The research initiative, led by a Stockholm-based study group, selected the UW Center for Commercialization for its ability to produce startup companies with higher survival and growth rates, for success in raising funds for those companies, and for the number of jobs created by its startups, which the index cited as well above the global average.

The New Ventures Facility, located in Fluke Hall, opened in February 2012 as an incubator that provides UW startups with access to critical lab and office space on the UW campus.

In that short time, the Center for Commercialization has provided “exceptional quality to its clients, produced growth companies and high economic impact for the region,” said Dhruv Bhatli, co-founder of the global index.

“For these reasons it has been selected as the emerging business incubator of the year,” Bhatli said.

This year marks the second release of the global index ranking. More than 300 university business incubators in 67 countries participated in this year’s index, compared to 150 incubators in 22 countries included in the inaugural 2013 ranking.

“On the heels of just announcing our record number of 18 new UW startup companies launched in 2014, we are delighted to be named global emerging incubator of the year after only two-and-a-half years of operation,” said Patrick Shelby, director of New Ventures. “We’re not only spinning out more companies, we’re creating stronger startups with higher survival and growth rates that, in turn, are providing jobs and boosting our region’s economic health.”

The New Ventures Facility is one key element in C4C’s larger commercialization initiative dedicated to maximizing UW’s contribution to the Washington state economy by spinning out start-ups that bring to the marketplace innovations in life sciences, clean technology, alternative energy and information technology.

“This global recognition underscores the health of our companies and graduates, and the remarkable success of our many UW innovators, including faculty, students and research staff,” said , the newly named UW vice provost of innovation.

The ranking also enhances the UW’s reputation as a leader “in taking ideas to impact,” said , executive director for commercialization.

“From our No. 1 national ranking in the number of licenses signed and the number of technologies licensed to the increasing number of inventions disclosed, patents filed, and startup companies generated, we are helping to translate scientific discovery into products, services, therapies, diagnostics and cures that can help millions of people worldwide,” Rhoads said.

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Using technology developed by ’s lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering, a team of UW scientists and engineers working at the Applied Physics Laboratory is creating a control system for underwater remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs.

These instruments can perform a variety of undersea tasks too dangerous — or even impossible — for humans, including oil and gas exploration, biohazard clean-up and mining, and environmentally sensitive scientific research.

In June, the UW and BluHaptics team will travel to Washington, D.C. to showcase this technology at the SmartAmerica Challenge, as part of the Smart Emergency Response Systems team. The will be a three-day event, including a White House presentation, a technology exposition and a technical-level meeting.

The UW research team is working with a “submersible manipulator test bed” at the APL, which is made up of specialized, submersible equipment similar to what’s used in the oil and gas industry for offshore operations. This equipment is submerged in a large water tank for a realistic test environment.

“Essentially, we’re combining the spatial awareness of a computer system with the perceptive capability of a human operator,” said��, a senior engineer in the Department of Ocean Engineering and part of the BluHaptics team. “To do this, we use what’s called a haptic device.”

Haptics describes feedback technology that takes advantage of the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations or motions to the user. The haptic device is used both to control the robot and to provide force feedback to the user.�� This feedback guides the human operator to the desired location, pushing back on the hand to avoid collisions or other mistakes.

The haptic input device is similar to using a mouse with a computer, Stewart said, “but it’s giving three-dimensional input, so you’re actually defining a point in space where you want the robotic arm to go.”

“Haptics does for the sense of touch what computer graphics do for vision,” said Chizeck, who co-directs the .

The technology creates a virtual representation based on a combination of sonar, video and laser inputs — sensory feedback that enhances the human-robotic interface and speeds up operations. This translates into tackling the task at hand safely and more efficiently, while greatly reducing the risk of damage to the environment.

The BluHaptics robotic control system is based on key algorithms developed by Fredrik Ryden in electrical engineering as part of his doctoral work. This work was originally directed to robotic surgery, which allows surgeons to operate remotely via a computer connected to a robot — a surgical alternative for certain medical procedures that can mean enhanced precision and less trauma for the patient, and decreased fatigue for the surgeon. BluHaptics is now applying and modifying these same algorithms to underwater robotics.

