Houston researchers are hard at work in the lab to progress medical advancements at the bedside. Getty Images

Every day, important research is being completed under the roofs of Houston medical institutions. From immunotherapy to complex studies on how a memory is made, Houston researchers are discovering and analyzing important aspects of the future of medicine.

Here are three research projects currently being conducted around town.

University of Houston's potential solution to sickle cell disease

Vassiliy Lubchenko is a University of Houston associate professor of chemistry. Courtesy of UH

For the most part, sickle cells have been a mystery to scientists, but one University of Houston professor has recently reported a new finding on how sickle cells are formed — enlightening the medical community with hopes that better understanding the disease may lead to prevention.

Vassiliy Lubchenko, UH associate professor of chemistry, shared his new finding in Nature Communications. He reports that "droplets of liquid, enriched in hemoglobin, form clusters inside some red blood cells when two hemoglobin molecules form a bond — but only briefly, for one thousandth of a second or so," reads a release from UH.

In sickle cell disease, or anemia, red blood cells are crescent shaped and don't flow as easily through narrow blood vessels. The misshapen cells are caused by abnormal hemoglobin molecules that line up into stiff filaments inside red blood cells. Those filaments grow when the protein forms tiny droplets called mesoscopic.

"Though relatively small in number, the mesoscopic clusters pack a punch," says Lubchenko in the release. "They serve as essential nucleation, or growth, centers for things like sickle cell anemia fibers or protein crystals. The sickle cell fibers are the cause of a debilitating and painful disease, while making protein crystals remains to this day the most important tool for structural biologists."

Lubchenko conclusion is that the key to prevent sickle cell disease is to is to stop the formation of the initial clusters so fibers aren't able to grow out of them.

Baylor College of Medicine's immunotherapy research in breast cancer

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Baylor College of Medicine researchers are looking into the complexities of immune cells in breast cancer. Getty Images

Baylor College of Medicine researchers are leading an initiative to figure out the potential effect of immunotherapy on different types of breast cancers. Their report is featured in Nature Cell Biology.

The scientists zoned in on two types of immune cells — neutrophils and macrophages — and they found frequency differed in a way that indicated potential roles in immunotherapy.

"Focusing on neutrophils and macrophages, we investigated whether different tumors had the same immune cell composition and whether seemingly similar immune components played the same role in tumor growth. Importantly, we wanted to find out whether differences in immune cell composition contributed to the tumors' responses to immunotherapy," says Dr. Xiang 'Shawn' Zhang, professor at the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center and member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine, in a news release.

Further exploring the discrepancies between the immune cells and the role they play in tumor growth will help better understand immunotherapy's potential in certain types of breast cancer.

"These findings are just the beginning. They highlight the need to investigate these two cellular types deeper. Under the name 'macrophages' there are many different cellular subtypes and the same stands for neutrophils," Zhang says. "We need to identify at single cell level which subtypes favor and which ones disrupt tumor growth taking also into consideration tumor heterogeneity as both are relevant to therapy."

Rice University, UTHeath, and UH's memory-making study

Researchers from all corners of Houston are diving into how memories are made. Courtesy of Rice University

When you make a memory, your brain cells structurally change. Through a multi-institutional study with researchers from UH, Rice University, and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, we now know more about the way memories are made.

When forming memories, three moving parts work together in the human brain — a binding protein, a structural protein and calcium — to allow for electrical signals to enter neural cells and change the molecular structures in cognition. The scientists compared notes on how on that binding protein works.

The team's study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Peter Wolynes, a theoretical physicist at Rice, UH physicist Margaret Cheung, and UTHealth neurobiologist Neal Waxham worked together to understand the complex process memories experience in the process of being made.

"This is one of the most interesting problems in neuroscience: How do short-term chemical changes lead to something long term, like memory?" Waxham says in a release from Rice. "I think one of the most interesting contributions we make is to capture how the system takes changes that happen in milliseconds to seconds and builds something that can outlive the initial signal."

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7 can't miss Houston business and innovation events for July

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Editor's note: While many Houstonians are flocking to vacation destinations, there are still plenty of opportunities to network and learn at tech and business events for those sticking close to home this month. From an inaugural biotech summit to the 12th edition of a local pitch showcase, here are the Houston business and innovation events you can't miss in July and how to register. Please note: this article might be updated to add more events.

July 10 - Out in Tech Mixer 

Out in Tech Houston provides an inclusive networking space for LGBTQ+ people and allies working in tech. Check out this relaxed, social-mixer event, hosted on the second Thursday of every month.

This event is Thursday, July 10, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at Second Draught. Register here.

July 14 – Latinas in Tech Coworking Day 

Connect with fellow Latinas in the industry at Sesh Coworking. Network or work alongside peers, board members and community leaders in a shared office environment.

This event is Monday, July 14, from 9-11:30 a.m. at Sesh Coworking. Find more information here.

July 17 – UTMB Innovation VentureX Summit

Attend the inaugural UTMB Innovation VentureX Summit, where innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers and investors will dive into the future of biotech. Expect panel discussions, fireside chats, a technology showcase and networking opportunities.

This event is Thursday, July 17, from 7:30 a.m.-4 p.m. at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Find more information here.

