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Two Rice bioengineers win NIH Director’s New Innovator awards

Two Rice University bioengineers received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award (NIA) for creative research projects…

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Two Rice University bioengineers received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award (NIA) for creative research projects demonstrating broad impact potential.

Credit: (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

Two Rice University bioengineers received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award (NIA) for creative research projects demonstrating broad impact potential.

Part of the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, NIA awards support early-career investigators with ambitious, unconventional project proposals “in any area of biomedical, behavioral or social science research relevant to the NIH mission,” according to the agency’s website.

Rice’s Jerzy Szablowski and Julea Vlassakis will use the grants for their individual projects. Szablowski is developing a noninvasive, high-resolution method of mapping gene expression, and Vlassakis is studying complex, single-cell level processes and interactions in a model of pediatric bone cancer.

It is the first time that Rice researchers received the distinction.

“It’s like lightning struck the same spot twice,” Vlassakis said, noting the highly competitive selection process. Szablowski added that the awards are “pretty unique compared to typical NIH grants,” offering a greater amount of freedom to explore and innovate.

“Science can be quite unpredictable, so this allows us to take greater risks that could lead to transformative outcomes,” he said.

Szablowski’s research project is focused on developing synthetic markers carried in the bloodstream that relay detailed information on how genes get expressed in the brain. Known as “Released Markers of Activity” or RMAs, these reporters can provide information on as few as 100 cells or fewer, making them a high-sensitivity tool applicable to a variety of monitoring purposes.

“Gene expression underlies a lot of different biological processes,” said Szablowski, an assistant professor of bioengineering. “But because this process takes place inside cells, you can’t spy on it unless you go inside the cell and mash it up and analyze its contents. This is not ideal when you’re trying to keep track of something that’s happening deep inside tissue over time.

“The ability to monitor gene expression with a blood test would allow you to track how a single area of tissue changes over time and learn, for example, what makes some people susceptible to developing an addiction or an illness like Parkinson’s.”

RMAs are especially useful for surveilling parts of the body that are difficult or dangerous to sample, like the spinal cord or the brain.

“We have tools to noninvasively deliver genes to tissues,” Szablowski said. “This tool makes it possible to measure the gene expression noninvasively in a way that simply wasn’t possible beforehand.”

The markers can also be used to track neuronal activity to assess the effect of certain medications or to study how the brain processes pain or anxiety. This could potentially allow researchers to more accurately diagnose pain or anxiety disorders and lead to more effective therapies.

“We’re particularly interested in applications of this kind of recording in anxiety-related disorders,” Szablowski said. “RMAs will allow us to measure how the brain responds to different anxiety-inducing environments and to compare these responses.”

The funding enables Szablowski to work on increasing the sensitivity of the synthetic markers to the single-cell level and on diversifying the range of physiological processes they monitor.

Vlassakis will use the grant to study how cancerous cells and immune cells interact, looking to shed light on the mechanisms that allow tumor cells to evade or repel immune defenses. Her work will focus specifically on Ewing sarcoma, the second most common pediatric bone cancer.

“We’ll study the interplay between cells that leave from the tumor and spread elsewhere in the body and the immune system, which should be able to recognize those cells as not normal and shut down the process,” said Vlassakis, an assistant professor of bioengineering and a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Scholar. “But, in fact, immune cells don’t do a very good job of identifying spreading cancer cells.”

Vlassakis seeks to recreate the kinds of intercellular interactions that take place as a tumor is spreading using detailed, three-dimensional models that replicate the tumor microenvironment.

“There really hasn’t been a model for Ewing sarcoma that encompasses the tumor, the immune cells and a material that best mimics bone environment,” Vlassakis said.

Vlassakis is also developing ways to extract individual cells from the models and analyze their make-up and behaviors at the protein level.

“We care about measuring single cells because there’s some variation from cell to cell that can be meaningful in terms of which cells are the ones aggressively invading the environment and driving the cancer to spread versus the less migratory cells,” Vlassakis said. “Ultimately, those cells will have distinct proteins that they’re expressing that are helping them carry out their specific function.”

Understanding individual differences between cells may help uncover ways to interrupt metastatic processes, Vlassakis said. But in order to analyze them, she has to lure the cells into tiny devices designed to measure the proteins they express, their structure and more.

