Five3 Genomics offers genomics software and services for personalized cancer therapy.

The co-founders of Five3 Genomics are (from left) Charles Vaske, Steven Benz, and Zachary Sanborn, all former graduate students in the UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering.

The co-founders of Five3 Genomics, a new biotech company based in Santa Cruz, are former graduate students in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, where they helped develop innovative cancer genomics software.

Their company, which has signed a license agreement with UCSC, offers software and services for cancer researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and health care organizations. Its goal is to provide the data processing and analysis required for personalized cancer therapy, in which treatments are matched to the specific genetic aberrations found in an individual patient’s cancer cells.

“We’re working with academic collaborators to build out the platform and starting conversations with pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies,” said CEO Steve Benz, who completed his Ph.D. in bioinformatics this year. “It’s a great opportunity to be able to take this technology and commercialize it so that it can be used to help patients.”

In addition to Benz, the co-founders of Five3 Genomics include Chief Technical Officer Zachary Sanborn and Chief Scientific Officer Charles Vaske. All three of them worked as graduate students with UC Santa Cruz bioinformatics experts David Haussler and Joshua Stuart, who are doing pioneering work in the field of cancer genomics. Haussler, a professor of biomolecular engineering and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, said that Benz, Sanborn, and Vaske were “brilliant grad students.”

“Working at UCSC they were exposed to the cutting edge in computational genomics,” Haussler said. “They played a key role in developing our cancer genomics program. They are pure self-starters, and developed the code to implement their ideas from the bottom up. The algorithms they developed represented new breakthroughs in our ability to interpret DNA sequence information obtained from cancer tumors. This area is poised to move from the academic realm into the clinical realm in the next few years. By spinning off a startup company, they have put themselves in an excellent position to play a key role in this transformation.”

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New mouthwash targeting harmful bacteria may render tooth decay a thing of the past.

Wenyuan Shi, UCLA

A new mouthwash developed by a microbiologist at the UCLA School of Dentistry is highly successful in targeting the harmful Streptococcus mutans bacteria that is the principal cause tooth decay and cavities.

In a recent clinical study, 12 subjects who rinsed just one time with the experimental mouthwash experienced a nearly complete elimination of the S. mutans bacteria over the entire four-day testing period. The findings from the small-scale study are published in the current edition of the international dental journal Caries Research.

Dental caries, commonly known as tooth decay or cavities, is one of the most common and costly infectious diseases in the United States, affecting more than 50 percent of children and the vast majority of adults aged 18 and older. Americans spend more than $70 billion each year on dental services, with the majority of that amount going toward the treatment of dental caries.

This new mouthwash is the product of nearly a decade of research conducted by Wenyuan Shi, chair of the oral biology section at the UCLA School of Dentistry. Shi developed a new antimicrobial technology called STAMP (specifically targeted anti-microbial peptides) with support from Colgate-Palmolive and from C3-Jian Inc., a company he founded around patent rights he developed at UCLA; the patents were exclusively licensed by UCLA to C3-Jian. The mouthwash uses a STAMP known as C16G2.

The human body is home to millions of different bacteria, some of which cause diseases such as dental caries but many of which are vital for optimum health. Most common broad-spectrum antibiotics, like conventional mouthwash, indiscriminately kill both benign and harmful pathogenic organisms and only do so for a 12-hour time period.

The overuse of broad-spectrum antibiotics can seriously disrupt the body’s normal ecological balance, rendering humans more susceptible to bacterial, yeast and parasitic infections.

Shi’s Sm STAMP C16G2 investigational drug, tested in the clinical study, acts as a sort of “smart bomb,” eliminating only the harmful bacteria and remaining effective for an extended period.

Based on the success of this limited clinical trial, C3-Jian Inc. has filed a New Investigational Drug application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is expected to begin more extensive clinical trials in March 2012. If the FDA ultimately approves Sm STAMP C16G2 for general use, it will be the first such anti–dental caries drug since fluoride was licensed nearly 60 years ago.

