Non-Profit Hosting Gala To Celebrate Disease Research And Science Education
This spring the Human BioMolecular Research Institute will be celebrating over a decade of brain research with a 10th anniversary fundraiser gala. The gala will be held on Saturday, May 30th at the Rancho Santa Fe Garden Club, and will be an occasion to celebrate advancements in research and science education, as well as anopportunity to build financially toward future programs and research.
Motivated by the impact on individuals and families that is often the outcome of Alzheimer’s and other related diseases, the Human BioMolecular Research Institute (HBRI) in San Diego has spent over a decade researching central nervous system diseases including Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, substance abuse addictions, and others.
While molecular research is the bulk of HBRI’s mission, HBRI is also very involved with the advancement of science education in the San Diego community, hosting a Science Discovery Day every year that brings 5th grade students from Del Mar Pines School to the laboratory to run experiments and learn about scientific research, and opening its doors every summer to student interns.
HBRI’s 10th anniversary gala will be an opportunity to celebrate a decade of successful scientific partnership with the San Diego community. Please click here to read the full article from the HBRI.
Nominate a Director of the Year
Nominations are now open for Director of the Year 2009!
The Corporate Directors Forum recognizes that our members and supporters are best positioned to identify the highest performing directors in our community.
Please take a moment and think of at least one director you have personally seen in action or heard about, who has performed outstandingly in the boardroom or "behind the scenes". It could be the way he/she handled a particular situation that stands out, or he/she could excel for being a steady, positive influence over time.
With your involvement, the Corporate Director Forum has maintained an extremely high quality slate of honorees year after year, and DOY has grown in stature to become one of the top business events in San Diego.
To view category descriptions click here
To nominate a director go to: DOY 2009 Nominations
To view past honorees (1991-2008): Past Honorees
Be sure to reserve Tuesday, September 29, 2009 for the awards dinner at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla.
Private Company Financings Update from Cooley Godward: 2008 Year in Review
Cooley Godward Kronish LLP is pleased to present our findings on private company financings through the fourth quarter of 2008, which can be found by clicking on the PDF link below. This report provides a summary of data, reflecting our experience in venture capital financing terms and trends. Information is taken from transactions in which Cooley served as counsel to either the issuing company or the investors.
Readers of Cooley’s Private Company Financing reports are accustomed to our six-quarter study and format. In light of the recent market turmoil, we thought it would be useful to compare 2008 as a whole with prior years. As we reviewed our data, however, 2008 seemed to track recent history more than we anticipated, until we looked at the data in two groups, with the first three quarters of 2008 in one group and the fourth quarter in the other group. Once we filtered the data into these two groups, we quickly identified an unsurprising trend—the first three quarters of 2008 appeared similar to the preceding several years, whereas the fourth quarter of 2008 showed a marked deterioration of certain financial and non-financial terms for startup companies.
As a result of this recent dramatic change in terms, our report first highlights significant differences in financial and non-financial terms in the fourth quarter versus prior years and quarters, followed by our more typical array of other statistical data, both on a quarterly and annual basis.
Regular readers of these reports will find the data they are accustomed to receiving in the Annex at the end of this report, along with other statistical data collected for the current period.
We hope you find this Update informative. Please let us know what other information you would find useful by contacting any of the Cooley partners listed at the end of the reportor your local Cooley counsel.
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La Jolla Institute Licenses Technology to Medimmune
An asthma discovery by a researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology has been licensed by MedImmune, a leading biotechnology company and wholly owned subsidiary of AstraZeneca PLC. MedImmune licensed the discovery to explore its use in the development of a potential biologics drug for treating asthma.
Under the agreement, MedImmune was granted exclusive intellectual property rights to the discovery, which demonstrated the pivotal role of a protein called the OX40 ligand in asthma. The finding was made by the laboratory of La Jolla Institute scientist Michael Croft, Ph.D., and marked a major milestone in asthma research.
Asthma is achronic disease of the airways that can cause wheezing, coughing and difficulty breathing. It is the most common serious chronic disease of childhood and is the third-ranking cause of hospitalization among U.S.children under age 15.
