New Biology Economy

We're Still into this Field

2007-06-07T23:53:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted here in a while, as I have been busy with a very exciting opportunity.

But, be assured, this field that I have written about in the previous posts is never very far from my mind. The recent announcement about the sequencing of James Watson's DNA for $1 million in just a matter of months is just another notable milepost on the long road to a low-cost personal genome scan, and the questions that will bring, as well as the hope of advances.

Right now, I am involved in the establishment of a converged newsroom at Hofstra University and teaching online journalism to undergrads and graduate students. Teaching and working in a newsroom, together, at one time and trying to find the leading edge. It's wonderful.

To see my students' work from the spring 2007 semester, click here. Or, click here to read the work of the first Hofstra graduate online journalism class in the fall of 2006.

I plan to reload this site when circumstances allow, and will include new interactive and multimedia elements to enhance a conversation about the business of the emerging new biology economy.

You can always drop me an e-mail.

MK

New New Biology Economy to Debut Jan. 31

2006-12-05T11:00:00.000-05:00

A new and revised guide to the business and news on the cutting edge of the life sciences will debut on Jan. 31. This online publication will integrate new story-telling tools to provide news and analysis of what we term the "New Biology Economy" -- the emerging and fast-growing molecular biology tools marketplace, which is building on foundational advances in technology and science to create new insights into complex biological systems and revolutionize medicine and healthcare.

NC and Florida Biotech Sites Go Forward

2006-05-18T00:17:00.000-04:00

Two biotech facility developments – in western North Carolina and in Florida – are moving forward.

This week David Murdock, the owner of Dole Co., joined with Erskine Bowles, the president of the University of North Carolina, visited the state legislature in Raleigh to lobby for financial support for a proposed $1 billion biotechnology center in the former site of a textile facility in the town of Kannapolis, near Charlotte. (See previous New Biology Economy article).

According to coverage by The Associated Press, Murdock asked the state to consider removing a 7 percent tax on equipment purchased for the center. Bowles asked the legislature for a $5 million one-time funding and $1 million in recurring funds to support the project.

Meantime, back in Kannapolis, an executive for Castle & Cooke, Murdock's real estate firm, told the Cabarrus Regional Chamber of Commerce, that the biotech facility, to be named The North Carolina Research Campus, should generate some 2,200 jobs in its first 30 months of operations. That would not just be scientific jobs, but would include support staff and other workers at the campus, which will additionally have living, retail and public facilities.

According to an article from the Charlotte Observer newspaper, the initial construction of the core laboratory building, the keystone of the 350-acre facility, will be completed in November 2007. Ground was broken in February. Additionally, the design for a building housing scientists from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, is expected to be started first and will join buildings for scientists from Duke and North Carolina State University projected to be completed by the end of 2007 or early 2008.

Meantime, in Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush approved a 99-year lease between Florida Atlantic University in Abacoa and The Scripps Research Institute. Subject to approval by the Scripps board, the lease wraps up a deal to locate an eastern branch of Scripps in the state of Florida, a economic-development play supported by an estimated $600 million in state and county funds. (See previous New Biology Economy report on Scripps in Florida.

Thermo-Fisher Merger is Big Business as Usual

2006-05-08T22:37:00.000-04:00

Does the economic “sweet spot” of the emerging New Biology Economy lie in integration? That is, for a life-sciences tools company to be successful -- and not irrelevant -- in serving the on-the-cutting-edge life sciences, laboratory and healthcare markets, does it need to not only provide beige-box machines, as well as services and consumables, but also be able to create “solutions” that cross all competitive boundaries – as well as managing computing, facilitating automated sample prep, data analysis, and creating simpler, and cheaper automation?

Likely so, at least in a broad sense of the market, and Monday's announcement of the intended $11 billion marriage of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific seems to illustrate this. Subject to regulatory and shareholder approval, the two firms will become Thermo Fisher Scientific, based in Waltham, Mass., under the leadership of Marijn Dekkers, Thermo's president and chief executive. It will be a giant in the field.

The new entity will blend Thermo's high end instrumentation, notably its mass specs, with Fisher's enormous reach in the lab market.

In a presentation Monday, the companies projected a complete presence in today's paradigm of biomarker research (sample prep, analysis, interpretation) with instruments and reagents and consumables.

But, really this is a data point in an industry that is apparently ready for a roll-up, a consolidation in search of economic efficiencies – and not one about quickening the process of the commercialization of life-sciences innovation or enabling regulatory understanding to speed the eventual approval of emerging biomarkers. Those are all challenges that will likely be generational in scope.

Thermo Fisher Scientific will be a substantial competitor with a broad reach but will not have an easy path against the other molecular biology tool companies that we consider to be the New Biology Economy players -- muscular competitors like General Electric, Roche, Agilent Technologies and Applied Biosystems at the top tier, then a next tier of companies -- Beckman Coulter, Bio-Rad Labs, PerkinElmer – followed by reagent players including Invitrogen, Qiagen, and Sigma-Aldrich as well as instrument makers like Waters Corp.

And, that is leaving out companies like Quest, LabCorp and LabOne, who could be the real integrators of the future, or relatively small innovators like Affymetrix and Caliper, or pharma giants Pfizer, Sanofi, Glaxo, J&J, Merck, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb, Wyeth, Abbott or Lily, or biotechs like Amgen or Genentech. Not to mention Siemens and Philips, or even Gen-Probe.

These competitors are making multiple plays into the fuzzy future that is the new biology economy – the market that is evolving from the advances made from the sequencing of the human genome and the emerging fields of proteomics and metabolomics all rolled under the umbrella term of systems biology, or integrated biology.

Consider the financial question of reducing the cost of sequencing a whole genome, which as of August 2005 was estimated at $2.2 million, but needs to be lowered to around $1,000 in order to have a significant impact on healthcare. Will this new company have any impact on that? Not likely, but when that goal is reached, it is likely to be there with “solutions” to take advantage of it.

Likely, there will be other rollups, and smaller innovators too. This bears watching and we look forward to doing just that.

Siemens Pays $1.9B to Enter IVD Market

2006-04-27T23:16:00.000-04:00

Siemens on Thursday announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Los Angeles-based Diagnostic Products Corporation for approximately $1.9 billion.

Subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, the deal would make DPC, which had sales of $481 million in 2005, a wholly owned subsidiary of Siemens Medical, which produces medical imaging and healthcare information technology and competes with General Electric and Philips.

The acquisition would broaden Siemens's health offerings by the additon of DPC products such as automated body fluid analyzers and including tests related to cancer and cardiac disease, as well as hormone and allergy conditions.

Siemens heralded the acquisition as it entry into the in-vitro diagnostics market. As such, it is an expensive move, but one that demonstrates the hopes for growth in this sector, given an aging population in the US, which is expected to require greater healthcare services and products.

According to some studies, US demand for in vitro diagnostic products is projected to grow over 6 percent annually to $17.9 billion in 2009 fueled by new reagents and instruments with improved disease detection and measurement capabilities. Currently the large share of IVD products are for health assessment screening, and diabetes-related blood glucose monitoring.

But, polymerase chain reaction products, as well as microarrays and, in the future, nanoarray technologies – in combination with new disease markers and targets -- are seen as spurring greater demand. IVDs today represent less than 5 percent of total healthcare expenses.

For more information on the in-vitro diagnostics market, see this article by Michael Rosen, published on the Wisconsin Technology Network.

California Stem-Cell Organization Disburses $14M

2006-04-10T23:41:00.000-04:00

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the agency formed when California's voters authorized the sale of some $3 billion in bonds to fund stem-cell research, today announced the allocation of some $12.1 million in its first disbursement of grants.

The money did not actually come from the sale of any of the bonds that voters approved in voting for Proposition 71 in November 2004. , but rather from the sale of bond anticipation notes to six California entities after the agency approved the sale of these financial instruments last week.

The institution plans to sell some $50 million of the notes to create a next round of funding and sidestep the roadblock of current litigation that is asking courts to determine the constitutionality of Proposition 71, and has held up the sale of the bonds.

The initial disbursement went to 16 universities and nonprofit research institutions led by the Keck School of Medicine – which in combination with the University of Southern California-affiliated Childrens Hospital Los Angeles – received funds totaling $1.38 million.

The grants will be used to prepare some 170 scientists and students in the basics of stem cell science, including ethics. The funds were parsed out to eight University of California campuses including the California Institute of Technology, Stanford, USC, and four nonprofit research institutes.

For more information, see The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine website.

UCSC-led Team Gets $1.6M NIH Grant for Biosensor

2006-03-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

A team of researchers led by Holger Schmidt, an associate professor of electric engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and scientists at Brigham Young University, has received a four-year $1.6 million NIH grant to develop a biosensor for potential medical or bioresearch applications.

The technology will integrate into one chip both electrical and optical capabilities to characterize biomolecules and will build on previous work that combined the development of nanopore technology with liquid-core optical waveguides, UCSC said in an announcement this week. Essentially, light is beamed through small volumes of liquids on a chip to obtain measurements both electrically and optically.

The grant announcement illustrates what appears to be a typical path for development of a new technology: it's conceived in academia, and then receives grant support for further development. Then, if successful, at some point down the line, possibly, the technology is transferred to a commercial entity that continues the development and possible commercialization.

It also points to the growing trend to miniaturize this type of technology onto a single-chip form.

DOE scraps plans for 4 Genomic Science Facilities

2006-03-29T23:29:00.000-05:00

The Office of Science of the US Department of Energy this week scuttled plans to create four user facilities to support its Genomics:GTL program, and instead will create two facilities to support research in bioenergy.

The Department of Energy's GTL (formerly, Genomes to Life) program, initiated in 2000, is an effort to support systems biology research for benefits in energy production, carbon dioxide absorption and the transformation of radioactively contaminated waste, according to the agency's website.

So, instead of its less than a year old plans for creating four facilities, for research and operations in protein production, molecular imaging, proteome analysis, and systems biology, the agency will instead focus on using its research resources to find ways to produce biologically based renewable energy resources. This change of plans comes in response to the President's Advanced Energy Initiative and a review of the DOE's GTL program by the National Research Council of the National Academies. (Click here to read the report.)

For background, the DOE initiated the Human Genome Project and operates the Joint Genome Institute. The GTL program has received $240 million annual funding from 2002 to 2006, which has supported some 75 research projects, with 65 percent of the monies going to scientists at DOE operated labs, and 35 percent to researchers at academic and private research institutions.

Originally, the four planned facilities were described by the DOE as:

A facility for the Production and Characterization of Proteins and Molecular Tags;
Facility for the Characterization and Imaging of Molecular Machines;
Facility for Whole Proteome Analysis;
Facility for Analysis and Modeling of Cellular Systems.

According to a statement, the DOE's Office of Science is formulating a plan for one or two vertically integrated centers with a focus on bioenergy research with the hope that these can be operational at a date earlier than the originally planned Facility for the Production and Characterization of Proteins and Molecular Tags.

Having visiting the DOE's Pacific Northwest National Lab's proteomics facilities in 2004, we came away impressed by the sheer power of the instrumentation gathered there and the ingenuity and smarts of the scientists using it. We can only hope that this kind of government effort can continue to support research that not only will have positive benefit for US energy needs, but also for health and the advancement of life sciences.

Hawaii Med School Conference Focuses on Systems Biology

2006-03-28T22:46:00.000-05:00

Systems biology, the idea of using massive computing power and new knowledge of biology deriving from emerging fields like genomics and proteomics as well as traditional knowledge to get an overall view of biological systems, is rising on the agenda at the John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Leroy Hood, co-founder of the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle, and Marc Kirschner, chairman of the new Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, are among the systems biology notables that will speak at the second annual Hawaii BioScience Conference, which is slated to begin Sunday, June 25.

The conference will cover genomics and no doubt the emerging thought in systems biology as well as presentations from Nancy Cox, chief of the influenza branch of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on emerging infectious diseases and influenza pandemics.

Additionally, presentations will be provided by Ed Liu, the director of the Genome Institute of Singapore; Hiroshi Mizushima, director of bioinformatics at the National Cancer Center Research Institutes Center for Medical Genomics, and Stephen O'Brien, chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute, both speaking on topics related to genomics and medicine.

Further information is available at http://www.hibiosci.org/

We attended the initial conference in Hawaii last year and found the presentations to be powerful and the speakers – as well as the attendees – to be of the highest caliber, not to leave out the hospitality and organization of the hosts. Mahalo.

India and University of California to Cooperate on Research

2006-03-27T22:58:00.000-05:00

India today signed an memorandum of understanding with the University of California to facilitate research activities. India and the University of California committed to spend some $10 million annually in joint research in areas including biomedicine, molecular biology, drug design, nanotechnology as well as other high tech areas, according to news reports.

The agreement was signed by V. S. Ramamurthy of India's Department of Science and Technology and by Gretchen Kalonji, director of international strategy development at the University of California System, according to a news report.

Kalonji, formerly professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, was named to her post with the University of California in 2005 with the mission of "creating the first coordinated and comprehensive international strategy in UC history," according to a university website.

[New Biology Economy returns to its usual publication schedule after a short hiatus required by pressing workload in launching Nassau News, a pioneering multimedia community journalism project at the School of Communications at Hofstra University. To learn more, go to http://nassaunews.org]

Aussie Group Uses RNAi for High-Fiber Wheat

2006-02-27T23:57:00.000-05:00

Scientists from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and the French-based agricultural biotechnology company Biogemma UK are hoping to use the relatively new molecular-biology technique of RNA interference to develop a high-fiber wheat.

The researchers identified an enzyme that converts the amylose starch molecule to amylopection and then devised a silencing technology to stifle its production by inserting a fragment of DNA into the wheat to engage the process of RNA interference, according to a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wheat higher in amylose is harder to digest, lowering the rate of blood sugar uptake and increasing the passage of fiber into the large bowel, which has beneficial health implications for humans [just read the fiber content on loaves of bread].

The knowledge gained through this research will be applied into a selective breeding program to produce a high-amylose wheat, rather than using genetic modification for commercialization, according to published reports.

RNA unterference is an emerging technology that is used to silence or turn off the production of protein in the DNA-to-protein biological process. Specifically, small RNAs are use to direct cellular RNAi mechanisms to degrate messenger RNA, silencing the expression of the gene by blocking production of the protein.

The technology is seen as being very specific and may hold great promise as a therapeutic. Still, it is very early in the game and there is much work to be done in understanding how this technology works in the human body and its long-term effects.

Andrew Fire and Craig Mello of Stanford and the University of Massachusetts, Worchester, respectively, coined the term “RNAi” after they injected double-stranded RNA into C. Elegans and noted the gene-silencing effect. Their research was printed in the journal Nature in 1998.

The first findings of this phenomenon date back to 1990 in plant research by scientists in the US and the Netherlands.

Australia's CSIRO has developed and is commercializing an RNAi “hairpin” technology.

Florida County Picks New Site for Scripps

2006-02-15T23:51:00.000-05:00

The Florida site of the Scripps Research Institute will be located in Jupiter, Fla., after Palm Beach County commissioners on Valentine's Day voted by a narrow margin to locate the biotech institute in the northern end of the county on the campus of Florida Atlantic University, in an urban area some five miles from the Atlantic Ocean, near Interstate 95, and the Florida Marlins spring training home.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) had lobbied for a location in Boca Raton, in southern Palm Beach County, hoping to recreate an atmosphere for biotech R&D like that surrounding Scripps in La Jolla, Calif. The state and the county have pledged some $600 million to this effort, which echoes the biotech bonanza hopes of economic development authorities throughout the country, and indeed throughout the world.

A 2002 Brookings Institute study found that 83 percent of local development agencies have biotech among their top two priorities and 41 states have biotech programs. Still, for the wanna-be hubs, the bottom 42 of the top 51 urban areas in the US -- outside of Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Washington, and Raleigh-Durham -- the risk and expense of creating a biotech hub de novo may never produce a profit, with the real estate adage of location, location, location, mattering most.

Still, Palm Beach County is an attractive place to live.

The county commissioners' decision overturned a 2003 decision by Scripps to place the facility on Mecca Farms, a 2,000-acre former orange grove located adjacent to the Florida Everglades. The Mecca Farms project was stopped last year after environmental groups successfully got a federal court to order construction halted until the completion of an environmental impact statement, leaving the farm bulldozed of its orange trees and in the hands of the county, which had already spent $60 million to buy it.

Apparently, according to news reports, an $8 million guarantee of funding for minority programs, provided the voting edge the proposition needed to pass the commission.

The new facility, on land the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel quoted as valued at some $230,000 an acre, is expected to open in 2008 with all land and construction costs, estimated at nearly $175 million by the newspaper, borne by the county. Scripps already has some 100 scientists working in the area in temporary laboratories.

The town of Jupiter has erected a website, the Biotech Research and Development Opportunities page, which gives a prospectus of 4.6 million square feet of potential R&D sites in the area.

Who Profits From President's Initiative on Rapid HIV Tests?

2006-01-31T23:58:00.000-05:00

In his state of the union address on Tuesday night, President Bush proposed a Federal initiative “to join with African-American churches and faith-based groups to deliver rapid HIV tests to millions.”

We took a quick look at the text of the President's annual speech, which sets the administration's policy tone for the next year, to see what it might mean to what we call the New Biology Economy.

The first thing we thought of is this: What companies might prosper from such a government push on rapid HIV tests?

According to Rapid-Diagnostics.org, a website funded by the US Agency for International Development and PATH, a Seattle-based non-profit group, there are some 30 commercially available rapid diagnostic tests for HIV from companies like Abbott Diagnostics, the largest supplier of HIV tests, and Bio-Rad Laboratories.

Rapid HIV tests are critically important as they are cheaper, and produce results in 5 to 30 minutes, which stands to increase the number of patients who actually get their results instead of the significant number of people who make the initial visit for counseling and a blood-draw for a test, but never return for results that may take from one to two weeks to obtain in traditional EIA (enzyme immunoassay) testing proceedure.

In 2004, the FDA approved Bio-Rad's Multispot HIV-1/HIV-2 Rapid Test for use by clinical laboratories and OraSure Technologies Advance HIV1/2 Antibody Test for use with oral fluid and for use on plasma specimens, the only rapid HIV test to be approved in the US by the FDA for use with oral fluid, according to the CDC.

According to the 2005 HIV Testing Conference website, the rollout of rapid HIV testing in the United States “in public-health settings has varied considerably by state and local health department due to both state regulatory requirements and system-development needs. State regulations that require phlebotomy training for personnel performing finger-stick rapid-tests (California) or that CLIA-waived laboratories have lab directors with a PhD (Pennsylvania) were barriers for implementing CLIA-waived rapid tests in community-based organizations.”

The organization concludes that the “roll-out of rapid testing in the United States has taken time.”

Recently, the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center and two of 14 San Francisco Department of Health testing sites stopped using the OraQuick Advance test. The LA organization reported 13 false positives in November, which certainly is devastating news for a patient to receive.

OraSure Technologies Inc., the Bethlehem, Pa.-based company that makes the OraQuick Advance tests, stands behind its product and is working with testing sites, the CDC and the FDA to try to discover why the false positives are occurring in what appear to be geographical clusters.

Why has the rollout of a rapid HIV tests in the US been slower than overseas, where these tests are much more available?

According to the website, the Body, it is because these diagnostics test for both HIV-1,the most common HIV infection in the world, and HIV-2, which is most prevalent in West Africa.

The patent for the HIV-1 test is controlled by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) while Bio-Rad controls the HIV-2 patent, which was originally granted to France's Institut Pasteur and was then licensed to a spin-off, for-profit corporation. After a series of business transactions, effective control of the US patent was subsequently traded among the big-three makers of conventional diagnostics, including Abbott Laboratories, the largest supplier of HIV tests. The result: anyone who wants to market an HIV test that detects both HIV-1 and HIV-2 in the U.S. needs the permission of Abbott and the others, according to a 2002 article available online.

So, as it typical of any biomedical initiative, there are patents and licenses and royalties to pay, and operational issues to overcome before a person can go to a church or other organization and get routed to a rapid HIV test. This will be an interesting process to observe.

Former Celera IT Guru to Howard Hughes Medical Institute's New Janelia Farm

2006-01-30T23:51:00.000-05:00

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced the appointment of five administrators to operate the Janelia Farm Research Campus, which is expected to open later this year in Ashburn, Va.

The campus, fully funded by HHMI, is a kind of 21st Century scientific set dedicated to biomedical research. Like many other new biology facilities across the country, it will have open spaces to encourage interaction between its resident and visiting illuminati.

Scientists at Janelia Farm will not have teaching, grant-writing, and administrative duties, they will have more time for informal interactions with their colleagues. To promote productive “collisions,” we have designed central meeting places, and people at Janelia Farm will have many opportunities to meet one another. These include the dining room, coffee hour, and an evening pub, as well as periodic social events in the evenings and on weekends (open to friends and families). More formal occasions will also be scheduled, such as weekly internal seminars.

A core goal of Janelia Farm is to free scientists from the need to write grant proposals and to allow them the freedom to change research direction without concern for the impact on their funding.

We at New Biology Economy like to think of it as the coffee-pot theory of cross-disciplinary scientific collaboration. Brew a pot of good coffee and the conversations will follow.

The folks who will create the infrastructure supporting this geek bonhomie, as announced by HHMI, follow:

Marshall Peterson, former chief technology officer at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., and former vice president for infrastructure technology for Celera Genomics, and an aerospace engineer by education, will serve as director of information technology. Applying his experience in creating the computing infrastructure that supported Celera's private enterprise efforts in sequencing the human genome, Peterson, 58, will direct the design, implementation, and support of the scientific computing infrastructure for the $500 million campus, which will be focused on biomedical research and research on how information is processed by neuronal circuits, and on developing imaging technologies and methods for image analysis.

Reed George, 41, former senior program manager for the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, where he directed the project's DNA sequencing operations and its technology development group, will serve as director of scientific services, overseeing core labs in microscopy, instrument design, and molecular biology.

Joanne Theurich, formerly of DST Health in Williamsport, Pa., will serve as director of administration and finance, duties that will include managing technology transfer.

Howard Day will serve as director of facilities, overseeing the laboratory, conference, and housing spaces on the 300-acre campus along the Potomac River, while Jennifer Farris, former director of catering and conference services for The Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, NC, will serve as director of campus services such as housing, dining, and a fitness center.

The organization is hiring. Click here to read more.

See previous New Biology Economy coverage from Thursday, June 30, 2005

St. Jude Researchers Identify Bird-Flu Gene

2006-01-26T22:43:00.000-05:00

In a study of hundreds of flu viruses collected from around the world, investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis have identified a gene that exists in bird flu viruses but notin human influenza, according to a study available online and published in the Jan. 27 issue of Science magazine.

Additionally, a protein – NS, for non-structural protein – may be the key to why the bird influenza is so destructive to the cells it infects, a potential virulence determinant, according to Science.

"We were surprised to see a lot of variation in this NS protein. That was the clue. We felt it must be playing an important biological role," Clayton Naeve, senior author of the Science paper and chief of molecular biology at St. Jude, told Reuters.

According to an article distributed by the Canadian Press news agency:

An initial analysis of the viral sequencing performed by Naeve and his co-authors from St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., identified a sort of tag on the end of the non-structural, or NS1, protein inside avian viruses that may help explain the high death toll in people who become infected with the H5N1 virus.

The NS1 protein is known to block the production of interferon, a protein the immune system generates to help it fight viral infections.

The NS1 proteins from avian viruses differed from those of human viruses, containing this special motif or tag that allows the avian NS1 protein to latch on to proteins in human cells.

