cancer patients as far away as Midland and Odessa. In fact, the pediatric specialists treat children in 40 percent of the state. As the largest non-university pediatric center in the country, Cook Children’s has a long history of leadership in the fields of oncology and hematology. Teaming up with UNT Health Science Center’s Institute for Cancer and Blood Disorders, and its new research on lipo proteins and the signaling protein RLIP 76, allows physicians access to innovative new treatments and helps researchers bring their solutions directly to the patients who need it – now. “The partnership with the University of North Texas Health Science Center strengthens our academic credibility through research and helps us recruit top-level NIH (National Institutes of Health) researchers to work here,” Bowman said. “The timing is right,” said Marc Hahn, DO and dean of TCOM. “With new leadership at both Cook Children’s and the UNT Health Science Center, we can take the next steps to collaborate with the

Brain research Individuals who enroll as Brain Bank donors will provide updated information regarding hospitalization records, any brain-related history or infections. These data and health histories will be used to help diagnose the ailments and piece together the research puzzle When tissue is collected quickly, viable cells can be studied in the laboratory, which provides a unique view of pathogenic processes that cannot be obtained in any other way.

36

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Dr. W. Paul Bowman

region’s top pediatric hospitals by using our nationally recognized research capabilities to treat children here in Fort Worth, and in many of the towns throughout West Texas. This partnership also enables us to develop graduate training that pairs research and clinical care.” The partnership has been formed in the right place at the right time to be a powerful influence on the health care of children now and in the future, Hahn and Bowman agree.

Ghorpade and Uht came to the UNT Health Science Center this year to establish the Brain Bank. Ghorpade brings 10 years’ experience in HIV-1 research and successfully established a similar program at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Uht brings with her training in neuropathology at the University of California-San Francisco and experience as an autopsy pathologist at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Together, Ghorpade and Uht are a dynamic duo, and in the pioneering spirit of Texas, they hope to help blaze a trail to the cure of these devastating illnesses.

UNT Health Science Center

Protecting the heart with quick shot of estrogen I

n a groundbreaking study, researchers from the University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC) at Fort Worth and the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas are partnering to battle the effects of traumatic brain injury, shock and sudden cardiac arrest. Dr. James Simpkins, UNTHSC chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, has partnered with Dr. Jane Wigginton of the Emergency Medicine Department at UT Southwestern, to study the effects that estrogens have on patients who need emergency resuscitation, specifically those with traumatic brain injury, shock and sudden cardiac arrest. These studies are critical because less than 5 percent of the 1,000 Americans who suffer sudden cardiac arrest survive.

This new study has found that the rapid administration of a dose of estrogen, a strong anti-oxidant and an anti-inflammatory drug in sudden cardiac arrest cases increases brain cell survival by up to 65 percent. “The hope is to devise an intervention so that when emergency medical personnel show up and they deduce that someone has had traumatic brain injury, a stroke or sudden cardiac arrest, they can administer something on site that can protect the brain,” Simpkins said. “If we can administer these drugs to people very early, we can protect the brain and increase survival.” This new study has found that the rapid administration of a dose of estrogen, a strong anti-oxidant and an anti-inflammatory drug in sudden cardiac arrest cases, increases brain cell survival by up to 65 percent in sudden cardiac arrests. It was discovered that the same combination of estrogen and other substances delivered intravenously post injury may have similar effects in subjects suffering from traumatic brain injury. Simpkins explained that emergency medicine procedures are in place to immediately resuscitate patients who have suffered one of these traumas. However, typically resuscitation efforts are designed to make a person’s heart start beating again, for example, or restart breathing. Until now, no measures have been put into place to attempt to protect the brain’s health in the case of a traumatic injury requiring resuscitation. “We have to act as soon as possible when emergency medical crews

Dr. James Simpkins

arrive on the scene,” Simpkins said. He explained that by the time an emergency crew has performed resuscitation efforts, transported a patient to a hospital and stabilized the patient, it is often too late to protect the brain. “We know these substances can protect the brain and are safe to send out with emergency medicine doctors,” he said, adding that these compounds can be easily administered to a patient at the scene to protect the brain. These compounds have no dangerous effects on patients who do not have a brain injury. Simpkins said he is passionate about this study because he lost his father and his grandfather to strokes – but there were no medical procedures in place to protect them. By the time the necessary help arrived and tests were run, it was too late. “There has to be a paradigm shift in that we need to administer these treatments as soon as possible, before it is too late,” he said. “This can improve survival and reduce neurological deficits from shock. It is very much needed.” This study is part of the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium, a National Institutes of Health-funded program designed to study cardiac arrest and trauma events in patients, the outcomes of these events, and the effects of field treatment administered immediately following these events dramatically affect patient survival rates.

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

37

UNT Health Science Center

Intermittent oxygen deprivation may strengthen heart F

or many people who have a history of heart problems either in their family or their own past, a healthy heart is always on their minds. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle and regular visits to the doctor are two things that an individual can do to keep his or her heart healthy. As many of the athletes who competed in this summer’s Olympic games demonstrated, athletes know the benefits of training at high altitudes and competing at lower altitudes. Air pollution notwithstanding, the benefits of high altitude training have been clear for decades, which is why the American cycling team trains in Colorado, where less oxygen in the air makes the heart work harder.

Intermittent hypoxia treatment may be a powerful adjunctive therapy for patients at risk of heart disease. – Dr. Fred Downey

Now, researchers at the UNT Health Science Center at Fort Worth have demonstrated that depriving the heart of oxygen actually may strengthen it. These recent discoveries by research team Robert Mallet, PhD and associate professor of Integrative Physiology, Fred Downey, PhD and regents professor of Integrative Physiology, and doctoral student Myoung-Gwi Ryou were noted in the June 2008 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine and may lead to a new paradigm in protecting the hearts of patients at risk of coronary disease. Hypoxia (lack of oxygen) historically has been considered harmful to the heart. However, this new research has demonstrated that a 20-day program of brief, repetitive, moderate reductions in the

38

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

amount of oxygen in arterial blood help increase the heart’s resistance to heart attack. “Intermittent hypoxia treatment may be a powerful adjunctive therapy for patients at risk of heart disease,” Downey said. “The brief periods of moderate hypoxia are easily tolerated by most people, require neither surgery nor expensive medications, and can be administered by the patient at home or work using available devices. Indeed, intermittent hypoxia has been used for several decades in Eastern Europe to treat heart and neurological diseases and high blood pressure.”

