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Biodesign Institute brings world-class labs to ASU

Institute improves quality of life through discovery

When the Biodesign Institute opens the doors of its first new building Dec. 14, it will mark a significant milestone for Arizona State University. By adding some of the most advanced research laboratories in the nation, it will mark a major step toward fulfilling President Michael Crow’s vision for ASU becoming a New American University.

The 170,000-square-foot building, the first of four that will make up the Biodesign Institute, will be home to 285 researchers and eight of the institute’s initial 10 centers. The building itself is sleek-looking, and the labs incorporate the latest innovations in design and functionality to promote scientific inquiry and collaboration. 

“This building and the Biodesign Institute are visible signs of where we want to take ASU to make it one of the great American universities of the 21st century,” Crow says. “Researchers at the Biodesign Institute will advance scientific knowledge, but do so to advance society and help improve the quality of life for all people.

“Because the research that will be done in the institute is advanced, the researchers need an advanced facility to perform their work. The first building of the Biodesign Institute is one of the best in lab design and functionality,” Crow says.

Collaboration is one of the themes for the building. Inside, every design element tries to foster collaboration and the exchange of ideas, from the visually open spaces in the interior, to meeting nooks located throughout the building, to the large number of whiteboards scattered throughout the building. But it took the support of many ASU departments, Arizona legislators, Valley industry and research entities to make this foray into the lucrative, yet highly competitive, field of biomedical sciences a reality. 

Because Arizona lags behind other bioscience “corridors” (Boston, the Silicon Valley and San Diego), and because Arizona was starting from scratch, it was determined that if the state was serious about the biosciences, it needed to make significant investments. ASU’s own investment funded construction of the first of the four interconnected buildings that will comprise the institute. The Arizona Legislature passed a research infrastructure bill that funded construction of the second phase, which will be completed next fall.

“The Biodesign Institute is the flagship entity intended to launch ASU into the ranks of a pre-eminent research university,” says Biodesign Institute Director George Poste. “It had its origins in the imperatives Michael Crow outlined in his vision for a New American University, such as an entrepreneurial focus and intellectual fusion.”

Poste’s own job is to build the institute in what he says is the next conceptual shift in the evolution of the life sciences: the convergence of biology, computing and engineering.

The mission of the institute is to advance innovations for improving human health and quality of life through use-inspired biosystems research and effective, multidisciplinary partnerships. Researchers at the institute will tackle some of the thorniest issues facing humans today, ranging from the development of vaccines to treat a myriad of emerging viruses, to the integration of devices that can restore movement to those who are paraplegic or quadriplegic; from new laboratory instruments that work on the scale of nanometers (a thousandth the width of a human hair) to understanding how genes evolve and change over time; from design of sensor technology that could assure the safety of the foods we eat, to new miniature biology-based devices that could be the basis of generations of compact and highly powerful computers.

“I think one of the great advances of the coming decade will be the ability to combine the cognitive capacity of biological molecules, to recognize any other class of biological molecules and to link those into miniature devices,” says Poste, who recently was named R&D Magazine’s Scientist of the Year.

Behind much of the basic philosophy of the Biodesign Institute is the goal of replicating what is found in nature. Employing the “design principles” of nature, which have evolved over millions of years, could lead to a range of extraordinarily elegant solutions to what look like intractable problems.

For example, understanding how plants generate sugars could lead to new pathways, whereby plants can be used to generate human-like proteins and possibly lead to an effective means of producing proteins that are medically important and inexpensive to produce. Or developing the technology to utilize plant-based vaccines that can be freeze-dried and distributed to areas of the world where normal vaccines, with their need for syringe-delivery and refrigeration, cannot be effective.

Both are research projects at the institute.

By taking cues from nature, it is expected that researchers of the Biodesign Institute will find the innovative solutions to the complex problems of today. But in their quest, the scientists need the infrastructure, the high-tech lab space, to succeed.

In other words, these advances would not be possible without a world-class facility to conduct the research – a facility like the first building of the Biodesign Institute.

By Skip Derra. Derra, with Marketing & Strategic Communications, can be reached at (480) 965-4823 or (skip.derra@asu.edu).