universities

$11M facility offers cutting-edge chemical libraries

John Carroll — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 09:02:21 -0400

Armed with slightly more than $11 million in grant money, three Chicago-area universities are joining forces to create state-of-the-art chemical libraries that can be used to identify new drug compounds. The University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago are developing the Chicago Tri-Institutional Center for Chemical Methods and Library Development with money from the NIH and the Chicago Community Trust. The center will test small molecules for use against a range of diseases.

"In order to develop new drugs, you need to start with new compounds," said Center Director Sergey Kozmin, Associate Professor in Chemistry at the University of Chicago. Kozmin is also developing a facility that can reduce the amount of time it takes to synthesize a molecule to just a fraction of what it requires today.

- read the report from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

Barriers falling between pharma and academia

John Carroll — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:42:50 -0400

Big Pharma is going back to college. With analysts eager to highlight the deficiencies of their pipelines, major companies like GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Pfizer have been signing up with academic researchers to explore new avenues of drug development. GSK's $25 million deal with Harvard followed collaborations involving Columbia University and four colleges are now working with Pfizer on new therapies for diabetes. According to the Financial Times, universities are now the next-gen labs of Big Pharma.

But that's not the only change. Insiders note that these new agreements between academic research groups and industry are much better at outlining patent rights as well as publication rights.

"In the past, academics thought that pharma companies were too secretive, while pharma companies thought that academics lacked a firm understanding of the proprietary perspective and what it takes to move drugs from the laboratory into the clinic," says Corey Goodman, who leads the Pfizer Biotherapeutics and Bio Innovation Center. "Both sides have gotten over their hang-ups and have now realized that we need to break down the barriers."

It's also been widely noted that after years of eroding federal support for academic research, academic groups need pharma's R&D funds more than ever.

- read the article from the Financial Times

VC firm looks to early-stage research projects

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 06:59:59 -0400

Third Rock Ventures recently unveiled a $378 million life sciences fund which it says will concentrate on early-stage drug discovery--linking academic research to biotech companies. In an interview with Investor's Business Daily, Third Rock's Kevin Starr explained that a "giant void" has developed in biotechnology, with Big Pharma and VC firms looking to invest in late-stage products. Says Starr: "Amazing innovation is happening in academia and medical centers, and no one is building that bridge to translate that into important companies. We're jumping in to bridge that void." The bulk of their time is spent talking to innovators, he says, who have yet to gain commercial traction.

- see Third Rock's release on the fund
- here's the report from CNN

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MIT computer model designs better therapies

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 06:59:59 -0400

Researchers at MIT have developed a computer model which they say can rev up the effectiveness of an antibody-based therapy. And it's not just a theory. They say that they have used the model to design a new form of cetuximab (Erbitux)--a therapy for colorectal cancer--that is 10 times better at binding to its target than the original molecule. The model reviews potential amino-acid substitutions, looking for ways to build a structure with greater binding properties. The scientists say that better protein modeling can also reduce the cost of developing the drugs.

"New and better methods for improving antibody development represent critical technologies for medicine and biotechnology," says MIT Professor Dane Wittrup.

- see this release from MIT
- here's a report on the new model

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Israeli group creating fund for drug research

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:01:39 -0400

The Israeli Life Sciences Industry group is helping set up a $300 million to $500 million initiative to spur the development of biotechnology and help finance drug research in the country. Chief Scientist Dr. Eli Opper says that the country is already in negotiations with multinational biotech companies to create development centers in Israel while the government is adding to the biotech/nanotech activities of Israel's universities. Care Capital partner Dr. Argeris N. Karabelas told the group that development collaborations with major companies were the best tool to engineering success in the field.

- read the report from Globes

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Universities, public institutes lead biotech revolution

Mon, 07 May 2007 20:01:39 -0400

A worldwide analysis of biotech patents shows that universities and public research institutions play the leading role in drug discovery, with the U.S. and Japan well ahead of Europe in innovation. The intellectual property firm Marks & Clerk examined patents filed between 2002 and 2006 and found that the Japan Science and Technology Agency played the lead role in filing 1,022 patent "families;" clusters of patents all linked to a single discovery. The University of California ranked second, with 543 patent families, and the U.S. government came in third, with 443 patent families--most coming from the National Institutes of Health. Their figures were presented at BIO 2007 in Boston this week.

Only a small number of private companies penetrated the firm's top-20 list. Genentech ranked fourth with 421 patent families while Millennium Pharmaceuticals came in sixth. In addition, the most high-profile patents were filed by universities, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology holding all or part of the three most frequently cited patents. Europe fared poorly in the comparison. The universities of Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Columbia all held more than twice as many patent families as Oxford, the leading European university. Somewhat surprisingly, Denmark was the leading European country for biotech innovation while the 162 patent families created by the country's Novozymes put it at the top of the list of European companies.

- read the report from The Financial Times

Johns Hopkins to host cardiovascular research 'grid'

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:01:39 -0400

A group of three universities has banded together to create a research grid that will allow cardiovascular researchers to share data, analytical tools and models on healthy and diseased patients. The Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins University will host the grid--which is being funded with an $8.5 million federal grant--and work with Ohio State University and the University of information that can be shared by everyone who is connected. And that's a big advance from the traditional research model, in which individual labs work in California, San Diego. Research teams will be the nodes in the grid, feeding in new isolation.

"In the past, biomedical research was mainly done in individual labs," said Raimond Winslow, director of the institute at Johns Hopkins. "The Cardiovascular Research Grid will enable us to assemble large, geographically distributed research teams and bring together the leading experts in the world to focus on a common problem, regardless of their location."

- check out Johns Hopkins' release on the grid
- read the report from Computer World

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