Read the about BluHaptics on the Center for Commercialization’s website.

In this system, the DNA is pulled through a nanopore while an ion current through the pore electronically reads the DNA’s sequence. The nanopore is an engineered protein developed specifically for DNA sequencing by Gundlach’s team in collaboration with Michael Niederweis, a microbiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The licensing deal gives San Diego-based Illumina, developer of integrated systems for genetic variation analysis, exclusive worldwide rights to develop and market the nanopore DNA sequencing technology that is based on the engineered pore.

“Many companies and universities are looking at nanopore technology as one way to realize that potential, but the technology developed by Drs. Gundlach and Niederweis is among the most promising,” said Christian Henry, senior vice president and general manager of business.

The nanopore was created by genetically engineering a protein pore from a mycobacterium smegmatis. The pore has an opening 1 billionth of a meter in size, just large enough for a single DNA strand to pass through, but needed to be modified to become useful for this sequencing technology.

Last year Gundlach’s team published a study in that found the combination of a genetically altered M. smegmatis pore and DNA polymerase could be used to directly determine DNA sequences using just single DNA molecules. The polymerase, an enzyme that acts as a catalyst in the formation of long-chain molecules, serves as a molecular motor that moves a DNA strand through the pore one nucleotide at a time. Their study reported a successful demonstration of this new technique using six different strands of DNA. The results corresponded to the already known DNA sequence of the strands, which had readable regions 42 to 53 nucleotides long.

While mycobacterial nanopores were first studied as potential chinks in the armor of the tuberculosis bacteria, they are now part of efforts to make genetic sequencing faster and cheaper. Gundlach believes this may lead to readily available personalized medicine, potentially revealing predispositions for a variety of illnesses, such as cancer, diabetes and addiction.

Sequencing reveals genetic variations, which partly determine each person’s risk for many diseases, as well as which drugs will work best for each individual. Cancer centers are already sequencing tumors in search of variations that make some resistant to chemotherapy. And global sequencing studies seek to find the genetic contributors to a variety of conditions from autism to diabetes.

“The nanopore technique also can be used to identify subtle DNA modifications that happen over the lifetime of an individual,” said Gundlach. Such modifications, referred to as epigenetic DNA modifications, may take place as chemical reactions on the DNA within cells – and tell the cells how to interpret their DNA. While essential for proper cellular functioning, epigenetic modifications can also be the underlying causes of various undesired conditions.

“Epigenetic modifications are important for things like cancer,” Gundlach said, “and being able to provide DNA sequencing that can directly identify epigenetic changes is one of the charms of the nanopore sequencing method.”

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UW Medicine and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have recruited world renowned and brain cancer Eric Holland to establish world-class research programs on brain and other solid-tumor cancers. He will leave Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and arrive in Seattle this summer.

At UW Medicine, Holland will be a professor of neurological surgery, hold the Chap and Eve Alvord and Elias Alvord Chair in Neuro-oncology, and direct the , established in 2009 to promote, develop and coordinate interdisciplinary brain tumor care and research among physicians and scientists in a variety of fields.

One of Holland’s priorities will be to recruit a team of internationally recognized brain cancer investigators to implement the vision of the late Ellsworth “Buster” Alvord, former head of neuropathology in the UW Department of Pathology and a Seattle philanthropist. Alvord and his family funded five endowed chairs in five different UW Medicine departments to create a multidisciplinary brain cancer research center.

“Eric Holland is exceptionally well qualified to lead the Alvord Brain Tumor Center, and I am confident that he will recruit outstanding researchers and clinicians to establish the Alvord Center as the best in the world,” said CEO of UW Medicine and dean of the UW School of Medicine. “Under Dr. Holland’s leadership, we will be able to fulfill the vision for brain cancer research and clinical care established by Buster Alvord when he and his family made their extraordinarily generous commitment to establish the Alvord Center. I am delighted to welcome Eric Holland to UW Medicine.”

