Horizons and reflections at BIO5

For listeners who may not be familiar with the BIO5 Institute, how would you describe its mission and the impact it aims to have on the community?  

The BIO5 Institute was formed to bring people together to make sure we had answers to grand challenges and then get those solutions there into the community where they could help people.  

We have three missions. The first is to bring people together across the University of Arizona and across the world, including engineers, scientists, physicians, pharmacists and all areas of biosciences to work on those hard problems. How are we going to cure cancer? How are we going to feed all the people in the world? How do we live healthy, productive lives?   

The second mission is making sure those inventions don't just stay in the laboratory, but that they get out there into the community. That could be in a variety of ways. We can help people make new medical devices, bring them into a clinic and test them so they eventually become part of clinical practice. It could be through patenting with our partners, Tech Launch Arizona, and making sure that patents are filed, and start-up companies are formed. It could be through community engagement to make the communities healthier and stronger.  

Finally, our third mission is to generate the next generation of the workforce. We're interested in getting high schoolers interested in biosciences and we have programs for students at the University of Arizona and a way for postdoctoral researchers to launch their careers. 

2024 was a remarkable year for BIO5. Could you share some of the key highlights and accomplishments that stood out to you? 

First of all, we had our biggest class yet of our KEYS, or Keep Engaging Youth in Science, high school interns. We welcomed 59 of them this summer, so they joined a group of almost 750 alumni. These are the students that we've touched and trained in bioscience research through real-world experience in a lab. They present their work to their community, and then they go out invigorated to join the STEM workforce. That's something I was excited about.  

Also, this year we've had a great return with our BIO5 member faculty. We provide them with seed grants to help them with interdisciplinary work to address those grand challenges I talked about. And so, we've brought back over $150 million this year in external grants and contracts. That's money that comes into the state of Arizona from those faculty that we help support. This is a fantastic return on investment in the small amount of money that we provided in seed grants.   

Finally, we've had a really great year in terms of engagement. We have an open house every year, where we bring members of the community, families, and anybody who's interested in knowing what goes on behind the doors of BIO5. We show them the great work that's happening here, both in terms of our research and our workforce development. So, we had over 100 people at our open house this year, which was pretty exciting.  

We also bring people in all throughout the year in various ways. About two times a week we have some sort of event, from giving a tour for tribal high school to different community organizations that want to find out the work that we're doing.  

Collaboration is a cornerstone of BIO5’s work. Can you talk about a partnership or collaboration this year that you found particularly inspiring or impactful? 

That's one of the exciting things – we get to bring groups of people together to solve grand challenges, and that can take many surprising twists and turns. Let me give you three examples. 

One of my favorite examples is the work that's going on at the College of Medicine - Phoenix with faculty member Melissa Herbst-Kralovetz and her postdoctoral researcher Nicole Jimenez. They are working on chronic pelvic pain and its relationship to the microbiome and endometriosis. This is an incredibly understudied area, something that affects vast numbers of women, and it's really complicated. So, they started working on the linkage between this vague pain that women might have with diseases such as endometriosis and environmental factors. They realized they needed to bring in some collaborators and are now working together with gynecologic surgeons and with a public health faculty member, Leslie Farland in epidemiology. What they're finding is that there's a signature of microbiome genes environment that's related to having chronic pelvic pain, or having endometriosis, or having other health factors such as inflammatory bowel disease. It's turning out that all these diseases are linked.  

I think this points out the power of BIO5, that if you're just one scientist in a lab working alone, studying an individual gene, you'll never notice all these linkages to all these different types of diseases that happen in the body. And if you're not working with people who understand the data analysis and people who understand the clinical aspects of what you're doing, you'll never realize how we can come up with a solution that will help people. 

We also have a mother-son team here at the BIO5 Institute. Chris Frost and his mother are working on: How do we apply advances in plant biology to cancer biology? It turns out that there's things that we can learn from what happens in the genes of plants, what type of chemicals plants produce that could turn into more effective chemotherapeutics or treatments for cancer.  

