by Tamara Gaskill
Daily Lobo
Scott Sibbett said working in a 90-degree laboratory last summer could have been detrimental to his experiments.
"It was really affecting the experiments because we're working with these little tiny chips and we have fluids in there," Sibbett said. "They are extremely sensitive to temperature and we had to give up and temporarily move."
Sibbett said the swamp cooler in the basement lab of Castetter Hall where he does his research is the culprit. He said it only cools the building about five degrees less than the ambient temperature.
"The outside temperature basically dictates the inside temperature of our lab," he said.
Sibbett said he would like to see some of the $125 million bond that was approved by the regents last month spent on improving laboratories at UNM.
"The infrastructure for UNM is good," he said. "(There is) a good library - the facilities are generally good. The lab itself is quite antiquated."
Sibbett, a research professor, is dedicating his research to early disease detection.
He said he became interested in the topic after losing a close friend to breast cancer.
"Ten years ago, my best friend's wife died of breast cancer," he said.
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She was 32-years-old, too young to be getting regular mammograms, he said. She left two children behind when she died. If it had been detected earlier, it probably would have been preventable, he said.
Sibbett, along with other researchers, are working toward the development of an early disease detector. The detector would use nanochips to diagnose diseases and improve people's health, he said.
It would then be implemented within a device that looks at protein levels on a regular basis, he said.
"The long-term goal for us is to be able to take body fluid like urine or sweat or saliva, and separate out, identify and quantify all the proteins - and to do that on a device that is cheap and easy for anyone to operate," he said.
Sibbett said the underlying premise in his research is that proteins are an important factor in determining if someone is healthy.
"All of human function - whether it's brain power or muscle power or the immune system healing the body - is all predicated on proteins."
Dimiter Petsev, a research assistant professor in the Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Department, is also working on the research. He measures the fluid that is pumped into the device and records the data, among other things, to help better understand exactly how the proteins are transported in the body, he said in an e-mail.
Sibbett is using two laboratories to do the research and development of the protein chip. One lab is in the basement of the Electrical and Computer Engineering building. Sibbett said the space they occupy was never intended for lab experiments.
But, the relationship between the researchers is excellent, Petsev said, making the work enjoyable - despite the troubles with lab space.
Robin Simons, a graduate student in the Chemical Engineering department, shares a lab space with Sibbett. The temperature of the lab doesn't have much effect on his experiments - growing microbes.
He said they lack a lot of equipment, which he has to borrow from the Biology Department.
"There are a lot of things we could use," Simons said.
