At the next Beer with a Scientist event, Tommy Roussel, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Louisville, will explain how scientists take their inventions from the lab to the marketplace.

Roussel is an academic scientist who is always trying to bring his work to market. He is involved in research and development using microfabricated sensor technologies and custom instrumentation in support of the development of biomedical and diagnostic applications. He worked with Andrea Behrman, PhD, PT, of UofL in the development of a to improve therapy for children with spinal cord injuries.

“The journey from invention to product: A scientist’s tale of failure, failure, failure, success!” will cover intellectual property (why bother?), the lean startup methodology (who’s your customer and where is the market?) and a few projects that didn’t quite make it outside the laboratory walls.

Roussel’s talk begins at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 6, at , 8023 Catherine Lane. A 30-minute presentation will be followed by an informal Q&A session.

At this month’s Beer with a Scientist, Chesney, director of the UofL Brown Cancer Center, will share just how far those therapies have come in improving treatment of cancer.

Chesney will discuss cutting-edge approaches to stimulate the immune system to eradicate previously terminal cancers, focusing on treatments that stimulate white blood cells called T cells to kill cancer cells using antibodies and viruses. These immunotherapies are proving to be effective for multiple types of cancer.

“These novel immunotherapies are translating to previously terminal cancer patients having normal life spans,” Chesney said. “I believe we will experience a 25 percent decrease in cancer-related deaths in the next five years.”

Chesney’s talk begins at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, July 17, at , 8023 Catherine Lane. A 30-minute presentation will be followed by an informal Q&A session.

To generate new ideas in Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health, has offered researchers in other fields already funded by the NIH additional money to explore links between their current field of research and Alzheimer’s disease. Beverly, a UofL cancer researcher, has received one of the first rounds of these $385,000 awards.

“They are hoping to spark some new directions, uncovering potential new areas for research,” said Beverly, PhD, associate professor of medicine at UofL. “This will get more people involved in the work and develop some preliminary seed data.”

Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases affect more than 5 million people in the United States. As the population ages, this number is increasing.

Beverly’s primary research grant from the National Cancer Institute is to study ubiquilin proteins in cancer. Ubiquilin proteins are critical adapters that appear to be central to signaling pathways driving Alzheimer’s disease as well as cancer.

“The protein ubiquilin is lost in both cancer and Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases,” Beverly said. “What we hope to discover is how this protein, which is associated with aberrant cell growth in cancer, also is associated with aberrant cell death in neurodegenerative diseases.”

Beverly plans to use the new funding to determine whether and how ubiquilin regulates contradictory signaling pathways in neuronal cells and epithelial cells, and how the loss of ubiquilin affects multiple types of tissues.

Robert Friedland, MD, professor of neurology at UofL who has conducted research in Alzheimer’s disease for more than three decades, is collaborating with Beverly on the project.  

“We have known for many years that protein folding patterns are critical to neuronal damage in Alzheimer’s,” Friedland said. “The work Dr. Beverly has done with ubiquilin has uncovered pathways that may be involved in key mechanisms of both Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. We anticipate that the interaction of researchers in cancer and neurodegeneration will help advance both fields.”

With combined annual national expenditures of approximately $300 billion for cancer and Alzheimer’s diseases in the U.S., these conditions represent two of the largest burdens on the health care system. Beverly believes the laboratory research conducted in this project will facilitate the development of therapeutic interventions for these diseases.

“Only by understanding the basic molecular, biochemical and genetic causes of these diseases will we be able to make significant progress in treating these patients,” Beverly said.