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Power of 3

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Joseph Schwartz, right, with a collaborator, Daichi Shimbo, the director of the Translational Lab at the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center, in front of a poster they presented at an annual meeting of the American Society of Hypertension in New York City in 2013.Photo by John Booth, III

By Daniel Dunaief

The cardiovascular skies may be clear and sunny, but there could also be a storm lurking behind them. About one in eight people who get a normal reading for their blood pressure have what’s called masked hypertension.

That’s the finding in a recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology led by Joseph Schwartz, a professor of psychiatry and sociology at Stony Brook University and a lecturer of medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center. Schwartz said his research suggests that some people may need closer monitoring to pick up the kinds of warning signs that might lead to serious conditions.

“The literature clearly shows that those with masked hypertension are more likely to have subclinical disease and are at an increased risk of a future heart attack or stroke,” Schwartz explained in an email.

Tyla Yurgel, Schwartz’s lab manager from 2005 to 2016 who is now working in the Department of Psychiatry, wears the ambulatory blood pressure cuff that was a part of the study. Photo by Arthur Stone

Schwartz and his colleagues measured ambulatory blood pressure, in which test subjects wore a device that records blood pressure about every half hour, collecting a set of readings as a person goes about the ordinary tasks involved in his or her life. Through this reading, he was able, with some statistical monitoring, to determine that about 17 million Americans have masked hypertension, a term he coined in 2002.

Schwartz, who started studying ambulatory blood pressure in the late 1980s, has been actively exploring masked hypertension for over a decade. Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is more effective at predicting subclinical disease such as left ventricular hypertrophy and the risk of future cardiovascular events, said Schwartz. “There was some rapidly growing evidence it was a better predictor of who would have a heart attack or stroke than in the clinic, even when the blood pressure in the clinic was properly measured,” he said.

To be sure, the expense of 24-hour monitoring of ambulatory blood pressure for everyone is unwieldy and unrealistic, Schwartz said. The list price for having an ambulatory blood pressure recording is $200 to $400, he said. Wearing the device is also a nuisance, which most people wouldn’t accept unless it was likely to be clinically useful or, as he suggested, they were paid as a research participant.

Schwartz said he used a model similar to one an economist might employ. Economists, he said, develop simulation models all the time. He said over 900 people visited the clinic three times as a part of the study. The researchers took three blood pressure readings at each visit. The average of those readings was more reliable than a single reading.

The study participants then provided 30 to 40 blood pressure readings in a day and averaged those numbers. He collected separate data for periods when people were awake or asleep. A patient close to the line for hypertension in the clinical setting was the most likely to cross the boundaries that define hypertension. “You don’t have that far to go to cross that boundary,” Schwartz said.

After analyzing the information, he came up with a rate of about 12.3 percent for masked hypertension of those with a normal clinic blood pressure. The rate was even higher, at 15.7 percent, when the researchers used an average of the nine readings taken during the patient’s first three study visits.

William White, a professor of medicine at the Calhoun Cardiology Center at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington was a reviewer for one of these major studies. “They are excellent,” said White, who has known Schwartz for about a decade. “We should be monitoring blood pressure more outside of the clinical environment.”

Indeed, patients have become increasingly interested in checking their blood pressure outside of the doctor’s offices. “We have a 200 to 300 percent increase in requests for ambulatory blood pressure monitoring from our clinical lab during the last five to ten years — in all age groups, genders and ethnicities,” explained White.

The challenge, however, is that tracking hypertension closely for every possible patient is difficult clinically and financially. “There are no obvious clinical markers for masked hypertension other than unexpectedly high self-blood pressure or unexplained hypertensive target organ damage,” White added.

Schwartz himself has a family history that includes cardiovascular challenges. His father, Richard Schwartz, who conducted nonmedical research, has a long history of cardiovascular disease and had a heart attack at the age of 53. His grandfather had a fatal heart attack at the same age. When Schwartz reached 53, he said he had “second thoughts,” and wanted to get through that year without having a heart attack. He’s monitoring his own health carefully and is the first one in his family to take blood pressure medication.

