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Equipping Cells for Battle Academic Degree Programs (As of December 2017 BOG Degree Program Inventory) Baccalaureate 98 Master’s 126 Professional Doctorate 5 Research Doctorate 80 Specialist 7 5 Professional (Dentistry, Law, Medicine, Pharmacy, Veterinary Medicine) Number of Degrees Awarded (1905-Summer 2017) Baccalaureate 360,908 Master’s 111,744 Specialist 3,352 Engineer 88 Ph.D. 24,353 3,066 EDD 1,419 DMD 2,953 JD 19,327 DPH 7,605 DNP 285 SJD 4 AUD 361 DPM 31 DPT harmful cells to other parts of the body’s tissues,” ready to attack cancer cells. These soldiers said Morphogenesis President and CEO Michael have been armed and equipped for a fight Lawman. through immunotherapy treatments, which MD 5,760 DVM Imagine tiny biological soldiers inside the body uses the body’s own immune system to The process of capturing and releasing the make the attack. However, every soldier is not cells can be compared to finding a needle in a created the same and cancer can still break haystack and those searching include two UF through the well-intended and heavily armed student researchers. front line. Tampa’s Morphogenesis has technology that can help strengthen the weakest links among the ranks of biological soldiers and the company partnered with the University of 406 Florida (UF) to advance research through a Professional (Undesignated – Before 1959) = 75 Matching Grants Research Program project. All Degrees Carlos Rinaldi, Ph.D., UF professor and interim chair for the chemical engineering department, 541,737 Fall 2017 Enrollment 55,460 (End of drop/add) was tasked with reproducing previous exper- iments and finding conditions in which the technology can effectively capture cells from biological fluids and release them to keep them alive for further study. Most capture methods “Materials research and biological and biomedical testing is expensive,” said Rinaldi. “It’s really difficult and expensive work, so The Corridor funding has really enabled Morphogenesis to initiate this project.” Lawman agrees. “Without the Matching Grants Research kill the cells. Program, we wouldn’t have been able to do After obtaining often-rare cells from a blood we almost had to put this research away on a sample of a person with cancer, the new method could help develop personalized immunotherapy treatments and “clean the cancer patient’s blood of cancer,” according this project,” said Lawman. “As a company, shelf because of lack of funding, but with The Corridor we have been able to concentrate on this and take these developments to clinical trials this year.” to Rinaldi. “With the machine isolating the rare circulating tumor cells, we can end the spread of these f l o r i d a H I G H T E C H . c o m | 37