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]

Visit by NUS Board of Trustees and Senior Management

BOT members visiting the CSI lab.

LSI was happy to host the visit of Mr Wong Ngit Liong , Chairman, NUS Board of Trustees (BOT) and 3 other BOT members (Mr Ng Yat Chung, Mr Edward D ‘ Silva and Prof Saw Swee Hock) who called at the Center for Life Sciences on Saturday 23 May 2009 to visit the Biosafety 2 labs at SMART followed by a visit to the labs at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore.

They were accompanied by NUS Senior Management Deputy President and Provost Tan Eng Chye, Deputy President(Admin) Mr Joseph Mullinix and administrative staff from the Office of the Vice-President (Campus Infrastructure).

Visit by Dr John Hepburn

Prof Ong with Dr Hepburn at CeLS.

Dr John Hepburn, Vice President Research from the University of British Columbia visited CeLS on Monday, 4 May 2009. LSI Director, Prof Ong Choon Nam gave a briefing on CeLS and LSI.

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]

Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Programme

SOC-FOS-SICS Joint Workshop on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Date  :    Monday, 8 June 2009
Time  :    9 – 1pm
Venue:    Seminar Room 2
COM1-02-04
School of Computing

Editorial Team

Lim Chwee Teck
Sumita Anant
Ellice Lim
Siti Haryanti
Aziz Salim

Neurobiology Programme

“Neurobiology of Fatal Attraction”

Dr Ajai Vyas
Assistant Professor
Division of Molecular & Cell Biology
School of Biological Sciences
College of Science
Nanyang Technological University

Date  :    Thursday, 18 June 2009
Time  :    12 – 1pm
Venue:    CeLS Seminar Room 1

Research to Market (R2M) Seminar Series
(A Seminar Jointly Organized by Life Sciences Institute & NUS Enterprise)

“Questions, Answers, Decisions: Biomarkers in Pharmaceutical Drug Development”

Dr Alain J. van Gool
Head Molecular Profiling
Translational Medicine Research Centre
Singapore

Date  :    Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Time  :    11am – 12nn
Venue:    CeLS Auditorium

LSI Distinguished Lecture Series

“Nanostructure Processing of Advanced Biomaterials and Biosystems”

Prof Jackie Y Ying
Executive Director
Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology
A*STAR

Date  :    Thursday, 25 June 2009
Time  :    4 – 5pm
Venue:    CeLS Auditorium

LSI Public Lecture

“Trends on Breast Cancer in Singapore”

Dr Mikael Hartman
Assistant Professor
Dept of Epidemiology and Public Health,
Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS
Date  :    Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Time  :    11.30 – 12nn
Venue:    CeLS Auditorium

“Breast Cancer: Causes and New Targets for Chemoprevention”

Prof James Yager
Edyth H. Schoenrich Professor in Preventive Medicine,
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs,
Professor of Toxicology
Department of Environmental Health Sciences
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Date  :    Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Time  :    12nn – 1pm
Venue:    CeLS Auditorium