The H5N1 virus and the H1N1 virus, which caused the 1918 pandemic, have the bird motif. The viruses that caused the milder pandemics of 1957 and 1968 had a human motif on their NS1 proteins.

This is an important molecular insight, but does not unravel the riddle public health authorities face in dealing with a threat of a flu pandemic should the H5N1 bird flu virus mutate into a form that easily passes from person to person.

“You need much more work to demonstrate this actually contributes to virulence in nature," Naeve said.

Naeve and his St. Jude colleagues are conducting a project to sequence all of the genomes of known influenza viruses.

The work that yielded this particular insight was a large-scale sequencing of some 300 avian influenza viruses from a set of 11,000 flu viruses collected by Robert Webster of St. Jude's Infectious Diseases department.

The researchers produced 70 million bases of sequence information leading to DNA sequences for 2,196 genes and 169 complete bird-flu genomes. The new data has been combined with public data and will be available to researchers in a public genetic database.

The research was conducted in St. Jude's molecular biology lab and on its powerful computational system.

The institution's Hartwell Center for Bioinformatics and Biotechnology houses the big three tools – high-throughput DNA sequence analysis, gene-expression analysis, and proteomics/mass spectrometry. The torrent of data produced by all this sophisticated hardware – some 70 million bases of sequence information just for the 2,196 gens and 169 viruses in the study – was then analyzed, according to St. Jude information, on an IBM eServer BladeCenter Linux cluster system that includes 280 servers benchmarked at 600 billion floating-point operations per second, ranking it 251 among the world's top 500 supercomputers.

[Click here to go to the center's website]

Additionally, the Hartwell Center is not the only New Biology game in Memphis. Naeve also sits on the scientific advisory board of Genome Explorations, a early-stage company that takes advantage of nearby FedEx to provide genomic analysis services globally. Genome Explorations was co-founded by Divyen Patel, the former head of the Affymetrix GeneChip processing core laboratory at St. Jude, and Arno Justman, a former Navy aviator and entrepreneur.

Previous New Biology Economy articles on bird flu:

Thursday, October 20, 2005
Should the Next Weapon in Bird Flu Fight be DNA?

Thursday, September 22, 2005
Vietnam Opens Lab Test Facility for Bird Flu, Other Diseases, in Mountain Province

Thursday, September 29, 2005
Bats Seen as SARS Source

Thursday, October 06, 2005
Who Will Manage Quarantines?

Cynthia Kenyon on Aging

2006-01-24T23:40:00.000-05:00

Journalists aren't supposed to have heros, but New Biology Economy certainly has one scientist that it admires and that is Cynthia Kenyon, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Kenyon conducts her research using the C. Elegans soil roundworm as a model organism to study the genetic basis for aging.

In 1981, Kenyon, working as a graduate student in the laboratory of Graham Walker, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, identified the genes that are activated in bacteria exposed to DNA damaging agents. Kenyon named the damaged-inducible (Din) genes in order of discovery, with DinB so named because it was the second one she found.

Earlier this month, Walker and his colleagues published research in the Jan. 12, 2006, issue of the journal Nature that finally reveals – some 25 years later -- what exactly DinB does. The research indicates that DinB is proficient at copying over a particular kind of damage to the G nucleotide.

"In general, we think that nature evolved this function to help us survive DNA damage that would otherwise kill us," said Walker in a statement from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "It's probably a kind of damage that all cells encounter frequently in life.”

While it took 25 years to go from discovery of this gene to learn what it does, Kenyon's work continues. In 1993, Kenyon found that a single genetic change could double the lifespan of C. elegans. Kenyon's research has shown that aging in the worm is regulated by hormonal pathways that have counterparts in humans. By manipulating genes and cells, she has been able to extend the lifespan and period of youthfulness in worms up to six-fold. Specifically, her research indicated that mutations in the worm’s daf-2 gene, which encodes an insulin/IGF-1-like receptor, can double the lifespan of C. elegans.

Her insight into the response pathway for insulin IGF-1 has convinced her to alter her own diet, she said in an interview in 2004.

“I eat a low-carb diet. We gave our worms sugar and it shortened their life span. So, I’ve been on this diet for three years. I have a great serum profile. And, they have done studies now that are upholding this. They took two obese groups of people and put one half of them on a low-carb diet, a very stringent version of the Atkins diet where you eat only 30 grams of carbs a day, and the other half on a low-fat diet. Neither group actually turned out to lose much weight at the end of a year. But, the low-carb people had a much better responsiveness to insulin and [beneficial] triglyceride levels,” she said.

Kenyon has recently taken her research on animal aging to the next step, with mice. She has been able to increase their lifespan by up to 25 percent using similar mutations as in her research on C. elegans, according to an article in The California Aggie student newspaper at Cal-Davis.

Kenyon presented two free lectures at the University of California, Davis, on Jan. 24 and Jan. 25. We wish we could have been there as this kind of genetic research is an exciting and promising part of the New Biology Economy.

Davos Preview

2006-01-23T23:08:00.000-05:00

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum begins Jan. 25 in Davos, Switzerland, with an update on the global economy provided by a panel of economists including Jacob Frankel of AIG, Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, Laura D. Tyson, dean of the London Business School, and Min Zhu, the executive assistant president of the Bank of China. A highlight of the first day's meeting includes a special address by Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan.

Later in the meeting, former US President Bill Clinton will address the group in a conversation while another Bill, Bill Gates, will participate in the forum called “Global Plan to Stop TB.”

In the dot-com boom times, Davos was the annual meeting to describe the high tech agenda, at least for high-level ideas, and high-profile personalities. The meeting is still an important gathering but a lot less hyped.

The meeting, which lasts Jan. 25-29, lists more than 2,340 participants, including business and political leaders, gathering under the rubric of “The Creative Imperative” and holding discussions on:

human imagination, innovation and the creativity necessary to address the major challenges the world is facing” and five sub-themes: “The Emergence of China and India” and “The Changing Economic Landscape” to “New Mindsets and Changing Attitudes”, “Creating Future Jobs” and “Regional Identities and Struggles”.

New Biology Economy would love to cover this event but not this year. So, we offer the following links from the forum's website that, if we were there, we would cover:

A World Without Intellectual Property

Whether it is open source software, music exchange or unlicensed cloning of consumer and pharmaceutical products, the current regime for protecting intellectual property (IP) rights is under pressure. As product development cycles shorten and become more collaborative, companies need to rethink how they manage and protect IP. 1) How would innovation be rewarded in a world without adequate intellectual property protection? 2) How could companies potentially gain a competitive advantage by adopting new approaches to IP? 3) What new models might emerge in response to existing pressures on IP? Join with your peers in this collaborative workshop to look into the future, exploring the risk and opportunities for your organization in a world without IP rights.

India and the World: Scenario to 2025

Co-developed by the World Economic Forum and the Confederation of Indian Industry, the India and the World scenario explores potential futures for India and the internal and external forces shaping India's policy towards the rest of the world.

India's Life Science Revolution

India's rapid rise in IT-enabled services is a true success story. The life science industry is now a major focus for investment, with one million jobs expected to be created by 2010. 1) What factors bode well for the industry in light of India's previous success in IT? Has India sufficient research resources and the human capital to power a bioscience industry? 2) What models are Indian life science companies likely to adopt to compete internationally? 3) How might government regulation and patent issues impact the investment climate?

The Big Debate: Setting the Business Agenda Questions Demanding a Creative Response

This year's Annual Meeting theme, The Creative Imperative will explore the need for society, but in particular business, to develop fresh responses in order to flourish in a rapidly changing environment. The Big Debate will provide a unique platform for participants to test their views on what those responses might be. The Big Debate will, in part, include a table brainstorming around the five critical challenges identified for the Annual Meeting 2006: 1) emergence of China and India 2) changing economic landscape 3) new mindsets and changing attitudes 4) creating future jobs 5) regional identities and struggles We invite you to choose one of the above subjects by taking a seat at a designated table.

The Future of Healthcare

Healthcare costs are already as high as 15% of GDP in many developed economies and are set to rise as new treatments become available and populations age. 1) What new models and technologies will help contain healthcare costs? 2) What policies are already proving successful in delivering health solutions in a cost-effective manner? 3) Will new expensive and sophisticated treatments accelerate the shift towards two-tier health systems?

Human Enhancement -- Too Good To Be True?

From choosing the sex of a baby to improving athletic or mental performance through engineering and biotech advances, new methods to enhance the human body are bringing a fresh set of choices. 1) What forms of human enhancement are already available, and what is just around the corner? 2) Is society overly fixated on personal perfection and longevity? 3) Can there ever be international agreement on what is acceptable or unacceptable?

Phoenix's Pied Piper? Trust Sets Aside $50M to Attract Personalized Medicine Talent

2006-01-16T23:08:00.000-05:00

The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based charitable organization created to disburse funds left by philanthropist Virginia G. Piper, the wife of the founder of Motorola, Paul Galvin, has committed $50 million to attract 10 leading researchers in the field of “personalized medicine” to the Phoenix area.

The Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust's Initiative in Personalized Medical Science and Technology will “enable recognized research institutions in Maricopa County to attract 10 Piper Chairs -- leading scientists, engineers and clinicians in the fields of bioscience, nanotechnology and advanced information technology who are working to advance personalized medicine,” the foundation said in a statement.

Over the next five years, the trust will provide up to 10 $5 million grants -- each with $4 million earmarked for enhanced research; $500,000 for research by undergraduate and graduate students; and $500,000 no-strings Piper Prize in Personalized Medicine given to a leading researcher, much like the MacArthur “Genius Grants.”

The eligible area institutions -- universities, research institutes and hospitals -- successfully recruiting “Piper Chairs” will be required to ante up salaries and laboratory facilities.

Personalized medicine is a powerful concept that says medicine will, one day somewhere in the future, be tailored according to an individual's genetic profile. But, in reality, this is very much a visionary quest given that today's science doesn't even begin to have the information and knowledge needed to do this. It's biology's grand challenge and one that is being enabled by the technical and scientific breakthroughs in the new biology economy.

Phoenix is very much the biomedical hotbed, on a par with Seattle and other cities in the US following the bio leaders – Boston, San Diego, Maryland, and the Research Triangle. In 2000, the state's citizens approved a sales tax increase that provided some $44 million a year for research in the state public universities and downtown Phoenix has sprouted a core of biomedical research institutions, anchored by the Translational Genomics Research Institute and headed by Jeffrey Trent, who was the scientific director of the Human Genome Project.

Certainly, funding can be a powerful magnet for scientific talent. Who will take the bait?

Carnegie Mellon Prof Gets Grant for Mass Spec Development

2006-01-10T22:49:00.000-05:00

Mark Bier, an associate professor and the director for the Center for Molecular Analysis of the Carnegie Mellon University Department of Chemistry, has earned a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a heavy-ion mass spectrometer.

The instrument is being designed to overcome the hurdles that present technology faces in analyzing the composition of large complex molecules and will be able characterize large biomolecules (such as proteins, viruses, DNA) with masses over 150 kiloDaltons, according to a statement by the university.

No telling how long it will take this project to reach prototype stage, or even commercialization. But Bier has a track record in the field of mass spectrometry instrumentation, an increasingly critical tool in the field of proteomics and other applications where exacting molecular measurements and analysis are necessary. Bier was a co-inventor of the ion trap while working at Thermo Electron Corporation.

LabCorp and Lee Hood Hook Up

2006-01-09T23:41:00.000-05:00

Burlington, NC-based LabCorp this week announced it has entered into a strategic consulting deal with molecular biologist and biomedical visionary Leroy Hood, an inventor of pioneering automated DNA sequencing technology and founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.

According to a LabCorp statement, the relationship will seek to “develop innovative programs that accelerate the integration of medicine and molecular diagnostics.”

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

“A key component of LabCorp's future in molecular diagnostics is our ability to anticipate and fulfill medical needs by offering testing that can have a significant impact on patient management," Myla Lai-Goldman, executive vice president, chief scientific officer and medical director of LabCorp said in a statement.

LabCorp is one of three publicly held medical testing companies, joining Quest and LabOne, as well as privately held Speciality Labs, in conducting some 40 percent of the work done in the clinical testing market, which estimated at $41 billion a year, with the majority of testing conducted by hospital labs.

However, the clinical testing market is only growing at a single-digit pace, while new and non-routine tests, such as genomic testing, are seen as a double-digit growers with corporations like the LabCorps better positioned than hospital labs to serve that market due to the complexity of the equipment and the tests, as well as the licensing and royalties required to play in that arena.

It is very early in this shift to more genetic testing and there are few scientifically proven and FDA-approved biomarkers to base broader testing upon, but this will change in time.

By aligning with Hood, LabCorp is taking a relatively low-risk, low-cost option that, no doubt, it hopes will give it some protection against being blindsided by future developments in medical testing.

New York Governor Proposes $600 Million Challenge Fund for Biotech Research

2006-01-04T23:26:00.000-05:00

At this time of year, our governors read state-of-state speeches, to tout previous achievements and set the rudder for the future.

On Wednesday, New York Gov. George E. Pataki (R) delivered this annual speech to start the final year of his 12 years in office.

For the New Biology Economy, Pataki proposed enhancing the state's five Centers of Excellence by providing business tax incentives and links to new public math and science high schools.

New York has five Centers of Excellence statewide including: the Albany Center of Excellence in Nanoelectronics, the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems, the Rochester Center of Excellence in Photonics and Microsystems, the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, and the Long Island Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology.

While four of these centers of excellence are located in economically depressed areas of the state, the governor offered encouragement for urban biotech by proposing a $600 million fund of public and private monies to foster biotech research. “In New York City, home to some of the best research hospitals in the world, let's expand our efforts to keep New York at the forefront of the current revolution in biomed and biotech research,” he said.

Read previous New Biology Economy coverage of biotech in New York:
New York City Takes Big Step Into Biotech With Developer for East River Science Park, Aug. 11, 2005
Skolnick Bags Buffalo, Heads to Atlanta, Dec. 15, 2005
New York Startup Targets Faster PCR Amplification, Nov. 22, 2005
IBM and Three Institutes Ink Cancer Research IT Pacts Nov. 09, 2005

Innovation in the States

2006-01-03T23:21:00.000-05:00

As the year opens, the country's regional media examine their local economic growth drivers.

The Seattle Times asks whether the great northwest can accrue enough biotech companies, a critical mass, if you will, of both early stage and mature enterprises, to ameliorate the perceived risks that business management and scientific talent might feel about moving to one of the smaller biotech hubs of the country.

In Cleveland, Crain's Business looks at Osiris Therapeutics, a stem cell company based on research coming from the lab of Case Western Reserve University biology professor Arnold Caplan and colleagues.

The publication notes that Osiris recently reported a $19-million venture-capital injection from Swiss private equity fund Friedli Corporate Finance but lamented the fact that Osiris left Cleveland 10 years ago for Baltimore, where the company hoped to attract more talent because of the large biotech presence in Maryland.

In hurricane ravaged Louisiana, the Shreveport Times sees opportunities for venture-capital investment in a state reinventing itself. Certainly, it's not a big leap to the think that the state could target biotechnology as an economic engine for the future. Every other state is.

The Manufacturer, a trade publication for the manufacturing industry, looks at the activity in technology transfer in academia and provides a couple of meaty statistical paragraphs and news of a new website, www.innovationbridge.com, from the Kauffman Foundation providing open access to early-stage innovations and click-wrap online licensing. The 18-month pilot is limited to seven universities: the University of North Carolina, Cornell, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, Washington University in St. Louis, and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. (See New Biology Economy, November 29, 2005, for a list of the leading universities in terms of patents granted)

India Research Organization Contributes to Coffee Genomics Efforts

2006-01-02T22:50:00.000-05:00

India's Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology has joined the 14 countries of the International Coffee Genomics Network, which was organized in 2005.

As part of this effort, India's Hyderabad-based CCMB has completed a program to analyze DNA fingerprints and generate possible desirable molecular markers of a group of varieties of the coffea genus and will share data with the University of Trieste in Italy with hopes of creating a coffee breeding program based on this data as well as organize genotypes and create intellectual property surrounding the information, according to an article in India's Financial Express publication.

The ICGN members, besides India's Ramesh Aggarwal of the CCMB and BK Jayarama and HL Sreentath of the country's Central Coffee Research Institute, includes scientists from Kenya, Brazil, France, Colombia, UK, Italy, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, and the US (from Hawaii and Cornell University).

The ICGN's mission, according to the group's website, is to “decipher the genetic and molecular bases of important biological traits in coffee tree species that are relevant to the growers, processers and consumers.”

World coffee production in 2004 was 110.5 million 60-kilo bags worth some $5 billion. Production in 2005 was expected to shrink 5 percent, led by Brazil's production of over 30 million bags. See New Biology Economy, August 18, 2005

Fluidigm Chip Can Synthesize FDG in Nanoquantities

2005-12-20T00:34:00.000-05:00

A lab-on-a-chip technology developed by Fluidigm Corp. of South San Francisco can synthesize the radiolabeled glucose analog, fluorodeoxy-glucose (FDG), in nanogram quantitites, a team of scientists from Fluidigm, Caltech, UCLA, Stanford University, and Siemens Medical Solutions have demonstrated, according to a paper recently published in the journal Science.

FDG is critically important as a molecular imaging probe in positron emission tomography, but only has a half-life of 110 minutes, which puts limits on its use in administering it to a patent for use in diagnosis. Current methods require about 50 minutes for synthesis.

FDG, which in 1999 was approved by the FDA for the diagnosis of all cancers, cardiovascular disease, and epilepsy, is manufactured using cyclotrons. There are networks of these synthesizing operations located near areas of high PET instrumentation. Recently, the Mayo Institute recently opted to purchase cyclotrons to manufacture its own FDG and have a consistent supply uninterruptible by Minnesota's winters.

So, accelerating the synthesis time of FDG could be positive for increasing the use of PET diagnostics. Fluidigm's technology apparently can reduce synthesis time to about 15 minutes, according to the company. Note that this paper is only a proof-of-principle and hurdles of all kinds must be overcome before a promising concept is successfully commercialized at mass scale.

Fluidigm's technology is called an integrated fluidic circuit -- a dime-sized lab-on-a-chip made of silicone rubber containing a web of microfluidics -- piping, valves and chambers -- that resembles a biologist's version of a semiconductor.

Positron emission tomography is regarded as the gold standard for pathological analysis, a technique that produces images capturing the metabolism of radiopharmaceuticals absorbed by tissue in the body. Some 700,000 PET scans were performed at some 1,500 sites in the US in 2003, with 93 percent of PET studies conducted for oncology purposes, and 7 percent for cardiology and neurology applications, according to research published by IMV Medical Information Division, a Des Plaines, Ill., market research firm.

The leading edge of the technology is a $2-million combination of PET and computed tomography technology, with GE Healthcare the dominant player for these machines in a market estimated at nearly $500 million in 2004, followed by Siemens and Philips Electronics, respectively.

Stephen Quake of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., co-founded Fluidigm to commercialize the microfluidic technology that he and his colleagues have invented. Among Fluidigm's investors are Lehman Brothers, General Electric, Eli Lilly and the government of Singapore. Its partners include GlaxoSmithKline. The company earlier this year said that it will move its chip manufacturing operations from California to Singapore.

Skolnick Bags Buffalo, Heads to Atlanta

2005-12-15T23:10:00.000-05:00

Jeffrey Skolnick, a rare combination of brilliance in biology and informatics who was recruited with much fanfare to the University of Buffalo in 2002 from the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis to head the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, is moving south, to Georgia Tech, and taking a team of 19 colleagues and $1.5 million a year in grants with him.

While there are many comings and goings in the new biology economy, this one is interesting from purely a geographic point of view. The 52-year-old Skolnick, a Yale-trained biochemist and a bioinformatician, was brought into Buffalo by New York's leaders hoping to boost the area economically by using a $200 million investment in bioinformatics as a catalyst. That may still happen, but it won't within the next year or two. And, it will take a special breed of those who are hardy enough to sit through the area's notorious lake-effect snows and cold.

Skolnik is apparently taking a pay cut to escape the cold winters of upstate New York, and perhaps the impossibly high expectations for biotech breakthroughs and bioresurgence in Buffalo.

According to news reports, Skolnick earned $345,000 annually at the University of Buffalo, but will be paid a salary of $225,000 a year to hold an endowed chair in Atlanta, according to coverage in Cox News. Additionally, Georgia will ante up $5 million for Skolnick's computing and lab equipment needs.

Skolnick will join a robust biotech community of high ambitions at Georgia Tech,and surrounding Emory University and the University of Georgia on his arrival at the first of the year.

Buffalo will continue to be cold.

Honululu Bio Hub Gains Momentum

2005-12-14T23:58:00.000-05:00

Hawaii's Kamehameha Schools, a 120-year-old school system created to educate people of Hawaiian ancestry, and the owner of some $6.2 billion in assets, particularly some 365,000 acres of Hawaii real estate as the state's largest private landowner, recently named the Santa Monica, Calif.-based KUD International unit of Tokyo's Kajima Corp., and Phase 3 Properties of San Diego to develop a 400,000-square-foot life sciences research complex on the Honululu waterfront.

The project is expected to take 18 to 20 months to complete once construction begins, possibly in late 2006, a spokesman for the school system told the Star Bulletin newspaper of Honululu.

The development will be located near the University of Hawaii's John A. Burns School of Medicine, which was dedicated in January. The construction is part of a plan to create a biomedical hub and revitalize the Kakaako area.

Phase 3 Properties has developed, leased and managed biotech lab facilities including the San Diego Science Center in California, the Patriot Science Center in North Carolina and Nexus Canyon Science Park in Seattle. KUD helped develop the Burns School of Medicine facilities and has done projects in development, construction and financing globally.

Kamehameha Schools also recently said it was putting aside some $30 million for a new Hawaii-targeted venture fund that will invest in tech and life sciences companies to support its life sciences complex.

Meantime, the University of Hawaii Angel Investment network is seeking to create a venture capital fund with an entry investment of $25,000 – a sum that might attract a larger group of investors, according to an article in the Pacific Business News.

India Government Drafting Human Research Regulation Bill

2005-12-13T23:07:00.000-05:00

India's government is drafting legislation to regulate research on humans, according to news reports.

The possibility that India may impose regulation is important because the country is seen as an inviting resource for clinical trials with its large population of "treatment naive" people who haven't been exposed to medication, and a workforce that includes some 500,000 physicians.

In January 2004, Ajay Piramal, chairman of Nicholas Piramal India, the country's second largest drug maker, told Dow Jones at the annual World Economic Forum, that US and European drug companies should consider India as a site for conducting drug trials on humans because of potential savings from $200 million to $900 million on the development of a drug, a cost that is pegged at some $1 billion to $1.7 billion.

According to India's Business Standard publication, the human research regulation bill, which is likely to be introduced in the next session of parliament, draws heavily on ethical guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research and would provide for a regulatory agent to enforce ethical practices in scientific research on humans, including all clinical trials, and for research ranging from genomics to stem cells. Presently, India's drug controller-general (DCGI) regulates clinical trails.

The DCGI agency recently announced that it would create a website, slated for operation in the first quarter of 2006, to provide information about clinical trials in India including the name of the pharma sponsoring organizations, the contract research organizations involved, the number of volunteers, the clinical endpoints of the trials, and contact details. Additionally, the DCGI, with World Health Organization support, will seek to begin random inspection and audits of clinical trials in January with a team of 30 inspectors focusing good clinical practices.