Patients spend up to 20 minutes per day in a hypoxicator – a clear chamber – that reduces the amount of oxygen in the air to an equivalent of 16,000 feet in altitude. Then the oxygen is increased to normal levels. “It’s like coming down from Pike’s Peak, only much faster,” explained Mallet. “The cyclical hypoxia regeneration apparently helps strengthen the heart muscle, making it more resistant to heart attack and dramatically reduces damage from an attack.” Maximum effect is reached after 20 days of cyclical hypoxia. The next phase of testing will determine how long the effect lasts, or if it actually wears off. Eventually, the treatment may be tested on people who are at high risk of heart disease, in order to condition the heart before a debilitating attack.

Doctoral student Myoung-Gwi Ryou, Dr. Fred Downey, regents professor of Integrative Physiology, and Dr. Robert Mallet, associate professor of Integrative Physiology

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

39

News Notes

&

M.D. Anderson in study with Rosetta The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center will perform a clinical validation study with Rosetta Genomics Ltd. of Jersey City, N.J., a leader in the development of microRNAbased diagnostic and therapeutic products, The study will focus on Rosetta Genomics’ microRNA-based test that identifies the primary site of cancer of unknown primary (CUP). The study will include 100 patients who are diagnosed with CUP at M.D. Anderson and who meet the eligibility criteria. Rosetta Genomics expects this test to be submitted for regulatory approval in the second half of 2008. “The initiation of this validation study is an integral part of the commercialization roadmap for our diagnostic tests, as we advance them toward use in a clinical setting,” said Amir Avniel, president and CEO of Rosetta Genomics. “We believe the initiation of this study for our CUP assay with a leading cancer research center such as M. D. Anderson attests to the critical unmet need this test addresses.” CUP is a heterogeneous group of cancers that constitutes 3 percent to 5 percent of all cancers with a poor median survival of six months to 10 months, according to the company. Each year, about 70,000 patients in the United States are diagnosed with CUP. A patient typically is diagnosed with CUP only after undergoing a wide range of tests, including various imaging tests such as X-ray, CT, MRI and PET, which often fail to identify the origin of the cancer, according to Rosetta Genomics. “The current gold standard diagnostic evaluation for CUP consists of a careful history and physical examination, laboratory tests, imaging studies, invasive studies when necessary, and thorough pathologic evaluation. This process is lengthy and exposes the patient to unnecessary toxicities,” said Dr. Gauri Varadhachary of M.D. Anderson. “Rosetta Genomics’ microRNA-based CUP assay may present an alternative test to current diagnostic practices. This study aims to validate their assay as well as compare its performance with current tests for CUP.” HelioVolt announces solar cell advances HelioVolt Corp. of Austin announced at the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, its proprietary FASST reactive transfer printing process has produced thin film solar cells with 12.2 percent conversion efficiencies in six minutes. The efficiencies place HelioVolt’s Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS) devices among the highest-performing solar thin film products on the market, according to the company. HelioVolt currently is optimizing FASST for further efficiency gains and scaling up the process to begin commercial manufacture of thin film solar mod-

MicroRNA hairpin graphic courtesy of Rosetta Genomics Ltd.

40

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

ules and building integrated solar products. “In the lab, CIGS is already achieving the highest efficiencies of any thin film solar material. The challenge of course is transferring that efficiency to a high throughput, high yield, low cost process capable of delivering gigawatts worth of quality commercial product,” said Dr. BJ Stanbery, CEO and founder of HelioVolt. “We view these high-performance results as an indicator of FASST’s potential to meet that need. We’re already producing CIGS devices that are comparable with the highest efficiency thin film products on the market today, and we still see plenty of room to improve from here.” HelioVolt’s breakthrough is a process that bypasses silicon, the standard base material used in solar cells, in favor of a copper indium gallium selenide-based manufacturing process known as CIGS. HelioVolt places the chemicals on plates, squeezes them together and rapidly heats the materials. The resulting product can be made part of metals, plastic, glass or other materials, according to the company. In 2007, HelioVolt raised more than $100 million in venture financing to fund the company’s move toward volume production and international expansion. Model for Angelman syndrome developed by UT biologists A model for studying the genetics of Angelman syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes mental retardation and other symptoms in one out of 15,000 births, has been developed by biologists at The University of Texas at Austin. Their research demonstrates that when a particular fruit fly gene, dube3a, is altered, the mutant flies show behavioral dysfunctions similar to those experienced by humans whose UBE3A gene doesn’t function normally. The work, led by Yaning Wu and Janice Fischer of the Section of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology was published in the August edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “People inherit Angelman syndrome as a mutant UBE3A gene that does not make UBE3A protein,” said Fischer, a professor in the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology. The UBE3A protein is an enzyme that attaches a small protein called ubiquitin to other proteins. Ubiquitin attachment signals that the tagged protein needs to be degraded. “The simplest explanation for the disease biochemistry is that when UBE3A is not around to do its job, its substrates aren’t being degraded like they should be, and these proteins build up and interfere with brain functions,” Fischer said. The symptoms of Angelman syndrome in humans include severe mental retardation, epileptic seizures and sleep disturbances. The work Wu, Fischer and their collaborators have done during the last six years has involved engineering fruit flies with the appropriate mutations in their genes and also particular control transgenes. The researchers ran the mutant flies through a series of tests, comparing their performances to control groups of flies whose dube3a genes functioned normally. Among other results, the mutant flies weren’t able to climb as well up the sides of plastic containers, weren’t as able to form long-term memories (of aversive shocks) and were more likely to display circadian rhythm irregularities. In other words, the flies, Fischer said, suffer from a kind of Angelman syndrome, and should therefore offer a useful model for understanding the biochemistry of the disorder in humans. In particular, the fly models may provide clues to which specific protein,

