Blogs

Valencia College held their first Biotechnology Research Symposium in November with 17 students, faculty, staff, and industry participating. Their ATE grant, BioSpark, is providing opportunities like this for students to showcase their work and network with industry partners.

Valencia student Oscar Camargo presented his internship work with Annette Khaled from the University of Central Florida on a poster titled “Chaperonin Containing TCP-1 (CCT/TRiC) Is a Novel Therapeutic and Diagnostic Target in Neuroblastoma.” His work with the team was published on Frontiers in Oncology.

Another... Read more

Wow, there is a lot going on with applications of Artificial Intelligence to text. Will it make human writers obsolete? Will students use it to cheat? Can it help scientists understand the onslaught of papers we see everyday?

The answers to those questions, in my opinion at least, are no, yes, and yes. And to help answer the last question, I took a look at Explainpaper, a website that allows you to upload a paper, highlight the confusing text, and get a simplified explanation. The website was built by co-developers Aman Jha and Jade using GPT-3,... Read more

A recent Forbes article found that 25 U.S. states allow community colleges to offer bachelor's degrees---as long as they met a concrete need and did not compete with the state 4 -year colleges. This alternative avenue to a 4-year degree is helping community colleges play a key role in meeting biotechnology's labor shortage in the field of biomanufacturing. The 4-year degree meets the stated need by local employers for manufacturing workers who have a stronger theoretical understanding of biomanufacturing.

MiraCosta College started offering the first community college biomanufacturing 4-year degree in 2014. Theirs... Read more

Please note: this article was written by Hannah McClellan, EdNC.org Photo credits: Hannah McClellan. This article first appeared in EdNC .

Juan Galindo first learned about Johnston Community College’s (JCC) BioWork certificate program during a conversation with his bank teller.

Her son, in his mid-thirties, wanted to change careers, the teller told Galindo. After completing the BioWork program, manufacturing company Grifols hired him with just his certificate.

“She told me about that, and I was kind of like, ‘You know, I’ve always been kind of interested in biology, technology,” Galindo, 22, said. “That’s... Read more

Recently, the Tissue Culture Class from Palm Beach State College went on an amazing field trip to the FAU Pine Jog Environmental Education Center Orchid lab.

A special thank you to our Biotech Program Alumni, Bethany Simpson and Bennett Niemi, who both work at the lab and were fantastic hosts.

They shared their passion of working to repopulate native, rare, endangered Florida orchids.

They walked us through the process of taking orchid seeds and propagating... Read more

MassBay Community College, MA, received a $750,000 grant this October from the Baker-Polito Administration and Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC).

These funds will help the college:

- Create a new Center for Biomanufacturing Education and Workforce Training (CBEWT)

- Develop a biomanufacturing certificate degree

- Develop new courses relating to RNA, and Cell and Gene therapeutics.

- Purchase industry-specific equipment including Droplet Digital PCR, Bioreactors/fermenters, and other bioanalytical instruments.

- Offer short-term courses and workshops to adult learners and high school students

- Collaborate with local STEM... Read more

The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir

The incredible medical thriller of a scientist's fight to save her husband's life from a lethal, antibiotic-resistant superbug--by rediscovering a neglected therapeutic approach to killing bacteria. Steffanie Strathdee is an epidemiologist, and her husband Tom Patterson is a psychologist. Together they were vacationing in Egypt when Tom got sick. What at first seemed like a simple stomach bug soon turned out to be an infection of one of the most... Read more

There is so much to learn these days, how can you keep up? I decided to try listening to podcasts when I was doing something that kept my body busy but my brain on idle. So far, I have listened to three, and published InnovATE BIO blogs about each one that you might want to read, but there are plenty more out there that I plan on trying. It took a bit of getting used to as I tend to concentrate much more on what my eyes see than on what my ears hear (probably why I am so... Read more

Human bodies have been shown to play host to many different types of bacteria, viruses and yeast even when healthy. More and more evidence points to the non-human component of our bodies as having a profound effect on our health. When I learned about cancer, I was taught that human cancer is caused by human cells that go rogue, either due to genetics, or environment, or both. And that is still true. However recent discoveries have added additional factors to the story of cancer. Max Kozlov wrote a review that was published in Nature highlighting two... Read more

On October 5th, 2022 Genome Startup Day brought together front-line phage researchers and startup founders to talk about the state of phage research and some of its commercial opportunities. Founder and CEO of Phase Genomics Ivan Liachko hosted Jonathan Eisen, UC Davis professor of genomics and microbiology as well as a panel discussion moderated by Julianna LeMieux of Genetic Engineering News , with startup founders Jessica Sacher of Phage Directory , Nathan Brown of Parallel Health and Minmin (Mimi) Yen, of PhagePro .

See more ... Read more