Schwartz, who grew up in Ithaca, New York, came to Stony Brook University in 1987. He called his upbringing a “nonstressful place to grow up.” He now lives in East Setauket with his wife Madeline Taylor, who is a retired school teacher from the Middle Country school district. The couple has two children. Lia lives in Westchester and works at Graham Windham School and Jeremy lives in Chelsea and works for Credit Suisse.

As for his work, Schwartz said the current study on masked hypertension was a part of a broader effort to categorize and understand pre-clinical indications of heart problems and to track the development of hypertension.

Now that he has an estimate of how many people might have masked hypertension, he plans to explore the data further. That analysis will examine whether having masked hypertension puts a patient at risk of having cardiovascular disease or other circulatory challenges. “We are very interested in whether certain personality characteristics and/or circumstances (stressful work situation) makes it more likely that one will have masked hypertension,” he explained.

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David Matus in his lab at Stony Brook University. Photo courtesy of SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

At first look, the connection between a roundworm, a zebrafish and cancer appears distant. After all, what can a transparent worm or a tropical fish native to India and the surrounding areas reveal about a disease that ravages its victims and devastates their families each year?

Plenty, when talking to David Matus and Benjamin Martin, assistant professors in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University whose labs are next door to each other. The scientific tandem recently received the 2017 Damon Runyon–Rachleff Innovation Award, which includes a two-year grant of $300,000, followed by another renewable grant of $300,000 to continue this work.

In the first of a two-part series, Times Beacon Record Newspapers will profile the work of Matus this week. Next week the Power of Three will feature Martin’s research on zebrafish.

Long ago a scientist studying dolphin cognition in Hawaii, Matus has since delved into the world of genetic development, studying the roundworm, or, as its known by its scientific name, Caenorhabditis elegans. An adult of this worm, which lives in temperate soil environments, measures about 1 millimeter, which means it would take about 70 of them lined up end to end to equal the length of an average earthworm.

From left, David Matus and Benjamin Martin. Photo courtesy of SBU

Matus specifically is interested in exploring how a cell called the anchor cell in a roundworm invades through the basement membrane, initiating a uterine-vulval connection that allows adult roundworms to pass eggs to the outside environment. He is searching for the signals and genetic changes that give the anchor cell its invasive properties.

Indeed, it was through a serendipitous discovery that he observed that the loss of a single gene results in anchor cells that divide but don’t invade. These dividing cells are still anchor cells, but they have lost the capacity to breach the basement membrane. That, Matus said, has led the team to explore the ways cancer has to decide whether to become metastatic and invade other cells or proliferate, producing more copies of itself. In some cancers, their hypothesis suggests, the cells either divide or invade and can’t do both at the same time. It could be a cancer multitasking bottleneck.

Mark Martindale, the director of the Whitney Laboratory at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was Matus’ doctoral advisor, said a cell’s decision about when to attach to other cells and when to let go involves cell polarity, the energetics of motility and a host of other factors that are impossible to study in a mammal.

The roundworm presents a system “in which it is possible to manipulate gene expression, and their clear optical properties make them ideal for imaging living cell behavior,” Martindale explained in an email. Seeing these developmental steps allows one to “understand a variety of biomedical issues.”

Last year, Matus and Martin were finalists for the Runyon–Rachleff prize. In between almost getting the award and this year, the team conducted imaging experiments in collaboration with Eric Betzig, a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia. Betzig not only brings expertise in optical imaging technologies but also has won a Nobel Prize.

“We really appreciate the opportunity to work with [Betzig] and his lab members on this project,” said Matus, who also published a review paper in Trends in Cell Biology that explored the link between cell cycle regulation and invasion. He and his graduate student Abraham Kohrman explored the literature to find cases that showed the same switching that he has been exploring with the roundworm.

Yusuf Hannun, the director of the Stony Brook Cancer Center, said the work is highly relevant to cancer as it explores fundamental issues about how cells behave when they invade, which is a key property of cancer cells. Hannun said the tandem’s hypothesis about division and invasion is “consistent with previous understandings but I believe this is the first time it is proposed formally,” he suggested in an email.

Their work could apply to invasive epithelial cancers, suggested Scott Powers, a professor in the Department of Pathology at Stony Brook and the director of Clinical Cancer Genomics at the Cancer Center. That could include breast, colon, prostate, lung and pancreatic cancers, noted Powers, who is a recent collaborator with Matus and Martin.