or proteins, are accumulating in the brain and causing the dysfunction. “We’ve known for more than 10 years which gene is at fault, but we haven’t known some of the specifics of the process,” she said. “Now that we know that the fly gene works pretty much the way that the human one does, we can look for the key substrate in flies, and eventually test likely candidates in mice and see if they’re really associated with the disease.” UTEP technology may help patients walk Research from the University of Texas at El Paso’s new Laboratory for Human Motion Analysis and Neurorehabilitation may help people who have problems walking because of neurological problems such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury or spinal cord injury. The Smartgait Rehabilitation System developed by researchers at UTEP is a new technology designed to help neurologists better identify impairments in patients with walking disabilities. The innovative method allows doctors to measure a patient’s walking pattern from within the body. This creates a more accurate picture of where the damage is and provides a clearer idea of treatment options. The system was developed by a team led by Thompson SarkodieGyan, an electrical engineering professor at UTEP. A patent is pending for the system. “When we are able to quantify the impairment and know exactly where the impairment is and the level to which (the body part) is impaired, then (the system) enables the doctor to be very precise with what he does,” Sarkodie-Gyan said. Among the first to benefit from this new technology will be patients at El Paso’s Sierra Providence Physical Rehabilitation Hospital. UTEP will work with Sierra Providence to give patients access to the Smartgait technology on campus initially. UTEP’s Laboratory for Human Motion Analysis and Neurorehabilitation opened earlier this year. UTEP receives border security research grant The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has designated the University of Texas at El Paso as an Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence. A $6 million, six-year grant will be used to open the National Center for Border Security and Immigration at UTEP. UTEP will work in partnership with the University of Arizona at Tucson to conduct research and develop technologies, tools and advanced methods to balance immigration and commerce with effective border security. Their focus will be to assess threats and vulnerabilities, improve surveillance and screening, analyze immigration trends, and help enhance policy and law enforcement efforts. UTEP continues research in such disciplines as border infrastructure risk and analysis, facial recognition techniques, bio-defense, and nanoand micro-manufacturing. The university was designated the National Center for Border Security and Immigration earlier this year. – Compiled by Robert Francis

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

41

Immediate impact BY

Tonie Auer

UTEP professor focuses on cancer, transplant rejection research

42

W

hen Robert A. Kirken finished his doctoral work on bacteria, he did something most new doctorates don’t do — completely switched his field to focus on developing new drugs that will help the body rid itself of cancer and possibly even prevent organ transplant rejection. “After finishing my Ph.D. working on bacteria that grew in hot springs and hydrothermal vents in the ocean where water can actually boil, I didn’t see the immediate implication for humans. I wanted something with more of a human impact,” said Kirken, professor and chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso. “That is why I went to the National Institutes of Health where they are focused on understanding and curing human diseases. I hoped that my research would have a greater impact on human disease and that I would see the rewards of this work during my lifetime. It was a big switch for me and something totally opposite from my Ph.D. work. I find it to be extraordinarily satisfying and know that I made the right choice.” Kirken recently received additional funding for his research on tyrosine kinase inhibitors for the prevention of organ transplant rejection; and is doing work to develop novel immunomodulatory drugs with therapeutic potential against important clinical condi-

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

tions such as graft-versus-host disease, allergy and autoimmune disorders. “The immune system and immune cells are important to fight off infection and protect you from viruses and bacteria,” Kirken said. “If you get an infection, there are signals to tell your T cells and other white blood cells that they need to wake up and fight off this infection.” Signals Kirken said his research has been studying how those signals are transmitted from outside to inside then cell. “We study how these messengers function within cells,” he said. “We want to know how T cells work normally so that we can better understand them when they work abnormally and eventually cause diseases.” His research primarily has focused on one protein messenger — named “Jak3” — that likely plays a role in certain types of cancer. Kirken’s research team has generated several unique tools to study this protein. He believes it may represent a new target for drug discovery and design that can have therapeutic implications for humans. “There are many signals that turn cells on and off,” he said. “We

are trying to figure out how to measure them when they’re on and when they’re off, especially in a disease condition. We know that Jak3 is important for T cells to grow and respond normally to changes in the body, such as during an infection.” Children — like the infamous Bubble Boy — whose bodies can’t activate this enzyme typically die by age 2 because they can’t fight off infection. Every day we’re bombarded by countless pathogens and Jak3 is a critical messenger to allow people to fight off these infections. “At this stage of our research, we know better how Jak3 turns cells on, but we also know that without this enzyme, these cells are turned off or even fail to develop,” Kirken said. “The trick for us is to determine how to turn cells off during times when these cells are working out of control such as during certain types of cancer or during the rejection of transplanted organs.” Kirken said he hopes some of this information will aid in the discovery and development of new drugs to treat cancer and block rejection of transplanted organs. “If we think about rejection of transplants and organs, the problem is that if you can find a suitable donor to replace the defective organ, your immune system sees them as foreign and tries to get rid of them as if they were a virus or bacterium,” he explained. Blocking cells Kirken wants to identify and develop new drugs to control the immune response by blocking these white blood cells. “If we can find small molecules or drugs that can somehow inhibit Jak3 from doing what it wants to do, maybe we can slow down cancer progression or rejection of organs,” he said. “Moreover, maybe we can treat other diseases such as autoimmune disorders like Lupus. We understand this enzyme. Now we need to find drugs that can block or regulate its activity to control diseases.” Kirken’s hope is that these studies will provide new agents of commercial and therapeutic value with minimal adverse effects. So, when someone has an organ transplant, their bodies won’t reject the organs and they can live for many years in the presence of a drug that may manipulate the response of the T cell. “Most of the drugs out there don’t block this pathway, so we think it is a very novel target to try and control these types of diseases,” he added. So far, years of testing have been done in petri dishes and mice to make sure they are effective and safe. Eventually, Kirken hopes the research will attract pharmaceutical company support and one day be used to treat humans if the research supports this challenging goal. Among the financial supporters of Kirken’s research are the Lizanell and Colbert Coldwell Foundation, JP Morgan Chase Bank, N.A., Trustee, and the National Institutes of Health.

If we can find small molecules or drugs that can somehow inhibit Jak3 from doing what it wants to do, maybe we can slow down cancer progression or rejection of organs. – Robert A. Kirken, University of Texas at El Paso

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

43

The Botanical Research Institute of Texas is expected to move into its facility in the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens in 2011.

