UGA No. 2 for saving students on textbook money
UGA was ranked No. 2 by OpenStax that have saved their students the most money through adoption of OpenStax free college textbooks in the 2017-18 school year.
Grady College unveils virtual reality lab
Grady College has opened lab to allow students and faculty members to engage in the VR world
Researchers receive $2M NIH instrumentation grant
The grant funded an instrument to be used to improve the ability to perform metabolomics analysis
Who are you? Solving mysteries at CAIS
The Center for Applied Isotope Studies is the largest stable isotope laboratory in the world
Mixing health care and engineering for new careers
A partnership of scientists from across the United States is tackling cancer not from a health care perspective but from an engineering standpoint
Connecting the bots
A trending story on Twitter could mean thousands of people care about an issue—or that computers are doing their jobs.
Researchers at UGA found that Twitter “bots” can be the driving forces behind dialogue in social movements. The study was published in Academy of Management Discoveries.
“When a topic trends on Twitter, chances are a lot of central or very well-connected accounts are tweeting about it and perhaps shaping how others react. We found that some of these central accounts are actually bots,” said Carolina Salge, a Ph.D. student at the Terry College of Business and co-author of the research.
Bots (short for robots) are simple computer programs designed to carry out automated tasks—non-human actors that often try to go undetected. They can occupy an ethical gray area, said Elena Karahanna, co-author and Rast Professor of Business.
“They may be used to spread fake news, but they may also be used to spread facts,” she said. “And I think that’s where the ethical line is. If they are spreading the truth, it’s not unethical.”
This brief appeared in the fall 2017 issue of Research Magazine. The original press release is available at http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/bots-research-social-media/.
Satellite among NASA’s class of candidates for space mission launch
The University of Georgia CubeSat project is among 34 small satellites selected by NASA to fly as auxiliary payloads aboard missions planned to launch in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
The circadian rhythm of individual cells
UGA researchers have developed a new technology that may help scientists better understand how an individual cell synchronizes its biological clock with other cells.
The incredible, medical egg
May 10, 2016
It was with no small sense of anticipation that Robert Ivarie peered through the doors of an egg production facility in Elberton, Georgia, and scanned the massive room filled with strange-looking equipment and a virtual army of clucking chickens. This was unfamiliar territory for the UGA geneticist, and he longed for the relative comfort of his campus laboratory.
But Ivarie needed to see first-hand how the operation ran, because he was planning an audacious new research project, and the chickens would play a pivotal role. What he saw that day made him confident his plan would work.
It was the spring of 1996, and Ivarie had asked a friend working in the poultry industry for a tour of the henhouse. As they strolled along the floor, he watched with fascination as a continuous stream of freshly laid eggs tumbled gently down a series of conveyors and chutes on their way to a packaging station, where they were boxed and placed on a waiting truck.
“How many eggs today?” Ivarie asked.
“Eighty-five thousand,” said his friend.
That was all he needed to hear. Ivarie went back to his lab with renewed enthusiasm for an idea that could dramatically impact the pharmaceutical industry: he was going to use chickens to make medicine.
The incredible, medical egg
The fundamental idea behind Ivarie’s plan was relatively simple. Chicken eggs are naturally rich in a variety of nutritionally important proteins, a fact that has made them a popular breakfast choice for bodybuilders and athletes working to develop their muscles.
Ivarie wanted to create genetically modified chickens that would lay eggs containing proteins that could be purified and turned into therapeutics for humans.
“The average egg white contains about four grams of protein,” Ivarie said. “When I toured that facility in Elberton, I had an epiphany. Production would never be a problem, because the poultry industry already has that figured out. All we had to do was make the chickens, and we could get huge quantities of biopharmaceutical grade proteins relatively easily.”
Ivarie didn’t waste any time. That same year, he founded a startup company called AviGenics, and he hired Alex Harvey, who was working as a postdoctoral researcher in a colleague’s laboratory, to help him create the technology.
Ivarie and Harvey experimented with dozens of different approaches, and they and their co-workers eventually developed a suite of technologies allowing the generation of transgenic chickens by injecting a specially designed virus into freshly laid eggs. The chicks that hatched from these eggs developed into mature chickens that laid eggs containing the desired proteins in the egg whites.
“The virus acts like a delivery vehicle for a genetic code,” said Harvey. “We weaken the virus so it is incapable of replicating or causing disease, but it’s still able to transport small pieces of DNA into the developing chicken. Once that DNA segment bonds with the chicken genome, that makes the chicken lay the right kind of egg.”
To market, to market
It was an arduous process, but over time they perfected their technique, and they began producing a variety of medically important proteins using the platform. The company was also getting noticed by others in the industry.
AviGenics was acquired by outside investors and changed its name to Synageva BioPharma in 2008, growing from a promising platform technology into a mature company while being nurtured in UGA’s startup incubator in Athens, now known as Innovation Gateway.
It was gratifying for Ivarie to see his business take off, but his greatest satisfaction came late last year when the U.S. Food and Drug administration approved the sale of a drug manufactured using his techniques as the first treatment for patients with an ultra-rare and often fatal disease known as lysosomal acid lipase deficiency.
Patients suffering from LAL deficiency—also known as Wolman disease and cholesteryl ester storage disease—do not produce enough of the enzymes that normally break down fatty material in the body. This leads to a build-up of fats that can cause liver failure and heart disease.