The additional funding allows Matus and Martin to focus more of their time on their research and less on applying for other grants, Matus said.

Back row from left, David Matus and his father in law Doug Killebrew; front row from left, Maile 9, Bria, 7, and Matus’ wife Deirdre Killebrew. Photo by Richard Row

Matus lives in East Setauket with his wife Deirdre Killebrew, who works for Applied DNA Sciences. The couple met when they were working with dolphins in Hawaii. Matus’ first paper was on dolphin cognition, although he switched to evolutionary and developmental biology when he worked in Martindale’s lab at the University of Hawaii.

Martindale described Matus as prolific during his time in his lab, publishing numerous papers that were “profoundly important in our continued understanding of the relationship between genotype and phenotype and the evolution of biological complexity,” Martindale wrote in an email.

Following in Martindale’s footsteps, Matus replaced his middle name, Samuel, in publications with a Q. Martindale said several of his colleagues adopted the phony Q to pay homage to the attitude that drove them to pursue careers in science. Matus has now passed that Q on to Korhman, who is his first graduate student.

Matus and Killibrew have two daughters, Bria and Maille, who are 7 and 9 years old. Their children have a last name that combines each of their surnames, Matubrew. Matus said he feels “fortunate when I got here three years ago that they had me set up my lab next to [Martin]. That gave us an instantaneous atmosphere for collaboration.”

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By Daniel Dunaief

 

Adrian Krainer with Emma Larson earlier this year. Photo from Dianne Larson

The prognosis hit Dianne Larson of Middle Island hard. Within three weeks, anxiety attacks, a lack of sleep and fear caused her weight to plummet from 135 to 120 pounds. She found out her daughter Emma, who was 17 months old at the time, had a potentially fatal genetic condition called spinal muscular atrophy in which the motor nerve cells of the spinal cord progressively weaken. Normally, the SMN1 gene produces the survival of motor neuron protein, which, as its name suggests, helps maintain motor neurons. People with SMA, which has four types and severity, produce a lower amount of the functional protein.

“My mind went to the darkest of dark places,” said Larson, whose daughter couldn’t crawl or sit up to eat. “There was no hope. There was nothing I could do.”

At the time of Emma’s diagnosis, there was no treatment for a disease that is the leading genetic cause of death among infants and affects about 1 in 10,000 newborns. Thanks to the work of Adrian Krainer, a professor and program chair of cancer and molecular biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, that changed early enough to alter the expectations for Emma and children around the world battling a genetic condition that causes progressive weakness and can make moving and even breathing difficult.

Turning to a back up gene called SMN2, Krainer hoped to fix a problem with the way that gene is spliced. On SMN2, exon 7 is normally skipped and the resulting protein has a different sequence at the end. Krainer developed an antisense olignocleotide that binds to a sequence in the intro following exon 7, blocking the splicing receptor. The treatment, which is called Spinraza, helps guide the splicing machinery, which carries out one of the steps in gene expression that is necessary to build a functional protein.

The Larson family of Middle Island, from left, Dianne, Emma and Matthew. Photo from Dianne Larson

Larson had heard of Krainer’s work and was eager to see if his success with animal models of the disease would translate for humans. As soon as Emma reached her second birthday, Larson enrolled her daughter in a clinical trial for Spinraza. After her daughter had a few shots, Larson was stunned by the change. “I was in the master bedroom and she was in the den and I heard a voice getting closer,” Larson recalls. “Next thing I know, she was in my bedroom. I couldn’t believe she crawled from the den to the bedroom. I put her in the den and told her to do it again,” which she did.

The SMA community and Krainer received an early holiday present in late December when the Food and Drug Administration not only approved the treatment, but it also gave doctors the green light to prescribe it for all types of SMA and for patients of all ages. While the SMA community, doctors and Krainer have been delighted with the FDA approval, the excitement has been tempered by concerns about the price tag Biogen, which manufactures and commercializes Spinraza and funded the drug’s development, has placed on the treatment.

For the first full year of injections, the drug costs $750,000. Every year after that will cost $375,000, which Biogen has said publicly is consistent with the pricing for other drugs for so-called orphan diseases, which affect a much smaller percentage of the population.

Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit advocate for affordable medicines, sent a letter to the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services, seeking an investigation. The letter claims that the inventor and maker of Spinraza failed to disclose that the treatment received federal funding. KEI urges the government to use that alleged disclosure failure to end the patent and authorize a generic manufacture of the treatment.

Biogen didn’t return a call and email for comment. Patients and their families, meanwhile, are looking for immediate access to a life-altering treatment. “To be honest, I really don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Larson, whose daughter has four injections left as part of the extension trial soon. “I’m hoping insurance will cover it.”

Insurer Anthem announced late in January that the treatment was only medically necessary for patients with Type 1 SMA, which include people diagnosed with the disease within six months of birth. Anthem created a pay for performance model, which will require patients or their families to prove that the treatment is improving the lives of the recipients.

Larson said she has been in touch with a personal liaison at Biogen, which has been “helpful and supportive,” she said. “They have been going out of their way to reach out to the community to make sure everyone gets access.”

Larson, who is a financial advisor, said she understands the need for the company to generate a profit. “A lot of money goes into” research and development Larson said. “If they’re not gong to make money, they’re not going to” support the efforts to create a treatment.

Emma Larson will be turning 4 this month. Photo from Dianne Larson

Joe Slay, who is the chairman of FightSMA, a group he and his wife Martha founded in 1991 after they learned their son Andrew had Type 2 SMA, sounded hopeful that people who need this treatment will receive it. “I understand there’s constructive, good conversations between insurance companies and Biogen,” Slay said. “We’re monitoring that.”

While Andrew, who is now 30, considers the potential benefits of Spinraza, Slay is pleased the treatment is an option for people and is proud of Krainer’s work.Krainer is “by any definition of the word a hero,” Slay said. “He’s taken his natural gifts, his brilliance in science, his discipline year in and year out approach to his work and has applied himself 100 percent.”

Slay and FightSMA, which has raised over $8 million since its founding, helped provide seed money to Krainer more than 15 years ago, attracting a promising scientist to what was then an intractable medical challenge.

Tom Maniatis, who is the chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University, said Krainer, who did his doctoral work in Maniatis’s lab, showed considerable scientific promise early in his career. Krainer “clearly had the intelligence, drive and experimental skills to make important contributions,” Maniatis said. His work is “a perfect example of how deep basic science studies can lead to profound understanding of a disease mechanism and that, in turn to the development of a treatment,” explained Maniatis in an email.

Within Krainer’s own family, there is a connection to patient care. Krainer’s daughter Emily, who is a pediatric neurology resident at Rochester, may one day prescribe a treatment her father developed. “It will be quite something for me if she eventually prescribes Spinraza to one of her patients,” Krainer said. Even as other scientists and companies like AveXis continue to search for ways to treat SMA, Krainer enhances and refines his research.

“We continue to work on understanding aspects of SMA pathophysiology, the role of SMN levels outside the central nervous system and the potential for prenatal therapy,” he explained in an email. “We are also working on antisense therapies for other genetic diseases and cancer.”

Larson, who is overjoyed with her daughter’s progress, calls Krainer her “superhero” who “saved my daughter’s life.” “It’s such a different feeling when you know you can do something,” she said. When she found out that the FDA approved the treatment, it was “the best day.”

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By Daniel Dunaief

Born in Berlin just before World War II, Eckard Wimmer has dedicated himself in the last 20 years to producing something that would benefit humankind. A distinguished professor in molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University, Wimmer is hoping to produce vaccines to prevent the spread of viruses ranging from influenza, to Zika, to dengue fever, each of which can have significant health consequences for people around the world.

Using the latest technology, Wimmer, Steffen Mueller and J. Robert Coleman started a company called Codagenix in Melville. They aim to use software to alter the genes of viruses to make vaccines. “The technology we developed is unique,” said Wimmer, who serves as senior scientific advisor and co-founder of the new company.

Mueller is the president and chief science officer and Coleman is the chief operating officer. Both worked for years in Wimmer’s lab. Despite the potential to create vaccines that could treat people around the world facing the prospect of debilitating illnesses, Wimmer and his collaborators weren’t able to attract a pharmaceutical company willing to invest in a new technology that, he estimates, will take millions of dollars to figure out its value.“Nobody with a lot of money may want to take the risk, so we overcame that barrier right now,” he said.

