BioBeers Wrap Up: July 24th, 2009 at Flying Dog

BioBeers July was a great time on Friday evening.  This time around we didn’t have any presentations and things were relatively low key.  I was nice to see many new (and “Old”, both in terms of repeat offenders and genealogically speaking) faces.  Seems like the word on Ft Detrick is getting out as the USAMRIID, NCI contingency was obvious.  We even had one guest from Hopkins (who happens to live in Frederick).

BioBeers July 09 (select to view all pix)

Attendance was 77 people, which ain’t bad for lack of notice and summer vacations.  Notably absent was the usual MedImmune crowd.  Not sure if they had some other event planned or just because of my last minute planning.

Thanks again to ImQuest for bringing a bunch of wings (and people), Aerotek Scientific Staffing for bringing all the plastic-ware and plates and Flying Dog for being so awesome a place for our little venue.

More Work at Ft Detrick

I have been negligent in posting a few new offers coming out of Ft Detrick for Contracts, so here goes:

S09-174 RFP Cover Sheet Issued 7-2-09

This is an RFP for the following:

Using a sample of pure V-PROLI/NO that the NCI will supply, the Subcontractor shall provide all the data necessary to coauthor a report in a peer-reviewed journal in collaboration with the providers of the test substance that will include a full pharmacokinetic profile of this compound.

The Subcontractor shall develop and validate methods for assaying V-PROLI/NO in blood. Using methods completely consistent with animal welfare procedures approved by the NIH, administer V-PROLI/NO both intravenously, intraperitoneally, and orally to mice. Assay blood samples taken periodically, then convert the analytical data to the full set of pharmacokinetic parameters required for the desired publication, including at least clearance, Cmax, Tmax, AUC, distribution and metabolism half-lives via each route, and oral and intraperitoneal bioavailability.

Oligo Production

Requirement for this request include:

The company to provide the custom oligonucleotides must be able to meet the following technical criteria:

1. To synthesize single stranded DNA custom oligonucleotides up to 100 residues in length.

2. To provide purification of the oligonucleotides including desalting, BioRP cartridge, PAGE and HPLC purification.

3. To provide 5’ and 3’ modifications of the oligonucleotides.

4. To provide quality control of oligonucleotides by MALDI-TOF or Sequenom MassARRAY Oligo Check. QC data mentioned previously is included in every shipment. If the sequence of the individual oligonucleotides is found and documented to be incorrect by the researcher then the vendor will replace the product at no charge and be shipped IAW with delivery schedule below.

5. To provide optional large scale production of oligonucleotides in gram amounts.

S09-198 – RFI – Insect Cell Based Biopharmaceutical Development Issued 7-21-09

This one’s an RFI, which means they are looking for people capable of doing the work, but not issuing a contract, yet.  The caveate being, if you do the RFI, when the contract does come up you will be in the front of the line.  Well, I’m sure that’s not entirely accurate from a contractual, legal perspective, but whetever:

SAIC-F is seeking companies or academic institutes with knowledge and experience on laboratory development (using an insect cell based system) from gene sequence of interest for either a therapeutic protein or self assembling virus like particles (VLP).

Responses for BioBeers continue to roll in, but looks like this month will be nice and intamate with only, say, 60 people.  Still plenty of capacity for walk-in’s, but we do try to plan for food and staffing, so I’d appreciate an RSVP if you intend on coming.  Also still looking for a Sponsor to cover the “Tipping Fee”.  Also, if anyone has some research to present, I don’t have a presenter, yet.

If you’re on Twitter (or even not) I set up a Twtvite at http://twtvite.com/biq72l.   Sadly, I am the only one to respond.  Which means our topic of discussion for the edition of BioBeers will be:  How do we get Science geeks off their flabby a$$es and engaged in Social Media?

It’s a Date (or a tweetup?): Next BioBeers Friday 7/24, 4:30 PM at Flying Dog

After much procrastination, I finally scheduled the next BioBeers event for next Friday, July 24th starting at 4:30 PM at the Flying Dog Brewery.

As you may know, BioBeers is a celebration of the Biotech community in Frederick County (and beyond).  This forum provides a means for like minded  Biopreneurs and Biotech geeks to embrace their inner self and discuss Science over frosty adult beverages.  The venue is FREE (assuming I can find a couple sponsors, please inquire if interested), but you must be 21 or older and have a valid ID.

A fundamental goal of BioBeers is to accelerate the region towards achieving a top-tier bio-cluster ranking as a thriving and nurturing bio-entrepreneurial community. BioBeers is designed to function as catalyst, where like minded bio-preneurs gather to share ideas, cultivate business relationships and build life long friendships.

I hope you can join us.  RSVP via the logo in the left side bar, by emailing me HERE or joining the GoogleGroup.

Sponsorships available on a first come, first served basis.  Drop me a line or give me a call if interested.