Finally, for something completely different, we were excited this year to receive a wonderful donation of art from Marvin Lowe. This came about because Melissa Lowe and Jory Hancock provided this gift to us. These are magnificent large pieces, four-foot by eight-foot pieces that we were able to obtain and hang in one of our buildings that were blank white walls. These pieces are exciting because Marvin Lowe himself was an incredible, famous artist who was also fascinated with science, so his work incorporates scientific themes all the way from biology to astronomy. If you look at them, you start getting inspired by all the meaning and depth of this art. And this shows how we want to inspire the creative side of the brain, too. Those left- and right-hand sides of the brain are not completely different. They're not separate hemispheres. They feed one another, and it's really important in science to have creativity. 

You’re a highly respected biomedical engineer focusing on early cancer detection. What have been some of the highlights this year in your work in the Barton Lab? 

In my own work, I'm interested in finding an early detection for ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is one of those diseases that unfortunately isn't usually diagnosed until it's spread throughout the body. Because these symptoms are vague, easily confused for other problems.  

Our approach is to come up with a minimally invasive endoscope. This way we can have women who might be worried about ovarian cancer - maybe have a family history or genetic mutation -they can have something akin to a colonoscopy, where we can go and take a look inside the fallopian tubes, which connect to the ovaries, and see if there are any abnormalities that could signal the earliest changes that could lead to ovarian cancer.  

This is another difficult, challenging problem, and I like to say that I'm an example of what BIO5 does best, because I have to work with cancer biologists to understand how ovarian cancer starts, with gynecologic oncologists and surgeons to work on the clinical side, then together with my own group of optical scientists and biomedical engineers who are developing the devices. And if we're going to get this device accepted by patients and produced in the marketplace, we also must understand any legal, regulatory and economic factors. So I work heavily with people all across campus on this device.  

This year, we've worked on improving our device, which we successfully showed we could enter the fallopian tubes and take pictures, to make it more flexible, easier to use, and less expensive. I've had tremendous fun this year working on that project.  

Now, looking ahead, what do you see as the biggest opportunities for BIO5 in the coming year? 

2025, what does that look like for BIO5? We've got lots of exciting opportunities, and one of our major focuses is taking a look at the University of Arizona activities and the Phoenix area.  

Our traditional base has been here in Tucson, and I think we are doing an excellent job bringing people together here.  

One of the exciting initiatives going on is CAMI, or the Cellular and Molecular Immunotherapies Center, that's starting and kicking off in Phoenix. We want to make sure that we are supporting investigators, workforce, high school students, and companies in the Phoenix area, making sure that we're bringing people together there, too. We are very excited about immunotherapy, that's going to be one of the futures of treatment for so many diseases, and we're going to be part of that.  

In terms of other things that are going on to encourage even more exciting collaborations, we've revamped what our areas of focus are going to be. We're going to be working on resilient aging and immune system, as well as the microbiome, viruses, bacteria, fungi that co-inhabit our bodies with us and learn more about how they're useful in health or can cause diseases. We’ll be continuing with precision medicine, so that we know that we can provide the right treatment to the right patient, and technology - that's my area of interest. Plus, we have an incredible group of people here working on imaging and the Brain and Body imaging Center that we've recently established to understand the linkages between the brain and the body. Then there’s sensor systems that we're working on here, bioinformatics, which underpins everything. And I would be remiss if I didn't say artificial intelligence, which is going to help us extract more actionable information from these large mounds of data. 

Are there any new initiatives or projects you’re especially excited about for 2025?  

Like I mentioned, one of the things we're looking forward to is how we can better serve the people of the Phoenix area, and one way that we're going to do that is expanding our KEYS program to Phoenix.  

Right now, this is a program where students from all over the state come to Tucson. They're able to participate if they're from the Tucson area or have somebody that they can stay with for the summer. We also have a number of students who participate virtually. There's a huge number of students who are always interested from the Phoenix area, so it makes sense to have a cohort up there.  

Setting up a whole new cohort of KEYS students in Phoenix is going to be a bit of work and we have fantastic collaborators both within and outside of the university that we can work with. It's always an expensive endeavor, and KEYS is something that we rely on our donors for support, so we're hoping to achieve some more support to help us grow that program in Phoenix and hopefully have another 59 students in the Phoenix area.