Setting up new roots

BY

Leslie Wimmer

BRIT is building a $47 million facility in Fort Worth

44

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

T

he Botanical Research Institute of Texas will move into a new building featuring bio-based materials and environmentally-friendly architecture. The Research Institute’s new building will be located in the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens and a move is expected in 2011. The new $47 million facility will be located on the corner of University Drive and Harley Avenue, where the Fort Worth Public Health Department building currently sits. “With this new building, we will truly be able to take all of this to a new level, because this building will not merely put BRIT in close proximity to our botanic garden, it will literally put us in our botanic garden,” said Ed Bass, a founder of the institute and vice chair of the board of trustees. The plans for the Research Institute’s new building were unveiled at an event on May 14, and attendees included Bass; Tim McKinney, chair of the Institute’s board of trustees; Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief; Hugh Hardy of H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, the firm planning the building’s architecture; Javier González-Campaña of Balmori Associates, a landscaping company; and BRIT President Sy Sohmer. When BRIT was founded in 1991, it was intended to

rendering courtesy of BRIT

serve as a botanical science wing to other science institutions in North Texas including Texas Christian University, Southern Methodist University and the University of North Texas Health Science Center; to hold horticultural and living collections of plants and to provide education on conservation, Bass said. “That’s what we set out 17 years ago to do, now, BRIT has accomplished much of this and it has accomplished it in an attractive warehouse in a remote, hard-to-find location in our city,” Bass said. With its herbarium collection pushed past 1 million holdings and a library of more than 100,000 books, periodicals and journals from around the world, BRIT has outgrown its current building, located on Pecan Street downtown in Tindall Square, said spokesman Bill Lawrence. The construction, architecture and landscaping of BRIT’s new building aim to meet the gold standard of the United States Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System, or LEED system. Buildings are ranked certified, silver, gold or platinum. The new two-story, 69,000-square-foot building will focus on water and energy conservation, building material conservation by using bio-based materials and alternative species of wood and making the conservation design elements obvious so observers can learn about environmentally-friendly architecture, according to BRIT officials. The building will conserve water by using runoff from the building’s 266-space parking lot, which will be constructed to

meet up with and add space to the current Botanic Gardens parking lot. The lot will feature a large number of oak trees and engineering to catch, filter and hold rainwater for use during summer droughts for watering plants, González-Compaña said. Landscaping around the rest of the 5.2-acre site will include two small sections of Fort Worth prairie land, one on the ground and one on the roof of the building and an educational path from the Botanic Gardens to the Institute’s building with several sections of plants and information about the plants. The building will be lit mostly with natural light from windows facing north, and will feature several public spaces including a library and education area. The architects are looking at the possibility of using materials from the demolition of the Public Health Department building in the concrete for the new facility, Hardy said. Other materials that will be used are bamboo, which is easily renewable, recycled carpeting, recycled building materials and cypress wood, he said. “What a great moment to be building a public institution concerned about the environment,” Hardy said. “It’s not as though you had to go out and make people aware, everybody knows now, especially the younger generation is particularly aware of the fact that we live on a planet that has limited resources, the physical resources are finite, it’s only the botanical resources that are renewable.” The institute signed a 99-year lease with the city with a payment of $1 per year, an agreement that the Fort Worth City Council agreed to in early 2005, Moncrief said. RT

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

45

UNT conducts innovative research, solves problems with rare collection of equipment

BY

Sarah Bahari

A

46

cross newly paved Texas roads, jagged cracks began forming, in some cases, even before the streets opened to traffic. The Texas Department of Transportation turned to the College of Engineering and Center for Advanced Research and Technology (CART) at the University of North Texas to study the costly problem. Using an environmental scanning electron microscope, Seifollah Nasrazadani, an associate engineering technology professor, analyzed pavement samples prepared in the lab and collected by colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin to study numerous possible culprits. The tests eventually showed that concrete poured over already-corroded rebar steel was prone to cracking. Nasrazadani now is working with TxDOT to revise its guidelines to evaluate the surface of the steel before pouring concrete. Nasrazadani’s work demonstrates CART's unique capabilities. With a collection of rare, high-powered microscopes and other state-of-the-art equipment, the four-year-old center has emerged as a power player in innovative research and problem solving. Nearly 30 professors and 80 students from engineering, biology, physics and chemistry use the more than two dozen machines at CART to test and analyze materials from the micro to atomic level. The center’s most powerful microscope, the local electrode atom probe, can view materials roughly equivalent to 1/500,000th the thickness of a strand of hair. “We are able to do analysis that most other research institutions simply cannot do,” CART director J.D. Luttmer said. “These tools are giving us a better understanding of materials, and materials are an integral part of advancing science and technology.” Launched in 2004 with $15 million in federal funding, CART provides UNT researchers with opportunities to conduct a variety of research, including developing safer frying pans, producing more energy-efficient lights and creating an environmentally friendly substitute for chromium. UNT has reached across university lines, collaborating with

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

colleagues at other colleges, corporations and the government to assist in characterizing and identifying materials. “Our vision is to support and enhance scientific research at UNT and beyond,” Luttmer said. ! ! !

About four miles north of campus, CART is part of UNT's Discovery Park, a 550,000-square-foot research park that also houses the College of Engineering. The center is at the forefront of UNT's efforts to transform itself into a well-recognized research institution. In 2008, CART supported $3.2 million in research funding, and university officials envision that figure growing as university scientists apply for more grants and the center increases its visibility. “UNT has a long tradition of conducting a wide array of important research that makes a difference for our communities,” said Vish Prasad, UNT vice president for research and economic development. “Now, with the tools available at CART, our scientists can do more than ever before to find solutions and advance the edge of knowledge. This center is one of many great assets in the university’s research future.” David Diercks, the center’s facilities manager, said each of the center’s 28 pieces of equipment alone does not make CART unique. But the wide array of characterization tools has made for a strong selling point. For instance, a software company has a defect in its product but cannot figure out what is causing the problem. But using several pieces of equipment that allow researchers to zero in on a computer chip, CART could pinpoint the problem. Few, if any, other universities have as complete a collection as CART, Diercks said. Some pieces excel at inspecting a material’s surface, while others can slice a sample in half then examine its composition. Some can recreate environmental elements, wear and tear or aging by heating or cooling the samples. That’s important when it comes to research by scientists such as Nasrazadani, who was able to study the effect of temperature

We are able to do analysis that most other research institutions simply cannot do. These tools are giving us a better understanding of materials, and materials are an integral part of advancing science and technology.

photo courtesy of UNT

– J.D. Luttmer, CART director

CART added its High Resolution Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope in March 2005. The machine performs precise chemical and electronic structure analysis.

when pouring concrete. Nasrazadani also was able to generate images of wet concrete and then watch the sample change as the material dried. The microscope did this without a vacuum, which most rely on. “Conventional microscopes at most research institutions require high degrees of vacuuming,” he said. “By the time you're examining the sample, the vacuum has turned the sample into something else. We're able to evaluate materials as they are in the environment.” The financial impact of Nasrazadani’s work is significant. The state of Texas has more than 9,400 lane miles of pavement, and TxDOT spends more than 50 percent of its annual construction and maintenance budget on pavement. ! ! !

