News Update :: Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Contracts, Deals, Awards

Grant Joins Engineers, Doctors to Examine Life Science

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded an interdisciplinary team of scientists from UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering a $7 million grant to apply advanced engineering techniques to study life sciences.

The funding will go to form the NIH Nanomedicine Development Center for Cell Control, which will apply advanced engineering techniques and life science knowledge to research how the human body works at the molecular and nanoscale level. The center could accelerate development of medicines for diseases that do not respond to current medical treatments. One application will be to create an optimal drug cocktail to better manage disease development. Another would map the molecular events that trigger stem cells to differentiate.

The Center will be led by UCLA Engineering professor Chih-Ming Ho. The Center “boasts a collaborative team with key strengths in both engineering and medicine – a critical combination in nanomedicine,” said Ho. “By taking the unorthodox approach of directly controlling the molecular circuitries in cells, we hope to help effect critical changes in the treatment of disease.”...

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Princeton Deploys Wireless Network Alert System

Princeton University signed a deal to acquire technology that will enable its information technology staff to receive wireless alerts of critical events on the campus network. The university purchased HipLinkXS, a wireless messaging solution for network alerts.

The staff oversees several hundred Unix and Windows Servers that run campus Web sites and dozens of applications. The network is constantly monitored for quality of service. The decision to adopt the solution was taken because it provided a uniform Web-based interface with IBM Tivoli, the campus’s network monitoring application.

Chuck Augustine, Princeton’s senior manager of systems and data management services, said the campus’s previous messaging system relied on an in-house interface built several years ago to send and receive pages. “But large spikes in message volume often resulted in long back-ups or even a shutdown in service from our carrier,” he said...

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