Starting this month, we shall feature a safety quiz in the LSI monthly newsletter. The quiz shall test our knowledge of everyday safety procedures. Those who get all answers correct will be entered into a draw. The draw will be conducted at the Safety Committee Meeting. Answers will be provided in the next month’s newsletter along with winners of the draw. Deadline for submission is 15 June 2009.

For queries, you may contact Safety Manager, Kannan Ramachandran at lsikr@nus.edu.sg. Click here to participate in the quiz.

Our congratulations to Mr Tan Swee Jin a NGS PhD student with the Faculty of Engineering who won the Merit Award (Open Category) at the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors Awards 2009. Swee Jin is supervised by Assoc Prof Lim Chwee Teck who is with the LSI Bioengineering Programme.

He submitted the winning work, MicroDevice for isolation of cancer cells from peripheral blood for cancer diagnostics. Based on the latest experiment conducted, this device is now able to detect and isolate cancer cells as few as about 3 when spiked in 1 ml of blood. Swee Jin said he invented the device after reading numerous literature reviews on the cancer disease. [READ MORE]

In the absence of medical intervention, the outcome of every natural infection is dependent on the ability of a patient’s immune system to mount an effective attack against the invading microorganism whilst minimising the collateral damage to the patients ‘ organs and tissues that can be caused by an over-excessive immune response. Antibody responses that target invading pathogens form a critical component of these immune response pathways.

As part of a collaborative effort between researchers at the LSI Immunology Program and the NUS University of Cambridge, the immune pathways that are critical for controlling antibody-mediated immune activation have been thoroughly characterised as part of a study published in a top international Hematology Journal, ‘Blood’. [READ MORE]

The Research to Market (R2M) Seminar Series is an initiative by the NUS Enterprise in partnership with NUS academic departments and centers, to help connect our research community with industry. Distinguished speakers from industry will be invited to present their perspective on recent technological developments, market needs and trends, and opportunities for industry-academia collaboration. This seminar series intends to foster an active relationship between academia and industry, by providing channels for communication and networking, and to facilitate movement of academic innovation from research to market. [READ MORE]