In the late 1950s, Teflon entered the American household in the form of frying pans. The material was lauded immediately for its nonstick surface that made clean-up a snap. But Teflon, still a must-have in most homes, can emit a suspected carcinogen when exposed to high heat or scratched. The current Teflon coating scratches easily. Witold Brostow, a regents’ professor in materials science and engineering, along with his lab of students, is working to create a

replacement that is nonstick, scratch-resistant and affordable. “This is not an easy thing to do,” Brostow said. “If it was easy, someone would have come up with a replacement a long time ago.” Brostow uses CART's Tribometer to characterize the friction and wear properties of a variety of materials. By controlling the humidity and temperature, the researchers can simulate real-life conditions of practical wear. Madhuri Dutta, a graduate student who works in Brostow’s lab, relies daily on CART to test materials. She has been trained to use three instruments and plans to learn more. “The work is very interesting,” Dutta said. “Developing a new material would have so many real-world applications.” Affordability has proven the tricky part. Several years ago, Brostow’s lab designed a polymer with low friction and wear resistance using an additive originally developed for NASA. But that new polymer costs $1,000 for one-third an ounce, hardly feasible for the average kitchen. Brostow predicts the lab will develop a new, affordable polymer within three years. Teresa Golden, an associate chemistry professor, is working on a project with applications to the environment. Her lab is searching for a more eco-friendly way to protect stainless steel used in deep>

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

47

photo courtesy of UNT

Raj Banerjee, left, professor of materials science and engineering, works with Junyeon Hwang, a post doctoral research associate, also in materials science and engineering. The two are working with the local electrode atom probe, which CART purchased in late 2005.

ocean experiments from corrosion. Stainless steel now is coated in chromium, which in high concentrations can be toxic to the environment, especially when chipped. “During the production process and wear of the coating, chromium can leach into the environment,” Golden said, “which can be toxic to humans and cause environmental problems.” Researchers examined three samples of stainless steel using CART’s scanning electron microscope and energy dispersive spectrometry system. The samples were then partially immersed in solutions of cerium salt, rather than chromium. After coating the samples, researchers reexamined the materials using the same microscopes. Samples were then placed in a standard marine salt water aquaria solution to evaluate the potential corrosion prevention. “The equipment allows us to see things on the surface you would never be able to see by the eye,” Golden said. One of Golden's students will travel to Antarctica later this year or next to test the coatings they created and tested in CART. One of the most notable attributes of CART is its ability to bring together researchers across disciplines. In one project, Mohammad Omary, an associate professor of chemistry, and Nigel Shepherd, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, are collaborating to produce lightweight, energy-efficient white lights. The two are improving the brightness and power efficiency of white organic light emitting diodes. Organic light emitting technologies require less energy to produce and operate than fluorescents or incandescent lamps, thus leading to significant reductions

48

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

in energy costs, consumption and carbon emissions. The technology also is used for emissive flat panel displays, such as television and computer screens. Omary and Shepherd use a custom-designed, computer-controlled thermal evaporator for producing these functional multi-layered devices from pre-programmed recipes. The professors are helping the U.S. Department of Energy meet its goal of developing organic light-emitting diodes that produce 50 lumens per watt by 2015. ! ! !

CART rounded out its collection this past spring with two new additions: a scanning Auger nanopobe and scanning X-ray photoelectron spectropscopy microphobe. The scanning Auger nanoprobe is used to study the surface of materials. An electron beam is aimed at the surface of the material and the probe then analyzes the pattern of electrons that are emitted from the surface. The X-ray microphobe analyzes the chemical bond states as well as the composition of a variety of materials, including metals, ceramics and polymers. University officials hope to continue expanding CART — and they will likely turn to private donors and grants in coming months and years to do so. Luttmer said he envisions expanding CART in the next five years, concentrating heavily on the energy and aerospace industries. “We think there will be a lot of interest in what we can do here,” Luttmer said. “There aren’t many places with these sort of capabilities.” RT

Trauma is a battlefield

50

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

o one wants to hear that their city is like a battleground, but for injuries and trauma, that analogy may be a good thing. The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston is in the process of creating a Center for Translational Injury Research, and helping to lead the center is Dr. John Holcomb, a surgeon who recently retired from the military. He was serving as the commander of U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research in San Antonio, and he said bringing some of the knowledge gained in battle to civilian hospitals will help spur more research and better practices that help civilians and also filter out to military members again. This full circle effect is the goal of translational research, which seeks to take research from the lab to the clinic and then continually back and forth for refinement of treatments. Basic research needs to be in the lab, but more advanced studies need more advanced scrutiny. “Bringing them out of the ivory tower, so to speak, and into the clinic,” he said. Trauma is an area that especially needs research because it is the leading potentially preventable cause of death, Holcomb said. Often trauma happens to young people, and not only can it rack up huge medical expenses, but there’s also the lost income of people having to take time

