Massive new research effort will map inner workings of cells - San Francisco VA Medical Center chosen to host core ...( dical Center in Dallas (the headquarter...)

The Alliance's collaborative approach is an experiment in itself, said Bill Seaman, MD, and co-director of the San Francisco core lab. "It's an attempt to change the way we do research. By pulling together different groups with different types of expertise, we can accomplish things that would be impossible for even a very large single lab," said Seaman, chief of immunology at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and UCSF professor of medicine and microbiology. And unlike most research projects, scientists in the Alliance will publish their data on the Internet immediately after it has been analyzed, instead of waiting to publish peer-reviewed papers. Alliance researchers have also agreed to give up intellectual property rights to the data. According to Al Gilman, director of the Alliance and a pharmacologist at University of Texas Southwestern, any researcher who has a computer and Internet access will be able to access the data freely, and combine it with their own research to pursue new medical treatments more intelligently.

The Alliance has assigned two key roles to the San Francisco VAMC core lab, called the Laboratory for Development of Signaling Assays. The researchers will help to develop the experiments and methods that that other labs will use to explore the cell signaling pathways, and they will try to confirm the results of successful experiments performed in the Dallas core.

The Alliance will focus the project on two types of mouse cells: heart muscle cells, and antibody-producing cells of the immune system known as B lymphocytes, said Seaman. The interactions among signaling proteins in mice are often almost identical to those in humans.

Researchers in the Alliance first will attempt to understand signaling in normal cells, Simpson said. They w
'"/>

Contact: Kevin Boyd
kboyd@pubaff.ucsf.edu
415-476-8429
University of California - San Francisco
17-Sep-2000