In May 2013, NCRC welcomed the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care (M-CIRCC), a new center for the study of acute illnesses and injuries.

“The challenges of providing life-saving care to our most critically injured patients with the goal of returning them to their pre-injury state will require solutions that seem almost science fiction,” said M-CIRCC’s first director, Dr. Kevin Ward, MD, Professor of Emergency Medicine. “The only way to do this is to develop the scientific teams of the future, and this requires engaging experts in many diverse fields.”

With the formation of M-CIRCC, the already renowned critical illness and injury research at U-M has acquired an integrated and comprehensive platform across several major clinical entities, ranging from adults to children, and trauma to medical, while also drawing on cutting-edge engineering and applied basic science expertise of U-M’s world-class research enterprise. M-CIRCC deliberately reaches out to other established research programs to foster new collaborations, bringing together scientists, physicians and engineers in a broad range of specialties, from emergency medicine, surgery, internal medicine, nursing and pediatrics to biomedical engineering, pharmacy, epidemiology and bioinformatics.

Several locational benefits of NCRC add to the synergies between the key areas within M-CIRCC. Apart from the close connection with the medical school, the proximity to the College of Engineering on north campus and the presence of the Office of Tech Transfer right on the NCRC site are major advantages in the translation of the research into tangible patient benefits.

M-CIRCC is probably the only program in the country that is so broad based, and which has such an extensive level of involvement with medical, engineering and other schools across campus. This creates an enormous potential to help a large variety of patients with a range of critical illnesses and injuries.

“At U-M, we are making a commitment from laboratory bench to patient bedside, to develop and deliver the right care at the right time based on scientific knowledge at all levels,” Dr. Robert Neumar, MD, PhD, Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine said. “In our own emergency care setting, we are preparing to expand our capacity to begin intensive care from the time a patient arrives. But we need better monitoring technologies to tell us in real time what effect our efforts are having, and to guide therapy. M-CIRCC, and the combined resources of the University of Michigan, will help us get there.”

The center is already planning its first annual conference this Fall to discuss the challenges and barriers in the care of the critically ill, the matching of medical needs and engineering solutions, and business opportunities for entrepreneurs.

M-CIRCC operations include the labs of Drs. Ward, Neumar, and John Younger, MD, MS, Associate Chair for Research in Emergency Medicine, member of the Biointerfaces Institute, and one of the founding members of M-CIRCC, researchers who focus on cardiac arrest, sepsis, and critical care monitoring, as well as Dr. Hasan Alam’s surgery group with a large trauma research program. Researchers who will collaborate in the bioinformatics area will be dual-based in M-CIRCC and in the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics. Close collaborations with strategic partners such as the Biointerfaces Institute, Michigan Center for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR) and the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI), all of which are at NCRC, are facilitated by the new location.

An important part of the center’s mission is to serve as a place where junior investigators in the life sciences and engineering can be exposed to the intellectual richness and complexity of the challenges encountered when caring for the most severely ill patients.

Dr. Younger put it this way: “In every hallway of this institution, and on a daily basis, I walk by the brightest, most motivated students I have ever seen. All of these kids are going to apply their brains, energy, and passion to something. One of my personal goals for M-CIRCC is for the center to serve as a magnet for all of this talent, for it to be a place where students, residents, and fellows can get a sense of the impact they might have on the lives of our patients. We want them to spend some time with us and realize that there’s nothing else in the world they’d rather work on.”

There are more than 80 different types of autoimmune disorders, and approximately one in five people in the US suffer from autoimmune diseases. Lycera Corp. works on the discovery and development of selective, small-molecule immune-modulators for the treatment of patients with autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and inflammatory bowel disease.

Focused on the emerging areas of cellular bioenergetics and immune-metabolism, the company is developing drug candidates that selectively target and silence pathologically activated cells, and which have the potential for first-in-class oral efficacy without the adverse effects of current standard-of-care antiproliferative and immunosuppressive agents.

Lycera’s leadership team and advisors represent the core thought leaders in immunology, inflammation, medicinal chemistry and relevant biology and are responsible for key advances and discoveries in these fields. The ability to build academic collaborations and discuss cutting edge science within the speaker series at NCRC has been an outstanding opportunity for Lycera, and they have recruited a team with exceptional expertise in chemistry, biology and preclinical development. Dr. Anthony Opipari Jr., MD, for example, contributes to Lycera in the research team as a Senior Director of Biology. In this role, Dr. Opipari investigates new mechanisms of action to identify new targets for drug discovery and development. Dr. Opipari also serves as Associate Professor, Obstetrics & Gynecology, University of Michigan Medical School.