At Fred Hutch, where Holland’s research laboratory will be based, he will be senior vice president and director of the , an interdisciplinary program that encourages collaboration among faculty with a broad range of expertise – from molecular and cellular biology to genetics and clinical research. The division’s structure fosters laboratory, computational and clinical research that yields discoveries which can be rapidly translated into cancer treatments. Holland will oversee the recruitment of new scientists who are at the forefront of solid-tumor translational research in such areas as breast, prostate, gastrointestinal and other cancers.

With advances in genomics increasingly playing an important role in solid-tumor oncology, Holland’s expertise in this area will provide strong leadership to strengthen Seattle’s reputation in translational, solid-tumor research.

“I am thrilled at the prospect of working with the world’s leading experts in genome sciences, computational biology and those involved in the development of novel platforms for delivering innovative therapies to cancer patients,” Holland said. “The highly collaborative, multidisciplinary nature of cancer research at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine provides a solid foundation to build on.”

The potential of gene therapy to boost heart muscle function was explored in a recent ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý animal study. The findings suggest that it might be possible to use this approach to treat patients whose hearts have been weakened by heart attacks and other heart conditions.

Michael Regnier, UW professor and vice chair of bioengineering, Charles Murry, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Biology and co-director of the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, and Sarah Nowakowski, a UW graduate student in bioengineering, led the study. The findings appeared online March 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Normally, muscle contraction is powered by a molecule, the nucleotide called adenosine-5′-triphosphate, or ATP. Other naturally occurring nucleotides can also power muscle contraction, but in most cases they have proven to be less effective than ATP.

In an earlier study of isolated muscle, however, Regnier, Murry and their colleagues had found that one naturally occurring molecule, called 2 deoxy-ATP, or dATP, was actually more effective than ATP in powering muscle contraction.�� dATP ��increased both the speed and force of the contraction, at least over the short-term.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to see whether this effect could be sustained. To do this, they used genetic engineering to create a strain of mice whose cells produced higher-than-normal levels of an enzyme called ribonucleotide reductase. This enzyme converts the precursor of�� ATP, adenosine-5’-diphosphate or ADP, to dADP, which, in turn, is rapidly converted to dATP.

“This fundamental discovery, that dATP can act as a ‘super-fuel’ for the contractile machinery of the heart, or myofilaments, opens up the possibility to treat a variety of heart failure conditions,” Regnier, an established investigator of the American Heart Association, said. “An exciting aspect of this study and our ongoing work is that a relatively small increase in dATP in the heart cells has a big effect on heart performance.”

The researchers found that increased production of the enzyme ribonucleotide reductase increased the concentration of dATP within heart cells approximately tenfold. Even though this level was still less than one to two percent of the cell’s total pool of ATP, the increase led to a sustained improvement in heart muscle function. The genetically engineered hearts contracted more quickly and with greater force.

“It looks as though we may have stumbled on an important pathway that nature uses to regulate heart contractility,” Murry added. “The same pathway that heart cells use to make the building blocks for DNA during embryonic growth makes dATP to supercharge contraction when the adult heart is mechanically stressed.”

Importantly, the elevated dATP effect was achieved without imposing additional metabolic demands on the cells. That observation suggests that the modification would not harm the cell’s functioning over the long-term.

The study’s findings, the authors write, suggest that treatments that elevate dATP levels in heart cells may prove to be an effective treatment for heart failure.

Read the PNAS scientific , “Transgenic overexpression of ribonucleotide reductase improves cardiac performance.”

The work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

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BEAT BioTherapeutics, a private company spinout from the UW, has entered into an exclusive global license agreement covering�� this technology and is moving forward with clinical development. For more information, visit

As the clock approaches 9 a.m, Friday, March 15, fourth-year ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý medical student Anisa Ibrahim awaits the sound of the gong with “a mixture of excitement and anxiety.” It’s the signal that will send her, along with fellow UW medical students gathered in the Health Sciences lobby, to the long tables of elegant purple-and-gold boxes containing their futures as beginning physicians.