More than 30 million Americans (or 11.2 percent of the population) reported having a history of asthma in 2005, including nine million children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 20 million Americans said they currently have the disease. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimates asthma-related health care costs in the U.S. at $14 billion annually.
Founded in 1988, the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology is a nonprofit medical research center dedicated to increasing knowledge and improving human health through studies of the immune system. Scientists at the institute carry out research searching for cures for cancer, allergy and asthma, infectious diseases, and autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease and arthritis. LIAI's research staffincludes more than 100 Ph.Ds.
Inder Verma Named the Irwin Mark Jacobs Chair in Exemplary Life Sciences
The Salk Institute named principal investigator Inder M. Verma the first incumbent of the Irwin Mark Jacobs Chair in Exemplary Life Sciences. Established to honor its name sake's exceptional leadership in business and philanthropy, the honor is given to an internationally renowned senior Salk scientist who has made extraordinary discoveries in basic biomedical research and has contributed to the direction and vitality of the Institute.
Dr. Verma, a professor in Salk's Laboratory of Genetics, has made outstanding advances in research ranging from cancer biology to development of gene transfer technologies. He is one of the world's leading authorities in gene therapy, having developed a gene therapy vector, based on a stripped-down version of HIV, that successfully delivers genes for therapeutic purposes. His group also studies two genes implicated infamilial breast cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, and recently demonstrated that their action is linked to the cell's division cycle, and that BRCA1 regulates gene activity.
An American Cancer Society Professor, Dr. Verma is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, Third World Academy of Sciences and the recipient of the 2007 Cozzarelli Prize and 2008 Vilcek Prize.
The Irwin Mark Jacobs Chair in Exemplary Life Science is named after the Institute's Chairman of the Board, who redefined how the world thinks of telecommunications and information technology. Moreover, along with his wife, Joan Klein Jacobs, he has gone on to extend the same kind of visionary leadership to local, national, and international nonprofit organizations.
Salk Shows New Crop Growth technology
Eversince insects developed a taste for vegetation, plants have faced the same dilemma: use limited resources to out-compete their neighbors for light to grow, or, invest directly in defense against hungry insects. Now, an international team of scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Institute of Investigaciones Fisiológicas y Ecológicas Vinculadas a la Agronomía (IFEVA) has discovered how plants weigh the tradeoffs and redirect their energies accordingly.
The same light sensor that detects other plants crowding in and gives the signal to switch on the synthesis of the plant growth hormone auxin reduces the plant's responsiveness to the hormone jasmonic acid, which orchestrates the synthesis of a whole array of defensive chemicals, the researchers report in an article published in the current early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to fundamental discoveries in the life sciences, the improvement of human health and the training of future generations of researchers. Jonas Salk, M.D., whose polio vaccine all but eradicated the crippling disease poliomyelitis in 1955, opened the Institute in 1965 with a gift of land from the City of San Diego and the financial support of the March of Dimes.
Scripps Research Scientists Engineer New Instant Vaccination that Provides Instant Immunity
A team of scientists at the Scripps Research Institute has found a way to use specially programmed chemicals to elicit an immediate immune response in laboratory animals against two types of cancer. The experiments, thus far performed only in mice, appear to overcome a major draw back of vaccinations—the lag time of days, or even weeks, that it normally takes for immunity to build against a pathogen. This new method of vaccination could potentially be used to provide instantaneous protection against diseases caused by viruses and bacteria, cancers, and even virulent toxins.
The work is being published in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of March 2, 2009.
The team, led by Scripps Professor Carlos Barbas, III, Ph.D., tested the vaccination method—called covalent immunization—on mice with either melanoma or colon cancer.
The scientists injected these mice with chemicals specifically designed to trigger a programmable and"universal" immune reaction. They developed other chemicals, "adapter"molecules," that recognized the specific cancer cells. Once injected into the animal, the adapter molecules self-assembled with the antibodies to create covalent antibody-adapter complexes.
