Friday: Must post something

It is Friday, so I figured I had to post something. I have been busy fighting equipment at work and goofing around, in general.

So here a re a couple of newsworthy events, from my perspective.

From the Baltimore (and Washington) Business Journal, Montgomery County calls for new biotech, research campus near White Oak.  Having recently acquired about 115 acres for a mere $10MM (or only $87K per acre, that’s almost Frederick County pricing), they have issued an RFP in an attempt to integrate local Biotech with the near-by Federally funded Research Institutions, Universities and Hospitals.

Sounds like a good place to start a new stem cell RegMed lab, if you can stomach the traffic and the housing costs in that area, least you be forced to make to deary commute South on 270 every day!!  The NIH is moving a lot of stuff up to Frederick, but Montgomery County can keep their campus.  They don’t even have a BSL4 facility there nor do they have armed guards patrolling their perimeter.  Must mean the research happening up here is that much better, heh?

And another story I find interesting, reported by GenomeWeb Daily News  as preview to an article coming out in tomorrow’s edition of Science, is that the NIH Chemical Genomics Center, the National Toxicology Program, and the National Center for Computational Toxicology will collaborate under a “memorandum of understanding” to push EPA mandated toxicology studies away from in vivo animal research and to “in vivo and in vitro assays with lower organisms, and computational models for toxicology assessments.”

The EPA’s ToxCast program, launched in 2007, is currently profiling over 300 toxicants, most of which are pesticides.  This is currently done in vivo. In vitro systems have been used in Drug Discovery for a decade and employ rodent, dog, and non-human primate models routinely.

I would think it would be just as easy to make freshwater, North American fish models (not tropical Zebra fish).

I have always found it odd that the EPA dictates you kill a bunch of creatures to prove your product isn’t toxic.