San Diego’s Stem Cell Community Helping to Bring New Drugs to Market.
Four San Diego research institutes and privately-held Novocell will receive $36.12 million in grants from the state stem cell institute, with this latest money being directed at translating basic research into clinical therapies.
Cushman & Wakefield 1st Quarter Laboratory Market Report
The Cushman & Wakefield Life Sciences Group has just released its first quarter 2009 San Diego Laboratory Market Report:
http://www.sdlifesciences.com/pdf/market_update.pdf
New MBA Program
California State University San Marcos Extended Learning is preparing to offer a new master of biotechnology program. It will be the area’s first professional degree of its kind for the biotechnology industry, according to Al Kern founder of the university’s biotechnology programs. It is tailored to prepare graduates to meet industry needs for growing the life science industry, Kern said.
Darwin in a Test Tube
A team at the Scripps Research Institute has set up the microscopic equivalent of the Galapagos Islands – an artificial ecosystem inside a test tube where molecules evolve to exploit distinct ecological niches.
In an article published in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Scripps team’s work demonstrates some of the classic principles of evolution. For instance, research shows that when different species directly compete for the same finite resource, only the fittest will survive. The work also demonstrates how, when given a variety of resources, the different species will evolve to become increasingly specialized, each filling different niches within their common ecosystem.
The work, conducted by Sarah Voytek, Ph.D., a resent graduate of the Scripps Research Kellogg School of Science and Technology, is intended to advance understanding Darwinian evolution. Using molecules rather than living species was a robust way to do it because evolution happens over the course of just days, with a trillion molecules in a test tube replicating every few minutes.
Voytek’s coauthor and advisor, Scripps Research Professor Gerald Joyce, M.D., Ph.D., has been experimenting for several years with a particular type of enzymatic RNA molecule that can continuously evolve in the test tube. As each molecule replicates, there is a chance it will mutate, giving the population new traits over time.
Two years ago, Voytek developed a second, unrelated enzymatic RNA molecule that also can continuously evolve. She set the two RNAs into evolutionary motion in the same pot, forcing them to compete for common resources, just as Darwin did with species of finches on a Galapagos island.
Research for the article, “Niche partitioning in the co-evolution of two distinct RNA enzymes”, was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Skaggs Institute for Research.
Prize Capital Prepares to Offer $10 million prize for Algae Fuel Prize
Prize Capital, LLC is covering final planning, rules development and the master schedule for a proposed $10 million Algae Fuel Prize focused on spurring the development of radically advanced fuels from algae.
Prize Capital last month hosted a workshop at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography for reviewing criteria for the new Algae Fuel Prize. Participants included recognized experts in the algae and biotechnology communities from the University of Texas, Sandia National Laboratory,Flagship Ventures, British Petroleum, Synthetic Genomics, University ofCalifornia at San Diego, the California Energy Commission, The Scripps Research Institute, Colorado State University, The Freshwater Institute, The Natural Resources Defense Council, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Cleantech Group, the Harris Group, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Scientific Hatcheries, the X PRIZE Foundation, the Global Footprint Network, and SD-CAB, among others.
“From Charles Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic to help launch the multibillion dollar aviation industry, to the Ansari X PRIZE’s launch of the space tourism industry, prize competitions have sparked creativity from around the world to accomplish what many believed impossible,” said Lee Stein, founder and chairman of Prize Capital.
“Significant research is already underway on creating commercial fuels from algae. Prize Capital believes the power of a prize can stimulate additional research and focus world attention on the creation of truly sustainable and scalable renewable fuels to wean our world off its addiction to petroleum,” Stein said.
While inducement prizes have been around for over two hundred years, the Algae Fuel Prize will be the first application of the Prize Capital model. Under this model, Prize Capital selects teams from among those entering each competition and provide seach with working capital to create prototypes, secure protection for their intellectual property, and potentially other essential needs. The concept is to provide financial leverage so teams of all sizes can accelerate their discovery processes, enhance the level of competition and speed a result, Stein said.
“We see the Algae Fuel Prize as complementary to existing R&D efforts, including ours,” said Dr. Stephen Mayfield, a leading researcher at The Scripps Research Institute and founder of Sapphire Energy, a startup company in San Diego focused on creating oil from algae. “The current research initiatives and venture capital dollars that are focused on developing algae and other significantly advanced renewable fuel technologies will benefit from the new minds, creativity and media attention being added to the mix from this prominent competition.”
Salk scientist Marc Montminy elected to National Academy of Sciences
Salk researcher Marc R. Montminy, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the Clayton Foundation Laboratories for Peptide Biology, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious honorary society for scientists. The Academy made the announcement April 28, during its 146th annual meeting in Washington, DC.