According to the DNA India publication, there are about 350 Indian companies and 100 global firms presently involved in clinical trials in India with some 3,500 drugs under development and 4,000 new drugs applications reported.

The current India clinical trials market is estimated at $35 million, and predicted to grow to some $300 million by 2010, according to the India Times

Alberta Ponders $1B (CAN) Investment in Cancer Facilities

2005-12-12T23:08:00.000-05:00

Ralph Klein, the premier of the Canadian province of Alberta ,which is fiscally flush with royalites from oil and natural gas activities, is proposing to invest (CAN) $1 billion or about $850 million (US) into the Tom Baker Cancer Center in Calgary and the Cross Cancer Center in Edmonton, according to a newspaper report.

"We're already a leader in cancer research, but really I'd like to expand the role of the Baker and (Edmonton's) Cross Cancer clinics to make us a world leader in cancer research and treatment," the Edmonton Journal quoted the premier as saying.

About $650 million of the funds would go to replace the Tom Baker Center, while about $350 million would be used for improvements to the Cross Cancer Center, according to a report in the CBC online.

The Calgary facility would be a collaboration between the University of Calgary, the Calgary Health Region and the Alberta Cancer Board, which coordinates research, prevention, and treatment programs in the province and operates 17 facilities, including the Tom Baker Cancer Center and the Cross Cancer Center.

The proposal has a sniff of politcs about it. Klein, a former TV reporter, who has said this is his last term as premier and is facing a leadership review by his Conservative party in its annual general meeting this spring, has called the Canadian healthcare system “unsustainable” and the American system “unacceptable” and is tinkering with building a private healthcare system alternative to Canada's public system.

And, in a cheeky move, Klein, bowing to public pressure, has made a commitment that the provincial legislature is to be smoke free, forcing politicos -- including himself -- outdoors to puff their butts. In snowy Canada, that is no small price to pay for the habit.

Princeton-based Institute Gets $10 Million for Systems Biology

2005-12-02T00:03:00.000-05:00

The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, which hosted Albert Einstein as one of its first faculty members as well as a number of other scientific heavies including Robert Oppenheimer, and John von Neumann, has accepted a $10 million challenge grant from the Simons Foundation to expand the institute's three-year-old Center for Systems Biology.

Arnold Levine, a professor at the institute, has a staff of biologists, physicists and statisticians who will likely not use the funds to purchase loads of DNA sequencers, nor microarray hybridization ovens, nor even lab mice, but will likely consume lots of coffee and computer cycles on the institutes's IBM cluster in pursuing theoretical biology -- blending molecular biology, physics and mathematics.

Anyway, if they want that equipment, it is available through partnerships or with Levine's connections at Applera (he's on the board of directors of the company) or in his lab at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick.

The members and faculty of the Center for Systems Biology include: Gurinder Singh Atwal, Gareth Bond of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Lillian Chiang, Michael Krasnitz, Harlan Robins, Jiri Vanicek and visitors Gyan Bhanot of IBM Research and Nitzan Rosenfeld of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Levine, a native New Yorker, was among a group of scientists credited with discovering the p53 tumor suppressor protein and a leader in ongoing genomic research on the protein. He is chairman of the National Institutes of Health Commission on AIDS Research and the National Academies Cancer Policy Board. He was president of The Rockefeller University from 1998 until 2002, when he resigned citing health reasons, albeit under a cloud arising from reports of an inappropriate encounter with a student.

The Institute for Advanced Study is a private organization established in 1933 on $5 million in funds donated by the Bambergers of the landmark Newark, NJ, department store.

The Simons Foundation, established in 1994 by James Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, and his wife Marilyn Hawrys Simons, was created to support advanced research in science and mathematics.

GM Crops Seen as $210 Billion Market in 10 Years

2005-11-30T00:01:00.000-05:00

Land devoted to the growth of biotech crops grew some 20 percent in 2004, up 5 percent over the previous year according to a report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, a lobby group based at Cornell University.

Biotech crops were grown by approximately 8.25 million farmers in 17 countries in 2004, up from 7 million farmers in 18 countries in 2003, according to the group's report. The US was followed by Argentina, Canada, Brazil, China, Paraguay, India, South Africa, Uruguay, Australia, Romania, Mexico, Spain and the Philippines among the countries growing 50,000 hectares or more of these crops.

Elsewhere, a widely published report attributed to an Australian study predicts that the global production of biotech crops -- including grains, oilseeds, fruits and vegetables -- will reach some $210 billion by 2015.

Certainly the developing world, seeking to feed an expanding population of poor, will provide the most pressure to use GM crops as China, the world's biggest producer of rice, the globe'smost important food crop, will no doubt soon release the first GM rice cultivars, pest-resistant rice varieties.

This news comes as Swiss voters earlier this week approved a five year-ban on the farming of genetically modified crops in the country, reflecting Europe's mistrust of this technology and a deep divide between it and the US over this issue.

Meantime, back in the US, the Environmental Protection Agency, found that Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a DuPont subsidiary, and Mycogen Seeds, a unit of Dow AgroSciences, had violated Federal laws in plantings of experimental genetically engineered crops in Hawaii, according to a news report. In both cases, the plantings of experimental corn did not meet regulations for isolating the plants from accidentally breeding with neighboring non-modified corn.

Angel Funders Boost Academic Tech Startups

2005-11-29T00:32:00.000-05:00

Angel funding – that's funds from friends and family, as well as, officially, Securities and Exchange Commission-accredited high-net-worth individuals – is boosting early stage enterprises spinning out out of academia and non-profit research organizations, according to an annual survey by the Association of University Technology Managers.

The group announced last week that 21 percent of the funding for startup business enterprises in 2004, based on innovations coming from its members, was provided by angel investors, while venture capital accounted for some 19 percent.

These numbers are important indicators for the new biology economy as academia and non-profit research institutions are becoming the engines of innovation in the life sciences and high technology, fueled by Federal funds, and as a consequence of the large publicly held players in the molecular biology sector focusing on the quarterly demands of Wall Street and stepping into the marketplace when a technology has moved to a high state of commercial promise, or offers a high degree of potential as a disruptive factor.

Venture capital investors apparently are recalcitrant to support companies at the earliest stages of emergence, a situation that compels a demand for support from organizations that have not only funding, but also managerial and marketing expertise. It is often is the case that academics are more interested in commercial gain if it helps them fund their particular research interest. Although that is not to overlook the academic researcher with a yen for a dollar.

According to AUTM, startup companies flowing out of the member institutions in 2004 grew 24 percent compared to 2003, with 232 institutions responding to a survey conducted by the Illinois-based group that counts as its members some 381 US and Canadian universities, hospitals, and nonprofit research institutions.

Some 462 startups were reported in the year, reversing a three-year downward trend among AUTM members responding to the survey. Additionally, the group reported that 92 existing early-stage academic spin outs folded in 2004 compared to the 131 closing in the previous year.

The survey also reported 4,783 licenses or options granted on US members' technology, up 6.1 percent over 2003; some 10,517 patent applications, and $1.03 billion in licensing fees.

New York University and Columbia University are regarded as the leaders in the area, each with over $100 million in licensing income in 2004, according to an article in the State News, a publication covering Michigan State University, which was seventh on the AUTM list with licensing income of $36 million in 2004.

With $47 million in licensing income, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation of the University of Wisconsin is third, followed by Stanford with $47 million, and then the University of Minnesota ($45 million). MIT is 12th on the list with $25 million while Harvard is 15th with $16 million, the article said, in numbers attributed to the Chronicle of Higher Education

The top 10 universities in terms of patents granted, according to the US Patent and Technology Office, are: the University of California (424 patents); California Institute of Technology (135); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (132); University of Texas (101); John Hopkins (94); Stanford (75); University of Michigan (67); University of Wisconsin (64); University of Illinois (58); and Columbia (52.)

For those with an interest in more academic patent number crunching, see the blog, see Patent Chronicles

For a lawyer's take on patents, see Patent Baristas though, be prepared, there is no brevity in these briefs, but lots of information.

New York Startup Targets Faster PCR Amplification

2005-11-22T23:48:00.000-05:00

Thermal Gradient Inc., a one-year-old startup in Rochester, NY, is preparing to begin testing a prototype device that accelerates PCR amplification for DNA testing.

The company, which is funded by venture capital firm The Trillium Group, has produced a prototype device, which it says is about half the size of a paperclip, able to perform a 30-cycle polymerase chain reaction within minutes, accelerating what is typically a labor-intensive process that takes hours.

The company is aiming to mass manufacture the device for application in diagnostics through a partnership with the Infotonics Technology Center, a private-public collaboration based in Canandaigua, NY. Testing of the prototype is expected to begin in February at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Functional Genomics Center

Thermal Gradient was founded by Rochester residents Joel Grover, who is the CEO of the firm, and Robert Juncosa, who is chief technical officer and the inventor of the technology. Both previously worked for Ortho Clinical Diagnostics of Johnson & Johnson.

According to the US Patent and Technology Office, Juncosa is listed as an inventor for US Patent No. 6,485,690, “Multiple fluid sample processor and system” held by Orchid BioSciences of Princeton, NJ.

It's unclear how this device plays into the sticky PCR patent and licensing arena, with Roche holding process patent rights for the PCR-based diagnostics market, and Applied Biosystems holding instrument rights.

But Thermal Gradient's product path is clearly indicative of the path of innovation in molecular biology tools, winding through miniaturization and then mass production, something that perhaps the Infotonics Technology Center can handle. The center's partners include Corning, Eastman Kodak and Xerox as well as some 20 New York State colleges and universities.

And, if successful, this might mean the application of PCR in situations in genomics, or public health when minutes and quality or results are critical.

“PCR technology has become an essential research and diagnostic tool for improving human health and quality of life. PCR technology allows scientists to take a specimen of genetic material, even from just one cell, copy its genetic sequence over and over, and generate a test sample sufficient to detect the presence or absence of a specific virus, bacterium or any particular sequence of genetic material," according to Roche.

Long Island Medical Organization to Build $45 Million Lab Facility

2005-11-21T23:24:00.000-05:00

The North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System last week announced plans to erect a 55,000-square-foot addition to its headquarters in Manhasset, NY.

The facility, budgeted to cost $45 million and slated for completion in the latter part of 2007, will house two floors of laboratories, a conference center and one floor dedicated to ongoing research in Alzheimer's disease,
Parkinson's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic lymphocytic leukemia as well as other projects.

The project is to be supported in part by some $50 million in government grants as well as a $45 million donation from Leonard and Susan Feinstein. Leonard Feinstein is the co-founder and co-chairman of the Bed Bath & Beyond retail chain, and the institution's research organization will be named The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research.

The institute already is an NIH-designated general clinical research center with molecular biology and genetics core facilities as well as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, a viral vector laboratory, a tissue and DNA bank and a biostatistics group.

Certainly this announcement points to the one growth area in the new biology economy – laboratory facilities. There is a virtual building boom across the nation as communities and regions position their areas for the future by creating multi million-dollar buildings to attract researchers and funding.

India and Israel Link Up to Commercialize Technology Innovation as Funding Flows In

2005-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

India and Israel will begin a technology commercialization collaboration early in 2006, VS Ramamurthy, India's science and technology secretary, told the Indo-Asian News Service in an article widely distributed in the India press.

"Israel will be our first research and development partner for commercialization of innovations,” Ramamurthy said.

India's announcement of the joint venture comes as private-equity funding expands in the country.

"While the government accounts for over 80 percent of investment in research and development, the increasing risk-taking appetite of the private sector for innovation is seeing considerable activity and investment,” Ramamurthy added in the IANS article, available here.

According to a Reuters report, Private equity funds raised $260 million to invest in India in 2003, but by June, new funds already topped $500 million, according to researchers at the Asian Venture Capital Journal.

India's economy may grow as much as 8 percent this year while expanding at a 5-percent rate since the start of the decade, compared to less than 2 percent growth in Europe on a 10-year average and 3 percent growth in the US.

Private equity investment in India has more than doubled in 12 months to about $2 billion, Amrish Baliga, head of the private capital practice at ICICI Securities, told the online publication Daily News India. This investment is, however, is targeting listed companies, Nitin Deshmukh, head of private equity at Kotak Mahindra Bank, told the publication.

Meantime, International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, will invest about $ 300 million in another 3-5 years in pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare companies in India, according to reports.

Princeton Targets Neuroscience; UCLA Links a DNA Sequence to Cognitive Defects

2005-11-17T00:11:00.000-05:00

While stopping short of offering a degree in neuroscience, Princeton University plans to upgrade its research efforts and bring together psychologists and molecular biologists into a neuroscience institute on its campus.

Pending funding approval, the university's efforts, in a proposal approved by the board of trustees last week, will focus on theoretical and quantitative neuroscience, according to a report in the Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper.

The school will pursue an interdisciplinary approach in its neuroscience research efforts in the area and offer more options for those who opt to concentrate in neuroscience while majoring in either psychology or molecular biology.
[See neuroscience entry in Wikipedia]

Additionally in another neuroscience development, UCLA on Wednesday announced the discovery of unique DNA sequence variations associated with increased risk for schizophrenia, impairments in short- and long-term memory, and other cognitive deficits. The research will be published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry in November.

"I hope this is the opening salvo in a new molecular approach to fighting schizophrenia," Tyrone Cannon, a professor of psychology, psychiatry and human genetics at UCLA, said in a statement.

In the Recovery Room

2005-11-15T00:55:00.000-05:00

I spent the day yesterday in the recovery room of one of the greatest cancer research facilities on the planet, here on the east side of New York City, where I live. I was there not for surgery, nor research purposes, but for a friend who was undergoing a lumpectomy for ductile carcinoma, a non-invasive incidence of breast cancer.

The day started at 7 a.m. When my friend called me just to touch base as she got into the hospital. Her surgery was scheduled for 10:30. She was calling me to give me a telephone number to call and check on her, and, likely, to hear a friendly voice. A strong lady, a fireball really, this procedure was of no small worry to her, I believe. We talked and she hung up. She called me a few minutes later and said plans were moved an hour or two later and I shouldn't come to the hospital under the early afternoon.

This was one of the incredible fall days that blesses New Yorkers – bluebird sky, warm sun, cool temperatures – a treat before the haggard gray chill of winter sets in. I walked to the cancer facility and sat in the sun-drenched benches at the front of the building to check in with the nurses and to see how my friend was doing. Amazing, in front of a cancer facility, smokers puffing away.

I got a call saying my friend was out of surgery and would be ready in an hour. Whew, I breathed and looked up into that blue sky and sunlight. Thank you.

I took the elevator up to the recovery room, signed in, and walked through the doors and saw more than a dozen gurneys separated by curtains with patients in crimson robes and attendants in surgical greens and whites. Patients would lie in their gurneys, then get up, move around, and then move to a chair. There were all kinds of people there, young, old, men and women. It was almost factory-like, but the nurses were kind and caring.

While hooked up to a machine that read her blood pressure automatically –120/79 -- my friend took a look at her left breast. They did it on the wrong one, she said. Then laughed. I guess that was her way of letting me – us – know she was okay.

Is there a 5-star restaurant around here, she asked? I'm starving. A nurse came by and asked her to rate her pain. A 3, down from a 5 after the surgery. They sent me to the chairs, the waiting area where the recovery process accelerates. Next to me, in the next cubicle a woman sat with her friend. They had come up from DC for surgery, taken the Vamoose bus they called it, an economical ride from DC with videos. The friend gave her chum, just out of surgery, a pillow made of lavender buds. I could smell the aroma lightly from five feet away. I heard them talking implants with a surgeon.

My friend came out and sat. No 5-star restaurant here, she sniffed. She settled for a snack of graham crackers, orange juice, and coffee in the recovery room. A nurse came by and gave her a big amber bottle of pain medication. Then the doctor came in. She said she used the same incision to cut out two areas, taking a good margin. My friend was ready to go, and thanked the doctor. I took notes to make sure everything would be remembered. I shook the doctor's hand. I love shaking hands with a surgeon – so, so soft.

We left and took a bus uptown to my friend's apartment. We had an engagement in the evening, an academic investiture for another friend of ours, a fancy robing ceremony with speeches and even a prominent politician there. We drove an hour from New York out into the suburbs, where my friend took pictures of the ceremony, then dived into amazing treats at a reception afterwards – lamb chops, fruit, cheeses, smoked meats.

I couldn't believe this lady had undergone surgery earlier in the day, and then was still plugging away. After all that protein, when we were done, we had a sweet tooth satisfied with a cup of coffee and a whole-wheat donut at a donut shop nearby.

She told me she found inspiration in the story she read in a newspaper about a Broadway star, Maria Friedman, who discovered a lump in her breast while the play "The Women in White" was in preview, had surgery, and is scheduled to appear in the opening Thursday, according to news reports.

I took inspiration from her. And, from all the other patients in that recovery area.

Breast cancer is probably one of the first areas that will benefit from the molecular biology tools now being brought to bear in medicine. Already the drug Herceptin is making an impact.

On 60 Minutes Sunday on CBS, the news magazine covered the idea that maybe people who have fatal diseases should have more access to unproven drugs.

And, in Sioux City, Iowa, a women's church group makes pillows for women who have had breast cancer surgery.

According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, excluding skin cancers, accounting for 1 in 3 cancers diagnosed. In 2005, an estimated 211,240 cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed among women, with 40,410 expected to die, according to ACS figures. Normal news practices are to round off those figures, but I just can not do that. Each number is a person and each is significant.

My friend got through this day, and I'm thankful.

UK's Angle Technology Ventures Bring Smart Money Early to Tech Transfer

2005-11-10T23:45:00.000-05:00

Angle Technology Ventures of Guildford, Surrey, UK, is looking to get closer to the font of innovation, seeking to invest in American university-developed intellectual property with seed-stage funding and commercialization assistance such as management and consulting, known as “smart money” in venture capital parlance.

The firm is investing primarily in the information-technology and life-sciences sectors and has opened US offices in Vienna, Va., and Philadelphia, in addition to its office in the Surrey Research Park in the UK. It has made an undisclosed initial investment in forming Aberro, a Vienna, Va.-based startup that is developing a software testing application.

Angle appears to be looking to carve out a upstream niche in the tech-transfer value chain, and do the work that many universities are seeking their tech transfer offices to perform.

Certainly Angle doesn't have the capacity to handle a great volume of this type of tech incubation, and assumes a greater risk profile than typical venture capital firms in taking on promising ideas -- before business plans are created, before executives are hired. And, perhaps most importantly, before significant equity is created, leaving the investment liable to dilution when later-stage investors step in -- if the project has any sort of commercial promise.

The firm, according to an article in the Washington Business Journal, has $14 million in funds for investment in the US.

Certainly tech transfer is a bottleneck in innovation. Many promising ideas in academia or in other non-profit institutions don't cross the commercialization chasm because of a dearth of early-stage funding or professional management, or a scientist/inventor simply lacking an appetite for entrepreneurship.

Still, academia is fast becoming an engine of innovation in the biotechnology sector as few public companies, under pressure for quarter-to-quarter growth, are able to engage in long-term research efforts without an immediate economic payoff.

David Counts, a molecular biologist trained at the Medical College of Georgia, recently joined Angle Technology Ventures from Ben Franklin Technology Partners, where he was director of life sciences, and will be based in Philadelphia.

IBM and Three Institutes Ink Cancer Research IT Pacts

2005-11-09T23:37:00.000-05:00

IBM will provide $3 million in technology and services to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to create a integrated information management system, the company said Wednesday.

New York-based IBM's announcements are another example of the deal-making in the emerging new biology economy. In these cases, the company is providing its technology to go hand-in-hand with medical data, including genomic information, in an effort to provide a better insight into disease for the benefit of patients, and clinicians.

These are early stage efforts that deal with the goal of creating knowledge from medical data, but do not really address the scientific veracity of data such as biomarkers. That is another ongoing challenge for scientists and clinicians.

Working with New York City-based Memorial Sloan-Kettering, IBM will integrate hospital data with text mining and analysis tools to create a system for predictive analysis and research in cancer, as well as creating a searchable database by standardizing and extracting information from the center's repository of thousands of pathology reports.

IBM is also joining with the Molecular Profiling Institute and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center-Mother and Child University Hospital Center under separate agreements announced today.

IBM and the Molecular Profiling Institute of Phoenix, Ariz., will collaborate to use molecular profiling technologies for application in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

In this project, IBM's information technology systems will be used to create a report based on a patient’s molecular profile, IBM said.

In a deal with Quebec's CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center-Mother and Child University Hospital Center, a university teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Montreal, IBM will collaborate with the institution to develop an informatics system, merging information from an individual patient file with genomic data to seek better defined genetic markers for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Can Microarrays Accelerate Influenza Diagnosis?

2005-11-08T23:39:00.000-05:00

A microarray -- a leading-edge molecular biology tool containing influenza DNA sequence information -- developed by researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and recently tested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has shown that it can identify specific types and subtypes of influenza strains from patient samples in less than half a day.

This is not the first influenza-targeting diagnosing microarray, and it is not likely to be the last as the specter of an influenza pandemic hovers over global public health. Last month, Mulkiteo, Wash.-based CombiMatrix announced the availability of a commercial microarray for the identification of H5N1 bird flu virus and, the company said, all other strains of Influenza A.

Both so-called "chips" shorten current methods that take can days to characterize flu subtypes infecting patients, and animals. Still, today both are limited to use in labs with the sophisticated equipment necessary to process the chip, which in the University of Colorado case, is a very high quality microscope slide spotted with DNA. The CombiMatrix chip is based on the company's semiconductor technology.

The Colorado chip, developed in the lab of Kathy Rowlen, a chemistry professor, was evaluated for three primary subtypes of flu in the October CDC test -- the avian flu strain H5N1, and two of the most common human flu types worldwide in recent winters, H1N1 and H3N2.

The chip was more than 90 percent accurate and will be tested again for accuracy and speed against standard flu-virus culturing methods at the CDC's Atlanta headquarters next month, the university said in a statement. The university researchers are planning to make the sequence information, derived from the Las Alamos National Lab influenza database [subscription required], freely available to researchers.

The Colorado technology was developed with a $2 million, five-year grant to CU from the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Rowlen's lab is also working on technology that would free the technology from the lab bench.

“In theory, you want to try to get rid of all the work in labs with sophisticated equipment to catch and preconcentrate the virus,” Martin Mehlmann, a post-doctoral researcher in Rowlen's lab, told New Biology Economy. “The idea is to have a small device with a power supply that could be used [in the field]. There is a still a long way to go.”

11 US Universities Seek to Optimize Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

2005-11-04T00:04:00.000-05:00

A group of 11 US universities are forming a partnership in collaboration with the FDA to seek methods for reducing costs in drug development and manufacturing.