SciBarCamp PA Day 2 and Beyond

I’ve been trying to find the time to throw up a post about the second day of SciBarCamp, so here it goes.  I am kind of glad I didn’t rush one up on Friday morning since I have found so many more worthy posts from other people, especially some of the pictures.  I forgot to bring my camera, so my pictures were just from my Blackberry, which aren’t bad but really not that good.

Before we get into Day 2, I wanted to share something from the flight in.  I had a window seat on the flight in and it seemed like we were on a Southern approach to SFO.  I was amazed at the seemingly endless “sludge ponds” that lined SF Bay in all colors of the rainbow.  I saw a post this morning on twitter that points to the fact that these are actually “Salt Ponds” and teeming with life.  The post also has a link to view on GoogleMaps

So back to Day 2 of SciBarCamp.  The sessions started right on time at 9:30 AM.  My first session was a OpenSource Health/disease research discussion with Jen McCabe of NextHealth.org (among others) and Alexandra Carmichael of CureTogether.com

From Alex Pang's Flickr stream

Next up was a discussion with Matt Baggott entitled “WTF, Psychedelics?”  discussing the use of psychoactive compounds in research, primarily MDMA or “Ecstasy”.   Some pretty cool stuff

U-stream of this discussion can be found on Naomi Most‘s most awesome blog post HERE.

Then the last session before lunch was with Dewayne  Hendricks of Warpspeed.com.  There we discussed Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and Buckminster Fullers “World Game“.   Dewayne was a participant in the original World game 40 years ago and recently re-played the game to many of the same prognostic outcomes. I’ll have to tell you, the conclusion’s aren’t that good.

After lunching on an endless supply of delicious Curried dishes, the afternoon sessions were with Naomi Most and DrKiki (aka Dr Kirsten Sanford)  called “Spinning Science”.   Click on the picture to take you to the full Ustream or go to nthmost’s web page for more.

After this session was one by Grad student and WIRED science writer Aaron Rowe & Rick Henrikson: The future of medical technology. I don’t have any pictures form that one, but I would recommend looking through some of the comments on FriendFeed for this and many other sessions.  I think that pretty much every session had one person tweeting or directly inputting on FriendFeed.

My last session was Brian Mallow, the Science Comedian.  Since I’ve already posted about Brina, so I’ll spare you again.  There were many other sessions I missed, as highlighted in an excellent post by Martin Fenner.   There are also a couple of good  Photo albums out there.

Mine is HERE, Naomi’s HERE and Alex Pang’s HERE

One great shot from Alex’s collection is the Group Shot we took at 1 PM:

That evening, while some prepared to head to SciFoo at Google the next day (Pictured Duncan and  Andrew), I headed out with a numbe of other BarCampers to a Singularity University event at NASA Ames.

One of the goals of Singularity is to save 1 billion people in this 9 week course.  They call this the “Humanity’s Grand Challenge”

Suffice to say that they had a number of “Brilliant” people on the panel (pun intended), but I think my time would’ve been better spent in a pub somewhere.  Geesh…

It was an amazing and wonderful week in San Francisco, but I think I’ve had enough of the Left Coast for another year.

Greetings from #scbPA

A quick morning post about Day 1 at SciBarCamp Palo Alto.

After an uneventful flight across the contintent on Tuesday, we (my traveling companion in Palo Alto is my new business partner in Gahaga Joseph Jackson)  were bright and early Wednesday in search of coffee on Main Street Palo Alto.

I find it odd that they get so little rain here that most shops are open foyer, without doors and awning and such to keep the rain out.  Also, the weather is odd because it’s so “temperate”, tempertures hovering only a few degrees between 58-63 F all day/night in mid-July.

So we stopped in for a coffee at the University Cafe on University Ave to kill an hour before things got started

Then down the street to the Institute for the Future, our gracious hosts for the two-day event, the same place we held BioBarCamp last year.

In standard BarCamp format, Alex Pang of IFTF made some opening remarks:

Then everyone mingles and discussed topics for sessions (to be held all day today):

Sessions are then posted to a White Board with room assignments and time slots, 1 hour each session:

During all of this session planning, there is a lot of networking and catching up to do with people you only encounter at these sorts of unconferences.  One new person I had a chance to chat with briefly was Chia Hwu from 23andMe who I hope will be giving us more insight  into their recently announced Research Revolution.

I was trying to figure out why my web cam wasn’t working on Ustream.  Still can’t figure it out.  We then had a Keynote Address by Sean Mooney (recently relocated to the Bucks Insititute from Indiana University).  I tried tweeting it and streaming it, but found that so distracting I couldn’t concentrate on the talk.  Excerpts of the keynote stream (via my new friend Naomi Most from PirateCat Radio) can be seen HERE (trying to get this post up and get in a shower, so I won’t embed).  I would also suggest following via the FriendFeed room, which integrates twitter feeds and allows more detailed discussions.