Match Day, which takes place on the same day every year at medical schools across the nation, is when thousands of graduating medical students find out – at exactly the same time – ��where they will train as residents via the

This year, 222 senior UW medical students learned of their 2013 residency positions at simultaneous gatherings across the UW School of Medicine’s five-state WWAMI region (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho), including Match Day celebrations in Seattle, Billings, Missoula, Spokane, Boise and Anchorage.

For Ibrahim, the anticipation builds as she waits with her husband and young daughter to learn where she will begin the path to fulfilling her dream of becoming a pediatrician. Originally from Somalia, Ibrahim is the oldest of five children and the first in her family to attend college. She moved to Seattle as a young child, completed her undergraduate education at UW, and hopes to match at Seattle Children’s, her first choice for residency.

“But I think I’d be happy anywhere,” she said with a big smile.

Moments later Ibrahim, mom to two young daughters, is clearly elated when she learns she will be starting her residency at Seattle Children’s.

“I am just thrilled,” she beamed.

UW medical student Seth Stratton said he’s quite happy with his second choice match at Northwestern University (his first choice was Vanderbilt). He’s the son of two UW faculty members: Dr. John Stratton, professor of medicine in the Division of�� Cardiology, and Carolyn-Webster Stratton, a child psychologist and professor emeritus of family and child nursing. Seth said he plans to go into internal medicine with an eventual focus in cardiology and pulmonary/critical care medicine.

“It a unique opportunity to experience a different medical culture at a different place,” he said, adding with a smile, “though my parents probably would’ve been happier if I’d decided I wanted to stay here.”

Ria�� Andrade, originally from Whittier, Calif., which she describes as “east of East L.A.,” applied only to family medicine community residency programs in southern California, because she’s eager to return to the region “where they’re doing the best at serving the populations I want to serve — the underserved and the undocumented.”

So Andrade and her husband of five years were delighted when she matched at her first choice for residency: Long Beach Memorial Medical Center.

Estell Williams, the youngest of seven children and also the first in her family to go to college, also matched at her first choice: UW. She plans to become a surgeon and to continue her work to address the underrepresentation of minorities in medicine and healthcare disparities across populations.

Describing her emotions leading up to Match Day as “more excitement than anxiety,” Williams said she couldn’t be happier to have landed at UW.

“I feel at peace today,” she said. “I’ve worked hard for it – we all �󲹱���.”

This year’s National Match is the largest in the history of the program. Read about some of the nationwide.

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A team of UW Medicine researchers, in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Munich, conducted the study. Their findings appear in the July 26^th��issue of the journal��Neuron.

The approach could eventually help those with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that is the most common inherited form of blindness, as well as age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of acquired blindness in the developed world. In both diseases, the light sensitive cells in the retina — the rods and cones — die, leaving the eye without functional photoreceptors.

“This is a major advance in the field of vision restoration,” said co-author Dr. Russell Van Gelder, chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at the UW School of Medicine.

The chemical, called AAQ, acts by making the remaining, normally “blind” cells in the retina sensitive to light, said lead researcher Richard Kramer, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology. AAQ is a photoswitch that binds to protein ion channels on the surface of retinal cells. When switched on by light, AAQ alters the flow of ions through the channels and activates these neurons much the way rods and cones are activated by light.

“This is similar to the way local anesthetics work: they embed themselves in ion channels and stick around for a long time, so that you stay numb for a long time,” Kramer said. “Our molecule is different in that it’s light sensitive, so you can turn it on and off and turn on or off neural activity.”

Because the chemical eventually wears off, it may offer a safer alternative to other experimental approaches for restoring sight, such as gene or stem cell therapies, which permanently change the retina. It is also less invasive than implanting light-sensitive chips in the eye.