The collaboration will be called the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Technology and Education and will include:

• Duquesne University: Alan Seadler, chairman, Biotechnology Leadership; James Drennen, associate professor of pharmaceutics;
• Illinois Institute of Technology: Ali Cinar, dean of graduate college; Dimitri Hatziavramidis, research professor of chemical engineering and director of the particle technology and crystallization center.
• Purdue University: Prabir Basu, director of the institute; Stephen Byrn, head of the department of industrial pharmacy; Charles Rutledge, vice president for research; G.V. Reklaitis, professor of chemical engineering.
• Rutgers University: Michael Klein, dean of the school of engineering; Fernando Muzzio, professor of chemical engineering.
• University of Puerto Rico: Lesbia Hernandez, dean (San Juan); Nelson Cardona, dean (Mayaguez); Evone Ghaly, associate director of the center for pharmaceutical processing research; Rodolfo Romanach, professor of chemistry; Carlos Velazquez, professor of chemical engineering.
• University of Connecticut: Robert McCarthy, dean and professor of the school of pharmacy; Michael Pikal, endowed chair of pharmaceutical technology; Robin Bogner, associate professor of pharmaceutics.
• University of Iowa: Rolland Poust, professor of pharmaceutics; Lee Kirsch, associate professor of pharmaceutics.
• University of Kansas: James Roberts, professor of electrical engineering and vice provost for research; Vadim Gurvich, assistant director of the center for drug discovery; Eric Munson, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry.
• University of Kentucky: John Parks, associate vice president for research; Michael Jay, professor of pharmaceutical sciences.
• University of Maryland School of Pharmacy: James L. Hughes, vice president of research and development; Stephen Hoag, professor of pharmacy.
• University of Minnesota: Marilyn Speedie, dean of the College of Pharmacy; Raj G. Suryanarayanan, professor of pharmaceutics; David Grant, professor of pharmaceutics.

According to an article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the organization is “initially focused on lobbying Congress for funding.” The Indianapolis Star newspaper reported that the group will seek $25 million in federal funds through the FDA to run the center.

While the university group includes institutions in Indiana, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico, areas with large pharma representation, while North Carolina, a state with a large pharma segment, is conspicuously absent.

Supercomputer Models Ribosome

2005-11-02T23:38:00.000-05:00

Scientists at Los Alamos National Lab have successfully created an in silico molecular simulation of the ribosome, the cell's biological machine that "reads" RNA to create proteins.

Using 768 processors of the 8192 available on “Q,” the Los Alamos supercomputer, the researchers simulated 2.6 million atoms in motion for a computer model of the ribosome at work.

A paper describing the effort will appear in the Oct. 24 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This success has implications for drug discovery as well as for systems biology, a multidisciplinary and emerging scientific effort which, in part, has biologists and computer scientists cooperating to construct computer models of biological processes at the molecular level.

"The methods and implications lie at the interface between biochemistry, computer science, molecular biology, physics, structural biology and materials science," Kevin Sanbonmatsu, leader of the Los Alamos team, said in a statement. "I believe the results serve as a proof-of-principle for materials scientists, chemists and physicists performing similar simulations of artificial molecular machines in the emerging field of nano-scale information processing.

The study identified a corridor, a new region inside the ribosome, through which the transfer RNA must pass in order for the RNA decoding process to occur, potentially offering new targets for antibiotics.

While this study modeled the ribosome, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab are working to join the Blue Gene supercomputer and the Purple supercomputer, formerly housed at IBM's Poughkeepsie Development Center, to model the human brain, a long-term effort conservatively estimated to cost $100 million.

S. 1873 Adds Protection for Vaccine Makers

2005-11-02T00:42:00.000-05:00

While President Bush was at the National Institutes of Health on Tuesday outlining a plan to ask Congress for $7.1 billion to defend against a potential influenza pandemic he was also asking Congress to grant vaccine manufacturers protections against civil lawsuits.

I'm also asking Congress to remove one of the greatest obstacles to domestic vaccine production: the growing burden of litigation. In the past three decades, the number of vaccine manufacturers in America has plummeted, as the industry has been flooded with lawsuits. Today, there is only one manufacturer in the United States that can produce influenza vaccine. That leaves our nation vulnerable in the event of a pandemic. We must increase the number of vaccine manufacturers in our country, and improve our domestic production capacity. So Congress must pass liability protection for the makers of life-saving vaccines,” the President said.

The US Senate is considering legislation (S. 1873) that will establish a lead federal agency that will oversee the development of countermeasures against bioterrorism and create incentives for the domestic manufacturing of vaccines and countermeasures, and provide liability protections for those that develop vaccines against biological weapons.

The bill would give the US Secretary of Health and Human services power over what information the public can know about the drugs people could be made to take if the bill is enacted. It would also shield manufacturers, universities and other drug research institutions against liability when drug products lead to illness, disability or death. It also would exempt the new agency from standard Freedom of Information Act and Federal Advisory Committee Act requirements for public transparency and would exempt certain federal cost oversight requirements.

The bill, the Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005, was introduced by Sen. Richard Burr (R) of North Carolina on Oct. 17, and approved by the Senate's health committee and is now on the Senate calendar.

It would establish the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency, and an advisory group, the National Biodefense Advisory Board, composed of the director of the agency, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the assistant secretary for public health emergency preparedness, the director of the National Institutes of Health, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FDA commissioner, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, the assistant secretary of homeland security for science and technology, and the secretary of agriculture.

Additionally, the secretary of HHS would appoint four representatives from pharma and biotech, four academicians, and five other members, all serving for three-year terms.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), an advocacy group, is calling the bill "a drug company stockholder's dream and a consumer's worst nightmare."

John Hanchette, a journalism professor whose bio says he was a former editor at USA Today, is in full attack mode on the bill, as seen on an editorial published on the website of the Niagara Falls Reporter.

Double-Digit Growth Seen for In-Vitro Cancer Diagnostics

2005-10-31T21:53:00.000-05:00

A market research group, in a report on the in vitro cancer diagnostics market, today reported that 50 immunoassays for new tumor markers, some 20 biochip systems, and another 25 tests for genes and proteins in peripheral blood are close to being ready for market introduction, and at least 25 new immunohistochemical and in-situ hybridization assays will be introduced in the near future.

Kalorama Information of New York today in a market report entitled: “World Market for Cancer Diagnostics to Reach $7.4 Billion by 2009” says that the market for in-vitro diagnostic tests for cancer will grow at a low double-digit rate to reach that plateau.

New technologies such as microarrays, mass spectroscopy protein patterns, and the amplification of tumor cell DNA and RNA coupled with bioinformatics and the unraveling of relationships between genes and proteins and cancers, as well as demographic pressures of an aging population provide optimism for the market outlook.

On the other hand, the report sees hurdles to growth in the costs of new tests, and the success of cancer management using traditional test methods such as tissue biopsies and serum assays.

”Cancer drug research is gradually shifting from traditional cytotoxic chemotherapies toward higher specificity immunological and biological approaches that target unique biochemical receptors and signaling pathways. These new drugs will be more cancer- and patient-specific and will have the potential for slowing cancer growth and inhibiting disease progression, with fewer adverse effects on the patient.”

As these drugs come to market, in vitro diagnostics will become critical to matching drug to cancer and to patient and then the monitoring of the drug's action on the disease.

Meantime, at the annual cancer prevention research meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research this week in Baltimore, researchers presented evidence that diet is a key to cancer and that eating more fruit and vegetables – and not smoking – are good ideas in the cancer battle.

Click here to read a roundup of food findings from the AACR meeting [garlic, broccoli sprouts and all sorts of brassicas, and onions are all good. In fact, the 'prudent' diet includes more cruciferous vegetables, other vegetables, fruits, whole grain, cereals, fish, poultry and beans.]

Non-Profit Journals Propose Medline Links to Articles

2005-10-28T00:01:00.000-04:00

A group of the non-profit publishers of medical and scientific journals have recommended that the NIH expand its Medline database and website to allow online access to articles on their journals' websites.

The publishers' [PDF] proposal is in response to the NIH's voluntary program that asks its grantees to submit to the agency any manuscripts that result from NIH-funded research. The program asks for the manuscripts to go to the agency after peer review and acceptance for publication, but prior to final copy editing.

The publishers' say their suggestion would allow for the documents to receive a final edit, saying that would serve to protect copyright and minimize the potential for the rapid spread of confusing and potentially serious errors.

A listing of the journals -- which includes the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine but not the others regarded in the top tier [Nature, Science and Cell] -- is available at: http://www.dcprinciples.org.

Hapmap Publication a Milestone

2005-10-27T01:31:00.000-04:00

The International HapMap Consortium has published its haplotype map, a milestone advance in the scientific effort to gather data on variation in the human genome and an important step towards the still far-off vision of personalized medicine.

So important, apparently, that the hapmap.org website was unavailable early Thursday morning.

The project to determine and map patterns of genetic variation throughout the human genome has brought scientists from Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria, the UK and the US together to document minute variations [single nucleotide polymorphisms] in DNA from 269 volunteers drawn from four different ethnic groups -- Nigeria's Yoruba people, Tokyo residents, Han Chinese from the Beijing region and in the US state of Utah residents of Northern European heritage.

While the map doesn't address all of the estimated 10 million SNPs thought to be expressed in the human genome, it does include 1 million SNPs produced in Phase 1 of the three-year project. And, with another 2 million SNPs already mapped by Perlegen for the next phase of the project, it creates a critical mass of data and provides “overwhelming evidence,” according to a statement from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, that variation in humans occurs in blocks called haplotypes.

This knowledge, and that to come, will be important in improving the diagnosis and treatment of diseases with significant genetic components such as heart disease, asthma, Type 1 diabetes, schizophrenia, and some types of cancer.

HapMap data are available in public databases, including the HapMap Data Coordination Center (www.hapmap.org), the NIH-funded National Center for Biotechnology Information's dbSNP (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/index.html) and the JSNP Database in Japan (snp.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp).

Gene Switch Identified in Malaria-Vector Mosquitoes

2005-10-25T23:51:00.000-04:00

Researchers have identified a gene called SPRN6 as a regulatory switch that is turned on in Anopheles mosquitoes when they are infected with the Plasmodium parasite.

This gene apparently helps the mosquito, the transmission vector for malaria in people, which is a leading cause of disease and death globally, killing a conservatively estimated million people among an estimated 300 million to 500 million cases a year, according to the World Health Organization.

Only Anopheles mosquitoes can transmit malaria. They transmit it only after having taken a previous blood meal from an infected person. Once inside the mosquito, the parasite matures in the gut and then travels to the salivary glands, where it can infect a human in the mosquitoes' next blood meal.

The protective gene was identified in a study conducted by a team of investigators from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Malaria Research Institute, the University of Texas Medical Branch, the Imperial College of London and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany. The study was published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The researchers used RNA interference, a new molecular biology tool, to deactivate the gene and found that the parasite level in the genetically modified mosquitoes increased in the Anopheles stephensi and the ability of the Anopheles gambiae to rid itself of the parasite.

The researchers are using this knowledge to create a transgenic mosquito with the SPRN6 gene permanently on in an effort to create a mosquito immune to the parasite and thus a weapon to disrupt the transmission of the disease.

Malaria, a problem that affects 40 percent of the world's population, is not going away despite years of eradication efforts in the west, and the parasite is increasingly resistant to drugs, and the mosquito to insecticide. And, malaria may be expanding it reach from tropical areas because of global climate change.

Check out the article Fighting Malaria in Chemical and Engineering News and find the Oct. 24 issue of the New Yorker magazine for an informative article by Michael Specter [not available online].

Should the Next Weapon in Bird Flu Fight be DNA?

2005-10-20T19:53:00.000-04:00

British biochemical engineers, in a paper published in in the November and December issue of the journal Biotechnology Progress, suggest that DNA vaccines should be considered as a weapon against a potential influenza pandemic such as that feared possible should the avian influenza virus H5N1 mutate into a bug that is transferable from human to human.

"A DNA vaccine is not a panacea, however it could be useful if the situation gets out of hand," Peter Dunnill of University College London said in a statement released today by The American Chemical Society.

"If we're going to try it, we need to move,” he said. “You can't expect to walk into a production facility, hand over the instructions, and expect them to make it on the spot. It's going to take some weeks, and we really don't know how much time we have."

A DNA vaccine could be produced in as little as two or three weeks, Dunnill said.

DNA vaccines are derived from the DNA of an infectious organism. They work by being injected into the cells of a person, usually in muscle tissue. Once injected, the genes of the foreign DNA are expressed, starting a cascade that leads to the synthesis of infectious organism proteins inside the injected cells, causing the immune system to respond as if infected by the infectious organism itself.

DNA vaccines, however, are not a proverbial silver bullet and the technique is largely untested in humans.

To create a DNA vaccine, scientists would create a "loop" of DNA -- a plasmid vector -- that would contain the biological construction plans for a protein on the outer surface of the H5N1 virus. When that DNA is injected into cells, it would quickly reproduce the protein and trigger immunization in much the same way as a conventional vaccine does. [For a more technical explanation, click here to visit a website from microbiologist John C. Brown of Kansas University.]

Who Will Manage Quarantines?

2005-10-06T00:54:00.000-04:00

Who is in charge in case of a flu pandemic?

Earlier this week, President Bush, in a press conference, brought up the possibility of using the military to enforce quarantines within the US if there is an outbreak of avian flu:

The policy decisions for a President in dealing with an avian flu outbreak are difficult. One example: If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country, and how do you then enforce a quarantine? When -- it's one thing to shut down airplanes; it's another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu. And who best to be able to effect a quarantine? One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move,” he said.

While US law forbids the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement, and first response to disasters is the responsibility of local and state authorities, the recent hurricane disasters on the gulf coast have raised a shadow of uncertainty over the ability of states to react in an effective manner.

Still, some states are moving forward. In early October, the state of Colorado announced a draft plan to deal with a possible flu pandemic.

According to an article in the Colorado Springs Gazette, the plan calls for 10 executive orders that would go into effect with the governor’s signature and include quarantines that could cancel the state's schools or isolate a neighborhood, authorize rapid burial of epidemic victims without regard to funerals or religious practices and without death certificates in all cases.

Additionally, it would allow the state health department to order hospitals to cease admissions or transfer patients, including moving mentally ill patients out of medical facilities to make room for flu patients, and allow physicians and nurses licensed by another state to practice in Colorado.

Additionally, the Gazette said the state has 13 caches of medical equipment stockpiled around the state that can transform a gymnasium or large hall into a 500-bed hospital within hours.

Short History of Quarantines

The concept of quarantine in public health came from the plague and dates to 1377 when the rector of the Venetian repubic of Ragusa ordered a 30-day isolation period for ships, and 40 days for land travelers. Over the next century, other quarantine laws were introduced in Italian and French ports, according to a paper by Gensini et al, in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, November 2004. The authors conclude that the concept is “still fully valid.”

Meir Oren, general director of the Hillel-Yaffee Medical Center in Israel, writing in the Israel Medical Association Journal within the context of a bioterror attack, speaks to the importance of containing an outbreak at the start rather than than reacting to it once it has spread.

Additionally, he recommends “the implemention of isolation and control measures to lower the risk of further transmission of the disease while assuring the safety of medical teams and laboratory workers. Strategic contingency plans should incorporate well-defined procedures for hospitalization and isolation of patients, providing regional backup of medical personnel and equipment and maintaining close cooperation between the various bodies in the healthcare system.”

Quarantine is an effective containment measure, especially if voluntarily imposed,” he writes.

The Model Act

Following the 9/11 events of 2001, the Bush administration asked the Center for Law and the Public's Health, a joint program at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities,to draft a model law to address health care needs during a national emergency. The center released its "Model State Emergency Health Powers Act" on October 23, 2001. According to the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, the model law is under review in all states. (Click here to read the AAEM's guidance to members on the model law).

Moose Found with Chronic Wasting Disease

2005-10-03T23:14:00.000-04:00

A wild moose killed in Colorado in September has tested positive for chronic wasting disease, the first of its species known to have the neurological disorder that previously was considered to only be hosted in three cervid species -- mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), white-tailed deer (O. Virginianus), and Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus elaphus nelsoni).

The finding follows the confirmation last spring of CWD in a captive deer herd in upstate New York, and in wild deer in the same county, the first instance of CWD in the northeastern US.

CWD is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) that affects cervids. TSE is a family of similar diseases that may infect certain species of animals and people such as scrapie in sheep and goats, BSE in cattle, and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in people.

CWD has been detected among wild and farmed cervids in Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, Montana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois, New Mexico, Wisconsin, New York and West Virginia; as well as the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta.

The New York findings have led state officials to try to create an containment area within Oneida and Madison counties, mandating hunters in the area to check deer kills with authorities. Additionally, Pennsylvania has issued an order prohibiting hunters from bringing in certain parts of deer that are harvested in affected areas as well as suggesting safe meat handling methods. Additionally, Pennsylvania deer farmers will be required to test their animals for the disease.

While chronic wasting disease seems to be contained within a species by a molecular barrier, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this year in the Annual Review of Public Health these diseases “can pose a significant public health risk” given the example of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) and its transmission to humans. The CDC in 2003 cautioned that animals suspected of having CWD should not be eaten by humans or included in animal feed.

While around 50 companies are reported to be developing prion diagnostic assays, currently there is no fast test for a live animal. Testing today is done after a kill.

See New Biology Economy, September 21, 2005; August 29, 2005; August 5, 2005

Tags -- Chronic Wasting Disease

Bats Seen as SARS Source

2005-09-29T23:34:00.000-04:00

Two groups of scientists, working independently, this week published papers on research that determines that SARS likely originated in Chinese bats, rather than civets, as was originally thought.

In a paper published online today in Science Express, scientists say that SARS (Severe Acute Repiratory Syndrome) originated in Chinese horseshoe bats, not civets as was originally hypothesized. A separate research team, led by scientists from the University of Hong Kong, published similar findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this week.

The SARS coronavirus was responsible for a worldwide outbreak in 2002-2003 that affected more than 8,000 people and killed 774 before being brought under control.

The research points to Chinese bats as the reservoirs for the disease but now the next step is to determine how the disease moved from bats, to civets, and then to humans. One possible clue to this jumping of the species barrier was the fact that bats and civets were both kept in Guangdong markets, the region where the disease first emerged. Bats have medicinal usage in Chinese culture.

Click here to read the BBC's coverage.

In a related note, microbiologist Yi Guan, from the University of Hong Kong, told Reuters today he is concerned about the possibility of the misuse of oseltamivir, sold under the brand name Tamiflu, raising the possibility of drug resistance.

According to recent research published in The Lancet medical journal resistance to anti-flu drugs had risen by 12 percent worldwide in the past decade and in by more than 70 percent in some countries in Asia, including China.

"It's not accidental that resistance is highest in China. Something happened. When SARS happened, everyone went crazy. So people take antivirals now, they think they have bird flu (when they could have just the common flu or cold)," Guan told Reuters.

The US Senate today voted to provide $4 billion to stockpile anti-flu medicine -- $3 billion for Tamiflu -- as part of next year's defense bill, which is still to be approved by Congress.

See CTV coverage of Canada's plans on bird flu. Also see New Biology Economy, Sept.22.

Tags -- SARS, Bird Flu

Burrill Boosts Midwest for BIO Conference

2005-09-28T21:36:00.000-04:00

Steven Burrill, CEO of Burrill & Co., a San Francisco investment firm, says the midwest is more than the land that you see under the wings of jets bound for the west coast or the east coast.

Today, Burrill shilled for the country's midsection in a statement released to boost next year's BIO show, which will be held in Chicago.

Now, we like Burrill. We met him about four years ago when he spoke to a venture capital group here in New York, and he has taken my phone calls for interviews -- usually based on his annual predictions and report on the biotech industry, which are quantitative, thoughtful, and useful. [See New Biology Economy, June 22, 2005]

And, we admire BIO (Biotechnology Industry Organization) as, well, an industry organization. As far as being media savvy, well, maybe next year they might understand that blogs are an important medium for the organization. This year, they really hadn't got a handle on how to deal with credible blogs and bloggers in issuing credentials for the BIO conference held in Philadelphia in June. (See New Biology Economy, June 10, 2005)We were not cleared to cover the hallways and the booths inside the convention center, so we worked the outside. [See New Biology Economy, June 21, 2005]

But back to Burrill, who qualified his support for bio in midwest:

"The Midwest's biotechnology parts are greater than its whole right now," he said. "The Midwest is not the first place people think of when considering centers of biotechnology excellence but it's really more of an awareness issue than it is a fact issue.”

Burrill said states in the area have targeted life sciences as a growth engine and some have established specific funds to invest in the life sciences.

Of course, they are not alone but way behind California with Silicon Valley, where bio is as big as IT, and its stem cell funding, as well as mature efforts in Seattle, Boston, DC, and North Carolina not to mention New York and India, as well as China.

Still, if we as a country would ever figure out that agriculture is really, really important, then midwestern companies such as Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Dow AgroSciences and Monsanto would be recognized for their very significant research spend. Regardless, they stand alongside the pharmaceutical companies in the midwest as well as the academic giants of life sciences in Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin.

"The Midwest has the ability to build on its existing strengths especially in the areas of agricultural biotech and in the convergence of the medical device, diagnostic and therapeutic companies,” said Burrill.

Now let's see if he moves his offices from San Francisco to Chicago.

Tags -- Burrill, BIO, Midwest

World's Greatest Restaurant and Molecules of Taste -- Tales of the UK's Fat Duck

2005-09-27T22:48:00.000-04:00

Apparently, the world's top food minds agree: The best restaurant in the world is The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, UK, at least according to a panel of 600 experts convened by Restaurant magazine.

What this restaurants brings to the new biology economy is found in its innovative approach to food.

Food writers are calling it molecular gastronomy, a movement ignited by Ferran Adria, the chef at Spain's El Bulli, which came up No. 2 on the list. Adria experiments in his kitchen for half a year and then serves up the good stuff he has found for the other half of the year at his small establishment on the Mediterranean coast. He is selling a cookbook for $350.

At Fat Duck, the molecular approach of chef and owner Heston Blumenthal goes beyond a team in the back of the house, as well as the front, to include scientists and psychologists on staff.

In these two restaurants is a metaphor for what is happening in the biology world. Suddenly, faced with the torrent of data coming from relatively new technologies such as microarrays, and the extention of mass spectrometry for use in biomarker discovery, biologists are finding that they can not do it all and they need help.

Across the country, college campuses are constructing new multimillion dollar multidisciplinary facilities to connect biologists with statisticians, physicists, engineers in an effort to spur innovation and solve big new puzzles of biology. This is a highly simplified explanation of systems biology, which is the new discipline that is emerging from the human genome project, which not only unraveled the blueprint of human biology, giving us new knowledge, but also reminding us of how much we don't know – what this all means on a systems level.

So, the restaurants are a great way to see what can happen in taking a new approach.

Take a look at the Fat Duck menu and then read about the philosophy of the establishment.

Then read an article from the Royal Society of Chemistry's publication, Chemistry World, and get a behind-the-scenes view of the Fat Duck, and a recipe.

This too is New Biology.

Tags -- Biology, Molecular Gastronomy

Cancer Chief Takes FDA Reins

2005-09-26T20:45:00.000-04:00

Andrew von Eschenbach, named by President Bush as interim head of the Food and Drug Administration, will also remain the director of the National Cancer Institute.

In von Eschenbach, the nation's drug regulatory body gets a new-biology visionary, but also a survivor of melanoma, prostate cancer and basal cell carcinoma, and apparently, judging from his decision to head both agencies, someone with a no doubts about his abilities.

He replaces Lester Crawford, who resigned as chief of the FDA Friday, just two months after being confirmed as commissioner after holding leadership posts in the agency since February 2002.

At NCI, von Eschenbach has outlined an ambitious goal of eliminating “suffering and death from cancer by 2015.”

In testimony before Congress earlier this year, von Eschenbach said cancer research would work to identify, develop and use new biomedical technologies, particularly bioinformatics.

So, in taking on leadership of the embattled FDA, an observer can see no abatement of the agency's drive to adopt new technologies, as it has been, and a drive to accelerate the review process, and a driver for the development of new molecular tools for biology.

In the context of the FDA and new treatments von Eschenbach told The Associated Press: "I believe it's still important to ask the question, 'How can we accelerate the timeline? How can we make certain we are getting these interventions to the patients as quickly as possible?'"

