Thanks Google, Thanks SproutWorks

New Biology Economy, I would say, is official now. I noticed this morning that we're indexed in Google and are now listed in the SproutWorks directory.

A note to explain this blog: I have been posting here since June 2 (see the index). The site is my effort to track the changes occuring in the molecular biology tools industry, an emerging and dynamic market that I covered for the last three years as a journalist. This is the first blog to recognize the formation of a new market evolving out of the progress being made in the life sciences. The site exists to provide edited information on the news of the day relating to this market. I operate on a very tight budget (self funded), do little or no marketing, except what happens organically, and exist to provide service and information to whomever is interested in this area. The blog is focused on business, some finance, and anything that inspires.

Today's News

The University of Pennsylvania will open the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery on Friday, according to an article in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the university's student newspaper. Funded with a $9.5 million NIH grant, the center will house a multidisciplinary group of chemists, biologists and engineers to engage in drug discovery, focusing on molecules entered in the NIH database, with the goal of finding those that might be promising as drugs. The NIH has funded eight other research centers around the country.

Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., and Charles Shank, former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have been appointed senior fellows of the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which is being constructed in Ashburn, Va. The $500 million campus, which is to open in late 2006, is devoted to biomedical research and will focus on studying how information is processsed by neuroonal circuits, and on developing imaging technologies and methods for image analysis. The institute also yesterday named seven group leaders for the campus.

They are:
--Dmitri Chklovskii, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York
--Sean Eddy, HHMI investigator at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
--Nikolaus Grigorieff, HHMI investigator at Brandeis University
--Eugene Myers, University of California, Berkeley
--Julie Simpson, University of Wisconsin, Madison
--Roland Strauss, University of Wurzburg, Germany
--Karel Svoboda, HHMI investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York

The Department of Health and Human Services yesterday announced 24 members of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which will be directed by Dennis Kasper, who is director of the Channing Laboratory at the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

The advisory board members are:
--Arturo Casadevall, chair of biomedical research, chief of infectious disease, and professor of medicine, microbiology, and immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine;
--Murray Cohen, president of Consultants in Disease and Injury Control, Inc., a consulting firm;
--Lynn Enquist, chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Virology.
--Barry Erlick, founder and president of BJE Associates, a scientific and technical consulting firm;
--David Franz, vice president and chief biological scientist with the Midwest Research Institute and director of the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center at Kansas State University;
--Claire Fraser, president, director and co-founder of the Institute for Genomic Research, and professor of microbiology, tropical medicine, and pharmacology at George Washington University School of Medicine;
--Maj. Gen. John Gordon (USAF-Ret.), former Homeland Security Advisor and former deputy National Security Advisor for Counter-Terrorism to the White House;
--Michael Imperiale, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School;
--Paul Keim, director of pathogen genomics at the Translational Genomics Research Institute;
--Stanley Lemon, dean of medicine and chairman and director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston;
--Stuart Levy, professor of molecular biology and microbiology and professor of medicine, as well as the director of the Center for Adaptation Genetics and Drug Resistance at Tufts University School of Medicine;
--John Lumpkin, a senior vice president and director of the Health Care Group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and former director of the Illinois Department of Public Health;
--Adel Mahmoud, president of Merck Vaccines of Merck & Co., and adjunct professor of medicine at University Hospitals of Cleveland;
--Mark Nance, an attorney in private practice focused on matters of biotechnology law and business;
--Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, associate director of the National Center for Food Production and Defense, and professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota;
--David Relman, associate professor of medicine and of microbiology and infectious diseases at Stanford University School of Medicine, and chief of the Infectious Diseases Section at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System;
--James Roth, professor in the Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Preventive Medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine and director of the Center for Food Security and Public Health at Iowa State University;
--Harvey Rubin, director of the Institute for Strategic Threat Analysis and a professor of medicine specializing in infectious diseases at the University of Pennsylvania.;
--Thomas Shenk, virologist and professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University;
--Andrew Sorensen, president of the University of South Carolina with a research background in public health, epidemiology, and health policy;
--Admiral William Studeman (USN-Ret.);
--Anne Vidaver, professor and head of the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and former chief scientist at USDA;
--Diane Wara, professor of pediatrics and program director of the Pediatric Clinical Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, as well as chair of the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee

J. Craig Venter and Nobel Prize winner Hamilton Smith yesterday launched Synthetic Genomics of Rockville, Md. The startup firm will initially focus on ethanol and hydrogen production and integrate processes to design, build and test outputs from synthetic organisms.

Earlier this week, Venter announced a partnership Tuesday among his institute, the MIT and the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a research policy organization in Washington. Funded by a $570,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the group intends to study the implications of synthetic genomics. It plans to release its findings next summer.

The company is seeking to raise $30 million from private investors in its first financing and already has $15 million promised by an unnamed backer, according to news reports.

In a study published today in the journal Nature, researchers at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the University of California at San Diego, using a technology made by Madison, Wisc.-based microarray manufacturer NimbleGen Systems, have developed a method to identify thousands of regulatory sequences in the human genome. These protein sequences known as promoters are the starting points of the genes that determine how cells in the body as diverse as skin cells or neurons are formed from the same DNA.

New Biology Economy take – The publication of this paper gives NimbleGen Systems, a venture-capital backed company, a new tool to sell into the microarray market. NimbleGen has already forged one partnership with the microarray leader, Affymetrix.

The University of South Carolina yesterday presented a $166 million plan to expand its nanotechnology research center and to construct new health sciences buildings at campuses throughout the state.