Eckard Wimmer in his lab. Photo by Naif Mohammed Almojarthi

Codagenix has $6.2 million in funding. The National Institutes of Health initially contributed $600,000. The company scored an additional $1.4 million from NIH. It also raised $4.2 million from venture capital, which includes $4 million from TopSpin and $100,000 from Accelerate Long Island and a similar amount from the Center for Biotechnology at Stony Brook University.

Stony Brook University recently entered an exclusive licensing agreement with Codagenix to commercialize this viral vaccine platform. Codagenix is scheduled to begin phase I trials on a vaccine for seasonal influenza this year.

The key to this technology came from a SBU collaboration that included Wimmer, Bruce Futcher in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology and Steven Skiena in the Department of Computer Science. The team figured out a way to use gene manipulation and computer algorithms to alter the genes in a virus. The change weakens the virus, giving the attack dog elements of the immune system a strong scent to seek out and destroy any real viruses in the event of exposure.

Wimmer explained that the process starts with a thorough analysis of a virus’s genes. Once scientists determine the genetic code, they can introduce hundreds or even thousands of changes in the nucleic acids that make up the sequence. A computer helps select the areas to alter, which is a rapid process and, in a computer model, can take only one afternoon. From there, the researchers conduct experiments in tissue culture cells and then move on to experiment on animals, typically mice. This can take six months, which is a short time compared to the classical way, Wimmer said.

At this point, Codagenix has a collaboration with the Universidad de Puerto Rico at the Caribbean Primate Research Center to treat dengue and Zika virus in primates. To be sure, some promising vaccines in the past have been taken off the market because of unexpected side effects or even because they have become ineffective after the virus in the vaccine undergoes mutations that return it to its pathogenic state. Wimmer believes this is unlikely because he is introducing 1,000 changes within a vaccine candidate, which is much higher than other vaccines. In 2000, for example, it was discovered that the polio vaccines involve only five to 50 mutations and that these viruses had a propensity to revert, which was rare, to the type that could cause polio.

Colleagues suggested that this technique was promising. “This approach, given that numerous mutations are involved, has the advantage of both attenuation and genetic stability of the attenuated phenotype,” Charles Rice, the Maurice R. and Corrine P. Greenberg professor in virology at Rockefeller University explained in an email.

While Wimmer is changing the genome, he is not altering the structure of the proteins the attenuated virus produces, which is exactly the same as the virus. This gives the immune system a target it can recognize and destroy that is specific to the virus. Wimmer and his associates are monitoring the effect of the vaccines on mosquitoes that carry and transmit them to humans. “It’s not that we worry about the mosquito getting sick,” he said. “We have to worry whether the mosquito can propagate this virus better than before.” Preliminary results show that this is not the case, he said.

Wimmer said there are many safety precautions the company is taking, including ensuring that the vaccine candidate is safe to administer to humans. Wimmer moved from Berlin to Saxony after his father died when Wimmer was 3. He earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry in 1956 at the University of Rockstock. When he was working on his second postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, he heard a talk on viruses, which brought him into the field.

A resident of Old Field, Wimmer lives with his wife Astrid, a retired English professor at Stony Brook. The couple’s daughter Susanne lives in New Hampshire and has three children, while their son Thomas lives in Portland, Oregon, and has one child. “We’re very happy Long Islanders,” said Wimmer, who likes to be near the ocean and Manhattan.

Through a career spanning over 50 years, Wimmer has won numerous awards and distinctions. He demonstrated the chemical structure of the polio genome and worked on polio pathogenesis and human receptor for polio. He also published the first cell-free creation of a virus.

“This was an amazing result that enabled a number of important mechanistic studies on poliovirus replication,” Rice explained. Wimmer has “always been fearless and innovative, with great enthusiasm for virology and discovery.”

With this new effort, Wimmer feels he will continue in his quest to contributing to humanity.