Montminy's honor brings the number of Salk faculty elected to the NAS to 15. He was chosen along with 71 others including Salk adjunct professors Baldomero M. Olivera, Ph.D., a Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Utah, and Detlef Weigel, director, department of molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany.
Throughout his career, Montminy has been interested in the complex network of brain signals, hormones, and physiological mechanisms that modulate the body's energy balance and set the stage for metabolic disease. While investigating the genetic basis of diabetes, Montminy uncovered a family of genes that act as metabolic switches, turning other genes on or off.
Scripps Research Scientists Determine Workings of Potentially Useful Virus
Viruses are typically viewed as scourges. But Marianne Manchester, an associate professor at The Scripps Research Institute, and her colleagues are hoping to enlist the help of one particular virus to treat disease. Their discovery that the tiny plant virus, cowpea mosaicvirus (CPMV), attaches itself to a specific protein on mammalian cells brings them closer to achieving this mission.
In a study published in May 2009 issue of PLoS Pathogens, Manchester and her colleagues show that CPMV interacts with the mammalian protein vimentin— an interaction that scientists can now explore with the idea of using the virus to deliver “cargo,” such as drugs, to tumors or other diseased tissues.
“Vimentin was not at all a like lysuspect,” says Kris Koudelka, a postdoctoral fellow in the Manchester lab and an author of the study. “I had to do many sets of experiments to convince myself and the team that the result was real.”
Vimentin is part of the cytoskeleton, the internal scaffold that gives a cell its shape. While the vast majority of vimentin resides inside the cell, a small fraction somehow ends up on the cell’s surface. This surface vimentin turns out to be the target for CPMV.
CPMV’s structure, elucidated in 1999 by Scripps Research Professor John “Jack” Johnson, makes it ideal as a delivery agent. CPMV has about 300 different sites on its surface to which researchers can attach molecules. In addition, the virus, which is only harmful to plants, is compact in size—spanning only 30 nanometers in diameter (a nanometer isone billionth of a meter)—making it easy for the virus to travel throughout the body.
Manchester and colleagues showed one use for CPMV in a study published in 2006 in the scientific journal Nature Medicine, where they tagged the virus with several fluorescent dyes and injected it in mouse and chick embryos. The virus caused the blood vessels to light up by lodging itself in the endothelial cells that line the vessels’ walls. “It was extremely bright and the fluorescence lasted for several days,” says Manchester.
But to take full advantage of the virus’s properties, Manchester and her team wanted to know more about its interactions with cells. Their first question was “What protein is the virus attaching itself to?”
“We knew this virus could be used for all kinds of applications, but we did not know exactly how it worked,” says Koudelka, who first joined the Manchester lab in 2005 as a graduate student in the Scripps Research Kellogg School of Science and Technology. “It was like playing a game but with only half the instructions.”
Koudelka quickly determined that the virus had an affinity for a protein weighing 54 kilodaltons(kD)—the standard unit of measurements for proteins—found on endothelial and other types of cells. The next step was to figure out the protein’s identity. But pulling out a specific protein, out of the hundreds of thousands that are produced by any cell, proved to be a challenging task—one that took Koudelka more than two years to complete.
Koudelka under took a series of painstaking steps to eliminate unwanted proteins from the mix and sequentially narrow down the pool of candidates. Reasoning that any protein CPMV bound to would reside in the cell’s membrane, he separated membrane proteins from those in the cell’s interior. He then removed all the proteins that were not in the 54kD size range. After a few more “elimination” steps, he fished out those proteins that stuck to CPMV. In the end, he was left with three proteins—two of them were added during the elimination procedures and are part of the virus’s protective shell, orcapsid, and one was the mysterious CPMV binding protein.
Using mass spectrometry—a method that involves breaking down a protein to produce a pattern of fragments that serves as the protein’s fingerprint—Koudelka worked with Sunia Trauger, associate director of the Scripps Research Center for Mass Spectrometry, to demonstrate that the 54-kD protein was vimentin.
Knowing that surface vimentin is the receptor for CPMV will now help researchers direct the virus—and whatever cargo it carries—more precisely to its target. One possible application is to target CPMV to receptors on tumors so that it can deliver a treatment.
Another important implication of this work is that it may help find a way to prevent some infectious diseases. “Once we started to focus on vimentin, we realized that some bacterial pathogens and other viruses also use vimentin to get inside cells,” Manchester says.