In a speech at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center this year, von Eschenbach said that there is a need to integrate the 60 NCI-designated cancer centers into a network, with the caBIG bioinformatics informatics grid, an initial concrete effort as well as other more complex initiatives including the support for very early-stage and not clearly defined nanotechnology efforts.

Still, the realities are, for von Eschenbach at NCI, his budget for 2006 is the same as 2005 ($4.8 billion), which means less funds for individual researchers. The new biology economy is clearly going to be a team endevour.

"I'd like to see cancer centers take a much more aggressive position on fostering team grants rather than independent investigator research," he told Dana-Farber researchers.

Tags -- Cancer, molecular biology, National Cancer Institute

Vietnam Opens Lab Test Facility for Bird Flu, Other Diseases, in Mountain Province

2005-09-22T19:01:00.000-04:00

The Vietnam News Agency earlier this week noted in a small item that the country has opened a molecular biology laboratory in mountainous Yen Bai province, which is some 180 kilometers from Hanoi, accessible by rail and road.

The lab will process tests for Avian flu (H5N1), hepatitis B and measles viruses, which previously had to be done in Hanoi, the report said.

The new laboratory will also provide training for medical workers in the regional northwest of the country and will include the nearby provinces of Lao Cai, Phu Tho, Son La and Dien Bien provinces, according to the article.

Yen Bai has a population of some 700,000 people, including many ethnic populations, living in a forested region known for its cinnamon and tea production and home to the black crested gibbon Nomascus concolor and, according to a recent survey (click here to read PDF), some 106 species of birds, including hornbills.

But the location of this rural lab is interesting given that Vietnam is a hot spot for the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, or bird flu, which has affected 64 people, and killed 21 from December to June there, according to the World Health Organization.

Since the first bird flu patient was detected in Vietnam in late 2003, up to 91 human cases of infections, including 41 fatalities, have been reported in 31 cities and provinces, according to the Xinua news agency of China.

In an editorial in this week's Annals of Internal Medicine, authors John Bartlett of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Frederick Hayden of the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center, say that, so far, the H5N1 virus does not appeared to have the elements of human-to-human transmission necessary for a pandemic, but warn that the US has only enough the antiviral oseltamavir (Tamilflu) in its strategic national stockpile to treat 1 percent of the country's population. Oseltamavir is the only antiviral drug known to be effective against avian flu.

Through December 2004, the US had stockpiled enough oseltamivir for 2.3 million people, Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Congress in committee testimony in November.

Research studies to test a vaccine to protect humans against H5N1 virus began in April 2005.

For more on Vietnam and the H5NI virus, see the producer's journal for the PBS WideAngle documentary "H5N1 Killer Flu" by Micah Fink, a classmate from journalism graduate school at Columbia University.

Senate Says No Japanese Kobe Beef for You as Mad Cow Battle Simmers

2005-09-21T12:15:00.000-04:00

The US Senate yesterday voted to include language in USDA funding legislation that would bar the agency from allowing the importation of Kobe beef unless Japan reopens its markets to US beef.

Japan was the biggest US customer ($1.7 billion in 2003) until it joined some 60 countries banning US beef imports after the US confirmed its first case of mad-cow disease in December 2003.

Japan experts this week said that the ban is necessary, saying US cows were exposed to a higher risk of mad cow disease infection than their Japanese counterparts due to insufficient feed control in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, Kyodo News agency reported.

Kobe beef is a luxury product -- the Wagyu cattle that produce it, once limited only to Japan but now grown in the US, are fed a special diet to create a magnificently tender and well-marbled beef, or so I'm told. Diet is a vector for this disease and scientist believe that the disease is transferred through diseased animal protein in the food chain.

The Kobe beef market is certainly not a keystone of neither Japan's economy nor the US restaurant business. But beef clearly is economically important and the threat of mad cow disease is roiling the American business, which is part of the $170 billion national livestock industry.

Regulators march at a glacial pace

Earlier this month, the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of much of a cow's small intestine for use in food products and cosmetics as long as the final 80 inches of the intestine, which includes the distal ileum, are removed at slaughter. This abridges a previous ban in place since early 2004. Scientists believe that the brain, spinal cord and distal ileium harbor the prions that cause the disease and thus must be kept out of the food chain.

USDA is under some pressure for its handling of the potential threat to the beef industry, and to consumers. In response, the agency has screened some 450,000 sick or dead cows and is now testing an additional 20,000 healthy animals.

The FDA expects to issue new regulations on animal feed sometime in the fall. FDA in 1997 banned the use of ground-up cattle parts in cattle feed, but there have been calls to extend that to include all animal proteins as part of the battle against mad cow.

The solution to the problem may be in the hands of molecular biologists.

Today, there is no in vivo test for the presence of the disease. [See New Biology Economy Aug. 29, 2005; and Aug. 5 for additonal coverage.]

This disease causes abundant body proteins to misfold and accumulate in the brain, presenting long strands of proteins and dead brain tissues that appear much like sponges, thus the name, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow in cattle, scrapie in sheep, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease or variant CJD in humans.

But, scientists are advancing on creating a number of tests that appear to have some early-stage promise. In August, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine describing a technique to amplify the malformed proteins in the blood to a detectable level, using technology that requires about 70 hours to complete.

Earlier this month, GeneThera of Wheat Ridge, Colo., announced that it would open a lab and testing facility in northern Italy. In June, GeneThera inked an agreement with Beckman Coulter to collaborate on animal diagnostics. [See New Biology Economy, July 12.]

This week, Canada's Alberta Prion Research Institute this week formed an advisory council and named Joseph Martin, dean of Harvard Medical School, as chairman.

Additionally, Innovative Biosensors, a company in the University of Maryland's technology business incubator, has received a $110,000 NIH grant to study BSE. The company plans to use its Canary (Cellular Analysis and Notification of Antigen Risks and Yields) biosensor technology in this area.

Stanford Biochemist Named MacArthur Fellow

2005-09-20T10:41:00.000-04:00

Stanford biochemist Pehr Harbury is among the MacArthur Foundation fellows announced today.

Every year for the past 25 years, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago identifies a select group of thinkers and innovators who receive a grant of $100,000 a year over a five-year period. The details of selection process for the so-called “genius grants” is quite closely held and the funds are disbursed with, the foundation says, no strings attached.

The Harvard-trained Harbury joins an ecclectic list of 25 fellows including a conductor, a fisherman/scientist, a rare book specialist, a filmaker, and an Bronx social activist.

Harbury, 40, engages in protein research, investigating the structure, activity, and synthesis of proteins for application in drugs discovery. He has developed a technique called “DNA Display.” [Read his MacArthur profile. Read about DNA Display.]

According to Hurbury's website at Stanford, his lab's goal [this is highly simplified] is to find ways to achieve the controlled use of polypeptides to design proteins. The site says the lab relies primarily on three tools:

-- (a) the computational engineering of structures at atomic resolution, made possible by the advent of classical molecular mechanics potentials;
-- (b) biophysical characterization of peptide proteins composed from an expanded amino acid alphabet;
-- (c) the generation and screening of combinatorial libraries, both in vivo using bacterial screens and sexual PCR and in vitro by synthesis of compounds on solid support.

Thomas H. Maugh II of the Los Angeles Times writes that the pharmaceutical industry is interested in [Harbury's] technique, but will not provide funding without agreements that would, among other things, prevent him from publishing the results, he said. "Their restrictions are not workable," Harbury told the newspaper.

As a consequence, Harbury, 40, said he has spent the last couple of years writing grant proposals and seeking other funding sources with little success. "From that perspective, [the MacArthur] money is huge. It's very good timing on their part," the LA Times reported.

Biotech in a Building Boom

2005-09-19T10:47:00.000-04:00

This space could simply count the biotech related building projects across the country and have plenty to write about.

We've recently written about plans to create a facility to be called New York City's East River Science Park (see New Biology Economy, Aug. 11), and about a billionaire's plans to renovate the heart of a textile village in western North Carolina (see NBE, Sept. 13).

But, wait, there's more.

In Huntsville, Ala., entrepreneur Jim Hudson in August announced plans to build a $130 million campus to be called the Hudson-Alpha Institute for Biotechnology. In an article in the Decatur Daily on Sunday, Hudson said he had not determined the research focus for the facility, leaving that decision to the scientific director he will hire.

He told the newspaper that his vision is driven by the need to leverage the knowledge gained from the human genome project and the thrust to create personalized medicine.

"Our biggest challenge is how do we do personalized medicine? We know your genetic sequence. How do we use that information to treat you?” he told the newspaper.

The Hudson-Alpha facility, combining $80 million in private money with some $50 million in state funding, is expected to open in 2007.

Hudson is the founder of the genomics firm Research Genetics, also known as ResGen, a company acquired for $138 million by Invitrogen in 2000, and then consolidated to California after the hi-tech market bubble burst.

In New Haven, Conn., the Yale (University) Daily News on Friday reported that the school's new bioengineering department has opened, while many times zones west, the University of Hawaii's 10-acre John A. Burns School of Medicine is set for its dedication on Sept. 30, according to the Honolulu Star Bulletin newspaper.

It's clear from these articles and from previous coverage that as well as a housing boom, there is a biotech building boom. And, already there is some talk of using biotech as one of the keys to rebuilding New Orleans.

California Stem-Cell Organization Announces $40 Million in Possible Grants

2005-09-16T10:41:00.000-04:00

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine last week announced some $40 million in grants to 16 institutions for a stem-cell scholars training program.

The announcement is the first funding announced by the organization that is expected to ultimately disburse some $3 billion approved by California voters in 2004 with the passage of Proposition 71, the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative.

Stell cell research, with all of its controversy, appears to be a growth engine in the new biology economy with nearly a dozen other states trying to follow California's lead.

The grants will establish a three-year stem-cell training program for 170 predoctoral, postdoctoral, and clinical fellows at 16 universities and research organizations, at a cost of approximately $230,000 for each scholar each over the period, or a budget of $12 million a year for the program.

UCLA, Stanford, UCSD, and UCSF led the California universities to receive funding, each receiving grants of more than $3.6 million. The J. Gladstone Institute and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles will each receive $2.4 million while the Salk Institute and the Burnham Institute will each receive $1.4 million as the top independent organizations benefiting from the program.

The stem-cell organization does not have access to any state monies yet as it is involved in litigation over the constitutionality of the mandate. The group said this funding will be financed by bond anticipation notes, a bridge process that allows the sales of notes in anticipation of funding -- although there is speculation as to whether or not this money will ever be disbursed, given the litigation.

Tags - [Stem cells, Grants]

Newark Bioterror Research Lab Loses Track of 3 Mice; Officials Say Health Risk Minimal

2005-09-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

New Jersey state health officials say the threat to public health is “slim to none” after three laboratory mice infected with Yersinia pestis bacteria were missing and unaccounted for at a Public Health Research Institute laboratory on the campus of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, according to a report Thursday in The Star-Ledger newspaper of Newark, NJ.

The mice disappeared from a Biosafety Level 3 containment lab, the newspaper reported. David Perlin, the scientific director of the Public Health Research Institute, said the animals' disappearance was apparently due to a breach of animal-handling protocol by a technician and said investigators and scientists believe the missing mice had been eaten by the others in the cages, but that is not ascertainable. The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated.

The incident points out the problematic nature of having such laboratories in urban centers. The University of Texas in August broke ground on a Level 4 facility but similar effort by Boston University [see New Biology Economy, June 16], which plans to locate a $130 million lab in the city's South End, has become a political hot potato.

Yesterday, The Boston Globe newspaper reported that Michael Flaherty, Boston's city council president, had withdrawn his support for the proposed facility, saying the city is unprepared to deal with an accident at the facility. He said his opinion was formed in the aftermath of government reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The facility still has the support of Boston's mayor, The Globe said.

The Washington Business Journal earlier this week reported that George Mason University has received a $25 million NIH grant to create a 83,000 square foot Level 3 lab.

Earlier this month, the University of Hawaii also won a $25 million grant to create a Level 3 facility. This has met with some public acrimony, acccording to a report in the Honolulu Star Bulletin newspaper.

Meantime, the future of the Department of Homeland Security's Level 3 Plum Island agriculture research facility off eastern Long Island is under question. The Long Island newspaper Newsday recently published an editorial supporting the construction of a Level 4 facility in New York, but suggested it might best be built away from “congested population centers.”

Ranbaxy Opens Drug Development Research Facility as India Looks to CRO Growth

2005-09-14T10:49:00.000-04:00

Ranbaxy Laboratories, an India-based pharmaceutical company, in late August opened a new research center in Gurgaon, one of India's key hubs for the rapidly expanding business process outsourcing industry.

The facility, Ranbaxy said in a statement, is the company's third in the area, and will focus on new drug discovery.

The opening of this facility in an area comes as India moves to replicate in clinical research, its growth in call centers and software development.

This year, India's parliament recast patent laws to align with global standards and issued a draft document outlining a broad national strategy in biotechnology development.

Previously, India's patent laws did not protect new molecules, but did protect processes, which fueled a generic drug industry that simply reformulated drugs patented elsewhere in the world for sale there. It is widely believed that the changes in India's patent regime, which will now protect new molecules, will encourage the country's pharmaceuticals sector to begin researching and developing new drugs and to begin investing in molecular-biology tools such as microarrays and mass spectrometers.

But, despite these moves and the country's resources of a lower-cost, highly trained, English-speaking work force, India must overcome hurdles in infrastructure, culture, and the pressing needs of its poor in order to rise in the new biology economy.

A shortage of investigators may “prove to be a major pitfall for Indian CROs,” India's Express Pharma Pulse publication said this week, noting a recalcitrance for India's people to serve as “guinea pigs” for the world in an environment that has “few legal safeguards” for protection.

Still, the resources India offers are huge. And it's changing, with entrepreneurs overcoming infrastructure and cultural resistance.

Last night, the PBS show WideAngle aired a report on the BPO industry in Gurgaon, focusing on the employees of Gecis, a company founded in cooperation with General Electric. This company has had to create its own energy plan to assure operations, has a fleet of vehicles to ferry its employees to work and back, and hired a chef to create a catering service to offer meals and snacks to feed its employees 24-7.

Tags -- [India Biotechnology, Outsourcing, CROs, patents]

Murdock Unveils Plans for Ambitious North Carolina Biopolis in Mills of Kannapolis

2005-09-13T10:24:00.000-04:00

David Murdock, the owner of Dole Food Co., yesterday unveiled his vision for a biotech center in Kannapolis, NC, a town near Charlotte that was once a center for the state's once-powerful-but-now-decimated textile industry.

Murdock, the 80-something billionare who bought Dole and took it private in 2003, has an ambitious $1-billion plan to fund the transformation of a 250-acre site holding a former Cannon Mills plant and an additional 100 acres of land in Kannapolis into a biotechnology center focusing on health and nutrition, according a 2,000-word statement issued yesterday.

Murdock on Monday unveiled his plans to revitalize the old mill town a half hour from Charlotte in a media event dotted with state and local officials as well as townfolk.

Reports of his plans initially surfaced in early August. [See New Biology Economy, Aug. 10]

Like many areas across the nation, including New York [see New Biology Economy Aug. 11], North Carolina is looking at biotechnology as a catalyst for economic development. The state is already one of the nation's hot spots for biotech, with activity centered in the Research Triangle area, which, depending on traffic, is some three hours to the east in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

Murdock has engaged the 16-school University of North Carolina as a partner in his vision of creating what is called the North Carolina Research Campus – projected to have 1 million square feet of office and laboratory space, and 350,000 square feet of retail and commercial space, 700 residential units, and a private math and science high school for girls.

But whether the Charlotte area can become a biotech center remains to be seen. Charlotte is a town whose skyline is dominated by sleek new downtown towers that speak of its position as a nexus for the country's banks, and the northern node of a suburban sprawl extending to Atlanta to the south.

Murdock's plans, as detailed in the statement, start with a 330,000 square-foot building housing 60,000 square feet of core lab space for DNA sequencing, microarray analysis and mass spectrometry (the typical toolkit of a complete molecular biology lab), as well as a contract biogenic manufacturing facility, and the Dole Research Institute.

The 10,000 square-foot Dole Research Institute will conduct nutrition research and develop new varieties of fruits and vegetables in collaboration with UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State University. The latter will open an Institute for Advanced Fruit and Vegetable Science with approximately 50,000 square feet of laboratory and research space and 100,000 square feet of experimental and research-oriented greenhouse facilities.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will establish the UNC Institute for Excellence in Nutrition, which will focus on research examining the relationship between nutrition and the brain, obesity, and cancer.

Additionally, there are discussions being held to create a community college-based training facility, a conference center and a 125-room hotel. Sweeping plans include a medical facility offering care for the employees who work at the center.

Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp), Murdock said, plans to place a facility on the campus.

Andrew Conrad, chief scientific officer of LabCorp's National Genetics Institute, is a member of the board of directors for Dole Food and Castle and Cooke Inc., a non-food-related Murdock company that owns most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

Murdock told the Charlotte Observer newspaper that he plans to create a $100 million venture capital fund to encourage companies to locate in the area.

The state legislature has indicated that it will cough up some $60 million in funds to buy specialized equipment for the site and $25 million a year for university support in the area, UNC system president Molly Broad said, according to the Daily Tarheel, the UNC-Chapel Hill student newspaper. The Raleigh News & Observer heard the equipment budget as $16 million. So too did the Charlotte Observer.

So, now, why do I find myself, after examining all of this, hearing, "Ya Got Trouble?" from The Music Man?

For more on Murdock, read this profile in The Salisbury (NC) Post from early in 2000.

Randox Biochip-based Test for Drugs of Abuse Gets FDA Clearance: Report

2005-09-12T09:43:00.000-04:00

Randox Laboratories of Northern Ireland has received FDA clearance for a biochip technology, its “Drugs of Abuse” array, which allows the simultaneous detection of amphetamine, methamphetamine, cocaine, barbiturates, cannabinoids, opiates, methadone, benzodiazepines, lorazepam, phencyclidine and creatinine from a single urine sample, according to a report published today on the Laboratorytalk website.

The test is based on a biochip developed by Randox to run on its “evidence” system, which is an automated protein analysis platform that the company says can be used to conduct as many as 25 or more single sample tests simultaneously from as many as 180 patients per hour on a 1-square centimeter chip.

The Evidence analyzer automates assays for the biochips. The analyzer consists of a twin carousel, which is designed to enable continuous operation of the system, and a loading area, a reagent/sample addition station, an incubator, wash station, signal station, and imaging station.

Brown University and Prof Clear Hurdles to Nanopore Manufacturing IP Transfer

2005-09-09T10:17:00.000-04:00

Brown University has entered into a technology-transfer agreement with NABsys, a startup company co-founded by Xinsheng Ling, an associate professor of physics at the university.

Many academic institutions are encouraging entrepreneurship among faculty as technology transfer gains increasing economic importance given today's R&D environment where innovation shifts to the academic sector, with the commercial sector serving as marketing partner.

DNA sequencing technology is a prime example. Today's electrophoresis-based methods for sequencing DNA are expensive and while companies like Applied Biosystems are continually investing in optimizing the technology, they are unable to make more than incremental progress in lowering the costs of these methods.

So, government agencies like the NSF and the NIH are providing grant funds to encourage breakthrough technology development with the goal of bringing down the cost of sequencing a genome by an order of magnitude.

Ling's lab received $1.5 million in NSF funding for its technology research efforts. In July, NABsys took in $225,000 in seed funding from the Slater Center for Biomedical Technology.

In the exclusive licensing agreement announced in July, Brown takes a significant but undisclosed equity stake in the company, ending a period of acrimony between Ling, who claimed to have invented the technology while on sabbatical, and the university, which said essentially, So what? You were on payroll, we own it. The issue appeared to be over ambiguity in Brown's intellectual property and tech transfer policies, which the faculty amended in May.

With the seed funding, NABsys [Nanopore Array Biosystems] of Providence, RI, will begin to develop Ling's ideas for a method of manufacturing addressable nanopore arrays from silicon.

Nobel Laureate Leon Cooper, director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems at Brown University, joins Ling as co-founder. Barrett Bready, 28 and the holder of a medical degree from Brown, is the chief executive officer. (Click here to view a PDF of an article on NABsys from Mass Hi Tech.)

Tags – [DNA sequencing, technology transfer, academic entrepreneur ]

Harvard Medical Sees Pressure Rising for Higher Standards in FDA Drug Approval Process

2005-09-08T10:33:00.000-04:00

Jerry Avorn, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, this week writes in The New England Journal of Medicine that the FDA should ask tougher questions in its drug-approval process.

The acceleration of the discovery and development of new drugs is one of the keystones of the new biology economy. Molecular biology tools are increasingly seen as levers to shortening the lengthy and expensive process of bringing new drugs to the market by narrowing the pool of patients that may benefit from their use (pharmacogenomics), or by failing compounds earlier in the development process.

Avorn looks at the end of the pipeline, saying that the government supports a minimal standard for evidence for approval for a new drug that would be “unacceptable anywhere else in research.” It's not a sloppy process, he says, but one with a low standard of “proving that a new medication is superior to a usually irrelevant comparison treatment (such as placebo) in achieving a potentially irrelevant outcome (such as a surrogate measure),” he said.

“Beyond overly simple surrogate measures and the failure to demand relevant comparison trials,” he cites the recent approval of the BiDil brand of hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate for use in treating congestive heart failure in black patients as an example of the FDA's low standards of approval, saying this drug's approval was based on a “post hoc analysis of racial subgroups enrolled in a larger trial in which the combination did not perform particularly well,” he writes.

So, instead of testing the racial-difference hypothesis in a trial with blacks and whites, the drug passed regulatory minimal standards, and was approved, he said.

“The racial-difference assumption was embraced as fact, and the new pivotal study enrolled only blacks; it found that adding BiDil to their regimens worked better than adding placebo,” Avorn said.

He concludes that the rising concern about the efficacy–risk–cost trade-offs of drugs, and the potential mass purchasing power of Medicare in 2006, may convince Congress to change today's regulatory frameworks.

"The idea that government approval should be based on what a new drug really does for patients may soon come into its own,” he writes.

Tags -- [Drug disovery, drug development, regulation, approval, FDA]

Where are the Biosensors and Biochips?

2005-09-07T09:59:00.000-04:00

As the flood waters recede in New Orleans, there is a clear need for inexpensive, handheld multipurpose biosensing technology, something like the Star Trek tricorder. This is not a new need triggered by a disaster, but a R&D focus that only increased after 9/11 four years ago.

Much of the progress gets swept under the rubric of microfabrication and nanotechnology, the former much more advanced than the latter, which is really in an early-stage hype-up trajectory.

There are technologies emerging to fill this need, but the pace is slow:

-- Scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute are developing an optical waveguide sensor that uses a planar waveguide coated with antibodies and interferometry to detect the presence of a particular strain of avian influenza. The technology is in the proof-of-principle stage, according to an article published in Optics.org.

-- At the University of Rochester Center for Future Health, scientists are developing a prototype portable platform capable of detecting and identifying the presence of multiple biological or chemical agents, according to a report online in Physorg.com.

-- Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the National Cancer Institute are developing a lab method for detecting active anthrax proteins within an infected blood sample at extremely low levels, according to a statement on Eurekalert.
The method, which produces results in an hour, is described in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the new method produces unambiguous results in about an hour.

-- In Europe, the Optonanogen project is developing a miniature biosensing device to diagnose DNA searching for biomarkers for diseases such as cancer.