Elizabeth Bassett

N BY

Center set to conduct translational research on trauma

off work to heal. Additionally, some people may never return to work and lives can be cut short. The economic, physical, mental and emotional tolls can be huge. Doing research on such unpredictable patients can also be difficult, he said. Patients may come in to an emergency room at 4 a.m., as opposed to a patient who can make an office appointment during the day for a non-trauma study. Additionally, if a treatment option works well, it may not be challenged, he said. “We actually rely a lot on tradition in the most basic areas, and we want to work on that,” he said. Holcomb started work at the center on Sept. 1, and he said he is in the process of recruiting some staff, which will include administration, physicians, researchers and students. Once the center is at capacity, it will probably have about 25 staff members, he said, but at the moment it is just him and an administrative person. The center obviously will be working closely with the health science center there, but it also will have connections to the Memorial Hermann Healthcare System, which has many hospitals in the greater Houston area. Holcomb did a trauma fellowship in Houston about seven years ago, and the contacts he made at that time still are offering help with this new endeavor, he said. “The goal is to combine the good ideas that are coming out of the lab with worldclass investigators and perform these studies at world-class trauma centers that have a lot of trauma patients coming in,” he said. As with any new venture, adequate funding is always necessary. The – Dr. John Holcomb, Center for Translational Injury Research University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, the Memorial Hermann Healthcare System and the University of Texas System Medical Foundation pledged about $13 million toward establishing the center and bringing in expert staff. Additionally, the center received a $5 million investment through the Texas Emergency Technology Fund, created by the Texas Legislature to help the development and commercialization of new technology and promote research in Texas. This funding should get the center through its first two or three years, depending on growth, Holcomb said. The investment in trauma research makes sense, since trauma can have such an impact. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated 1.5 million Americans have a traumatic brain injury each year, and 50,000 of those die while another 85,000 have long-term disabilities afterward. Each year, 85,000 Texans are hospitalized as result of traumatic injury and 13,000 die, according to information released from the Texas Governor’s office when the funding was announced. “Not only will the development of a new generation trauma care products save lives, it will bring professional jobs and attract investment to our state,” said Speaker Tom Craddick in a press release. Holcomb said Texas already is a leading state for trauma centers in the United States, and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst echoed that sentiment in the same press release. “The center will also enhance Texas’ reputation as a national leader in clinical research of emergency medicine,” he said. The only other funding, as of the end of August, from the TETF to go to trauma research was $3.8 million grant to the National Trauma Institute in San Antonio in November 2007. Holcomb is certain that the new Center for Translational Injury Research will yield technology and practices that will ripple out across America, but starting in Texas is a good choice, he said. “Things are always bigger and better in Texas,” he said. RT

The goal is to combine the good ideas that are coming out of the lab with world-class investigators and perform these studies at worldclass trauma centers that have a lot of trauma patients coming in.

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

51

Money from heaven

52

C

huck McCoy believes in angels. In fact, he sees them every day while searching for top-quality moneymaking deals for angel investors to consider. As executive director of the North Texas Angel Network – a recently launched branch of a larger statewide network of nonprofit angel groups – McCoy is helping answer prayers for both entrepreneurs looking for seed money in their early-stage ventures and for daring investors who bank on risky ideas in hopes of a high rate of return. “My job is to find worthwhile investment opportunities for the members. It’s simple, really,” McCoy said. “NTAN is a forum. I act like a third grade teacher where everybody in class is well dressed and well behaved and I provide a place where entrepreneurs can come and tell what they did on summer vacation.” Formed in November 2007, NTAN took flight in January with its first accredited investor member. McCoy operates NTAN from a small office at TECH Fort Worth, a nonprofit business and technology-based incubator that fosters startup products and services. When Darlene Ryan, executive director of TECH Fort Worth, found in her research with Washington, D.C.-based Angel Capital Association that Fort Worth was the only major city in the country without an established angel network, she began looking for some divine intervention. Ryan sits on the advisory board of NTAN, along with Yoram Solomon, chair, and Ed Riefenstahl, director of MBA Experiential Learning at Texas Christian University. “It is very important to have an active angel network in our community,” Ryan said. “Soon after coming to TECH Fort Worth, I realized that I could coach, mentor and grow these technology-based companies, but that most of them were also going to need some early-stage money.” McCoy, a veteran dealmaker with a background in software products development, answered Ryan’s call. “There was a need for it and someone who understood the development of products,” he said.

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

photo by Jon P. Uzzel

BY

Betty Dillard

NTAN part of angel network trend across state, nation

Chuck McCoy is the executive director of the North Texas Angel Netork.

Using guidelines straight from the Kauffman Foundation, NTAN members identify and screen entrepreneurial applicants – primarily in early stage development – and educate and coach them for the purpose of raising money, assisting in their growth and improving the local economy. Although NTAN is located in a technology-based incubator, entrepreneurs from any industry seeking investment capital are encouraged to apply. “NTAN is looking for good deals,” McCoy said. “We seek entrepreneurs from any industries at any stage of company development with any product family. We want them to come tell us about their deal.” McCoy said NTAN, which acts solely as a facilitator, can become a beacon for fund-seeking entrepreneurs and investors alike. Applicants pay a $250 fee to start and a fee of $500 to pitch their early-stage products, while angel members pay an annual membership fee of $1,500. “NTAN offers a platform so that investors who maybe never have made these high risk early-stage investments can congregate with more experienced investors and a place where the entrepreneurs will know where to go to show their ideas – and to know where to get good coaching on what to do next,” McCoy said.

NTAN already has had success with its matching of angel investors and entrepreneurs, according to McCoy. One local start-up company has received financial backing from investors, while three other companies are in the due diligence process. “We bring entrepreneurs and investors together who have never known each other,” he said. “It makes each company stronger and more investable and it makes the investments already made in that company more likely to have a high payoff.” More than 258,200 angels pumped $26 billion into 57,120 ventures in 2007, according to the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Venture Research. From 2006 to 2007, the number of angel investors in the U.S. increased more than 10 percent and the number of entrepreneurial ventures receiving funding increased 12 percent, according to the center. McCoy said NTAN expects members to invest in seven or eight companies within the first year, with an average of $500,000 invested per deal. By comparison, the Houston Angel Network has invested $27 million in 54 deals since inception in 2002. Members, who form their own private opinions on whether or not to back a deal, can expect an average 27 percent rate of return at the time they invest, McCoy said. “They are able to elevate the very high level of risk with a start-up because they’ve been there and done that,” he said. “The most common background of an angel investor is that they themselves are successful serial entrepreneurs.” Angel investors’ background, said McCoy, also is a resource for entrepreneurs, who are rejected on a deal often because of insufficient growth potential, lack of sufficient talent of the management or lack of information about the local market. “If we think your deal is not investable, we’ll tell you right up front,” he