The Search for the Ideal Vaccination
The practice of vaccination has been extraordinarily successful in controlling certain diseases, but there are draw backs. Vaccine development can be an educated guessing game—in the case of the flu, for example, scientists must study worldwide outbreak patterns to anticipate which type of flu might strike a particular area. In addition, the most common vaccination strategies use whole proteins, viruses, or other complex immunogens—not just the specific part of the macromolecule that is recognized by the immune system—to elicit an immune response, which makes for wasted immune activity. Then there is the body's own kinetics – the time it takes to mount a disease-relevant immune response to immunogens limits the speed with which immunity can be achieved. Finally, age-related declines in the ability to mount strong immune responses to biological-based vaccines present another challenge to the effectiveness of such vaccines.
The Scripps Research Institute is one of the world's largest independent, non-profit biomedical research organizations, at the forefront of basic biomedical science that seeks to comprehend the most fundamental processes of life. Scripps Research is internationally recognized for its discoveries in immunology, molecular and cellular biology, chemistry, neurosciences, autoimmune, cardiovascular, and infectious diseases, and synthetic vaccine development. Established in its current configuration in 1961, it employs approximately 3,000 scientists, postdoctoral fellows, scientific and other technicians, doctoral degree graduate students, and administrative and technical support personnel. Scripps Research is headquartered in La Jolla, California. It also includes Scripps Florida, whose researchers focus on basic biomedical science, drug discovery, and technology development.
Scripps Research Scientists Develop New Diagnostics Technology
A team of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has developed a method of sensitively detecting specific chemicals in the laboratory—a discovery that may lead to a host of new ways to monitor a variety of chemicals in nature. Described in an advance, online publication of the journal Nature Biotechnology on February 22, 2009, the team's general method could be adapted for detecting a wide variety of compounds, including many that are relevant to diagnostic medicine and environmental work.
Similar to DNA, RNA is a basic component of cells and plays many roles in the body, including helping to transfer genetic information from DNA into active protein enzymes, which carry out many of the body's vital functions. Scientists have known for many years that some types of RNA molecules are themselves enzymes. More than 40 years ago, Nobel laureate Francis Crick proposed that RNA, and in particular self-replicating RNA, may have once been the basis of life on the early Earth more than four billion of years ago.
Because RNA aptamers can be made to recognize nearly any protein and many other molecules, says Joyce, this method should be general enough to detect a variety of chemicals significant in human health and the environment. Another potential application is in the area of molecular computing. At their heart, computers perform operations by moving and storing electronic charges in logical circuits. These same basic operations can also be accomplished biologically, using molecules instead of electrons as the basis of the logical circuitry. Self-replicating RNAs that are triggered by target chemicals could provide the functional basis for some of these operations.
Research for the paper, "Autocatalytic aptazymes enable ligand-dependent exponential amplification of RNA,"was supported the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps Research, and through an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award. See http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nbt.1528.html.
Scripps Research Team Finds Immune Molecule that Attacks Wide Range of Flu Viruses
Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute report the characterization of an immune system molecule that targets what appears to be an "Achilles heel" of a wide range of influenza viruses –including the viruses responsible for past global pandemics, those causing current common infections, and strains of bird flu believed topose future world threats.
The discovery of the molecule, an antibody known as CR6261, is good news for researchers who hope to design a flu vaccine that would give humans lifelong protection against a majority of influenza viruses. The antibody also has the potential to treat those who are unvaccinated and become infected with the flu.
The team's findings were published in the February 26, 2009, issue of Science Express, an advance, online publication of selected research papers from the prestigious journal Science.
"This is very exciting because it marks the first step toward the Holy Grail of influenza vaccinology—the development of a durable and cross-protective universal influenza virus vaccine," says the study's senior investigator, Ian Wilson, D.Phil., a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and a member of The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps Research. "Such a flu vaccine could be given to a person just once and act as a universal protectant for most subtypes ofinfluenza, even against pandemic viruses."
Flu vaccines now offer protection only for the specific strains of influenza that public health officials believe to be currently circulating in the population. This involves a lot of guesswork about which strains will be most prevalent and, because the virus is constantly mutating, this guesswork must be repeated year after year.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in the United States more than 200,000 people are typically hospitalized from flu complications every year, and about 36,000 people die from the illness. But that is in anormal year. Over the past century, three major human influenza pandemics (the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, the Asian Flu of 1957-1958, and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968-1969) have devastated the human population, killing around 50-100 million people worldwide.