The focus of the project, according to a report in labtechnologist.com, is to develop a system to detect mutations of the BRCA1 gene, which accounts for approximately 2.5 percent to 5 percent of the incidences of breast cancer in women. The system uses a nucleic-acid-coated array of 20 microcantilevers that react when they come into contact with a DNA sample, displaying the genetic irregularity.

This is by no means a complete list, just a snapshot of recent reporting on biosensors.

For more information:

-- Read a report from the European Commission on Nanobiotechnology.

-- Check out lawyers' take on intellectual property strategies in bioinformatics and biochips

-- Study a quick tutorial on military biosensing and biochips from the 2001 book, Opportunities in Biotechnology for Future Army Applications, from the National Academies Press

Tags [biosensing, biosensor, biochip, disease, microbiology]

DNA Technology May Not Provide Panacea for Identification of the Dead in US Gulf

2005-09-06T10:22:00.000-04:00

One week after Hurricane Katrina smashed the gulf coast area of the US, recovery efforts continue to find the living survivors. It's likely that at some point this week workers will start concentrating on recovering what official guess will be a staggering 10,000 dead.

CNN reports this morning that there are plans being made to purchase land for burial of the victims and adds that officials say that there are no plans for performing autopsies on victims whose deaths are not regarded as suspicious.

So, many of the victims may end up nameless due to the sheer numbers, adding to the devastating emotional impact of this disaster. Imagine families that may never know exactly the fate of a grandmother, father, mother, brother, sister, or a child.

Apparently, DNA forensics, the use of molecular biology techniques to positively identify human remains, may not solve the riddles from human remains waterlogged from days under water, or exposure to 90-degree temperatures for days, if they are indeed applied.

Amber Hunt of the Detroit Free Press cited Werner Spitz, a Detroit-area medical examiner with experience in human identification after a catastrophe, who said that some of the bodies may never be identified.

The problem is that you have to have a starting point, a known factor, an identity. That may not help the homeless people who died and were not reported missing or those whose homes, and DNA identity respository clues such as toothbrushes, combs, or razors, are long gone in the flood waters.

Rob Deaton, an investigator with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Oklahoma City, Okla., told John Fuquay of the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., on Sunday that DNA may be the only viable method of identification because of the length of time the bodies have been decomposed.

"The most severe decomposition begins after three days. After that, you almost have to go to DNA. After there's bloating, it's almost impossible to make a visual ID," he said in an article published Monday.

All of this may lead to a call for a national DNA identity registry. Already, England and Wales collect and permanently retain DNA from all people that are arrested for any “recordable offense.”

The Duke University Law and Technology Review in 2003 published an article that concludes that a DNA card scheme complying with the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution “is not beyond the realm of imagination.”

The DNA forensics market is estimated as a $120 million market by Applied Biosystems, the DNA sequencing leader who is moving to expand its operations in this market.

Princeton, NJ-based Orchid Cellmark, regarded as a leading provider of identity DNA testing services for human identity, in July reported revenues of $16 million for the quarter ending June 30 and a net loss of $1.8 million and lowered its forecasts for the remainder of the year as a result of “the slower than anticipated release of new National Institutes of Justice-funded bids for outsourced forensic DNA testing, as contract awards from states and other agencies have been delayed by up to six months from our original projections.”

Tags -- [DNA technology, forensics, human identification, registry, DNA forensics market]

Alpha Innotech Gets GE Channel

2005-09-02T11:07:00.000-04:00

Alpha Innotech, a 13-year-old San Leandro, Calif., digital imaging company today announced a marketing alliance with GE Healthcare.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed and it is not clear what the impact would be on GE Healthcare. Alpha Innotech, which operates out of a 35,000 square-foot facility, termed the partnership significant.

This deal is interesting within the focus of the New Biology Economy in that it illustrates a processes for enlarging a small company's market through distribution agreements. GE Healthcare has a large network of partners, including Harvard Bioscience and PerkinElmer.

In a statement, Alpha Innotech said it will supply imaging systems for life-sciences research that will be sold under the GE brand by GE Healthcare. The imaging products will be bundled with GE Healthcare's DNA and protein electrophoresis prducts.
In a statement, a spokesperson for GE Healthcare's Discovery Systems business segment said that the agreement “completes” GE portfolio of imaging products.

The GE agreement gives the company's its largest partnership. Currently, Alpha Innotech has partnerships with Clontech, Genemed, Panomics, Pierce Engogen and SuperArray.

Alpha Innotech in December announced a reverse merger with Xtrana of Broomfield, Colo. Formerly known as Biopool International, Xtrana was a developer of nucleic-acid testing technology. Previous to the merger announcement and facing liquidation, Xtrana sold its intellectual property to Applied Biosystems for $4 million in cash.

[Tags -- Alpha Innotech, GE Healthcare, Alliance, Partnerships, Genomics]

Chimp Genome Sequenced; Jury Finds Stratagene to Infringe on Third Wave IP

2005-09-01T11:51:00.000-04:00

An initial draft sequence of the chimpanzee genome was released, published today in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal Nature.

The chimp genome is the first non-human primate genome and the fourth mammalian genome mapped, following human (February 2001), mouse (December 2002), and rat (March 2004).

This is another domino falling in the path of sequencing technology, an expensive and time-intensive multi-institutional effort, but one that provides another large data dump in a growing foundation of genomic information and insight.

The newest genome-mapping shows that human beings and chimpanzees share more than 99 percent sequence identity in genes and proteins, while having accumulated more differences in the rest of their DNA.

[Tags -- Genome, Genomics, Chimp, DNA, Sequencing Technology]

A jury in the Western District of Wisconsin of the US District Court has determined that Stratagene's FullVelocity reagent technology infringes Third Wave US patents No. 6,090,543 and No. 6,348,314 and is deliberating damages.

La Jolla, Calif.-based Stratagene said today that has filed patent infringement actions against Third Wave, a Madison, Wisc.-based spinoff from the University of Wisconsin.

Last month, Third Wave earned FDA approval to market its genetic blood test, the Invader UGT1A1 Molecular Assay, to screen colorectal cancer patients for adverse reaction to the chemotherapy drug Camptosar (irinotecan).

Third Wave’s Invader product line is a series of analyte specific reagents for hemostatis, cardiovascular, and inherited diseases that are marketed to CLIA high complexity laboratories. The company claims accuracy of 99.9 percent for its tests versus the 98.5 percent accuracy of PCR-based tests. The chemistry-based technology consists of oligonucleotides, reagents, and controls.

[Tags – Stratagene, Third Wave, Patents, Intellectual Property, Litigation, FullVelocity, Invader, Wisconsin]

[Editor's note: Today we are implementing a tag system to provide rudimentary meta data on published articles]

New Orleans Microbiology Meeting in Doubt

2005-08-31T09:07:00.000-04:00

The flooding and devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the surrounding areas is sure to affect at least one scientific conference scheduled for the city in the near future and calls into doubt the city's ability to serve as one of the country's great convention and meeting destinations.

Of course, given the massive devastation and heart-rending human loss the area is suffering, this is likely the least of the great problems the city, and the US, will face.

But, for the 16,000 members of the American Society of Microbiology expecting to meet there in just about three weeks, starting Sept. 19, there is no official word yet on the status of the meeting, the 45th annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. The group's website says it is monitoring the situation.

It is quite likely that the city, rapidly filling with water from a breach in the defensive walls against the waters of nearby Lake Pontchartrain, will be in no shape to host visitors.

New Orleans, with some 38,000 hotel rooms and sites like the Ernest Morial Convention Center, the Superdome, New Orleans Arena, and other sites, is one of the country's top convention destinations, with 40 conventions listed on the website of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The Washington Post today reported that a number of conference representatives have called the Georgia World Congress Center and the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau over the last few days to see if the city could handle their business on short notice if needed.

[
Editors note: The devastation wracking New Orleans and surrounding areas has literally crumbled the communications infrastructure. New Orleans-based websites are unavailable with news reports saying that e-mail servers for big hubs like Tulane University are under water.

Even Google's cache feature can not call up archived versions of sites that are unavailable. News coverage has been spotty as on-the-ground reportage is limited by unsafe conditions and communications difficulties. First-person information is limited as computer connections are wiped out. The blogosphere and traditional media are an echo-chamber, reduced to repeating the same video and sound bytes, that are being produced by the on-the-ground reporters there.

The Craigslist New Orleans site offers heart-breaking messages from people looking for information about family and friends, and equally inspiring messages from people all over the country who are opening their homes to refugees, and offering money and resources. Shame that Amazon, Google, E-Bay, among others, are not responding to this calamity in the same fashion as they did to the tsunami.]

Life Science Job Ads: Stanford Sells Serenity

2005-08-30T09:20:00.000-04:00

From a job advertisement for a life sciences research assistant at Stanford, a part-time job in infectious disease research and molecular-based diagnostic testing.

Imagine . . .

. . . taking classes in yoga, graphic design, finance, piano or fencing.

. . . being able to kick off your shoes at lunch to feel the grass between your toes at one of the many parks on campus.

. . . jumping in to a world-class, Olympic-sized pool for a swim after work.

. . . sitting shoulder to shoulder with some of the world’s greatest minds—as you enjoy your morning coffee.

. . . collaborating with smart, dedicated people just like you, people who care passionately about what they do and where they do it.

You’ve been imagining life at Stanford University.

Now, since this blog originates in New York City . . .

Imagine...
. . . making a 1-hour A train commute and not leaving Manhattan.

. . . not daring to kick off your shoes anywhere in the city because goodness knows what's on the ground. Surely, the fellow walking the pitbull in the morning could have scooped up that pile.

. . . sitting shoulder to shoulder with some of the world's loudest mouths -- as you enjoy your $2 Starbucks.

. . . collaborating with smart, dedicated people just like you, who care passionately about paying their $2,000 monthly rent, having an unlimited Metrocard, and being able to get takeout.

. . .Still, here you can go to midtown and find Pfizer's headquarters, and dozens of capable lawyers, accountants, IT gurus, as well as downtown's financial companies.

. . . You've been imagining life in New York City.

Paper Describes New Prion Amplification Technology for Blood Testing Applications

2005-08-29T08:50:00.000-04:00

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston say that within six months they expect to have an early-stage technology to test human blood for the malformed proteins that cause new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or mad cow disease, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine this week.

New-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is believed to be caused by humans eating neural tissue, such as brain and spinal cord, from BSE-affected cattle.

The Galveston researchers have developed a technique that detects the proteins in blood samples taken from hamsters. Their test, which amplifies the proteins in blood to a detectable level, takes days to complete.

According to an article in Nature, the lead author of the study Claudio Soto, a University of Texas in Galveston neuroscientist, said the technology will need more testing. Additionally, there are ethical issues to resolve about screening for a disease that has no known cure. "That's an important question that someone has to resolve," Soto said.

Mad cow disease is an evolving food security concern. Two cases of the disease have been confirmed in US cows and currently the only way to test for it is in a post-mortem proceedure in animals.

Bio-Rad of Hercules, Calif., is the market leader in testing for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.

The company provides an ELISA test, a process in which brain material is homogenized, with normal prion protein being destroyed by a protease, and any remaining abnormal prion protein bound to the surface of a clear microtiter well and immunologically detected. The signal is detected by a spectrophotometer and results are output in a quantitative format. This testing procedure takes four hours to complete. [See New Biology Economy, Aug. 5.]

India Wants WTO Protection for Traditional Knowledge from Biomaterials to Music

2005-08-26T10:02:00.000-04:00

India is trying to organize developing nations to assure protection of traditional knowledge through the implementation of TRIPS (trade-related intellectual property rights) at the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Hong Kong in December.

India is seeking support from South Africa and from Latin America, particularly Brazil, to amend the WTO's intellectual property provisions to accommodate rules from the Convention on Biological Diversity.

India, along with some other mega-biodiverse developing countries, is demanding a legally binding regime which would enjoin all WTO members to amend their IPR laws to include the following three principles: (a) Disclosure of country or origin of source of biological material or traditional knowledge; (b) Prior Informed Consent (PIC); and (c) Equitable Benefit Sharing (EBS), said Shri Anthony de Sa, India's joint secretary of the ministry of commerce and industry in an article online in Indlawnews.com.

India's Financial Express, in an article earlier in August, said the country's efforts to achieve intellectual property rights for traditional knowledge could apply to traditional music. In an aside, Financial Express noted that music such as that used in nada yoga, vedic chanting and ragachikitcha, has a therapeutic benefit on the mind and body.

[Click here for an article on music therapy in India.]

If implemented, the challenge would be documenting this knowledge.

With Army's Walter Reed Center Closing, Future of Pathology Tissue Archive in Question

2005-08-25T11:30:00.000-04:00

The independent Base Closure and Realignment Commission today voted to shutter the US Army's Walter Reed Medical Center.

The 9-member commission exists to review the Department of Defense base closing recommendations and is subject to approval by President Bush, and the Congress.

Under the Pentagon's plan, the hospital would move most of its staff and services to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., to create a new facility. According to the commission, this would cost a total of $990 million for a savings of $301 million over 20 years.

Walter Reed is the Army's largest healthcare facility, and one of the largest in the Department of Defense. It has a high profile because it has been the place where presidents and foreign dignitaries have gone for state-of-the-art care and treatment.

Walter Reed also houses the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which has 22 subspecialty departments with more than 820 personnel, including more than 120 pathologists and other scientists.

The AFIP has a tissue repository from more than 3 million cases, including some 50 million paraffin blocks, and 10 million containers of formalin-fixed tissue. According to an opinion by pathologist Philip Cagle, writing in the journal Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the BRAC proposal would allow the tissue repository to be stored, but does not spell out how this repository would be maintained, updated, and made functional for education and research.

”The tissue repository is probably of no use without subspecialty pathology expertise to make it meaningful,” said Cagle. He asks for personnel to support the repository. “A group of subspecialists is needed if the full potential of this repository is to be met for in-house, organized symposia, telemedicine, and online teaching.”

After the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on 9/11, the institute identified 184 of the 189 people who died in the terrorist attack, some from only pieces of tissue.

The institute was established during the Civil War to study diseases on the battlefield.

The AFIP earlier this year issued a draft business plan that it projected would save $17.5 million a year. In June, the Government Accountability Office issued a report that said AFIP's plan would only save $5 million a year and would face a budget shortfall, given the DoD's plan to reduce funding by the estimated savings in the draft business plan.

Leroy Hood's Vision: Sequenced Genome, and Nanodiagnostics Available in 10 Years

2005-08-24T10:54:00.000-04:00

Leroy Hood tells the Seattle Post Intelligencer that in 10 years, medicine will have advanced to a point where you can have your genome sequenced for less than $1,000, and nanotechnology will have developed to the point that a single drop of blood will provide a thousand different measurements for diagnosis for predictive and preventative medicine.

[Click here to read the interview.]

Exactly a year ago, I visited Seattle and joined Hood at Julia’s Restaurant to chat over eggs and coffee to begin a day-long briefing at the Institute for Systems Biology on the north shore of Lake Union.

An hour passed like a minute as Hood explained his vision of innovation in biology, based in large part on his experience in developing the DNA sequencer. The key to progress in developing the new tools of molecular biology, Hood said, is nanotechnology and microfluidics. He said the cycle for innovative breakthroughs in these fields are some three to five years away.

Hood is a strong proponent of the importance of academia in the innovation cycle, especially for the types of progress that must be made to produce the vision he so energetically propounds.

Companies are really great at the implementation and the commercialization, but they have never exhibited much in the way of innovation,” Hood told me. “The companies will never do the innovation to get the next stage. Academics will take it there.”

Hood, while well respected and even admired, is not without his detractors -- people that believe his view of innovation is not achievable. Still, Hood is a leading evangelist for a systems approach to biological innovation. And, his views are moving to a larger mainstream audience. Just a few weeks ago, Hood was profiled in a Newsweek special section on the future of medicine.

Hood will keynote the Pacific Northwest Venture Capital Symposium Sept. 11-13 in Seattle.

Master Collaboration Pact Links UCSF With ChondroGene; Will Others Follow?

2005-08-23T10:09:00.000-04:00

Toronto-based ChondroGene, a 7-year-old genomics firm, has entered into a single collaborative agreement with the California Institute of Quantitative Biomedical Research that allows the company to create multiple collaborations with researchers at the University of Californa, San Francisco, without renegotiating each agreement.

UCSF is one of three University of California campuses associated with the institute, along with the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of California, Berkeley.

The agreement seeks to streamline the creation of research collaborations by creating a master template for things like intellectual property rights, disclosure, and licensing.

The San Francisco Business Times reports that the institute is negotiating similar broad agreements with Amgen and Genentech.

Mark Crowell, president of the Association of University Technology Managers, called the agreement "very significant" and said that while similar agreements are already in place elsewhere, he believes they will become more common as the National Academy of Sciences pushes universities to streamline the process of forging collaborations with industry, according to an article in the Business Times.

While financial details of the agreement were not disclosed and ChondroGene is a small player in the new biology economy, the pact reflects the changing nature of academic-industrial R&D collaborations.

ChondroGene, which reported $1.4 million in revenue and a loss of $731,000 for its most recent quarter ending June 30, operates on the idea that detecting changes in blood allows broader inferences on biological activity in the body, and these can be categorized uniquely as a biomarker. The company labels this as the sentinel principal.

The agreement allows the company to supply its sentinel IP with some control, and creates a pathway for commercial development of any applications arising through the collaborations.

The company offers gene-profiling services using the broad survey Affymetrix microarray technology and its own more-focused ChondroGene technology, as well as DNA sequencing.

IBM VC Group Goes Global; India Economy, with 6 Percent GDP Growth, No. 3 in 2020

2005-08-22T10:51:00.000-04:00

In 15 years, India will be the fastest growing economy in the world, and by expanding its GDP at a 6 percent per-annum rate, will be the world's third largest economy trailing the US and China, according to Deutsche Bank chief economist Norbert Walter.

Still, according to an article in India's Rediff.com, he said that to attain GDP growth of 7 percent to 8 percent annually, India needs to continually pursue aggressive reform.

In Hyderabad Saturday, R A Mashelkar, director general of India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, said the country is moving to establish two new research institutes -- in Pune and Kolkata -- modelled on the Indian Institute of Science.

In a media event after speaking to graduation ceremonies at the International Institute of Information Technology, Mashelkar said the country is seeking to create a $230 million National Science and Engineering Fund for basic research.
He also said that India needs to train more PhDs.

"The pharma industry leaders are collectively looking at employing hundreds of young Ph.Ds. In fact, they are complaining about the shortage of suitably skilled Ph.Ds in India," he said.

IBM this morning said that it has formed an advisory group of venture capital companies with an eye on creating a more formally structured way of targeting startup companies.

IBM will organize a group from Accel Partners; Darby Overseas Investments; Draper, Fisher and Jurvetson; Hummer Winblad; 3i; US Venture Partners; and Walden International, in forming a group the company said is conceived to add a global perspective to IBM's partnering ventures with startup companies. Claudia Fan Munce, the company's vice president of corporate strategy and managing director of IBM's Venture Capital Group, leads the group, which will meet four times annually.

The company pointed to emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China and the open-source movement as drivers for this effort.

For IBM, venture investment is more of a sales opportunity, and a chance to seed its technology into an early-stage company rather than making a direct expenditure of funds.

Tennessee Funders Partner With Battelle; UK Genomics Services Provider Spins Out

2005-08-19T10:01:00.000-04:00

A group of eastern Tennessee investors has organized with the goal of creating a $35 million venture capital fund, Innovation Valley Partners, targeting early-stage high technology companies nationally.

Battelle Ventures, a $150 million fund based in Princeton, NJ, will manage the group's investments. Battelle Ventures is organized to commercialize technologies emerging from Battelle-managed national labs, such as Tennessee-based Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and others.

The managers of Cambridge, UK-based Geneservice have completed a buyout of the company from its parent, Medical Research Council, a government funded agency.

The 25-employee company will operate as a genomic reagents and provider of services that include sequencing, genotyping, microarray expression analysis and whole genome amplification.

The MRC spinout lists 900 active customers including many of the large academic institutes in the US and UK as well as pre-clinical R&D labs in the biotechnology sector.

"We found that venture capitalists simply were not interested in us as a products and services company,” Tom Weaver, the company's CEO, told UK Business Weekly. “We have a viable commercial proposition in place – we have been breaking even for a number of years within the MRC – and we are now in a position to build a profitable business.”

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.The deal was partially financed by Lloyds TSB Corporate Technology & Life Sciences team, Geneservice said.

Plant Focus: Bananas, Flowers, and Mangos

2005-08-18T11:29:00.000-04:00

Researchers from the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation recently announced the completion of the first phase of sequencing the banana genome.

About 10 percent of the fruit's genome has been mapped, yielding some 40,000 DNA sequences, and another 5,000 genes.

This research advance comes as concern mounts that the Cavendish variety banana crop may be eradicated by disease, as happened to the Gros Michel cultivar in the 1950s.

India is the world's largest banana producer with 11 million metric tons grown in 2000, followed by Brazil, with 6.3 million tons, then Ecuador with 5 million tons, according to information at the impressive NationMaster website, which notes that 90 percent of the world's production is for local consumption, not export.

Ecuador is the world's leader in exporting bananas, while the US is the leading consumer, buying some $1.3 billion bananas a year.

According to NationMaster, the concern over the plight of bananas might be a bit, ahem, overripe:

”While the banana industry, including the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Research (FHIA) and the International Network for the Improvement of Bananas and Plantains in France, see the disease as a possible indicator of the demise of the fruit, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) disagrees. According to the industry, because existing banana plants are reproduced from cuttings, there is little genetic diversity and diseases, in particular fungus, can rapidly wipe out entire production regions. But according to the FAO, the export varieties make up only about 10 percent of the total world banana crop, and the produce of small-scale farmers in developing countries, which do not enter significantly into world trade, retain far greater genetic diversity.

The advances in understanding the banana genome are reassuring on one hand, but troubling to those who are concerned about GMOs.

Personally, I'm not much of a banana eater, save for banana pudding (vanilla wafers, pudding and sliced bananas, baked). But, I've worked in plenty of New York offices where bananas are a ubiquitous snack, purchased for a quarter off a fruit cart.

Still, what is interesting about this, in a New Biology Economy framework, is that Brazil is a research leader in the southern hemisphere, which is way under-exploited as a market for molecular biology tools. [See New Biology Economy 7/13/2005 for information about Brazil's research efforts in the coffee genome.]

In other plant news, Arabidopsis researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen, Germany, and the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, in a paper published in the journal Science on Aug. 12, have linked a small molecule present in leaves to the formation of flowers at the growing tip of a plant.

The full picture of this molecular messaging system has yet to be deciphered, but the scientists have determined that the FT and FD proteins in plants are linked to activate flowering.

“Being able to control the flowering process better should help to breed new varieties that can flourish in places where they would normally not flower at the appropriate time,” the researchers said in a statement.

Now, meandering off the science path, and onto the interesting, an article available online from The International Herald Tribune and reprinted from The Asian Age, H.Y. Sharada Prasad, an advisor to India's prime ministers Indira and Rajiv Ghandi, writes lovingly about mangos in India in August.

Mangos are India's national fruit and the number of varieties and the tastes of these fruit are overwhelming when compared to the meager varieties available here.

I'm a big fan of the fruit, especially when it is at its green stage and tart and crunchy. So far, this year I've tasted three varieties – the big green Mexican mangos, the yellow Haitians, and a small mango, the Dominicans in my neighborhood call vanilla.

Tech Transfer: Supporting the Outsourcing of Commercial Research and Development

2005-08-17T10:38:00.000-04:00

In the life sciences, the “R” part of research and development has essentially been outsourced to the academic sector, financed through NIH grants and other government support.