This all wrapped up around 6 PM and we split up into smaller groups for food.  I hung around with the organizers and went right next door for some Sushi at Miyake‘s:

Pictured here are Chris Patil, John Gilby and Brian Mallow.  I like hanging out with these guys because they know how to have fun.  Brian, Joseph and I ended up running into Shelley and her husband and having a couple beers at a nearby pub.  Brian is hilarious. I think he managed to reiterate a good portion of this routine into our pub conversation last night.  Well worth the watch:

Must wrap up and grab a shower now.  It’s going to be another full day of sessions, belly laughs and maybe even a couple beers.  Then NASA Ames is cohosting a Singularity U event called “Humanities Greatest Challenges” .  This is going to be an awesome day.

Is Science where IT was 25 years ago?

In case you haven’t noticed, my blogging has lately been dragged into the blackhole that has become the Twitterverse.  I spend so much time tweeting and reading interesting articles posted by my followers and friends and scouring my Google Reader RSS feeds to spew forth things I find interesting to the twitterverse.  I am neglecting FredCoBio.

My apologies.

I do promise to be more engaged this week.  I am leaving in the early afternoon tomorow for Palo Alto, CA to attend SciBarCamp.  Silicon Valley, the land of Google and Yahoo.  A Stranger in a Strange Land, me a Biotech guy in The Garden of Eden of IT.

I was just thinking about the way things were 25 years ago in 1984.  The Orwellian era, the first 4 years of Reganonimics.  Man, things were interesting back then.

After graduating a term early from Wittenberg in 84, we moved back between Rochester and Cleveland for a few months looking for work.  Finally, I landed a job selling windows in Rochester which lasted for about 3 months.  The windows were “made” by US Steel.  One of the lines in the canned pitch I spewed was that “if US Steel goes under , we’re all in trouble.”   I quit because I couldn’t stand bilking people for more money in windows than their house was worth, even without windows.  Then I got a contract job at Xerox, another local company in a new concept called “telemarketing”.

I was there about 18 months, from ’84 until ’85.  I was selling photocopiers (when you work at Xerox, you learn not to call them Xerox machines), Xerox Memroywriter Typewriters ( a daisy wheel typewriter/printer with a limited 10-40K of memory ) and this nebulous thing called an “ethernet”.  The idea of an ethernet was invented by Joseph Wilson for a “paperless office” some time in the mid 1960′s.  Our training was primarily composed of watching 16mm movies (probably Kodak film, which had entered the xerography business by his point in time) made by Joseph Wilson explaining how this “ethernet” would revolutionize the modern American office place.  In retrospect, it was fascinating.  At the time, for a 20-something more interested in what soccer match or practice was coming up that afternoon than actual work, it was like “meh”.    I could push more photocopiers and Memorywriter memory upgrades (after using it, most people did realize how much time it really saved to hit the F1 button to type the return address on an evnvelope than to key every stroke) without having to deal with trying to explain how a “paperless office” would make their life simple.  I made good money for the 80′s, but was still selling more than an entire sales branch of 5-6 field reps and only making 1/2 what one field guy would make.  Selling an ethernet installation over the phone was an entirely different issue.  That got under my skin, so I quit and decided to get back to my college training in Biology and Chemistry.

Before I left Xerox, I witnessed the most remarkable thing: a “facimile” transmission (perhaps the first in North America, The Japanese were rumored to have done this already) between Xerox Palo Alto and our building, building 813 on Henrietta Rd.   A single page of typed text took probably 45 minutes to transmit, but think of how much better that was than via US Postal Service back in 1984?

And so, as I prepare to leave my family alone for nearly a week,  I can’t help but to think of the irony of returning to Palo Alto.  I had this moment of transcendental thought perhaps linking those events of 25 years ago with today.  I hope to engage intelligent (mostly 20 something) people in conversations about how we need to be able to explain in common terms how the medical breakthroughs we have been working on for the past  25 years are analogous to the situation of  ”IT” ( a term surely not yet invented in ’85) and the state opf science today.  So much ignorance and denial of the potential benefits.  So much misunderstanding of the basics of the art.  And how quickly the art of IT advanced and how bio science is in the same state today.  That people could actually question the nature of life as evolving and dynamic, not fabricated by one of many Gods. That our collective knowledge of biological sciences is still so preliminary because the “hardware” doesn’t exist to exploit it fully.  Geesh, it freaks me out.

So I am going to Palo Alto in the AM, leaving FredCoBio.  As may late, great friend Ian Clarkson used to say (who’s father ained considerable noteriety as a UK trained toxicologist at the U of R who discovereded that methylmercury hydroxide, a by-product of some type of fungal infection of grain silos in Baghdad, was responsible for killing 10′s of thousands of people in the 70′s):  If you’re going to trip, you might as well travel.

And what a Long Strange Trip it’s been.