BIO5 Research Faculty

  • John N. Galgiani: Valley Fever Drug Development  

    As a doctor, John Galgiani, MD, would like to cure his coughing, feverish, sleepy patients, all 50,000 of them.

    That's the number of current infections from valley fever. It can leave patients in wheelchairs, facing hospitalization or worse. In Arizona, 30 people are likely to die each year from its complications, which can include meningitis. The disease still has no cure, but he would like to change that.

  • David Gang: Lifting the World's Diet, Reducing Pesticides  

    It's ancient knowledge that a spoonful of turmeric can soothe inflammation, but now a University of Arizona (UA) scientist is exploring how the complex structure of natural plants long used in Asia can offer medicinal benefits in other ways, many of them unnoticed in the West.

  • Felicia Goodrum: Unlocking the Survival Secrets of an Ancient Virus  

    Virtually everybody you know has the wily virus called CMV.

    Global rates of infection run from 60 to 90 percent, 100 percent in places with concentrated populations like New Delhi or Hong Kong. And at a typical daycare center, most children have it or soon will, since a bit of saliva or urine will carry it along. For most of us, our immune system keeps it in check. But it can be life threatening to those whose immunity has been compromised.

  • Marilyn Halonen: The Long, Twisting Road to Explaining Asthma  

    Marilyn Halonen: The Long, Twisting Road to Explaining Asthma Picture 20 youngsters on a typical soccer field. On each team, one or two will be carrying an inhaler to cope with asthma. Their burden of childhood wheezing, most often starting around the age of three, poses one of the most confounding challenges in bioscience.

  • Laurence Hurley: Redesigning the War on Cancer  

    For a medicinal chemist with successful innovations on the cutting edge of drug therapy for decades, a new grant for innovative research fits neatly into a pattern, especially when the grant program is called EUREKA.

    It was 2005 when Laurence Hurley, PhD, saw his new cancer drug administered to a patient for the first time at a hospital in San Antonio. It was part of the new directions in drug therapy that offer alternatives to simply destroying the tumors.

  • Rich Jorgensen: Innovation in Genetic Theory  

    Green petunia plants sprout in Rich Jorgensen's lab in the Plant Sciences Department in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, displaying the results of genetic alternations that reflect his innovations in genetic theory.

    DNA has always been the superstar in the realm of genetics, with RNA playing the role of an obedient waiter, delivering just what it's told.

  • Walter Klimecki: A Gene That Shapes Your Risk from Arsenic   

    Klimecki, an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the College of Pharmacy, also holds appointments in the Department of Medicine and Arizona Respiratory Medicine in the College of Medicine and he is a BIO5 member. His research spans the translational spectrum, from studies in humans to detailed laboratory models of those humans.

  • Serrine Lau: Finding Protein Markers on the Road to Personalized Medicine  

    In Serrine Lau’s laboratory, the big questions call for an afternoon cup of green tea.

    The water is boiling this day, because the question—how protein signatures work in sickness and health, and how medicines influence the functional status of proteins—is worth a lifetime of investigation.

  • Lonnie Lybarger: Outfoxing the Viral Interlopers  

    Whenever our immune system spots an interloper, it shouts 'Help!' and posts a molecular warning flag. But right away, the invading virus will be taking countermeasures, doing its best to disrupt the whole alarm system.

    For eight years, Lonnie Lybarger has been learning how the message systems work on both sides of a nasty little war involving invaders from the herpesvirus family. His work explores the interplay between our body's pathways for detecting virus infection (antigen presentation) and the virus' counter tactics (immune evasion). The findings could help millions at risk from viral diseases like herpes simplex virus, or HSV, cytomegalovirus, or CMV, or Epstein-Barr virus, or EBV.

  • Shelley McMahon: Adventures on the Great Tree of Life  

    Michelle (Shelley) McMahon is trying to peer back across millions of years to see our great common ancestors, using the life around us to see the history of all creatures as the 'tree of life.'

    That data-tree summarizes how a single ancestor gave rise to lineages that branched and changed, resulting in an amazing legacy, from saguaros to mushrooms to us.

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