Big public tool companies' role in this emerging ecology is to perform the “D” portion of the equation, picking technologies that they think are ready for commercialization and optimizing them for large-scale production and sale.

Largely, academia is struggling to systematize its part of the de facto process, investing in tech transfer offices, and the financial, human and digital resources to nuture early-stage technologies to the point of transfer, while guarding against conflicts of interest, and not straying from the traditional mission of education.

The standard-bearers in the high tech arena are Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Still, in the life sciences, tech-transfer efforts are just starting to approach critical mass, according to a number of articles recently published.

The Portland Business Journal today published online a five-part article by staffer Aliza Earnshaw that takes a very Oregon-based look at tech transfer among the state's academic institutions.

Across the country, the Nashville City Paper profiles tech transfer at Vanderbilt University, reporting that the university received $5.1 million in revenue for its interests in commercialized technology in the fiscal year ending in June and expects to see growth rates of 30 percent annually.

Perhaps one of the most successful tech transfer offices, if not the most successful, is that of the University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which, according to the Wikipedia, contributes some $30 million a year to the university. Warfarin (Coumadin) is named for WARF.

A recent article in Wisbusiness.com covers the presentations made by Mark Bugher, who runs the University Research Park in Madison, Wis.; Paul Peercy, dean of the UW-Madison Engineering School; and Tim Keane, head of the Marquette University Golden Angels Network investment group. The three were pitching trustees of the Wisconsin Investment Board last week for additional investment in science and technology in the state. The board is among the top 25 public or private pension funds with some $70 billion in investment capital and a venture capital funding of some $135 million.

In its latest edition, BusinessWeek examines both China and India. For the purposes of this blog entry, see the article, “The Seeds of Next Silicon Valley.” The piece focuses on information technology startups in India and reports that American VC s only invested some $240 million in Indian companies last year out of a total of $20.4 billion invested.

Does Jettisoning Semiconductor Business Boost Agilent's Life Science Segment?

2005-08-16T09:36:00.000-04:00

Agilent yesterday announced that it is selling its semiconductor business and divesting its Lumileds stake to get back to basics – making stuff that measures things.

The moves will bring the company, which reported some $2.8 billlion in cash on hand at the end of the quarter, an additional $3.5 billion that the company said will be spent repurchasing some $4 billion in its stock, and retiring some $1.5 billion in convertible debt.

The moves, which lifted the stock before Monday's market open, were predictable because although the semiconductor business was robust and mature, the ups and downs of the sector tended to drag down Agilent's overall results, overshadowing a successful rebound from the doldrums of the high tech downturn.

Agilent is one of the players in the New Biology Economy and is creating value in its Life Sciences business, which is the No. 2 player in the microarray market, a key provider in mass spectrometry, and is rapidly gaining momentum with acquisitions in the bioinformatics sector.

But, in announcing its third-quarter results yesterday, overall revenues of $1.7 billion were down 10 percent over the year-ago quarter, while net income of $104 million was up 4 percent over Q3 2004.

In its life sciences, revenues of $341 million were up 2 percent over $335 million in the year-ago quarter, while operating profit fell to $42 million compared to $45 million in the same quarter last year. Still, the company's internal measurement of the segments' success, return on invested capital, grew to 27 percent from 22 percent for the same period last year.

The company said it expects the life sciences unit to return to double-digit growth in the fourth quarter.

With all the moves announced yesterday, Agilent's life sciences and chemical analysis unit rises in stature, and expectations.

Rice Genome Sequenced, and Race to Lock Up Genetic Intellectual Property Begins

2005-08-12T09:56:00.000-04:00

An international consortium of researchers has announced the completion of the sequencing of the genome of the Oryza japonica subspecies of rice and published in the Aug. 11 issue of the journal Nature. The team of scientists completed an initial draft in 2002.

The sequence is 95 percent complete at greater than 99 percent accuracy and reveals 370 million base pairs and the locations of over 35,000 genes. The human genome sequence has 3 billion base pairs and 25,000 genes.

With a completed sequence in hand, at an estimated cost of $200 million, researchers can now begin to work to seek ways to improve production of this important plant, which provides a subsistance food to much of the world.

Additionally, the sequence information can be applied to research in other related crops such as corn, barley and wheat.

The announcement of this advance also is spurring thoughts of commercial breakthroughs.

Kapil Sibal, India's minister for science and technology, told The New India Express that India's participation in the sequencing effort “could ensure India’s food security’’ since ‘‘India now has complete access to the entire rice genome with no encumbrance related to intellectual property rights,” he said in an article published online.

“There will be a global race now to identify the valuable genes from the plethora of information that has been generated and these ‘precious genes’, which can definitely be patented,” he told the publication.

Seoul National University today announced the start of construction construction Friday of a $24 million medical bioengineering laboratory for stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk on its Kwanak campus, south of Seoul, according to an article in the Korea Times.

The South Korea government is footing the tab for the facility, which will be completed by October 2006. The seven-story complex will house labs for primate studies, stem cell research, animal cloning, and cell transplant and molecular biology research projects, the Korea Times said.

Additionally, the center will include a researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Scotland's Roslin Institute, the folks who created Dolly, the cloned sheep.

In India's Pharmaleader online publication, an article encourages students to look to the biotechnology sector.

With the biotechnology sector in India expected to add 10 lakh jobs by 2012, it is a happening career destination, writes Neeraj Bagga

”Set to witness an IT-like revolution in the country, this field is now a hot career option for students,” he writes.

The California Institute of Technology announced that Ahmed Zewail, director of the laboratory for molecular sciences and a Nobel Prize laureate, has received an $18 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to create the Ultrafast Science and Technology (UST) Center at the school.

The center will focus on “physical biology," a term Zewail uses to describe the search to understand the behavior of biological systems by directly observing them in the "four dimensions of space and time."

Like other cross-disciplinary systems biology efforts just beginning to gather momentum across this country's academic institutions, the center will serve to bring together Caltech researchers in physics, chemistry, and biology with the goal of creating new ways to “see” biology at the molecular level, and through time.

New York City Takes Big Step Into Biotech With Developer for East River Science Park

2005-08-11T11:25:00.000-04:00

Alexandria Real Estate Equities of Pasadena, Calif., will develop a 870,000 square foot facility on the Bellevue Hospital Center on the east side of Manhattan as a carrot to nurture biotechnology in the city.

The announcement of Alexandria's association with the East River Science Park was made at a press conference yesterday here in the city.

While New York has a concentration of biotechnology-related companies and top-tier academic institutions, the city has not risen to the level of Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, Phoenix, the Research Triangle, or Seattle as a magnet for a biotech industry. I know. I live in the city and over the last three years I have reported extensively from all of these locations.

The city recently received a top-tier ranking as a biotech center, but this in no way represents the reality. The city is an expensive place to live and work. One of the many cost-of-living calculators available on the Internet shows that if you make a $60,000 a year salary in San Diego, you would have to make $103,000 a year in Manhattan.

Real estate in Manhattan is also at a premium with asking prices for Class A mid-town office space renting for nearly $60 per square foot as of December, according to an article in The Real Deal, a publication covering real estate in New York. In the mid-town south area, with an 11 percent vacancy rate in December, asking rents for Class A space is $30.

The Bellevue hospital area, where I spent last weekend in an apartment high-rise near the new facility, is a place where you can see the sun rise, no trivial matter in this city of towers.

The neighborhood has upscale apartments set close to a concentration of low-income housing. There are plenty of restaurants, shopping, and movie theaters but it is on the outside edge of the east side of Manhattan, and accessibility by public transportation is limited as the No. 4, 5, and 6 subway lines are long cross-town blocks away.

Groundbreaking for the science park is slated for 2006 and the campus will be developed in two phases.

The first phase encompasses the building of two laboratory and office towers approximating 542,000 square feet of space. The first building will include 14 floors comprised of a spectrum of life science uses, including laboratory/office space for life science entities at all stages of growth, a state-of-the-art digital conference center, convergence cafe, space for clinical drug operations and other translational uses.

A second building will include laboratory and office space, as well as street-level retail. The plan also calls for a glass-enclosed Winter Garden and 43,000 square feet of publicly accessible open space, including a riverfront esplanade. The project's second phase calls for an approximately 330,000 square-foot laboratory/office building located on a parcel of land north of the site.

Alexandria brings experience to the table and is in a unique position to develop this area. The firm is a partner in Accelerator Corp., an biotech incubator in Seattle aligned with the Institute of Systems Biology. [Click here to read New Biology Economy coverage of Accelerator}

I visited the Accelerator last summer and found a huge facility with office space and managers and two startup companies – VieVax and VLST. Today, there are four companies located in the 20,000 square foot lab and office-space facilities.

Alexandra Real Estate, MPM Capital, ARCH Venture Partners and Versant Ventures partner with Lee Hood's Institute for Systems Biology to provide the space and some $15 million in venture capital to support the companies that are accepted into the space. Each company that passes muster can expect some $2 million in initial support.

There are two things that are key to Accelerator – the relationship with ISB, and the venture capital. And, those are keys to how this New York facility will do. There needs to be a scientific mentor-company relationship, a place where science park startups might be able to conduct microarray studies, or proteomics research, or simply get scientific feedback.

Additionally, there has to be access to funds, engineers and sophisticated computational power. [See recent New Biology Economy coverage of national venture capital funding.]

This facility will have $10 million to attract tennants, provided by the New York City Investment Fund.

This is an exciting start.

Read a recent speech about biotech in New York given by Russell Bissette, executive director of the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research.

Additionally, read an article on biotech in the city by Mitchell Moss, professor of urban policy planning at the Robert Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University.

Dole Thinks Biotech in Western NC

2005-08-10T10:25:00.000-04:00

Dole Foods is floating the idea of using defunct textile mills in western North Carolina to create a biotechnology center, according to news reports.

The company, which had $5 billion in revenues in 2004 and is the largest producer and seller of fruit, vegetables and fresh flowers, has approached N.C. State, UNC, and Duke seeking support for the creation of a facility for biotech research as part of a reworking of former Pillowtex textile mills near Charlotte.

Pillowtex was formerly Cannon Mills, a long-time keystone in the state's textile economy, which went bankrupt in 2003 leaving some 4,000 people jobless.

According to a memo from UNC leaders and disclosed by the Salisbury Post newspaper Saturday, the vision of billionaire David Murdock, who bought Dole and took it private in 2003, is to form a "biopolis" -- a 21st century city -- on the site, according to a memo sent Friday to UNC's board of governors from system President Molly Broad.

The facility would seek a Dole-N.C. State collaboration on fruit and vegetable science, a nutrition institute in collaboration with UNC-Chapel Hill; an analytical lab, a fermentation facility, and a research center directed by Duke, as well as an incubator for startup companies and a science high school for girls, according to a report by the Associated Press.

It is clear that Dole will not be able to foot the entire bill for this, and neither will the universities. And, since the biotech center of North Carolina is some three hours east in the Research Triangle area, it is questionable whether this concept can take root.

However, with nearby Charlotte -- with its skyline of massive towers -- revitalized as a banking center, there is potential for investment capital.

Monsanto Wants Patents on Corn ESTs

2005-08-09T10:18:00.000-04:00

Monsanto is waiting on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to decide if it can apply for US patent protection on five expressed sequence tags or ESTs from corn.

The agriculture company has twice been rejected on patent applications on these and in May decided to ask the court to decide the issue.

Affymetrix, Genentech, Eli Lilly and Dow AgroSciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences and the Association of Medical Colleges have weighed in against Monsanto.

If granted, this type of IP protection might, of course, slow down research and innovation, as the patent office has previously refused to grant patents on this information and says, according to an article by Anna Salleh of ABC Science Online, has not identified any “specific and practical benefit for using the ESTs, in particular the function of the particular genes and proteins they point to.”

Seattle Paper on Leaks of Drug Trial Secrets; NIH Report Issued on Conflicts of Interest

2005-08-08T10:38:00.000-04:00

The Seattle Times on Sunday published an investigative report by Luke Timmerman and David Heath that discloses that Wall Street insiders are learning about late-stage drug trials, and the progress of drug candidates, before results become available publicly. The investigative report points to hedge funds as the drivers in this search for information and “matchmaking firms,” such as Gerson Lehrman Group, as possible facilitators in a dialogue that apparently exposes confidential information.

Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, pens a valentine to the Pacific Northwest in a guest column in the Sunday Seattle Times advocating for a Congressional bill prohibiting discrimination in health insurance and employment on the basis of genetic information. The bill has cleared the Senate is awaiting House consideration. Collins said it is backed by the Bush administration.

Collins appears busier than some erstwhile new biology economy columnists, recently publishing in the Boston Globe, and covered here, a warning of a lack of oversight in the emerging personalized medicine market.

Kevin Freking of The Associated Press last week covered an NIH report issued Friday investigating apparent outside activities by its top employees in the period between 2001 to 2003. According to the AP, the report said that 22 percent of outside activities were not disclosed, and 28 percent were requests were approved – after the scheduled start dates of the engagements. The report covered the work of the top 174 senior level workers at the NIH.

The NIH in February began to restrict the ability of NIH scientists to work and invest outside the agency.

The report on the NIH, first covered by the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, was to be released to the public on Friday by the office of the Inspector General of HHS, but is not readily apparent on any of the agencies' websites.

On Sunday Marie McCullough of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote an article that looks at OvaCheck, a potential product for diagnosing ovarian cancer based on a blood test and proteomics and bioinformatics techniques.

The article traces the creation of Correlogic Systems of Bethesda, Md., by Peter Levine and Ben Hitt to commercialize a pattern recognition process underlying this diagnostic approach in an R&D cooperation with scientists Emanuel Petricoin, then of the FDA, and Lance Liotta of the National Cancer Institute.

The article, distributed online and available here, focuses on Correlogic and OvaCheck but examines the hurdles that proteomics – and by extension, other genomics-based techniques – have failed to meet thus far.

But, most interesting in the article, is the coverage of the interactions between the company and the tech-transfer deals involving Petricoin and Liotta, who left the government this spring to create a proteomics program at George Mason University.

Levine testified before Congress about the relationship between Correlogic and the agencies last June. The article did not say if the reporter attempted to contact either Petricoin or Liotta for comment.

Focus on Food

2005-08-05T11:21:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday, the USDA said that an elderly cow slaughtered in Texas in the spring did not have mad cow disease based on tests conducted by the agency's laboratory in Ames, Iowa, and the Central Reference Laboratory in Weybridge, England

Two cases of mad cow disease have been confirmed in the United States. In 2003, a cow born in Canada was discovered in Washington State in December 2003. The second was in November in a Texas-born cow.

This latest cow required testing at the world-class UK lab after initial tests proved inconclusive.

Bio-Rad, the California-based molecular biology toolmaker, holds a huge share of the market for BSE tests globally.

The company provides an ELISA test, a process in which brain material is homogenized, with normal prion protein being destroyed by a protease, and any remaining abnormal prion protein bound to the surface of a clear microtiter well and immunologically detected. The signal is detected by a spectrophotometer and results are output in a quantitative format. This testing procedure takes four hours to complete.

The USDA recently said that if Bio-Rad's screen test should indicate a positive, then it will require a follow-up "Western" blot.

In this proceedure, brain material is homogenized, and normal prion protein is destroyed by a protease, and the sample is electrophoretically separated in a gel, whereby remaining abnormal prion protein is immunologically detected. For example, antibodies to the prion protein are bound and then detected by a second antibody linked to an enzyme; and the bound enzyme reacts with a substrate resulting in staining or light emission from the membrane. This process requires one to two days to complete.

All of today's tests are performed post mortem, and the research challenge is to be able to detect the disease in live animals.

Barry Shlachter of Knight Ridder newspapers has written an informative article on BSE in the US, which is worth reading.

India Opens Bioinformatics Facility

2005-08-04T11:44:00.000-04:00

On Friday, India will open a new medical bioinformatics operation in Hyderabad.

The facility will be run by Andra Pradesh Center for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics and Sun Microsystems, which has provided $4 million of the $5 million investment for the facility.

The center seeks to create a database on infectious diseases and genetic disorders, focusing on tuberculosis for application in drug discovery and gene therapy.

Scientist bloggers are few, but growing, according to a feature in the current issue of The Scientist. The article runs down the current state of the blogosphere in biology and provides a list of some related blogs.

Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Partners, published online by Always On, blogs a recent presentation by grumpy futurist George Gilder [paraphrasing George]:

The interplay of biology and physics is the major innovation that’s happening today. It’s a transition from an industry dominated by three abundances: power, silicon, and transistors to one dominated by scarcity of those resources. We are going from analog to digital and back to analog. Optics engineers are analog engineers, as are bioengineers.

What the Heck is This Stuff?

2005-08-03T10:26:00.000-04:00

This is my dream job. It's a dream because it doesn't exist outside of this medium. No journalistic organization today has a spot assigned for someone like myself to filter, examine, and report on this marketplace. There are organizations that write about the genomics market, and others that cover segments of this market, but no one is taking an economics/business approach to looking at what the convergence of the advances in molecular biology, cellular biology, and information technology, combined with business culture and financing changes mean in the global marketplace.

So, that's my assignment. Why me? For the last three years, I covered the microarray market. Microarrays are a genomic technology that functions at the molecular level and can measure gene activity. I watched the market grow from being essentially a home-brew technology to becoming a calibrated, industrially produced near-commodity and a $1 billion a year market. Suddenly, the growth curve for this market was less hockey stick . But, microarrays, applied to DNA and RNA, are just the beginning of the technological growth curve for the life sciences.

Proteomics, the investigation of the proteins produced by the body, is just beginning and the use of mass spectrometry and chromotography is just starting to hit uphill growth. Metabolomics, the study of metabolism, is even earlier and in the just emerging phase.

Then there is systems biology, a term most often paired with Lee Hood of the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle. This has come to mean the application of the knowledge gained in genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, combined with heavy duty computation to begin to create biological models that can predict. This is all, admittedly, very forward looking and research and advances come in little bits, like popcorn starting to pop in a microwave. The key to getting a big bowl of puffed bits is in streamlining the culture of innovation, and clearly, we are not there yet.

Our patent schemes are becoming a choke-collar on innovation and wealth-creation.

The R in R&D is largely being outsourced to academia and funded by the government.

India and China are beginning to move in this market, and aren't alone as countries in eastern Europe, and in Latin America may also become players, connected by the Internet, and fueled by lower fundamental cost structures.

In the US, innovation and growth for the molecular biology tools makers is coming from acquisitions, producing a short-term blip and an uptick in what is undoubtedly a cyclical market.

Today, New Biology Economy celebrates its second month but I'm not throwing any parties yet. Typically, experts say the third month is the hurdle for most bloggers. So, we will work through this month and in September, we'll pop corks.

If you are curious about how this publication is doing, check out Google. Searching for new-biology-economy now produces two pages of references as we propagate through the network.

For a reality check, we are No. 24591 and regarded as an "crunchy crustacean" in the Truth Laid Bear's blogosphere ecosystem rankings. That's better than being an "insignificant microbe," the bottom of the Truth Laid Bear's food chain.

Integrating Engineering Mindset Critical on Road to Successful Translational Medicine

2005-08-02T10:28:00.000-04:00

Writing in the July-August issue of American Scientist, the magazine of the Sigma Xi association, Michael Liebman, chief scientific officer of the Windber Research Institute, which is located in southern Pennsylvania, makes a case for integrating an engineer's approach into translational medicine.

Why? Well, this is what he writes:

Because an engineer uses the fruits of science to feed the appetite of technology. Unlike scientists, who tend to approach problems from a "bottom-up" perspective by collecting data and seeking patterns, engineers take a "top-down" approach, probing a specific system for clues, taking it apart and considering how each component can be handled in a tailored solution. An engineer is a problem solver rather than a hypothesis generator.

He says that while genomics, proteomics and other high-throughput technologies are "seductively powerful," the generation of data is "far outstripping scientists' ability to convert it into usable knowledge."

He suggests that an engineer's approach requires that translational-medicine research place more emphasis on "going from the bedside to the bench, rather than the other way around."

New Biology Economy Take: Liebman is espousing the essential tenent of the new biology economy and this is that we are only just understanding biology and that in order to advance, we need to combine the tools from different disciplines, the analysis and problem-solving skills used by engineers, physicists, chemists, etc., to get a larger picture of what is biological truth. It's an evolutionary process, but one that institutes like Windber are employing, and building new facilities that bring these folks together.

Windber in July began the process of moving its nearly 70 employees into a new 36,000 square-foot, $8 million research facility.

Windber describes itself as: "one of the most integrated clinical, genomic and proteomic research facilities in the world, acquiring, storing thousands of clinical samples each year within its tissue repository and carrying out analysis using a proprietary data warehouse and analysis system."

BIO Asks Congress to Unblock SBIR Funds for Majority VC-owned Small Firms

2005-08-01T10:06:00.000-04:00

The Biotechnology Industry Association is prodding Congress to pass legislation that would allow venture-capital majority-owned companies to be eligible to receive Federal Small Business Innovation Grants.

The biotech trade association last week said it has gathered a petition with the signatures of some 280 bio industry executives seeking to overturn what it considers a new interpretation of Small Business Association regulations barring companies that are 51-percent owned by venture capital firms from eligibility for SBIR grants, which are typically in the range of $100,000 or more.

It is arguable whether or not government funding agencies are taking a narrower view of what is or isn't a small company. Steve Berberich of the Business Gazette of Maryland, in an article published July 22, covers both sides of the issue.

New Biology Economy take: Federal funding has become a critical part of the innovation process in biology, that is clear. These funds allow small companies to diversify their efforts or engage in projects they might otherwise not be able to pursue. Venture capital funding provides a more solid financial foundation for early-stage companies, but also starts the clock ticking on commercialization and sets a horizon for an exit of the funders. SBIR funds take some of the risk out of early-stage projects.

BIO is making a greedy grab for funding that should go to worthwhile projects that are otherwise unfundable. If a company has progressed with its commercialization efforts to the point where it is majority-owned by VC, then it is clear that the company has cleared certain hurdles and can be regarded as having the promise, but certainly not a guarantee, of being able to enter the marketplace. VC is high risk/high return capital and most investors in this market understand that a .300 batting average is outstanding and that one home run in 10 investments is an enviable track record.

A way around the logjam that BIO is complaining about is to spin-off efforts that are so important that the only way to fund them is through SBIRs. And, in the final analysis, shouldn't anything paid for with taxpayers' money ultimately benefit the public domain?

University of Iowa, like others, asks state for $2 million for tech transfer, bioscience

2005-07-29T10:30:00.000-04:00

The University of Iowa will present $2 million in three project proposals next week for economic development and bioscience faculty recruitment.

According to an article in the Iowa City Press Citizen, one of UI's project proposals totaling $900,000, which would doube with mandated matching funds, is additional staff for tech transfer activities.

The other UI projects, totaling $1.1 million without matching funds, are to double the funding for recruiting bioscience faculty members and to help pay for the Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing and the university's technology innovation center.

In Wisconsin, the Biomedical Technology Alliance of Southeastern Wisconsin, an academic coalition for collaborative medical technology and biotech research, will receive $500,000 instead of $2.5 million, as Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle exercised a partial veto in signing the state budget bill Monday. The proposed $2.5 million would have consumed all of the funding available for technology commercialization grants, loans to start-up businesses as well as funding for four entrepreneurial and tech transfer centers that opened last fall around the state.