“By sprinkling in some factors that the cells are known to gravitate towards, we’re aiming to get them to migrate into microwells that we design that are part of our single-cell protein-measurement devices,” Vlassakis said. “We’re really interested in integrating single-cell measurement technologies as we probe the biology of cells in these tumor models.”

The technologies Vlassakis is working on could be used to measure and observe other types of cells, laying the groundwork for more fine-grained analyses of various other cancers and disease states such as autoimmune disorders.

“We’re just learning more and more about the importance and really mystifying nature of the immune system,” Vlassakis said. “Getting this award is a great honor, and it’s really exciting to get the resources and time to delve more deeply into this research.”

-30-

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Award information:

“Monitoring neuronal activity with a blood test – Released Markers of Activity (RMA)” | National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering | Principal Investigator: Jerzy Szablowski | Project number: 1DP2EB035905-01
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/tqAPqmyRFUCr72wLKQRQNw/project-details/10687503

“Deep phenotyping of fusion oncoprotein-driven pediatric cancer metastasis with single-cell proteomics” | National Cancer Institute | Principal Investigator: Julea Vlassakis | Project number: 1DP2CA290802-01
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/tqAPqmyRFUCr72wLKQRQNw/project-details/10687394

Image downloads:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2023/09/230925_NIH_Fitlow_7811.jpg
CAPTION: Julea Vlassakis (left) and Jerzy Szablowski have won the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2023/10/230925_NIH_Fitlow_7802.jpg
CAPTION: Jerzy Szablowski is an assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2023/09/230925_NIH_Fitlow_7794.jpg
CAPTION: Julea Vlassakis is an assistant professor of bioengineering and a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Scholar. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

Related stories:

DARPA grant will fund hunt for drug that can keep people warm:
https://news.rice.edu/news/2023/darpa-grant-will-fund-hunt-drug-can-keep-people-warm

Rice bioengineer seeks better signals from cells:
https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/rice-bioengineer-seeks-better-signals-cells

Szablowski receives Michael J. Fox grant for Parkinson’s Research:
https://bioengineering.rice.edu/news/szablowski-receives-michael-j-fox-grant-parkinsons-research

Bioengineering department adds single-cell expert via CPRIT grant:
https://news.rice.edu/news/2021/bioengineering-department-adds-single-cell-expert-cprit-grant

Links:

Department of Bioengineering: https://bioengineering.rice.edu/
Microtechnologies Laboratory for Pediatric Oncology: https://vlassakislab.rice.edu/
Laboratory for Noninvasive Neuroengineering: https://www.szablowskilab.org/
Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT): https://www.cprit.texas.gov/

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,240 undergraduates and 3,972 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

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3 hours ago

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March 9, 2024

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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Mortgage rates fall as labor market normalizes

Jobless claims show an expanding economy. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

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19 hours ago

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March 8, 2024

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Everyone was waiting to see if this week’s jobs report would send mortgage rates higher, which is what happened last month. Instead, the 10-year yield had a muted response after the headline number beat estimates, but we have negative job revisions from previous months. The Federal Reserve’s fear of wage growth spiraling out of control hasn’t materialized for over two years now and the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9%. For now, we can say the labor market isn’t tight anymore, but it’s also not breaking.

The key labor data line in this expansion is the weekly jobless claims report. Jobless claims show an expanding economy that has not lost jobs yet. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

From the Fed: In the week ended March 2, initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits were flat, at 217,000. The four-week moving average declined slightly by 750, to 212,250


Below is an explanation of how we got here with the labor market, which all started during COVID-19.

1. I wrote the COVID-19 recovery model on April 7, 2020, and retired it on Dec. 9, 2020. By that time, the upfront recovery phase was done, and I needed to model out when we would get the jobs lost back.

2. Early in the labor market recovery, when we saw weaker job reports, I doubled and tripled down on my assertion that job openings would get to 10 million in this recovery. Job openings rose as high as to 12 million and are currently over 9 million. Even with the massive miss on a job report in May 2021, I didn’t waver.

Currently, the jobs openings, quit percentage and hires data are below pre-COVID-19 levels, which means the labor market isn’t as tight as it once was, and this is why the employment cost index has been slowing data to move along the quits percentage.  