July 17 – Open Project Night 

Collaborate on solutions for some of Houston’s most pressing issues at this month’s Open Project Night at Impact Hub Houston. Hear from guest speakers and listen to open mic pitches. July’s theme is Decent Work & Economic Growth.

This event is Thursday, July 17, from 5:30-7:30 p.m at Impact Hub Houston. Register here.

July 24 – NASA Tech Talks

Every fourth Thursday of the month, NASA experts, including longtime engineer Montgomery Goforth, present on technology development challenges NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the larger aerospace community are facing and how they can be leveraged by Houston’s innovation community. Stick around after for drinks and networking at Second Draught.

This event is Thursday, July 24, from 6-7 p.m. at the Ion. Register here.

July 30 – Ion Bike Club

Join Bike Houston at the Ion for a 45-minute guided cruise through the Ion District and Midtown. Afterward, enjoy a complimentary beer and network with like-minded riders at Second Draught.

This event is Wednesday, July 30, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Ion. Register here.

July 31 – Bayou Startup Showcase

Hear pitches from startups and small businesses from Rice University’s OwlSpark and the University of Houston’s RED Labs accelerators at the 12th annual Bayou Startup Showcase. Read more about this year’s teams here.

This event is Thursday, July 31, from 3:30-7 p.m. at the Ion. Register here.

Houston researchers: Here's what it takes to spot a great new idea

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Having a “promotion focus” really does create a mental lens through which new ideas are more visible.

Key findings:

  • New ideas can be crucially important to businesses, driving innovation and preventing stagnation.
  • Recognizing those ideas, though, isn’t always easy.
  • Nurturing what is known as “promotion focus” can help managers spot fresh ideas.

Whenever the late surgeon Michael DeBakey opened a human chest, he drew on a lifetime of resources: the conviction that heart surgery could and should be vastly improved, the skill to venture beyond medicine’s known horizons and the vision to recognize new ideas in everyone around him, no matter how little formal training they had.

Appreciating new ideas is the heartbeat of business as well as medicine. But innovation is surprisingly hard to recognize. In a pioneering 2017 article, Rice Business Professor Jing Zhou and her colleagues published their findings on the first-ever study of the traits and environments that allow leaders to recognize new ideas.

Recent decades have produced a surge of research looking at how and when employees generate fresh ideas. But almost nothing has been written on another crucial part of workplace creativity: a leader’s ability to appreciate new thinking when she sees it.

Novelty, after all, is what drives company differentiation and competitiveness. Work that springs from new concepts sparks more investigation than work based on worn, already established thought. Companies invest millions to recruit and pay star creatives.

Yet not every leader can spot a fresh idea, and not every workplace brings out that kind of discernment. In four separate studies, Zhou and her coauthors examined exactly what it takes to see a glittering new idea wherever it appears. Their work sets the stage for an entirely new field of future research.

First, though, the team had to define their key terms. “Novelty recognition” is the ability to spot a new idea when someone else presents it. “Promotion focus,” previous research has shown, is a comfort level with new experiences that evokes feelings of adventure and excitement. “Prevention focus” is the opposite trait: the tendency to associate new ideas with danger, and respond to them with caution.

But does having “promotion focus” as opposed to “prevention focus” color the ability to see novelty? To find out, Zhou’s team came up with an ingenious test, artificially inducing these two perspectives through a series of exercises. First, they told 92 undergraduate participants that they would be asked to perform a set of unrelated tasks. Then the subjects guided a fictional mouse through two pencil and paper maze exercises.

While one exercise showed a piece of cheese awaiting the mouse at the end of the maze (the promise of a reward), the other maze depicted a menacing owl nearby (motivation to flee).

Once the participants had traced their way through the mazes with pencils, they were asked to rate the novelty of 33 pictures — nine drawings of space aliens and 24 unrelated images. The students who were prepped to feel an adventurous promotion focus by seeking a reward were much better at spotting the new or different details among these images than the students who’d been cued to have a prevention focus by fleeing a threat.

The conclusion: a promotion focus really does create a mental lens through which new ideas are more visible.

Zhou’s team followed this study with three additional studies, including one that surveyed 44 human resource managers from a variety of companies. For this study, independent coders rated the mission statements of each firm, assessing their cultures as “innovative” or “not innovative.” The HR managers then evaluated a set of written practices — three that had been in use for years, and three new ones that relied on recent technology. The managers from the innovative companies were much better at rating the new HR practices for novelty and creativity. To recognize novelty, in other words, both interior and external environments make a difference.

The implications of the research are groundbreaking. The first ever done on this subject, it opens up a completely new research field with profound questions. Can promotion focus be created? How much of this trait is genetic, and how much based on natural temperament, culture, environment and life experience? Should promotion focus be cultivated in education? If so, what would be the impact? After all, there are important uses for prevention focus, such as corporate security and compliance. Meanwhile, how can workplaces be organized to bring out the best in both kinds of focus?

Leaders eager to put Zhou’s findings to use right away, meanwhile, might look to the real-world model of Michael DeBakey. Practice viewing new ideas as adventures, seek workplaces that actively push innovation and, above all, cultivate the view that every coworker, high or low, is a potential source of glittering new ideas.

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This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom.

Jing Zhou is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology in Organizational Behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business of Rice University. Zhou, J., Wang, X., Song, J., & Wu, J. (2017). "Is it new? Personal and contextual influences on perceptions of novelty and creativity." Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(2): 180-202.