said. “We’ll tell you the kind of milestones you need to reach before becoming investable and we’ll refer you to someone who would be interested. “It gets down to what the investor believes about the team, about the product and the market need for that product.” According to McCoy, the Dallas-Fort Worth area is the fourth largest economic entity in America – and is growing at a fast clip. “There is an incredible underpinning of human creativity and technology in this town,” McCoy said. “There is a continual stream of new medical devices coming out of this environment, and a continual stream of advances in data communication and sensing technology that’s really going to change the world.” He also sees innovative creations in the food manufacturing business, investable green sources of energy such as wind power and more efficient electric motors jumping off the drawing boards of Metroplex start-ups. “It’s a fascinating time to be here,” he said. Ryan, like McCoy, is optimistic and enthusiastic about the creativity and growth of a diverse range of new products sprouting in the local economy. “I strongly believe that Fort Worth is THE best place to live and to grow a company. People who live here are investing; they should consider investing a portion of their portfolio locally,” Ryan said. McCoy said his main job is to assist entrepreneurs in better communicating their products to potential investors. “Any entrepreneur who comes to us, whether or not they are funded, we want them to go away with a better understanding of their own creation and of how to communicate that to the business public – especially potential investors – and a better understanding of the investment climate that they are actually involved in,” McCoy said. RT

Angel networks organizing around the state In the last few years several profit and nonprofit angel networks have formed around Texas. Angel investments fill a critical gap for entrepreneurs who require outside investment, but need less money than most venture capitalists like to invest. Typically, angel investments are grouped into three categories: • Friends and family money - ranging up to $200,000 • Angel investment – from $200,000 to $2 million • Venture Capital investment – more than $2 million Below is a list of several angel investment networks and angel investment-related organizations in Texas. Central Texas Angel Network Austin 512-656-9487 www.centexangels.org

The InvestIN Forum of Angel Investors Dallas 214-329-1244 www.theinvestinforum.com

Texas Women Ventures Fund Dallas 972-725-0323 www.texaswomenventures.com

North Texas Angel Network Fort Worth 817-339-8968 www.northtexasangelnetwork.angelgroups.net

Camino Real Angels El Paso www.caminorealangels.com

Waco Angel Network Waco 254-752-6611 www.wacochamber.com

Houston Angel Network Houston 832-476-9291 www.houstonangelnetwork.angelgroups.net San Antonio Technology Accelerator Initiative San Antonio 210-458-2523 www.satai-network.com

Eyes of Texas Partners The Woodlands 281-296-1687 www.eyesoftexaspartners.angelgroups.net North Dallas Investment Group Dallas 972-644-7112 www.chapmanhext.com or www.no-ig.com

Texas Investment Network Inc. Dallas www.texasinvestmentnetwork.com

Segregated cinema

Dr. G. Williams Jones, a pioneer in film research.

BY

Michael H. Price

SMU’s Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection represents linchpin of cultural research

54

T

he Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection — so called in view of its discovery in a long-neglected storage building at Tyler — has held open a fascinating window onto an obscure corner of American cultural history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The discovery began in 1983 with a call from a perplexed warehouse foreman to Dr. G. William Jones, an influential cultural scholar who headed the Southwest Film & Video Archive at SMU. The property manager had heard of a movie-preservation project at Dallas — and he had stumbled across 100 or so unwanted film canisters. “Would your archives be interested in taking a look at

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

what appear to be some old films which have been sitting in one of our warehouses for a long time?” the foreman asked Jones. “… We’re getting ready to dispose of them ...” Jones, whose watchword was “If it’s on moving-picture film, we want it,” called my newspaper office, in turn, and a small group of film enthusiasts formed an expedition. We hardly knew what to expect those octagonal canisters to yield, but nonetheless we expected to find some fairly ordinary movies that had played in some East Texas theaters but never got shipped back to their distributors. What we found was — well, I said it was an expedition. Like digging into a King Tut’s Tomb of film archaeology. The warehouse was dank and dark and dusty, suitably

crypt-like. Its contents lent new meaning to the term neglect. The ambient haze, coupled with various aromas of decomposition and decay, told us the approximate age of the abandoned films as soon as we neared the area — nitrocellulose, the combustible substance on which motion-picture films had been printed until around 1948. So now, we were playing bomb-squad detectives in addition to archaeologists. “Anybody ever heard of a movie called The Blood of Jesus?” Jones asked. The title was all it took to cinch a bona fide revelation: Long presumed lost, The Blood of Jesus is a historic blackensemble picture made in 1941 by a versatile AfricanAmerican entertainer named Spencer Williams Jr., for a white-owned Dallas studio that supplied feature-film attractions to black-neighborhood theaters. I started to bring Dr. Jones up to speed on the histories of Spencer Williams and Alfred Sack’s Sack Amusement Enterprises. “Just tell me the time,” Jones said. “Don’t build me the clock.” Just then, I noticed another canister whose scrawled label read: “Dirty Gertie.” This was bound to be one of Williams’ post-WWII films, Dirty Gertie from Harlem, U.S.A. — hardly as scarce as The Blood of Jesus, but nonetheless a treasure. If the site had yielded these two pictures, which bookended Williams’ Dallas-studio career before he moved to Hollywood as a television star, then what were the chances of a fuller representation of his career? Strong, as it turned out — assuming that the nitrate film stock remained chemically stable. And much of it had resisted decomposition. Practically everybody — in 1983, anyhow — remembered Spencer Williams for his work during the early 1950s on a CBS-TV series called Amos ’n’ Andy. Enormously popular with a massed audience of any coloration one might mention, Amos ’n’ Andy was a pioneering black-ensemble TV program that in 1953 ran afoul of complaints from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The cancellation effectively ended Williams’ career, for Amos ’n’ Andy also had helped to signal a decline in segregated moviegoing. Williams could not turn back to Al Sack’s company, which had abandoned its black-cinema line in anticipation of a gathering social trend. But neither could Williams, at 64, advance to mainstream Hollywood despite writer-directoractor-producer credentials. His age, and typecasting as a broad-stroke comedian, assured Williams’ retirement for the long term. And although the Sack–Williams films of 1940-1946 had continued to play well into the 1950s, almost exclusively in black neighborhoods, their 35-millimeter theatrical prints fell prey gradually to nitrate decomposition, neglect and occasionally deliberate destruction and — in one crucial case — abandonment at that warehouse at Tyler. Bill Jones and I identified a range of titles representing not only Spencer Williams’ Texas career, but also the work of an earlier black-cinema pioneer, Oscar Micheaux, and various other examples of what the present-day filmmaker Spike Lee has called “a separate cinema.” In all, discounting a larger number of conventional Hollywood-studio movies and the

