Women’s work. In the sciences, and particularly in biotechnology, the worlds of academia and industry have grown increasingly similar. Universities are moving ever more quickly to transfer research results into patentable, commercially viable products, and industry has become more and more reliant on academic research as the pace of innovation continually gathers speed.

Laurel Smith-Doerr, a CAS assistant professor of sociology, is interested in how these changes affect the careers of women working in the life sciences. According to her, the strongest factor influencing gender equity is the structure of the organization.

Smith-Doerr’s research shows that female Ph.D.s in biotech firms are nearly eight times as likely to be in leadership positions as those in more hierarchical organizations such as academia, despite rules aimed at correcting gender discrimination in hiring and promotion decisions. “We know from classic ethnographies of organizations,” she points out, “that instituting more bureaucratic rules and levels of hierarchy tends to increase the power and salience of informal, hidden modes of operation.”

Biotechnology firms, on the other hand, have a network structure with flatter job ladders, and proportionately fewer people in leadership roles. They function with cross-departmental teams, and in collaboration with many other organizations — universities and research institutes for basic science, pharmaceutical corporations and hospitals for clinical testing, and venture capital firms for funding and management advice.

According to Smith-Doerr, working within networks of many collaborators and stakeholders leads to increased transparency in decision-making, more choice in choosing collaborators, and recognition of collective rather than individualized rewards. Such a structure ultimately creates more leadership opportunities for groups that have been traditionally at a disadvantage in science.

“In the academic realm, universities seem more aware of the consistent inequalities for female scientists,” she writes. “The results of my paper indicate that those interested in greater gender equality need to consider changes at the organizational rather than individual level.”

The results of this research appear in Smith-Doerr’s book Women’s Work: Gender Equality Versus Hierarchy in the Life Sciences (Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, 2004).

On target. Ideally, chemotherapy should zero in on cancerous tissue, flooding it with exactly the right amount of drugs to kill the cancer cells and avoid damaging surrounding normal cells. Although treatments for the disease have improved considerably, doctors still have no reliable way of knowing if a drug has reached its target, and if so, exactly how much of it has been absorbed.

A new optical instrument developed by Irving Bigio, an ENG professor of biomedical engineering, shows promise for providing physicians with this valuable information. Using a process known as optical pharmacokinetics, the instrument accurately measures how much of a chemotherapeutic agent has been absorbed at a specific site in the body. Depending on the site under investigation, a simple fiber-optic probe is applied either externally to the skin, or internally by means of an endoscope directing light to the tissue in question. The wavelengths of the light reflected back is analyzed using new computational algorithms developed by Bigio. The device analyzes the different light signatures of the reflected light to accurately determine the concentration of the drug absorbed by the tissue. Since the readout is almost instantaneous, the changing levels of the drug in the tissue can be monitored.

This system will be especially useful for photodynamic therapies, which use light to activate drugs after they have been absorbed by the body. By following the absorption of a drug in the diseased tissue, doctors will know when the drug has reached the best level for activation and how much light to administer to activate it most effectively.

Bigio is also adapting the system to assess the growth of blood vessels in and around a tumor (a measure of the tumor’s vitality) and the effectiveness of anti-angiogenic agents that try to destroy a tumor by choking off its blood supply.

Further information about Bigio’s work can be found at http://www.bu.edu/dbin/bme/faculty/?prof=bigio.