Remedy Launches Salary Surveys
MEDTECH Equity & Executive Compensation Survey
Remedy Compensation Consulting announces two surveys tailored for the medical technology industry for 2009: MEDTECH Sales Compensation Survey and MEDTECH Equity & Executive Compensation Survey.
The MEDTECH Equity & Executive Compensation Survey provides two types of comprehensive compensation information specifically geared towards medical technology companies: complete equity strategy information and executive pay and practices information. The survey includes all elements in total direct compensation and will provide breakouts for: ownership status (publicly-traded, pre-IPO and private), market segment(e.g., cardiovascular, neurology, orthopedic etc.), company size (basedon number or employees) and geography (by region, city, etc.). Moreover, the survey provides comprehensive equity strategy design information for the entire employee population including grant guidelines, anticipated program changes, and shareholder requests.
Please contact Alissa Howell, ahowell@remedycomp.com, 858-334-5726 with questions or register online to participate.
MEDTECH Sales Compensation Survey
Remedy Compensation Consulting announces two surveys tailored for the medical technology industry for 2009: MEDTECH Sales Compensation Survey and MEDTECH Equity & Executive Compensation Survey.
The MEDTECH Sales Compensation Survey provides comprehensive pay and plan design information for U.S.-based sales organizations. The survey covers each sales group commonly found within medical technology sales organizations including: direct sales, indirect (distributors) sales, and inside sales. The survey will also provide breakouts by market segment to provide participants with greater visibility into the pay and practices distinctions within the market. In addition to detailed pay data that includes all elements of total direct compensation, the survey asks comprehensive incentive plan characteristic questions. Some examples of incentive plan questions are: slope of the payout curve, commission rates, quota setting and performance metrics.
Please contact Alissa Howell, ahowell@remedycomp.com, 858-334-5726 with questions or register online to participate.
BIOTECH Equity & Executive Compensation Survey
Remedy Compensation Consulting announces the 2009 BIOTECH Equity & Executive Compensation Survey. This survey provides two types of comprehensive compensation information specifically geared towards biotechnology companies: complete equity strategy information and executive pay and practices information. The results of this survey will be invaluable for those responsible for the company’s equity programs and to those involved in the executive compensation process.The survey includes all elements in total direct compensation and will provide breakouts for: ownership status, round of financing, company size and geography. Moreover, the survey provides comprehensive equity strategy design information for the entire employee population including grant guidelines, anticipated program changes, and shareholder requests. The survey report will reflect current trends in executive compensation program characteristics, including: executive compensation philosophy, long-term incentive programs, equity ownership guidelines, short-term incentive programs, executive benefits, and employment agreements.
Please contact Alissa Howell, ahowell@remedycomp.com, 858-334-5726 with questions or register online to participate.
Knobbe Names New Partners
The partners of Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear LLP are pleased to announce that the following exceptional associates received invitations to join the partnership commencing January 1, 2009:
Orange County
Christian A. Fox
Curtis R. Huffmire
Philip M. Nelson
Christopher L. Ross
San Diego
Ryan E. Melnick
San Francisco
Eli A. Loots
Los Angeles
Yanna S. Bouris
AnaptysBio Selects Gable PR
AnaptysBio, Inc., a privately-held therapeutic antibody platform and product company, has selected Gable PR to provide public relations and investor communications programs as a key part of the company’s strategic growth plan for 2009 and beyond. Gable PR is a public relations firm based in San Diego.
AnaptysBio has developed a platform for generating therapeutic antibodies that isunique in the field. The platform mimics the body’s natural evolution and selection processes for creating potent antibodies to fight disease. As a result, AnaptysBio believes the antibodies generated by its platform will result in therapies that are highly effective and better tolerated by the human body. Competing platforms often require scientists make artificial changes to antibodies, resulting in lower likelihood that they will be well tolerated.