pre-1948 titles whose prints had decomposed, the selections salvaged for the Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection number approximately 20. Corporate underwriting enabled a general transfer to safety-film stock, and the collection has since been preserved in digital video, as well. The value to cultural research is immeasurable: The films represent a decisive black response to white Corporate Hollywood during a time of segregation as a matter of national policy. The pictures were created on tiny budgets — around $10,000 for a feature-length film — and shot under near-spontaneous circumstances with mingled professional and amateur players and ethnic-mixture crews. (A distant relative of mine, cameraman Roland C. Price, photographed an earlier Williams film — 1940’s Son of Ingagi.) As such, the films embody an authenticity that is lacking in the moneyed artifice of Hollywood-studio productions of that same general period. The collection has been a steady attraction for researchers since 1983. The films also have found a fund-raising function beyond the academic realm as a boxed-DVD set, also known as The Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection. The three-disc package sells for $250 from SMU’s Hamon Arts Library; it contains such films as Williams’ Juke Joint (1947), Micheaux’ Murder in Harlem (1935) and George Randol’s mysterycomedy Midnight Shadow (1939). Bill Jones, the primary-source archivist, died in 1993, two years after the publication of his book, Black Cinema Treasures: Lost & Found, by the University of North Texas Press. Today, Tinsley Silcox oversees the archive for SMU’s Hamon Arts Library. On the Web: www.smu.edu/blackfilms/ RT

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

55

Discover the latest in science-reality research

Research Texas, Inc. magazine was created by Texas Community Newspapers as an innovative twice-a-year opportunity for business, investors, foundations and government decision-makers to learn more about the impressive research projects at many Texas’ colleges, universities and private sector companies. The magazine presents Texas’ unique on-going research achievements, inventions, patents and programs promoting these successes to a worldwide audience. So, keep up with Texas’ latest science-reality reading.

56

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Upcoming issue! Spring ‘09! Reserve your space now! For more information and space reservation, call us at 817.336.8300 or email: [email protected]

w w w . R e s e a r c h Te x a s . o r g

Making connections Contact information for companies, organizations and universities mentioned in Research Texas American Electronics Association 202-682-9110 www.aeanet.org

Texas State University 512-245-2111 www.txstate.edu

Botanical Research Institute of Texas 817-332-4441 www.brit.org

Texas Tech University 806-742-2011 www.ttu.edu

Decker, Jones, McMackin, McClane, Hall & Bates P.C. 817-336-2400 www.deckerjones.com

University of Houston 713-743-9999 www.uh.edu

Emergent Technologies Inc. 512- 263-3232 www.emergenttechnologies.com

University of North Texas Health Science Center 817-735-2000 www.hsc.unt.edu/research

HelioVolt Corp. 512-767-6000 www.heliovolt.net

University of Texas at Arlington 817-272-2011 www.uta.edu

Milken Institute 310- 570-4600 www.milkeninstitute.org

University of Texas at Austin 512-475-7348 www.utexas.edu

North Texas Angel Network 817-339-8968 www.northtexasangelnetwork.org

University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, Texas 75080 972-883-2111 www.utdallas.edu

Pickens Plan 877- 872-3247 www.pickensplan.com Scott & White 254-724-2111 www.sw.org/web/SW/researchAndEducation Southern Methodist University 214-768-2000 www.smu.edu Texas A&M University 979-845-5051 www.cvm.tamu.edu

University of Texas at El Paso 915-747-5000 www.utep.edu University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center 214-648-3111 www.utsouthwestern.edu University of North Texas 940-565-2000 www.unt.edu ViaGen Inc. 512-401-5900 www.viagen.com

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

57

Texas Emerging Technology Fund Commercialization Investments to First Quarter 2008 – By Contract

Data provided by Texas Emerging Technology Fund – www.emergingtechnologyfund.com 58

RESEARCH TEXAS

FALL 08

Venture Capital Scorecard Venture Capital Investment in Texas by Investment for Second Quarter 2008 Total Dollars Invested – $256,927,000

% of Total

Amount

41.92 %

$108 million

Networking and Equipment

9.89 %

$25 million

Software

8.44 %

$22 million

Industrial/Energy

Semiconductors

6.78 %

$17 million

Financial Services

5.44 %

$14 million

Medical Devices and Equipment

5.05 %

$13 million

Telecommunications

3.70 %

$10 million

Computers and Peripherals

3.41 %

$9 million

IT Services

3.06 %

$8 million

Biotechnology

2.72 %

$7 million

Media and Entertainment

2.56 %

$7 million

Business Products and Services

2.32 %

$6 million

Electronics/Instrumentation

2.18 %

$6 million

Healthcare Services

2.10 %

$5 million

Consumer Products and Services

0.44 %

$1 million

Source: PriceWaterhouseCoopers MoneyTree Report

Venture Capital Investments by Region Second Quarter 2008 Total Dollars Invested – $7,387,589,200 Silicon Valley New England LA/Orange County NY Metro Midwest San Diego Northwest Southeast Texas D.C./Metroplex Philadelphia Metro Colorado North Central Southwest South Central Upstate NY AK/HI/PR Sacramento/N. Cal

No. of Deals

306 119 64 80 58 38 58 55 36 51 34 26 21 21 9 8 3 3 Source: PriceWaterhouseCoopers MoneyTree Report

Investment

$2.95 billion $823 million $584 million $393 million $367 million $366 million $333 million $332 million $257 million $235 million $189 million $184 million $162 million $86 million $80 million $21 million $18 million $2 million

Definitions of the regions can be found on the MoneyTree™ Web site at www.pwcmoneytree.com

FALL 08

RESEARCH TEXAS

59