More than 500 people gathered this week for the MichBio Expo, the annual celebration of all things life science sponsored by MichBio, the state's life science industry association.
The event, which moves around the state and this year landed in Kalamazoo, kicked off Tuesday with a career day for high schoolers hosted by Western Michigan University, and detailed presentation from 15 promising life sciences startups.
In opening remarks Wednesday, WMU president John Dunn said he's lived all over the country and that when it comes to the life sciences industry, "let me tell you, folks, this is a sweet spot," with a long history of life sciences innovation dating back to figures like W.E. Upjohn And Homer Stryker.
Dunn also said WMU is joining the recent parade of Michigan academic institutions establishing a medical school -- only Western's plans to be privately funded.
MichBio executive director Stephen Rapundalo briefly urged members to fight against proposals for a medical device tax in the health care reform bills currently moving through Congress.
A "hot innovations" emerging technologies session kicked off Wednesday's formal agenda, starting with Shuichi Takayama of the University of Michigan speaking on microfluidic models of the human body, which could some day assist in medical research. Takayama is also CEO of Incept Biosystems, a startup commercializing the technology.
Takayama said the technology could be used to advance treatments for infertility, by making breeding dishes more like the human body's environment.
The technology might also allow "micro bio-printing" of stem cells, to differentiate them into different types of cells, using the cells themselves as both the ink and the paper.
Nigel Crompton, a professor at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, presented his resarch on "late" radiation toxicity.
"One in three of us will get cancer, and half of those who get cancer will be treated with radiation," Crompton said. He said "late toxicity" refers to severe, long-term side effects from that radiation therapy, and currently no method exists to pre-screen patients for adverse long-term effects of radiation.
He's developed an assay that takes about two days to process that will determine which patients will have severe long-term effects from radiation, including sores that never heal and radiation damage to the brain. The assay works by irradiating the patient's blood and studying the effects. The assay also allows doctors to customize radiation doses.
Michael J. Anderson of Michigan State University presented on nano-biosensors for biodefense.
Anderson said the increasingly global United States food supply is vulnerable both to bioterrorism and plain old poor sanitation practices.
He's working on biosensor technology that will allow food to be tested before it enters the country. More at
www.egr.msu.edu/~alocilja.
Paul Bourget, founder of Middleville-based LumenFlow Corp., presented on his imaging and optics company.
"We are Barry County's largest high-tech company," Bourget said. "We are Barry county's only high-tech company."
The company was founded in 2000 as an outgrowth of a Grand Rapids company. Initially focused on the telecommunications industry, the company is now supplying the biomedical, aerospace, metrology, color management, defense, and machine vision industries. One possible medical application: composite visual information of the inside of blood vessels.
Technical breakout sessions followed on topics ranging from risk analysis in research and development, new clinical trial requirements from the United States Food and Drug Administraiton, intellectual property protection, the medical device supply chain, new drug research laboratory gear, business succession planning and diversifying products.
The event also featured a big trade show with more than 60 booths from pharma companies, trade associations and industry service providers.
The afternoon keynote from Robert E. Fischell, "Future Medical Devices for Improved Health Care," featured the latest medical advances from the developer of the modern pacemaker, implantable defibrillator and the implantable insulin pump.
Fischell said he didn't mean to disparage pharmaceutical development: "I happen to work on medical devices because I couldn't understand chemistry that well." But early in his career he says he found out that drugs permeate the entire body, causing systemic side effects, while electrical medical devices operate locally, and therefore side effects are local. For electrical problems in the body, Fischell said, it's better to treat it locally with devices rather than drugs.
Fischell's latest advance goes the pacemaker one better. Fischell said present technology can diagnose a heart attack within 90 seconds, but today's heart attack patients don't get effective treatment for more than six hours after the actual event -- meaning they either die or develop some level of congestive heart failure from living with a partially dead heart.
Fischell's proposed AngelMed Guardian System detects the earliest signs of changes in heart rhythm caused by a heart attack, contacts an ambulance and a hospital, and gets a patient treated immediately, saving heart muscle.
Fischell said 95 patients have been implanted with the device so far, and six lives have already been saved.
Fischell has also founded Nuralieve Inc., which is developing an electromagnetic device to treat migraine headaches, and another company with an implantable device to treat epileptic seizures before they start.
Both send brief pulses of electromagnetic energy into the brain into the centers that start both migraines and seizures -- stopping the cascade of electrical problems that cause both.
The migraine device has so far been tested successfully on 164 patients. The epilepsy device has been implanted in only a handful -- but patients have gone from having as many as 30 debilitating seizures a month down to zero.
The devices also have possibility in treating other brain diseases with an electrical problem at their root -- including Parkinson's disease, severe depression, involuntary motion disorders, autism, severe and chronic pain, obsessive compulsive disorder, morbid obesity and more.
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