“The photoswitch approach offers real hope to patients with retinal degeneration,” Van Gelder said. “We still need to show that these compounds are safe and will work in people the way they work in mice, but these results demonstrate that this class of compound restores light sensitivity to retinas blind from genetic disease.”

The blind mice in the experiment had genetic mutations that made their rods and cones die within months of birth and inactivated other photopigments in the eye. After injecting very small amounts of AAQ into the eyes of the blind mice, Van Gelder and his colleagues confirmed that they had restored light sensitivity because the mice’s pupils contracted in bright light, and the mice showed light avoidance, a typical rodent behavior impossible without the animals being able to see some light. The team is hoping to conduct more sophisticated vision tests in rodents injected with the next generation of the compound.

“The advantage of this approach is that it is a simple chemical, which means that you can change the dosage, you can use it in combination with other therapies, or you can discontinue the therapy if you don’t like the results. As improved chemicals become available, you could offer them to patients. You can’t do that when you surgically implant a chip or after you genetically modify somebody,” Kramer said.

From optogenetics to implanted chips

The current technologies being evaluated for restoring sight to people whose rods and cones have died include injection of stem cells to regenerate the rods and cones; “optogenetics,” that is, gene therapy to insert a photoreceptor gene into blind neurons to make them sensitive to light; and installation of electronic prosthetic devices, such as a small light-sensitive retinal chip with electrodes that stimulate blind neurons. Several dozen people already have retinal implants and have had rudimentary, low vision restored, Kramer said.

Eight years ago, Kramer, Trauner, a former UC Berkeley chemist now at the University of Munich, and their colleagues developed an optogenetic technique to chemically alter potassium ion channels in blind neurons so that a photoswitch could latch on. Potassium channels normally open to turn a cell off, but with the attached photoswitch, they were opened when hit by ultraviolet light and closed when hit by green light, thereby activating and deactivating the neurons.

Subsequently, Trauner synthesized AAQ (acrylamide-azobenzene-quaternary ammonium), a photoswitch that attaches to potassium channels without the need to genetically modify the channel. Tests of this compound are reported in the current��Neuron��paper.

New versions of AAQ now being tested are better, Kramer said. They activate neurons for days rather than hours using blue-green light of moderate intensity, and these photoswitches naturally deactivate in darkness, so that a second color of light is not needed to switch them off.

Coauthors with Van Gelder, Kramer and Trauner are post-doctoral fellow Joseph Nemargut and ophthalmology resident Yivgeny Sychev at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý; and UC Berkeley graduate students Aleksandra Polosukhina, Jeffrey Litt, Ivan Tochitsky, Ivan De Kouchkovsky, Tracy Huang and Katharine Borges. The work was supported by the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health (EY018957 & EY003176) and Research to Prevent Blindness.

UW Medicine’s two academic medical centers are ranked the best in the region and the state of Washington in U.S. News & World Report’s 2012 edition of America’s Best Hospitals. UW Medical Center holds the No. 1 rank and Harborview Medical Center is No. 2 out of 35 hospitals in the Seattle metropolitan area and more than 100 hospitals in the state. In addition, UW Medicine’s Valley Medical Center is ranked No. 4 in the metro area and No. 7 in the state of Washington.

To be ranked in a metro area, a hospital had to score in the top 25 percent among its peers nationally in at least one of 12 medical specialties. This year’s Best Hospitals, the 23rd annual edition, showcases more than 732 Best Regional Hospitals of the nearly 4,800 hospitals nationwide. Fewer than 150 are nationally ranked in at least one of 16 medical specialties. The rest of the recognized hospitals met a standard of performance nearly as demanding in one or more specialties. The methodology behind the 2012-13 Best Hospitals national rankings is also used to recognize Best Regional Hospitals. The national rankings encompass 16 medical specialties, and up to 50 hospitals are ranked in each specialty. Additional hospitals in a specialty are recognized as high-performing. Hospitals that are either nationally ranked or high-performing in at least one specialty are recognized as Best Regional Hospitals.