The online publication, Drug Researcher, discusses Pfizer's outsourcing of some of its technology jobs to India. The article concludes that the emergence of bioinformatics expertise in India is luring Pharma R&D activities on a piecemeal basis but "end-to-end proprietary drug discovery and development in India is unlikely to emerge for several more years."

ZDNet, the online IT publication, looks at companies that acquire patents from other companies and then seeks revenues by enforcing them, focusing on Acacia Research, a California-based firm best known for its V chip for television but also the parent company of CombiMatrix, a molecular biology tools developer.

The article delves into the changing patent regime and is a worthwhile primer on today's patent market, if not the final word on a space that is likely to change even more and require more collaboration. Remember that there are on the order of 100 patents involved in the making of a desktop computer – if there wasn't a way to create order out of this, innovation would surely come to a halt.

Today's Forbes.com takes a look at the contract research organization market, the firms who are increasing their share of work performed for Pharma. Based on information provided by David Windley, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. in Nashville, the article identifies Covance, Charles River Laboratories, and SFBC International, and ICON as the top pharmaceutical industry outsourcers.

Satish Amarnath, a microbiologist working with Manipal Hospital in Bangalore,
writing in India's Express Healthcare Management magazine, takes a look at clinical laboratory development in the context of healthcare and the need for the human touch.

The next century may see patients being monitored from home, where sensors placed in their body measure blood sugar and transmit through the intranet to the hospital. This could be evaluated by expert systems and would react even before we have said Jack Robinson and injected or stopped release of insulin from a repository in the body.

So, will doctors become redundant?

I would still say that the realm of the doctor providing a healing touch and a soothing influence will never be irrelevant as seen in patients counseled for HIV, where patients fight the deadly virus infections by a few tests, a little medicine and a lot of advice and moral support.

Amarnath has been blind since he was attacked by someone who threw sulphuric acid on his face in 1998. He continues to do his work and, in a profile published in Eyeway magazine this spring, he explains how he performs his work in microbiology despite his impaired sight.

In microbiology, a lot is based on sight, on seeing things and reporting what is there. Yes, I can’t do that now but what I do is this: I ask two people to describe it to me and then I draw my conclusions.

Life Sciences Tops VC Investments in the 2nd Quarter: MoneyTree Survey

2005-07-28T11:15:00.000-04:00

Venture capitalists returned to the life sciences sector in the second quarter, investing $1.5 billion in 154 companies for approximately 25 percent of the $5.8 billion invested overall, according to the MoneyTree Survey released this week by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Venture Economics and the National Venture Capital Association.

The overall total of VC investment was down from $6.1 billion invested in the same quarter last year, but up over the previous quarter's $4.9 billion.
VC's hit a three-year high in investing $1.3 billion in startup and early-stage companies, according to the survey.

The group also released additional geographic tracking of VC invesment in the first quarter, showing the Silicon Valley area obtaining $305 million, or 42 percent, of the $675 million invested in the period, followed by $96 million to New England (14 percent), $64 million to Philadelphia (9.5 percent), and $59 million to San Diego (8 percent).

The first-quarter Silicon Valley deals were led by a $107 million late-stage investment in Fibrogen, a maker of treatments for the treatment of fibrosis. Perlegen Sciences, a spinoff of microarray leader Affymetrix, received $74 million. NuGen Technologies, a maker of genomics analysis tools, took in $11 million.

In New England, biotech tools companies SynBio, Protedyne, BG Medicine, Primera Diagnostics combined for approximately $10 milion in funding.

VC investment doesn't indicate the leading edge of innovation, but indicates trends that are broadening out and reaching market acceptance.

Invitrogen Acquires BioSource

2005-07-27T11:11:00.000-04:00

New Biology Economy today returns to daily publishing after a one-week summer hiatus.

Invitrogen will buy Camarillo, Calif.-based BioSource for $130 million in cash, the company said Tuesday, ending a saga that started in the spring when Bio-Rad was rebuffed as it made several attempts to buy the firm for about $80 million.

BioSource employs some 240 people and sells products for genomic and proteomic research. With the purchase, which is slated to close by the end of the year pending regulatory and shareholder approval, acquisitive Invitrogen adds cytokine reagents and assays to its product portfolio.

In a photo op earlier this week, the University of Albany (NY) previewed its new cancer research center, known as the GenNYSis Center for Excellence in Cancer Genomics.

The 113,000 square foot building is located on the university's east campus in Rensselaer, NY. The center cost a little more than $45 million to complete, with most of the money coming from state grants and local businesses.

Sunnyvale, Calif-based Labcyte earlier this week announced the closing of a $21 million Series C financing with its major investors and three new firms participating. The round was led by Cross Atlantic Partners and included Hambrecht & Quist Capital Management and the Bay Area Equity Fund, a fund managed by JPMorgan, as new investors. Labcyte will use the funds for expanding its low-volume liquid handling business. Labcyte is a privately held company that was formed by the merger of Picoliter and Labcyte in October, 2003.

Applied Biosystems, Applera's life sciences business and the genome-sequencing technology leader, on Wednesday reported 4 percent growth on revenues of $478.5 million for the fourth quarter ending June 30, compared to $460.5 million a year ago. Net revenues were boosted 1 percent by foreign currency exchange benefits. ABI had net income of $72 million, up over $51 million a year ago, and boosted by $10.6 million related to discontinued operations.

The company reported revenue of $143 million for its declining DNA sequencing business, a 2 percent increase, year over year; a 16 percent increase to $140 million for its Real-Time PCR business; a 1 percent drop on revenues of $119 million for its mass spec business; a 7 percent decline in PCR.

For the year, ABI's instruments business was down 4 percent, while consumables increased 12 percent.

The company's cash and short term investments were $756 million, up from $676 million as of March 31, 2005.

Earlier this week, ABI announced that it has entered an agreement with the National Institute of Genomic Medicine of Mexico to conduct a genotyping study of Mexico's population. Financial details of the collaboration were not disclosed.

"The Mexican population includes a mixture of more than 60 Meso-American native groups and Spaniards. Analyzing and characterizing genetic variation in our unique population is the only way to cost-effectively develop better strategies for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of common diseases in our country, such as diabetes, asthma, and hypertension," said Gerardo Jimenez Sanchez, director general of the Mexican genomics group.

On a related note, the Cape Times publication of South Africa, an article uses the human genome project as a jumping-off point to denounce South Africa's “obsession with race classification.”

. . . the present government is using race classification as a means of monitoring its success in bringing about transformation and equity in respect of a number of indices in South African society post-1994.

The author of the op-ed piece calls for the scrapping of all racial classification in the country.

Branford, Conn.-based 454 Life Sciences, a majority-owned subsidiary of CuraGen Corporation and a rising competitor to ABI in the DNA sequencing market, said Tuesday that is has earned $11.5 million in milestone payments from Roche. The two companies entered an exclusive 5-year, world-wide agreement for the promotion, sale, and distribution of 454's genome sequencing systems, capped at $62 million.

Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California, San Francisco, and research colleagues have published a paper in the initial Public Library of Science Genetics journal.

The paper discloses some 23 genes in the worm and model organism C. elegans that each “somehow normally acts to reduce longevity, whereas inhibiting any one of them increases lifespan,” according to a statement.

The genes affect a wide variety of activities, including insulin signaling, metabolism, and dietary regulation.

Spying the Job Market

2005-07-19T10:14:00.000-04:00

On occasion, we like to look at the job boards to get an idea where growth is coming from in the industry. This is not an exhaustive examination by any manner, but quick peek.

On Monster, Affymetrix is seeking an applications specialist and a senior scientist II. According to the ad, the applications specialist will help customers by phone or e-mail and assist in lab work and perform some training. Bachelor's degree required. The senior scientist should have eight years of experience, a bachelor's degree, and will link analysis and biology functions.

Additionally, the company is looking for a manufacturing engineer to work in the Boston area, and a "clinical market attack planner."

Agilent Technologies is seeking a research associate and a scientist for its new outpost in Cambridge, Mass. The job will require a bachelor's degree and will entail working with microarray technology and data. The scientist will work in collaboration within the company and with customers to determine new microarray applications. Bachelor's or master's degree required.

Additionally, the company is hiring an assistant to help in Cambridge, "screening managers' internal and external correspondences (i.e. emails, voice mails, etc.) and actively reviewing, routing and responding to inquiries as appropriate with ability to handle sensitive situations while maintaining professional confidentiality."

News

Proctor & Gamble and Coca-Cola are underwriting African-American Lives, a four-part PBS documentary scheduled to air in February. The program will use DNA analysis as part of its investigation into the origins of African Americans, including tools provided by a collaboration between microarray leader Affymetrix, and DNA Print Genomics.

In-house coverage of the sixth annual University of California Systemwide Bioengineering Symposium, held at UC, Santa Cruz in June.

Collins Warns About a Lack of Oversight on Rising Personalized Medicine Market

2005-07-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

Francis Collins, the leader of the government's genomics work, writes an op-ed piece about the rise of personalized medicine and sounds a warning in Sunday's Boston Globe. Collins writes:

The public is also in urgent need of education and guidance. Even the savviest consumer is likely to have difficulty interpreting the onslaught of advertisements from companies trying to hitch their wagons to the personalized medicine star.

These ads run the gamut from established medical laboratories offering tests for genes involved in susceptibility to serious diseases, such as breast cancer, to Internet opportunists making wild claims about being able to tailor diets or face creams to a person's DNA profile.

There is no way for consumers to gauge whether a genetic test is scientifically valid, let alone whether it is appropriate for them or reimbursable by their insurance companies. The lack of oversight of such tests leaves the average person vulnerable to misuses or mispresentation of what personalized medicine truly is.

Interesting to note that on my browser, the Google ads that were presented with the story were from RealGenetics [Test your DNA to find relatives], SeqWright [Genotyping, Mutagenesis, Synthesis. Shotgun Lib, SNPs, Contigs. GLP], and Applied Biosystems [See More Genes & Use Less Sample Complete Expression Analysis System].

The website Medical News Today covers a paper published in the July issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology describing a technology using quantum dots to identify genes.

"The idea is very simple and straightforward, but I think we're the first ones to make it work," said biomedical engineer Shuming Nie, of Indiana University, who led the researchers who published the paper.

In a side note, Charles Choi of UPI, in a recent article, notes that experts expect big legal battles in the quantum-dot intellectual property arena over the next few years.

David Ewing Duncan, a science writer and author of the book, "The Geneticist Who Played Hoops With My DNA ... and other masterminds from the frontiers of biotech," on Sunday penned an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle that says media should be more aware of biotechnology.

Society lavishes resources on their work and allows them to tinker with life itself, yet we know more about Paris Hilton than we do about people who are among the most powerful on Earth -- with the tools, knowledge and technology to create wonders or, if something goes wrong, to destroy us.

Deals

Today, Geron and Merck announced a licensing agreement to develop a cancer vaccine targeting telomerase, according to Reuters.

Under the agreement, Geron will receive an upfront payment, milestone payments, and royalties. Merck has also agreed to buy equity in Geron at a future date as part of Geron's next round of financing. Additional terms were not disclosed.

PR

The (UK) Guardian newspaper today posts an article on Roche, most interesting for its quotes from Jonathan Knowles, Roche head of R&D. Knowles tells the Guardian that deals are the key to success in the pharmaceutical market:

"The vast majority of science and medicine happens outside Roche," he said.

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The Los Angeles Daily News profiles Amgen.
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Why this interest in the biotech biggies? The Scotsman on Sunday published an article on the recent upward moves in the biotech stock sector.

Plant World

In an article from the Winston-Salem Journal, and reprinted in the Lexington Dispatch, David Rice reports on the establishment of the planting of genetically engineered rice in rural eastern North Carolina.

The rice is designed to produce proteins found in human milk, saliva, and tears, according to the article, reprinted in the Lexington (NC) Dispatch, which said Ventria Bioscience, the planter, has received two USDA permits to conduct the research at the state-owned Tidewater Research Station in Washington County. Originally, Ventria was attempting to grow the rice in Missouri, but St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch said it would boycott buying any Missouri rice if that happened. Ventria capitulated and said it would not grow genetically modified rice within 120 miles of commercial rice crops.

What's the Use of News?

2005-07-15T10:34:00.000-04:00

An article today by Morningstar talks about investors and the flow of information. Basically, it examnies how investors – big and small – make money from the daily information flow. Read this:

By the time it's on TV, its already too late. Even with the wide array of market-data tools we have at Morningstar, we doubt we could come close to generating an attractive return this way. But why bother? If the majority of the market is focused on the near term, why not simply seek long-term returns that attract far less competition? Many investors must either report their returns each quarter or simply can't develop the patience to hold a stock even when it doesn't appreciate immediately. This frenzy often leaves attractive returns on the table.

But, we think that this emerging market is so early in formation that press releases, conferences, etc., can only be indiciative of long-term trends and are interesting for the detail they give of what the future may look like – two or three years out. We pick and choose those that we think may indicate a trend, given the context of the new biology economy and our experience in this market for the last three years.

However, somethimes there are articles we think provide some benefit to know about and are underreported. For example, the following article on Chiron, the flu vaccine maker. More than anything, Chiron's bumbling represents an opportunity for biomedicine to develop new methods to create new influenza vaccines.

Chiron, which yesterday announced the FDA is inspecting at its Liverpool FLUVIRON influenza virus vaccine manufacturing facility with the goal of restoring production, also said that it expects to limit production of its German-mad Begriva flu vaccine, due to sterility problems.

Chiron said it expects to produce 18 to 26 million doses of Fluvirin for the 2005-2006 influenza season, with the vast majority of the supply going to the US – if it can successfully fix the problems that caused it to stop production last year. The company originally said it would manufacture 25 million to 30 million doses of Fluvirin before cutting that forecast in June. The company yesterday announced that it will supply 4 million doses instead of the previously forecast 12 million doses of Begrivac to customers outside the US.

Chiron cut its outlook for production of Fluvirin in June citing product start-up delays. Its earlier outlook was for between 25 million and 30 million doses.
Chiron manufactures influenza vaccine in two facilities for Europe and other non-US markets. In Marburg, Germany, Chiron produces Begrivac for the German and UK markets, and in Siena, Italy, produces the Agrippal and Fluad products.

India government officals are pitching the need for the country to develop world-class biotechnological research facilities in the country in order to drive economic benefits of technological changes happening globally.

Yesterday, addressing the Indian Council for Agricultural Research in New Delhi, India's agriculture minister Sharad Pawar said the council has established four regional referral laboratories for quality assurance as part of this effort.

The four labs have been established at: IARI, New Delhi, in the areas of pesticide residue in plant products; Bombay Veterinary College, Mumbai, for meat quality assurance; Cental Institute for Fisheries Technology for fisheries; and the Central Institute for Research on Cotton Technology, also in Mumbai, for cotton textiles, according to reports.

These reflect the indigenous nature of India's efforts in biotechnology – which are designed to first help the country solve its own problems.

Systems biology is now an entry in the Wikipedia.

Seattle and Philadelphia Life-Science Startups Score Early-Stage Investments

2005-07-14T09:49:00.000-04:00

Seattle's Accelerator, a biotechnology incubator, yesterday announced the founding of its fourth startup company, Homestead Clinical, which will develop blood diagnotics based on efforts originated at Lee Hood's Institute for Systems Biology.

Accelerator, with 20,000 square feet of lab and office-space facilites and a spinoff from ISB, will fund the startup with more than $2.5 million, according to an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Patricia Beckmann, a former venture capitalist at Vulcan and a longtime scientist at Immunex, was named the company's chief scientific officer. Funding for the company is provided by MPM Capital, Amgen Ventures, OVP Venture Partners, Arch Venture Partners, Versant Ventures and Alexandria Real Estate Equities, investors in Accelerator.

Immune Control, a Conshohocken, Pa., startup pursuing compounds for treatment of multiple myeloma and other immunological diseases through the use of serotonin antagonists, yesterday announced the closing of a $11.3 million investment by four venture firms, led by BioAdvance Ventures, a fund managed by Quaker BioVentures in Philadelphia and Domain Associates of Princeton, NJ. The other investors are NewSpring Capital of King of Prussia, Pa., and Anthem Capital Management in Radnor, Pa.

The company is headed by Stephen Roth, founder and former CEO of Neose Technologies, and former head of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Immune Control's efforts are based on the licensing of patents coming from research conducted by Brad Jameson of Drexel University's College of Medicine.

The Philadelpia Inquirer uses the company to examine the local life-sciences startup market in an article published today.

In the fall, a Taiwan delegation of government and business is planning to visit San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and Tokyo on a high-tech and science recruiting mission organized by Taiwan's ministry of economic affairs. A recent study determined that the island will suffer a total talent shortfall of 25,505 persons in the fields of semiconductors, image displays, communications, digital content, biotechnology, and information services.

Previous recruiting efforts, which included the above cities as well as Washington DC, Dallas, Chicago, and New York, resulted in the hiring of 1,155 overseas personnel to return and work in Taiwan, according to an article in a Taiwan government website.

Eight organizations yesterday announced the creation of the Brain Tumor Funders' Collaborative to support research into the treatment of brain tumors.

The eight are: the American Brain Tumor Association, Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada, Brain Tumor Society, Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation, the Goldhirsh Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the National Brain Tumor Foundation and the Sontag Foundation.

BTFC’s goal is bridging the 'translational gap' that prevents promising laboratory findings from yielding new medical treatments.

"It is time for the new tools of genomics, proteomics, complex systems biology, and informatics to be brought to bear on the quest for new brain tumor therapeutics," Susan Fitzpatrick of the James S. McDonnell Foundation said in a statement.

The funders did not disclose how much money would be made available through this collaboration.

Patent Reform

2005-07-13T10:10:00.000-04:00

Matt Krupnick of the Contra Costa Times newspaper, in an article published today, looks at what proposed changes in the US patent system might mean to California's universities.

The proposed change would allow the first first inventor to file an application to get it, rather than the first inventor to prove invention, thus bringing the US in line with most of the world's other patent regimes.

According to Krupnick's article, Cal officials are against the change, saying it would favor well-heeled companies over public universities. The Cal university system produced 424 patents last year, the US university leader with a portfolio of some 6,600 active patents accounting for more than $93 million in 2003-2004, according to Krupnick. Note: while the US patent system may not be in alignment with others globally, a US patent is regarded as the key legal protection for intellectual property.

Coffee researchers – not caffeinated researchers – are looking at identifying biological markers with the goal of overcoming the robusta (Coffea canephora) variety's limitations in self-fertilization.

[Say, who cares about robusta? Dontcha know that it's the arabica variety that makes a tasty latte? Well, robusta is what is used for instant coffee.]

Arabica is self-compatible, as opposed to the robusta type, in which certain plants with the same genotype can not fertilize each other.

Robusta is important because it higher genetic diversity offers the potential for increasing resistance to disease and environmental changes.

This research on identifying biomarkers, according to Food and Drink Europe, is being conducted in cooperatiion with Uganda's agricultural research institute. Brazil, the leader in robusta production, is also a leader in investigating the genomics of coffee.

Having had a cup of cheap and delicious Chock Full of Nuts arabica coffee this morning, let me add that world coffee production last year was 110.5 million 60-kilo bags worth some $5 billion. Production this year is expected to shrink 5 percent, according to today's Financial Times, led by Brazil's production of over 30 million bags. Prices are already starting to move up.

Ambion of Austin, Texas, said today that it will provide Europe's MitoCheck consortium with a genome-wide siRNA library targeting every human gene. MitoCheck will use the library to investigate the regulation of cell division. MitoCheck is the largest project on cell cycle control within the European Union's 6th Framework Program.

Richard Casey, the chief scientific officer of RMC Biosciences of Fort Collins, Colo., pens a useful primer on proteins bioinformatics, published today in the online publication of the Business Intelligence Network.

Rochester Med Center, J&J in Funding Collaboration

2005-07-12T09:53:00.000-04:00

The University of Rochester Medical Center and the pharma company Johnson & Johnson yesterday announced the creation of a partnership to provide funding opportunities for junior scientists in life-sciences research in the center. Grants provided through this collaboration will range from $50,000 to $100,000, according to news articles. While the size of the fund was not disclosed, it wil be administered jointly by the two entities and J&J will have rights of first refusal to license technology developed. The medical center will own any intellectual property rights developed, news articles said.

GeneThera, a Wheat Ridge, Col.-based life-sciences company, yesterday announced that it has granted Beckman Coulter rights of first refusal to license an in-development diagnostic blood test for live animals. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed but the company said that the announcement was a part of a larger agreement that allows the two to share data pertaining to the validation of the diagnostic tests, which are based on a genetic expression assay, GEA, a protocol designed to function on an automated Fluorogenic PCR platform.

Currently, the technology is being developed to test for chronic wasting disease, E.Coli 0157:H7, and Johne's Disease, diseases affecting cattle worldwide. Future plans include all infectious disease potentially affecting domesticated livestock as well wildlife intended for human consumption, particular priority being given to mad cow and hoof and mouth diseases in cattle, the company said in a statement.

In the UK, the Guardian newspaper today published an article discussing the funding of two new centers in systems biology, which next year, will start accepting the first of three classes of 10 new PhD students. The article gives a rough description of systems biology (concentrating a bit too much, we think, on the central role that computing will play in this field), but, for a broad non-scientific audience, gives a useful insight into the new arena in biology.

The online publication pf the magazine Expansion Management yesterday published an article with a short description of New York City's efforts to create a bioscience R&D campus in the city, as well as other efforts in the surrounding area. Interesting for New Biology Economy since it seems that every region in the country is looking to this type of activity for economic development. Certainly, New York City, with its high cost of real estate, presents a challenge for development, but the proximity to the pharma companies headquartered here, and in the surrounding tri-state area, as well as the world-class medical institutions in the area and the information-technology industry, offers great promise.

The online publication of the magazine Z has published an examination of the Bush administration's scientific policy. The article looks at the political battles that are ongoing and may well influence the future of scientific investigation in this country and concludes:

Based on an examination of documented actions by the Bush administration, reports from groups critical of its policies, and conversations with scientists affected by them, government-funded science is being subjected to tremendous, maybe unprecedented political pressure.

Deals, Venture, and Real Estate

2005-07-11T09:39:00.000-04:00

Netherlands-based VNU, the owner of market research firm ACNielsen and also the publisher of a number of niche trade publications, has agreed to buy IMS Health of Fairfield, Conn., in a deal valued at approximately $7 billion, the company said today.

IMS provides market research to many of the world's pharmaceutical companies.

La Jolla, Calif.-based Stratagene today announced that it has received US Patent No. 6,893,819, "Methods for Detection of a Nucleic Acid by Sequential Amplification." The patent is the fifth granted to the company for its FullVelocity technology.

The Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel today reports that Palm Beach County is seeking to retain real estate brokerage firm CB Richard Ellis to help it sell 163 acres of land in a 1,920-acre orange grove, Mecca Farms, to biotechnology businesses. Mecca Farms is where Scripps will locate its Florida research facility. The county's $500 million plan to convert the space for Scripps and biotech is under legal attack from environmental advocates.

The San Jose Business Journal also reported a land deal with Slough Estates of the UK purchasing 700,000 square feet of propety in Mountain View and Redwood City with an eye to renovating the space for use by biotechnology companies.

MSNBC reports that Santa Fe, NM-based Flywheel Ventures has closed a $31 million early-stage venture capital fund targeting technology companies in Arizona. The firm is expected to make investments in information technology and physical sciences companies, according to the article.

Millipore last week said that it would pay $90 million to acquire NovAseptic of Sweden, a company that specializes in the processing equipment used in the production of biologic drugs.