Do you have promising ideas for improving technician education but are not sure how to get them funded?

Apply by 11:59 p.m. EST, October 11, 2019 to be considered for this opportunity!

What is the New-to-ATE STEM Faculty Mentorship?
Up to 24, two-year college teams will be selected to join the 2020 technical assistance and mentoring support cohort!
STEM faculty teams receive mentoring, instruction, and resources to assist them in preparing a competitive proposal for submission to the National Science Foundation Advanced... Read more

The annual HI-TEC conference will be held July 22-25 in St. Louis, MO. The event is sure to be a busy one, packed with all kinds of great sessions to attend. We assembled a list of sessions presented by Bio-Link community members in order to it easier to plan your schedule. If you're planning to attend HI-TEC, send us your Twitter handle so we can be sure to follow you and make a list of conference-related tweets.

Monday, July 22

8:00 - 5:30 pm Missouri Biotech Day... Read more

A recent article from STAT news (1) relayed the story of Jaci, a young woman in Iowa dying from a rare form of ALS, and her parents heroic efforts to help her get access to an untested drug.

Interestingly, the drug is an antisense oligonucleotide. Antisense oligos are short pieces of DNA, that bind to complementary molecules of mRNA and target them for destruction. These types of drugs are interesting because they can prevent the production of toxic proteins.

In Jaci’s case, her form of ALS results from a toxic version of the FUS protein. Normally, FUS is... Read more

What if the drugs you are dependent on for your health could maybe give you cancer? What would you choose? To take them anyway? To try to find an alternative that might not work as well? To stop taking them? …..no good choices there. The FDA works hard so that you do not need to make that choice, however, it is difficult to inspect the drugs we use when many ingredients are made overseas. According to an NBC News special , 85% of the raw materials for popular drugs are made overseas, often in India and China where... Read more

Liftoff!

Des Moines Area Community College and Lone Star Community College have partnered with the UTEX Culture Collection of Algae at the University of Texas at Austin and NASA to send Haematococcus pluvialis samples into space to facilitate studying the effects of microgravity on algal growth. Microalgae are microscopic algae, much smaller than the macroalgae you see floating around in the ocean or washed up on the shore. They are found in freshwater and marine systems, living in both water and sediment. Microalgae can be cultivated to have characteristics that are useful to humans such as high protein... Read more

Baltimore City Community College hosted the impressive Maryland Collegiate Stem Conference on Saturday, April 27th, 2019. Approximately, 500 attendees (~300 students and ~200 faculty) from several community colleges and a few universities attended the event. Students presented posters on their research and alumni talked about their careers. It was especially great to see the Lt. Governor of Maryland, Boyd Rutherford, walking around and talking to the students about their posters. Having the Lt. Governor attend the event demonstrated the serious commitment that Maryland has made to educating students for STEM careers.

It’s a long slippery slope. One day you wake up and think, “We could do so much more for our students if only we had a bit more funding.”

Back in March, we [Digital World Biology, Bio-Link.org, and the AC2 Bio-Link Regional Center] hosted a panel discussion at the ABRF annual meeting to introduce community colleges to ABRF and vise versa. I am pleased to report that the session was a great success.

Why did we do this?

The ABRF is the Association for Biomedical Resource Facilities. These are the core facilities that support research at companies, government institutions, and Universities.

Our session had two goals: One was to showcase the kinds of advanced technical education that... Read more

The utilization of single use technologies for some or all of the processes in biotechnology have become common. Engineers can substitute plastic components for stainless steel-permanently plumbed systems at any point in the biomanufacturing process, although the technology to do this in the upstream process is much more mature than in downstream technologies. This approach replaces reusable stainless steel equipment with disposable, typically plastic, components.

The industry often uses the terms “single-use” and “disposable” as synonyms. In the early days of this technology vendors emphasized the term single use because it sounded better – the situation was similar to... Read more

Many of the drugs and other products that biotechnology companies produce are based on monoclonal antibodies. Biotechnicians who know how to work with and purify these materials are in demand.

Recently, the Northeastern Biomanufacturing Center and Collaborative (NBC2) made new curriculum modules available that include procedures for the upstream and downstream methods used to produce a specific anti-IL8 monoclonal antibody from CHO cells. This work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technology Education program (DUE #1501631).

Since antibodies play such a critical role in biotechnology, I thought it would good to... Read more