In 12 specialties, a hospital must be in the top 25 percent of all hospitals that qualified for possible national ranking, and thus received a U.S. News Score, by meeting various standards that included specialty-specific minimums for patient volume. In Cancer, for example, 901 hospitals in the original 4,793-hospital universe qualified to receive a U.S. News Score this year, and only 25 percent of those were ranked or recognized as high-performing in Cancer. In the other four specialties—Ophthalmology, Psychiatry, Rehabilitation, and Rheumatology—the rankings are based solely on hospitals’ reputations with surveyed medical specialists; hospitals are recognized as high-performing if they received nominations from at least 3 percent of the responding specialists.

Below are the specialties nationally ranked for UW Medical Center and Harborview Medical Center, as well as specialties classified as high-performing for UWMC, HMC and Valley.

UW Medical Center is nationally ranked in the following specialties:

• Cancer��(UW Medicine physicians practice at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance; The National Cancer Institute recognizes UWMC & Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as a designated Comprehensive Cancer Center.)
• Diabetes and endocrinology
• Ear, nose and throat
• Geriatrics
• Gynecology
• Nephrology

• Neurology/neurosurgery
• Orthopedics
• Pulmonology
• Rehabilitation

UW Medical Center is high-performing in the following specialties:

• Cardiology and heart surgery
• Gastroenterology
• Ophthalmology
• Urology

Harborview Medical Center is nationally ranked in the following specialties:

• Diabetes and endocrinology
• Orthopedics

Harborview Medical Center is high-performing in the following specialties:

• Gastroenterology
• Geriatrics
• Nephrology
• Neurology and neurosurgery
• Pulmonology
• Urology

Valley Medical Center is high-performing in the following specialties:

• Diabetes and endocrinology
• Orthopedics

UW Medicine includes eight entities: Harborview Medical Center, Northwest Hospital & Medical Center, Valley Medical Center, UW Medical Center, UW Neighborhood Clinics, UW Physicians, UW School of Medicine, and Airlift Northwest. UW Medicine also shares in the ownership and governance of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance with Seattle Children’s Hospital and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and shares in ownership of Children’s University Medical Group with Seattle Children’s Hospital.

The rankings are available at����and will be featured in the U.S. News Best Hospitals 2013 guidebook, which goes on sale in August. For more information, and to view the full list of 2012-2013 rankings, visit:��

KING TV Evening Magazine

UW Genetic Medicine

Everyone has a genetic story.

For artist Geraldine Ondrizek, an art professor at Portlands Reed College, her story begins with the tragic loss of her child to a condition caused by a genetic anomaly. Its a story that starts with her efforts to piece together her familys genetic history and that has brought her, in the years since, to a beautiful intersection of science and art that today defines the very essence of her work.

Since 2001, Ondrizek has worked with geneticists and biologists to gather images of human cellular tissue and genetic tests relating to disease, ethnic identity, and the depiction of genetically inherited conditions.

“She creates wonderfully rich collaborations with scientists, taking their work and running it through her poetic filter,” explains Genevieve Gaiser Tremblay. She met Ondrizek when both were fine art students at Carnegie Mellon University and today is the curator of Ondrizeks current exhibit, “Chromosome Painting,” on display at the Kirkland Arts Center through July 6, 2012. “Chromosome Painting” presents work generated from Ondrizeks two-year collaboration with Robin Bennett, a UW Medicine senior genetic counselor and co-director of the UW Genetic Medicine Clinic.

In the exhibits three bodies of work – “Chromosome Paintings,” “DNA Microarray” and “Chromosome 17″– Ondrizek meshes her chosen medium of cloth with the colorful and complex language of genetic data to create textile portraits of human chromosome maps. Her color patterns and sequences metaphorically portray what she calls “our coats of many colors.” “Chromosome Paintings” is based on a “synteny map” that compares gene sequences and chromosomes between species. The long silk panels, each printed with human chromosome maps, are displayed in bright fluorescent colors from chartreuse and fuchsia to oranges, greens and soft blues. All are arranged to depict stunningly visual chromosomal comparisons. Each panel is labeled with a type of cancer correlated with a genetic marker present on the chromosome.

