Archives   ::   Issue 43, September 2009     

Safety Day 2009

Life Sciences Institute and the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences are jointly organizing the Safety Day 2009 on Thursday, 22 October 2009. Mark this day in your calendar and come attend talks and view the poster and photo exhibitions in the CeLS foyer. Some of the talks in the auditorium would include topics on the Ergonomics for Working Adults, Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs), Laboratory Acquired Infections etc. Take part in the activities like the blood donation drive and CPR-AED training. Lucky draws will be held through-out the day. Results of the poster and photo competition will be announced at the end of the day. For more information on the programme, please view this link:

http://lsi.nus.edu.sg/safetyday2009/SafetyDay2009.pdf

Scientific Achievements

A Novel Fly Model of Parkinson’s Disease

prost

Dr Lim Kah Leong (Joint Associate Professor at the Department of Physiology, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and an adjunct member of the LSI Neurobiology/Ageing Programme) and colleagues have recently developed a novel fly model of Parkinson’s disease (PD).

It promises to speed up drug discovery efforts for the debilitating disorder. [READ MORE]

bhalliwell

A recent paper published by Dr Kim Chu-Young, member of the Biophysical Sciences and Medicinal Chemistry Programme, and his team have been featured in the October issue of Nature Immunology 10, 1096 – 1101 (2009):-

“Differences in the risk of celiac disease associated with HLA-DQ2.5 or HLA-DQ2.2 are related to sustained gluten antigen presentation” [READ MORE]

NIH Invited Talk for Cancer Biochip Inventors

bhalliwell

Prof Lim Chwee Teck and his NGS PhD student, Tan Swee Jin who invented a biochip which can isolate and retrieve circulating cancer or tumor cells (CTCs) from peripheral blood were invited to give a talk at a Conference on “Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs): Emerging Technologies for Detection, Diagnosis and Treatment” organized by the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

They were one of the only two speakers from outside of USA. [READ MORE]

Awards

Grant awards

bhalliwell

Prof Barry Halliwell, Programme Leader for the Neurobiology/Ageing Programme was awarded a $706K grant in the recent NMRC grant award for a project on “Probing the correlation between oxidative damage and wound healing outcomes’.

lowcm

Dr Low Chian Ming, member of the Neurobiology/Ageing Programme Neurobiology/Ageing Programme was awarded the NMRC EDG grant in May/Jun 2009 for a project on “5-Substituted benzimidazoles as novel anti-stroke drugs”. [READ MORE]

raghunath

Assoc Prof Michael Raghunath from the Tissue Modulation Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering, Division of Bioengineering, NUS, was awarded a Walton Visiting Fellowship to the National University of Ireland at Galway by the Science Foundation of Ireland for 17 months.

New Secretary-General of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE)

james goh

Prof James Goh Cho Hong of Dept of Orthopaedic Surgery and Division of Bioengineering, NUS was elected as the new Secretary-General of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE) on 9th September 2009. [READ MORE]

InCoB’09

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The 8th International Conference in Bioinformatics (InCoB), jointly organized by the National University of Singapore (NUS) Departments of Biochemistry and Biological Sciences, NUS School of Computing, LSI Bioinformatics Programme, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Bioinformatics Institute (BII) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) School of Computer Engineering, was held at Biopolis from 7-11 September 2009. [READ MORE]