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Jay Keasling – 2013 winner of BIO’s George Washington Carver Award

admin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:57:38 +0000

The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) named Dr. Jay Keasling as the recipient of its 2013 George Washington Carver Award for innovation in industrial biotechnology.

A panel selected Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at University of California, Berkeley; associate laboratory director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute; and director of Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, for his contributions to the field of synthetic biology promoting the use of engineering microbes to produce biofuels, medicines and even cosmetic compounds from simple ingredients like sugar cane and grasses.

Keasling will receive the award and deliver a keynote address during a June 18 plenary lunch session at BIO’s 10(th) Annual World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology. The conference is being held at the Palais des congrès de Montréal.

Culmination of the Artemisinin Project

admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 22:39:51 +0000

The following video demonstrates the first commercial application of synthetic biology to global health by Sanofi-aventis.

Sanofi was supported by funding from BMGF and technology from the University of Berkeley, California (Jay Keasling), the University of Saskatchewan (Pat Covello) and Amyris Inc. The Artemisinin Project required the collaboration and expertise of all parties, including OneWorld Health (who provided funding oversite) to ensure success.

Intellectual Venture Labs

admin — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:42:46 +0000

Malaria is both preventable and curable. Yet more than one million people—most of them children—are thought to have died of the disease last year, which is about as many as the year before. Governments and aid agencies have set up many programs to distribute antimalarial drugs, insecticides, and bed nets in endemic areas, and these important tools have curbed malaria’s spread through the poorer parts of the world. But existing countermeasures have only held the epidemic in check; they have not eradicated it. To have a real chance of conquering this disease, we need truly new approaches.

In 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation asked Intellectual Ventures to create new technologies that will not only fight malaria but will eventually eliminate this scourge of humanity altogether. Already our team of entomologists, epidemiologists, physicists, and other scientists have come up with innovative approaches that attack the parasite that causes the disease from several angles. Some make it easier to diagnose the disease quickly and accurately. Others destroy the parasites directly. Still others target the mosquitoes that serve as hosts to the parasites and spread malaria from person to person.

Read more about Intellectual Venture Labs important work in malaria here.

Malaria caught on camera breaking and entering cell

admin — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 18:45:07 +0000

The video captures the moment when a malaria parasite invades a human red blood cell – the first time the event has been caught in high resolution.

The Plasmodium parasite responsible for malaria is transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes, and is thought to kill almost 1 million people worldwide each year.

Jake Baum at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues used transmission electron microscopy, immuno-fluorescence and 3D super-resolution microscopy to record thousands of high-definition images of separate invasion events, a process that takes less than 30 seconds.

See the video and read the full story.