2013 saw Lycera add substantial leadership capabilities with the hires of Laura Carter, PhD Vice President, Biology, and Bruce Goldsmith, PhD, Chief Business Officer. Dr. Goldsmith most recently served as senior vice president corporate development at Allos Therapeutics, where he led the successful sale of the company and, previously, executed a global collaboration for the co-development and commercialization of the company’s lead oncology asset outside of North America. Dr. Carter was previously scientific director in the respiratory, inflammation and autoimmunity group at MedImmune, where she was responsible for overseeing research and development of treatments for autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.

Lycera was started in 2006 as a spin-out from the University of Michigan by founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Gary D. Glick, Werner E. Bachmann Chair in Chemistry, based on his original work on the science of immune metabolism. The company’s immune metabolism programs have identified novel small molecules that function as non-immunosuppressive immune modulators.

The company’s lead ATPase Modulator program exploits the specific bioenergetic profile of chronically activated immune cells that underlies autoimmune disease. ATPase Modulators selectively cause cell death, or apoptosis, in disease-causing immune cells. Since healthy immune cells are largely unaffected, this new class of immune modulators is expected to provide efficacy against autoimmune disease without immunosuppression.

Work at Lycera has shown that ATPase Modulators have outstanding efficacy in multiple preclinical autoimmune models. In translational studies, the modulators mediate cell death of pathogenic lymphocytes in tissue samples from patients. The lead compound offers potentially improved safety over existing systemic therapies by focusing immune suppression only where needed and only on disease causing cells.

Lycera has demonstrated that ATPase Modulators are highly effective in preclinical models of rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, lupus and acute graft-versus-host disease. There is also a strong scientific rationale supporting the potential of ATPase Modulators in selected oncology indications. ATPase Modulators may, therefore, represent a significant opportunity to create a portfolio of first-in-class drugs to treat a broad spectrum of autoimmune and other diseases. Lycera is rapidly advancing its lead ATPase Modulator to human clinical studies.

In February 2013 Lycera announced a collaboration agreement with Merck, known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, to discover, develop and commercialize small-molecule therapies directed to selected novel targets being investigated for the treatment of a broad range of immune-mediated disorders.

Lycera has been developing several approaches to control the differentiation and function of cells that produce the IL-17 family of cytokines, including T-helper 17 (Th17) cells. Th17 cells are a unique subset of CD4+ T cells that have been implicated in autoimmune disease. One therapeutic target in this program, RORγt, is the master transcription factor that orchestrates the differentiation of Th17 cells, inducing transcription of the genes encoding IL-17 family members. Lycera identified novel, potent and specific antagonists of RORγt that reduce IL-17 production in primary cells and in vivo.

“There are substantial unmet medical needs and opportunities in autoimmune disorders, and new targets representing attractive opportunities that we are very pleased to pursue through our new collaboration with Lycera,” said Rupert Vessey, D.Phil., FRCP, senior vice president, global scientific strategy, Merck Research Laboratories. “Lycera’s innovative capabilities and productivity, exemplified by the RORγt program on which we currently collaborate, make them ideal partners for Merck in this area of drug discovery.”

Lycera CEO Dr. Kathleen Metters, PhD, said “The dynamic environment at NCRC and the opportunity to collaborate more broadly across the health sciences sector within Michigan make this a truly outstanding research setting. This is a great home for Lycera and we will continue to look for ways to work with other groups in the public and private sector.”

Under the terms of the agreement with Merck, Lycera will receive an upfront payment and research funding, and is eligible to receive in excess of $300 million in research, development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments. Merck is responsible for clinical development and will have worldwide marketing and commercialization rights to any products that may be developed as a result of the collaboration. Lycera is entitled to receive royalty payments, as well as development and sales milestones, on global sales from any such products.

“We are absolutely delighted to expand our relationship with Merck, a collaboration that builds on the culture of scientific excellence fostered by both companies,” said Dr. Metters. “Lycera’s proven track record in accelerating early stage programs to development candidate status holds the potential to fuel Merck’s early stage pipeline.”

Megan’s experience writing for university marketing and development began in 2000, when she became web editor for the University of Iowa’s Iowa Alumni Magazine as it transitioned to a website. Projects of note at the University of Michigan include the first issue of State & Hill, the Magazine of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and the branding and identity development of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, formerly the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Megan has also written for several smaller nonprofit organizations, as well as structural engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti.

A native of rural Iowa, Megan has lived in New York, Chicago, and now Ann Arbor, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing and is now the Assistant Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, AnOther, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Granta Online, LIT, Mantis, and Tin House, and in the Everyman’s Library anthology Killer Verse, among other publications and anthologies. She also writes book reviews for Boston Review, and lyrics for composers Tucker Fuller and Kristin Kuster. web domain . free porn down load sites