In addition to Koudelka and Manchester, co-authors of the study, “Endothelial Targeting of CowpeaMosaic Virus (CPMV) Via Surface Vimentin,” also include Giuseppe Destito, Emily M. Plummer, Sunia A. Trauger, and Gary Siuzdak of Scripps Research.
Funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health.
Cooley Godward Kronish Launches a New Clean Tech Stimulus Portal
Cooley’s new Clean Tech Stimulus Portal - focuses on providing up-to-date information on the latest newsrelated to government funding opportunities for clean tech companies. The site features in-depth alerts on details of funding opportunities, clean tech funding resources, as well as links to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act).
"The flexibility and immediacy of the Clean Tech Portal is a great tool for us to quickly disseminate information and provide updates to our clients and readers as the Recovery Act continues to take shape and additional funding opportunities become available," said Gordon Ho, leader of Cooley's Clean Technologies practice group.
Cooley, teaming with Washington, DC-based government relations firm McBee Strategic, has assisted two clients in completing loan applications to the Department of Energy's Loan Guarantee Program. If the loans are approved, the companies will receive approximately $400 million in low-interest federal loans to finance commercial scale-up of their clean energy technologies.
Cooley Godward Kronish Private Company Financings Update
Cooley Godward Kronish LLP has posted its May 2009 findings on private company financings through the first quarter, which can befound by clicking on the PDF link below. This report provides a summary of data, reflecting the firm’s 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. In light of the dynamic market environment we continue our expanded format to report onthe state of private company finance transactions. Like our recent year end report, our report first highlights significant differences infinancial and non-financial terms on the current market measured against the recent past, followed by our more typical array of other statistical data, both on a quarterly and annual basis.
In general the firm continues to see significant weakness in market terms for companies, but in many cases the rate of decline has slowed. Anecdotally, investors are still looking to deploy capital but at lower valuations and at more aggressive terms. This anecdotal feedback is supported by the data in the first quarter report.
Cooley expects to continue this more detailed report for the next several quarters as it hopes to see the market stabilize. 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.
Oncology Social Worker Survey Finds Patients Especially Distressed by Cancer of Unknown Primary Origin
About 30,000-50,000 individuals in the United States each year are diagnosed with a cancer of unknown primary origin (CUP). Although these cancers generate little attention and are generally overlooked in terms of information, education and supportive resources, they are among the 10 most common malignancies in the developed world.
A recent survey of U.S. oncology social workers - sponsored by San Diego-based bioTheranostics - suggests that a CUP diagnosis causes significant distress for affected patients, even beyond the distress associated with a defined cancer diagnosis. The Association of Oncology Social Work (ASOW) and bioTheranostics, a company specializing in molecular diagnostics for oncology, conducted the survey in February and March of this year to better quantify and understand the psychosocial impact of CUP. The inability to diagnose a primary cancer creates significant therapeutic challenges and results in substantial psychological challenges for patients as well.
Full results from the survey were presented at the AOSW annual meeting in Savannah, GA. it more difficult for physicians to determine optimal treatment plans.
AOSW will publish the results of the CUP survey on their Website in order to raise awareness of the particular difficulties CUP presents to patients.
Construction of Nordahl Medical Centre Completed
Grubb & Ellis|BRE Commercial real estate brokerage announced May 12, that construction is complete at Nordahl Medical Centre in San Marcos, the first Class A medical condominium project built in the San Marcos/Escondido area.
The three-story, 55,450-square-foot building was developed by Newport National Corporation. The project is located at 838 Nordahl Road, at the newly signaled intersection of Medical Centre Way and Nordahl Road.
Suites are available for sale or lease ranging from 1,000 squarefeet up to 55,450 square feet on floor plates of approximately 19,000square feet.
An open house event scheduled exclusively for doctors, dentists and office managers is set for June 5, June 6 and June 7 at the project. The exclusive listing team and developers will be on-site to offer personalized tours. Bank of America, the preferred lender for Nordahl Medical Centre will also be available to discuss financing options. Please contact Jennifer Lough at 760.431.4201 or jlough@breb.com to RSVP or for more detailed information.
Grubb & Ellis|BRE Commercial’s Mark Avilla and Matty Sundberg are the exclusive marketing and sales team for Nordahl Medical Centre. For more information, call 760.431.4200 or visit www.nordahlmedicalcentre.com.
Riding the Economic Wave
Riding the Economic Wave - Challenges and Opportunities is the theme of this year’s annual Sino-American Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Professionals Association (SABPA) conference on June 6, at the Hilton in DelMar. Registration and other information is available at www.sdbiopharma.org. Co-organizers of the event are the San Diego section of the American Chemical Society and UCSD Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Services.