2-US_Job_Quits_Rate-1-2

3. I wrote that we should get back all the jobs lost to COVID-19 by September of 2022. At the time this would be a speedy labor market recovery, and it happened on schedule, too

Total employment data

4. This is the key one for right now: If COVID-19 hadn’t happened, we would have between 157 million and 159 million jobs today, which would have been in line with the job growth rate in February 2020. Today, we are at 157,808,000. This is important because job growth should be cooling down now. We are more in line with where the labor market should be when averaging 140K-165K monthly. So for now, the fact that we aren’t trending between 140K-165K means we still have a bit more recovery kick left before we get down to those levels. 




From BLS: Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 275,000 in February, and the unemployment rate increased to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, in government, in food services and drinking places, in social assistance, and in transportation and warehousing.

Here are the jobs that were created and lost in the previous month:

IMG_5092

In this jobs report, the unemployment rate for education levels looks like this:

  • Less than a high school diploma: 6.1%
  • High school graduate and no college: 4.2%
  • Some college or associate degree: 3.1%
  • Bachelor’s degree or higher: 2.2%
IMG_5093_320f22

Today’s report has continued the trend of the labor data beating my expectations, only because I am looking for the jobs data to slow down to a level of 140K-165K, which hasn’t happened yet. I wouldn’t categorize the labor market as being tight anymore because of the quits ratio and the hires data in the job openings report. This also shows itself in the employment cost index as well. These are key data lines for the Fed and the reason we are going to see three rate cuts this year.

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January…

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19 hours ago

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March 8, 2024

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January jobs report was the "most ridiculous in recent history" but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush. 

What happened? Let's take a closer look.

On the surface, it was (almost) another blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, or rather just one bank out of 76 expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in February the US unexpectedly added 275K jobs, with just one research analyst (from Dai-Ichi Research) expecting a higher number.

Some context: after last month's record 4-sigma beat, today's print was "only" 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR... and now in the US, apparently.

Before we go any further, a quick note on what last month we said was "the most ridiculous jobs report in recent history": it appears the BLS read our comments and decided to stop beclowing itself. It did that by slashing last month's ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K,  a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!

Of course, that does not mean that this month's jobs print won't be revised lower: it will be, and not just that month but every other month until the November election because that's the only tool left in the Biden admin's box: pretend the economic and jobs are strong, then revise them sharply lower the next month, something we pointed out first last summer and which has not failed to disappoint once.

To be fair, not every aspect of the jobs report was stellar (after all, the BLS had to give it some vague credibility). Take the unemployment rate, after flatlining between 3.4% and 3.8% for two years - and thus denying expectations from Sahm's Rule that a recession may have already started - in February the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped to 3.9%, the highest since February 2022 (with Black unemployment spiking by 0.3% to 5.6%, an indicator which the Biden admin will quickly slam as widespread economic racism or something).

And then there were average hourly earnings, which after surging 0.6% MoM in January (since revised to 0.5%) and spooking markets that wage growth is so hot, the Fed will have no choice but to delay cuts, in February the number tumbled to just 0.1%, the lowest in two years...

... for one simple reason: last month's average wage surge had nothing to do with actual wages, and everything to do with the BLS estimate of hours worked (which is the denominator in the average wage calculation) which last month tumbled to just 34.1 (we were led to believe) the lowest since the covid pandemic...

... but has since been revised higher while the February print rose even more, to 34.3, hence why the latest average wage data was once again a product not of wages going up, but of how long Americans worked in any weekly period, in this case higher from 34.1 to 34.3, an increase which has a major impact on the average calculation.

While the above data points were examples of some latent weakness in the latest report, perhaps meant to give it a sheen of veracity, it was everything else in the report that was a problem starting with the BLS's latest choice of seasonal adjustments (after last month's wholesale revision), which have gone from merely laughable to full clownshow, as the following comparison between the monthly change in BLS and ADP payrolls shows. The trend is clear: the Biden admin numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP (which directly logs employment numbers at the company level and is far more accurate), shows an accelerating slowdown.

But it's more than just the Biden admin hanging its "success" on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge... such as the growing unprecedented divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) survey and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 275K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped for the third straight month (and 4 in the past 5), this time by 184K (from 161.152K to 160.968K).

This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has not budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.

There's more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of "new jobs" has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that's great... until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).

Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the new jobs have been part-time jobs!

But wait there's even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!

The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers...

Source: St Louis Fed FRED Native Born and Foreign Born

... but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since June 2018!

This is a huge issue - especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border...

... and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened - i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

Which is also why Biden's handlers will do everything in their power to insure there is no official recession before November... and why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get even more ridiculous.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2024 - 13:30

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