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From left, Robert Catell, chairman of the board, Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center; Vyacheslov Solovyov; Sergey Gelman, a Stony Brook engineering student; and Yacov Shamash, vice president for economic development at Stony Brook University. Photo from Stony Brook University

By Daniel Dunaief

It’s lighter, cheaper and just as strong. In the age of manufacturing the latest and greatest high-technology parts, that is a compelling combination. Indeed, the Department of Energy recently awarded the Brookhaven Technology Group, a business incubator tenant of the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center at Stony Brook University, $1.15 million to develop a high-temperature superconductor cable with a new architecture. The grant supports the research of Vyacheslav Solovyov, an adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at SBU and the principal investigator at Brookhaven Technology Group.

“Very few projects are funded, so we’re very excited that ours was chosen,” said Paul Farrell, the president at BTG. The potential applications for Solovyov’s Exocable, as the new architecture is called, span a wide range of uses, including in high field magnets for a new breed of accelerator. The work entails creating a high-temperature superconducting cable that is an integral ingredient in creating the superconducting machinery. The BTG process produces a high-temperature superconducting cable after removing the substrate, which is a single-crystal-like material. Solovyov transfers the superconducting layer to a supporting tape that can be engineered for strength and not for crystallinity.

This work reduces the weight of the tape by as much as 70 percent per unit length for the same current capacity. The potential for this new cable is that it can contribute to the growing field of research at Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory on superconductivity, said Jim Smith, assistant vice president of economic development at Stony Brook. “Maybe this is the next industry that replaces the Grummans and the aerospaces that have left,” he said. Semiconductors are of particular interest to manufacturers because they transmit energy with no resistance. Right now, about 6.5 percent of energy transmitted around the United States is lost in distribution wires, Smith said. Maintaining the energy that’s lost in the wires would have “tremendous benefits.”

To be sure, while the research at BTG could contribute to lower cost and improved efficiency in high-temperature superconductivity, there are hurdles to making this process and the applications of it work. For starters, the company needs to produce kilometers of ExoCable. “The challenge is to demonstrate that the properties will be as uniform as they were before the substrate removal,” explained Solovyov, who has been working in superconductivity since 1986.

Recently, Smith said he, Farrell and Solovyov met to discuss the wiring for their facility. “A lot of power and wiring will be installed in the next four to five weeks,” Smith said. Scientists who worked with Solovyov expressed admiration for his work and optimism about his results. Solovyov’s “new activity will definitely advance the long-promised practical application of superconductivity electrical power transmission, as well as in the development of high-field magnets for both industrial and scientific application,” David Welch, a former collaborator and retired senior materials scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, wrote in an email. Welch explained that Solovyov focused on methods for making composites of superconducting material with normally conducting metals in the form of wires, tapes and cables necessary for their practical application. “Such a combination of talents is unusual,” Welch continued. Early on, it was clear “that [Solovyov] was going to become an important member of the scientific staff at BNL.”

Solovyov started working on this process with BTG about a year and a half ago. When he first started collaborating with BTG, the company was working on a superconducting project funded by the army. When that work ended, Solovyov and BTG worked together to submit new proposals to the DOE. According to Solovyov, Stony Brook has been “very helpful in terms of providing facilities and lab space.” Stony Brook’s goal, Smith said, is to help companies like BTG succeed and measures that success in the number of new jobs created in the energy field.

Solovyov, who grew up in the Ukraine, said he has had several breakthroughs in his career. He helped develop a patented technology that can speed up the processing of superconducting materials by a factor of 10. “That has been used in production and I’m very proud of it,” Solovyov said. The professor lives in Rocky Point with his wife Olena Rybak and their two children, Natasha, 19, who attends Suffolk County Community College, and Dennis, 14, who is in high school. Solovyov said he enjoys Long Island, where he can fish for striped bass and bluefish. He pan fries what he catches.

As for his work, Solovyov has four patents and applications for three more. He and Farrell said the company is looking for opportunities for expansion. He is exploring ways to work with large-scale generators and wind turbines. Farrell explained that BTG has ambitions to become a larger company. BTG would “like to become a major contributor in this field,” Farrell said. That could include adding staff and developing more products that can be sold and used worldwide. “If our product is successful, in the sense that it improves the capability of superconductors to be used commercially, we’ll be adding people.” This work will need more funding, which the company plans to get either from the Department of Energy, from private investors or both.

“If you can improve the usefulness of superconductors and reduce the cost of the wire, there’ll be wider use than there is right now,” Farrell said.

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