Inaugural Bindley Day planned at Discovery Park life sciences research center

November 15, 2012  


WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A leading research center in Purdue University's Discovery Park will shine the spotlight on its efforts and outreach to the campus and regional life sciences community through the first-ever Bindley Day on Nov. 30.

The day of research focus at the Bindley Bioscience Center, which is free and open to the public, will run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Nov. 30 with activities, presentations, demonstrations and door prizes planned.

"Since the center opened seven years ago, Bindley's equipment, technology, state-of-the-art labs and research expertise have sparked life science and bioscience research collaborations with state, regional, national and international industry partners," said Richard Kuhn, director at Bindley and head of the Department of Biological Sciences.

"The Bindley Bioscience Center is connecting researchers in the life sciences with engineers and initiating and facilitating interdisciplinary research that blends life sciences and engineering, making a significant impact on our state and region. Our close proximity to the Birck Nanotechnology Center also has enhanced the research capabilities within both centers," Kuhn said.

The morning session, in Room 121 at the nearby Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, will feature short overview presentations by Bindley core facility directors and managers describing research capabilities and services provided within their cores, said Bindley project manager Tommy Sors.

An open Q&A session will follow during lunch. In the afternoon, participants can visit each facility where core personnel will be conducting hands-on demonstrations and be available to answer more specific questions related to individual research projects, Sors said.

For more information, go to http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/bioscience/bindleyday

To register for the event, which includes a provided lunch, go to https://purdue.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_3JXMRBy62kItROZ

Discovery Park's Bindley Bioscience Center, which opened to researchers in October 2005, is a 50,000-square-foot research facility that includes 20,000 square feet of laboratory space to facilitate research activity of multiple life sciences teams in parallel.

Sors said the event will showcase the center's labs, which are organized by function rather than by projects. The center has six large, open and flexible labs with seven core research capabilities: biological mass spectrometry technologies; computational life sciences and informatics; integrated screening; biophysical analysis; flow cytometry and cell sorting; imaging; and translational pharmacology.

Research core activity in metabolomics, proteomics and cytomics supports dozens of academic and corporate projects, Sors said. The integrated screening lab combines diverse technologies including robotics for automated analyses of druglike compounds, microbial diversity and biomolecular interactions.

Bindley houses a National Institutes of Health-funded research center that's exploring proteomics for cancer biomarkers and the Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded Frontiers Research Center known as C3Bio.

Bindley also is home to the Center for Global Research and Intervention in Infectious Diseases (C-GRID) and
 plays a key role for the Indiana Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Its Physiological Sensing Facility in Bindley develops and implements innovative multimodal sensors in biological systems. The Center for Analytical Instrumentation Development, supported by the National Science Foundation, Transportation Security Administration and NIH, is developing next generations of research instrumentation.

Bindley is named for 1962 Purdue graduate William E. Bindley, who in 2002 contributed $52.5 million to the university. Bindley designated $7.5 million of his gift to cover half the cost of the two-story research facility, with the rest funded by earnings from unrestricted endowments.

A $15.9 million expansion is currently under way in Discovery Park to add a cancer research facility at Bindley. The Multidisciplinary Cancer Research Facility is expected to open in 2013 to enhance the disease research capabilities on campus, integrating scientific expertise from the molecular level through animal disease modeling.

The addition will house investigators from the National Cancer Institute-designated Purdue University Center for Cancer Research to work on innovative animal models of disease, development of new therapeutics and in-vivo animal imaging.

With Bindley's proximity to the Birck Nanotechnology Center (they're connected via a skywalk), the addition also broadens Purdue's efforts in nanomedicine, which uses nanotechnology for advancing diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases.

A federal grant from NIH is funding the original $14.9 million for the multidisciplinary cancer research facility; the remainder is from gift funds and facility and administrative funds.

Writer: Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu

Sources: Richard Kuhn, 765-494-4407, kuhnr@purdue.edu

Tommy Sors, 765-494-1678, tsors@purdue.edu

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