BIO5 educates thousands of students each year – from high schoolers through post-docs- via internships, research experiences, networking opportunities, skills training, student employment, assistantships, participation on grants, and experience in presenting and publishing.
BIO5 enables young professionals to explore future career opportunities through programs like the annual Student/Industry Networking Event. At this event, employers talk with students about how to prepare for jobs in industry, business, service organizations, and administration.
Flagship training programs like the KEYS Research Internship have produced outstanding results in building a pipeline of excelling high school students into our state universities.
Each year, BIO5 hosts and leads dozens of interdisciplinary seminars and conferences and hands-on training workshops to create connections and encourage the sharing of knowledge. Topics range from Bayesian statistics, to virus genomics, to transcranial magnetic stimulation, to plant breeding, to resilience and independence in aging, to the role of digital technology and virtual reality in healthcare, and much more.
BIO5’s commitment to supporting innovative projects and new ideas to further interdisciplinary, catalytic early-stage research includes funding seed, pilot, and equipment grants totaling over $2M each year. Projects have included novel pathophysiological approaches used in the development of more precise therapeutics for childhood epilepsy, tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, advancing genomic data to help solve the 10-billion people question, using machine learning and visualization on social media to detect Type 2 diabetes risk, and many more.
BIO5 staff is here to support the institutional tri-mission of improving health, engaging students, and impacting Arizona. Staff provide direction and resources related to advancing research, economic development, innovation, entrepreneurship, external engagement, industry relations, knowledge dissemination and profile building, and education, outreach, and training initiatives benefiting Arizona.
Members of BIO5 have access to a number of valuable facilities, resources, and equipment including cores in genomics, computing, imaging, drug development, and more.
A class called Applied Concepts in Cyberinfrastructure, or ACic, is taught every fall semester at the UA by CyVerse co-principal investigators and BIO5 members Dr. Eric Lyons, Assistant Professor of Plant Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Dr. Nirav Merchant, Director of Biocomputing at Arizona Research Laboratories. The class, which utilizes technology from CyVerse, a National Science Foundation funded, UA-led computational resource, allows students to tackle real-world data challenges. In the past, students have had the chance to create an interactive map that allows researchers to make predictions about areas that will see an abundance of mosquitoes, thus informing mosquito-borne disease risk. The map is one of multiple complete software systems created by the class that can now be utilized by scientists anywhere in the world.
Donato F. Romagnolo, PhD, professor of nutritional sciences and cancer biology, and Ornella I. Selmin, PhD, associate research professor of nutritional sciences, are leading a team of researchers who are investigating how genistein, a component of soy foods, might suppress the development of breast cancer. They’ve found that a particular gene, BRCA1, when functioning properly, keeps DNA stable and protects against genetic diseases like cancer. However, if that gene becomes damaged and is “silenced”, then it is unable to do its job of suppressing tumors.
Genistein comes into play by protecting BRCA1, and when used as a therapeutic treatment can even unsilence an abnormally functioning BRCA1 allowing it to resume its role preventing tumors. Fellow BIO5 member Tom Doetschman, PhD, is a collaborator on the team, providing expertise with genetic models.
A new drug aimed at shortening the lifespan of cancer cells has been invented by Dr. Vijay Gokhale, Senior Research Scientist at the BIO5 Institute, and Dr. Laurence Hurley, Associate Director of the BIO5 Institute. This new technology essentially induces cancer cells to get old and die by targeting gene expression, specifically through the creation of a drug that regulates the expression of a protein called telomerase. Similar technologies created in the past which control lifespan have taken several months to exert effect in cancer cells, however this novel invention promotes cell aging and death within days. The drug has been licensed to a new startup called Relegene, also co-founded by Drs. Gokhale and Hurley, with the aid of Tech Launch Arizona.
