If you’re like me, your New Years resolutions included a proclamation to get caught up and stay on top of all your work, home and family obligations, without investing in caffeine pills to do so. Getting more done in less time is a universal dilemma and especially problematic to small business owners. In any industry, biotech being no different, time and cost savings can be made by investing in the proper computational tools. This isn't always obvious to small businesses used to going it alone, but from the very beginning, your startup business plan should include an strategy for operations and how time will be managed. As a small business owner myself, I know I often brush off the idea that I need a complex tax accounting program, but at the end of each fiscal year I spend hours balancing expenses and earnings, when I could have all that data at my fingertips with the push of a button.

Large pharmaceutical corporations optimize their operations with databases for everything from purchases to bioreactor pH to managing their pipelines. Tools like XML authoring save hours of repetitive changes to SOPs, labels and other documents. Why should a startup be any different? In fact, startups generally need to do more with less people, and those people often have to be proficient at a number of different skills. These are reasons enough to aim high in terms of efficiency and utilizing specialized tools for all aspects of your business management.

Being a scientist means getting to use lots of funny words that other people don't come across under ordinary circumstances. I've made a list of some of my favourites. Feel free to add your own!

If you are good at both math and science and looking for career options in biotechnology, there are several ways to utilize all your skills. One occupation is as a statistician for a biomedical/pharmaceutical company or CSO. Statisticians are needed to analyze data from drug trials, in particular to perform meta-analyses of large sets of data from multiple trials.

Researcher have found a new bioindicator for cancer-causing molecules, based on their interactions with DNA. A team lead by Michael Strano of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has developed a type of nanoparticle, called carbon nanotubes, coated with DNA that, when injected into the body, interact with targeted molecules and fluoresce in the near-infrared range of the spectrum.

The method, published in December 2008 in Nature Nanotechnology, describes validation ex-situ using six genotoxic analytes (either drugs or reactive oxygen species). They also describe the uptake and activity of the carbon nanotubes in live 3T3 cells.

According to interviewers, Strano considers the nanoparticles safe because they are coated with DNA. Does this mean they presume the particles won't cause cancer themselves by interfering with the DNA double helix of the cellular genome? The safety of nanoparticles is a subject of increasing importance to toxicologists and regulators. In fact, the publication by Strano et al. came out barely one month after headlines by Reuters screamed of an "urgent" need for nanomaterials regulation.

_Sources:

Steenhuysen, J. Nanotech sensor detects toxins in living cells. Reuters, Monday December 15, 2008.

Kahn, M. Urgent regulation needed for nanomaterials: experts. Reuters, Wednesday November 12, 2008

Heller et al. Multimodal optical sensing and analyte specificity using single-walled carbon nanotubes. Nature Nanotechnology, doi: 10.1038/nnano.2008.369.