“It’s a horrific disease,” said Harvey. “Many children born with this disorder won’t live to see their first birthday, and people with less severe forms of the disease may make it to their thirties or forties, but they often require liver transplants to stay alive.”
Now, thanks to Ivarie’s early work and partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry, scientists can create the proteins that LAL-deficient patients lack and administer them intravenously. The treatment is nothing short of a new lease on life.
When Ivarie, now a professor emeritus, reflects on the 20 years’ worth of work that led to this discovery, he can’t help but feel proud.
“What could be more satisfying?” he asked. “You have a little kid who is battling a life-threatening illness, and when you give them a drug that you’ve helped create, they become healthy again. That’s an amazing feeling.”
Ivarie is also proud of the fact that his scientific work led to the creation of a viable business.
“This is a great example of a small company that turned into a real job generator,” he said. “We have an exceptional talent base at the University of Georgia, and the technologies our faculty and staff are developing can create new businesses and jobs. It can be done, and more importantly it can be done right here in Georgia.”
But the promise of Ivarie’s technology extends beyond the success of a single drug or company, as the same fundamental techniques could serve as the foundation of new protein-based therapeutics for a variety of diseases and disorders.
“We can use this process to create almost any protein,” Ivarie said. “I think the future for this technology is bright.”
An (Anti-) Explosive Success
A UGA professor has turned his innovations into a thriving business and public service that decontaminates, defuses and neutralizes a variety of risky situations.
New frontiers in biology
May 10, 2016
[dropcap text_color=”white” background_color=”#bf1f24″]A[/dropcap]rt Edison joined the University of Georgia last year as one of its newest Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholars. A faculty member in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology, the department of genetics, the Institute of Bioinformatics and the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, Edison devotes much of his time to the study of metabolomics, an emerging field that offers scientists a broader understanding of many important life processes. Here, he discusses his work and the future of metabolomics research at UGA.
A great deal of your research focuses on something called metabolomics. Can you help those who aren’t familiar with the term better understand what that means?
Basically, metabolomics is the study small molecules called metabolites, and the metabolome refers to all the metabolites in an animals, plants or microbes. The ultimate goal of metabolomics is to measure and quantify all of the metabolites in a living system. We’re a long way from achieving that goal, but it’s important, because metabolites are involved in a variety of fundamental biological functions in humans, animals and even plants. The food that we eat is fuel for metabolism, and most of the signaling that happens in our cells is through metabolic processes. Metabolites are involved in just about everything that happens in the body.
So if they are found throughout our bodies, what does that mean for human health?
The metabolites in the human body are incredibly sensitive to a variety of influences, and they change as we interact with our environment, as we age, when we contract a disease or when we take medicines. All these things are reflected in the metabolome, so that creates a nice opportunity. If we could measure and quantify the metabolome, researchers could, for example, compare a group of patients who have cancer with a group of people who do not and see how their metabolomes differ. This kind of approach could give us some important clues about the causes of diseases, but it could also lead to the development of new diagnostics and therapeutics.
Have you tried this kind of approach in a real patient population?
Yes, I’m working on a study with collaborators that focuses on children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. One of the big problems with research on this disease is that there are no biological markers accepted by the Food and Drug Administration that we can use to determine if a new therapy works. The only accepted metric that we have now is a walking test where they see how far a child can walk in six minutes. So if someone develops a new drug and it doesn’t make them walk a greater distance, it’s usually deemed ineffective. That’s an incredibly crude way of assessing potential therapies, so what we’re doing is looking at metabolic compounds excreted in the urine of these patients to see if we can identify a solid biomarker associated with the disease. If that works, we may be able to develop a new test to evaluate the efficacy of drugs.
Your laboratory also does a lot of work with worms. How do worm studies fit into the big picture of metabolomics?
The great biologist E.O. Wilson estimates that four out of every five animals on Earth is a nematode, a worm. By his estimates, they are the most abundant animal on the planet in terms of sheer numbers, but we know very little about them. In my lab, we study a small soil nematode called Caenorhabditis elegans, about one millimeter in length, which you might find outside your home in a compost pile. What we would really like to accomplish with our research on C. elegans is to map the metabolome to the genome and understand the relationships between metabolites and genes. Genomic researchers have given us a wealth of information about how genes affect organisms, but we know far less about the metabolites, so our research on worms will hopefully help us place some of those missing pieces of the biological puzzle. Also, what we learn in worms will almost certainly help us understand the role of metabolites in humans and other animals.
So despite the potential applications in human health, you’re still a champion of basic science.
Absolutely, I want to see horrible diseases eradicated just as much as anybody, and I’d love it if my work could contribute in some way to that goal. But the lessons of science demonstrate that we don’t always know where those discoveries will come from. A lot of the research into human health abandons basic science in favor of something more applied, but much of what we know today about disease or medicine stems from basic science. My new colleagues here at UGA have been fabulous, and I think that together we can make some real progress in our fundamental understanding of all life, including humans.
UGA chemist receives NSF CAREER Award for nanobiotechnology
Jin Xie, an assistant professor in the department of chemistry in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program.
UGA a partner in the fabric revolution
The University of Georgia is a partner in a new national public-private consortium to revolutionize the fiber and textiles industry through commercialization of highly functional, advanced fibers and textiles for the defense and commercial markets. The partnership, called Advanced Functional Fabrics of America, or AFFOA, was announced today by the Department of Defense.