“Chromosome Light Boxes” showcases each chromosome synteny map printed on white silk within a light box so the colors glow from within. These panels also are marked with the genetic anomalies linked to different types of cancer found on each gene. “DNA Micro-array” is formed from several large silk panels imprinted with small chunks of DNA sequences known as “probes” that identify target sequences of DNA and are easily seen as red, yellow, green and blue dots. And “Chromosome 17” is Ondrizeks prototype for her 2011 UW Medical Center public art commissioned piece that today hangs in its lobby in commemoration of 50 years of medical genetics at UW Medicine.

“Genetics touches all of us,” Bennett explains. As a genetic counselor, she works closely with patients and families who are concerned about inherited diseases or conditions, and are seeking counsel about genetic testing and possible preventative action against disease.

“Learning about family medical history in conjunction with genetic testing can provide important information at many times throughout the lifespan,” Bennett said. “This collaboration shows the beauty in our DNA and brings this art and genetic science to the public, so we can have a dialogue to help allay fears and misconceptions related to genetics.”

It all began in 2009, when Bennett, Ondrizek and Tremblay first collaborated on their shared vision of art and medical science – just as the UW Genetic Medicine Clinic was gearing up to celebrate its 50^th anniversary. Tremblay introduced Ondrizek to Bennett and her team of renowned genetic researchers at UW Medicine, including Dr. Arno Motulsky, a pioneer medical geneticist known as one of the fathers of modern human genetics, who founded the Division of Medical Genetics at UW in 1956. The access that Bennett provided to her team of researchers inspired Ondrizek to assemble a rich collection of images from several prominent UW Medicine researchers, including Motulsky and his work on the molecular genetics of human color vision, and Dr. Peter Byers and his research into inherited connective tissue disorders.

The result was her UW Medical Center public art commissioned piece, “Chromosome 17.” In both “Chromosome 17” and “Case Study,” a piece she created for the Portland Art Museum that is also part of the Kirkland Arts Center exhibit, Ondrizek used the National Center for Biotechnical Information database of the human genome as a resource to artistically map the gene sequences.

The silk panels of the “Chromosome Painting” exhibit were also produced in a small edition of 10 each of Chromosomes 1 to 23 and will be sold as scarves to raise funds for the UW Genetic Medicine Clinic for education and research, and specifically for those who have cancer and are unable to afford medical diagnosis and treatment. Funds will also benefit cancer patients who want to preserve their DNA so their families might benefit from future genetic testing. In addition, Tremblay recently received a 4Culture Independent Artist grant that will fund her public scholarship forums: “Genetic Portraits,” a teaching artist workshop, and “Genetic Visibility,” an interdisciplinary community forum exploring issues around genetic research, family histories and genetic banking.

Ondrizek��received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the UW School of Art in
1994.��Through her artistic vision of creating a beautiful representation to help make genetic information more understandable and accessible, Ondrizeks current exhibit presents captivating new works that showcase visual, scientific and metaphorical discoveries.

“Im tracing my own medical history, in effect,” she said, “and its challenging, given the fear and misunderstandings people have around genetic science. But I saw this as an entry point for people to start thinking about – and talking about – information that is sometimes hard to swallow. Its ultimately about all of our life connections.”

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“” runs through July 6 at the Kirkland Arts Center, 620 Market St., Kirkland, Wash. 98033. A final Artist / Curator talk and tour will be held at the gallery on July 6 at 4 p.m., followed by a closing reception from 6-8:30 p.m. about the exhibit.

Ondrizeks work will travel to Western Washington Universitys Western Gallery��for a show on color theory called “ColorMAD,” Oct.1-Nov. 12, and to the University of Houston Gallery of Art and the Johnson Space Center Nov. 19-Feb. 20, 2013. She will be a visiting artist and lecture on her work at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, on March 12, 2013. View work, visit the and learn more about the .