“With this new antimicrobial technology, we have the prospect of actually wiping out tooth decay in our lifetime,” said Shi, who noted that this work may lay the foundation for developing additional target-specific “smart bomb” antimicrobials to combat other diseases.

“The work conducted by Dr. Shi’s laboratory will help transform the concept of targeted antimicrobial therapy into a reality,” said Dr. No-Hee Park, dean of the UCLA School of Dentistry. “We are proud that UCLA will become known as the birthplace of this significant treatment innovation.”

The UCLA School of Dentistry is dedicated to improving the oral health of the people of California, the nation and the world through its teaching, research, patient care and public service initiatives. The school provides education and training programs that develop leaders in dental education, research, the profession and the community; conducts research programs that generate new knowledge, promote oral health and investigate the cause, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of oral disease in an individualized disease-prevention and management model; and delivers patient-centered oral health care to the community and the state.

Partnership with Johnson & Johnson will fund proof-of-concept research that brings innovative science to market.

Regis Kelly

The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) has signed an agreement with the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Office of Science and Technology (COSAT) to fund University of California proof-of-concept research that brings innovative science to market.

This agreement, along with the Rogers Family Foundation of Oakland, helps fund QB3’s “Bridging-the-Gap” program, initiated in 2008 to support scientific projects that have high commercial potential led by faculty at UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. These awards are intended to address the critical gap between federal funding for basic research and investments in product development. Each award typically provides $250,000 over two years for research.

Former award-winning projects include a prototype of an artificial kidney developed by Shuvo Roy, UCSF professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences, and an automated technique to improve prostate cancer screening, invented by Amy Herr, UC Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering.

The agreement establishes the JJSI-QB3 Awards as a component of the “Bridging-the-Gap” program and calls for annual awards over the next three years. QB3 will provide the awarded projects with services from the QB3 Startup-In-A-Box program, and potentially find space for them in the QB3 incubator.

“This agreement is an innovative academic-industry partnership model specifically focused on startup formation,” said Neena Kadaba, QB3’s director of industry alliances. “These awards are designed to provide a crucial amount of pre-commercial support to help would-be entrepreneurs address potential scientific risks in their technology before launching a company.”

The nine projects funded by QB3’s “Bridging-the-Gap” program to date already have resulted in five new companies and three licenses to existing firms.  The five companies formed in the past two years have raised over $9 million in private and public commercial funding.

”This agreement represents an important initiative for QB3 by providing additional opportunities for innovative researchers at our universities to create companies of value,” said Regis Kelly, director of QB3.

UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.

Collaboration has resulted in five initial projects for therapies to treat cancer, other maladies.

Jeffrey Bluestone, UC San Francisco

An 11-month-old partnership between UC San Francisco and Pfizer Inc., aimed at rapidly moving new therapies into human clinical trials, has selected its first projects for funding and joint development. Teams from the university and Pfizer will work together on experimental therapies developed by UCSF scientists with a goal of testing them in people with five hard-to-treat, often deadly conditions, including lung and prostate cancer.

Three to five additional projects from university researchers will be selected after a second round of proposals, due Nov. 4, are evaluated. Details on the proposal process and how to submit the initial two- to three-page preproposal can be found at http://officeofresearch.ucsf.edu/ITA/CTI, or email ita@ucsf.edu with questions.

As part of the unique collaboration, Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, will not only provide funding for the selected researchers, but has set up its own laboratory space next to UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. Scientists at the Pfizer lab, the Center for Therapeutic Innovation, will work directly with each of the UCSF teams.

“At UCSF, we are absolutely focused on finding new ways to turn the groundbreaking research of our scientists into therapies that benefit patients and the public,’’ said Jeffrey Bluestone, Ph.D., UCSF’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “Our work with Pfizer epitomizes our approach to building innovative, collaborative partnerships with industry.”

The Pfizer and UCSF researchers can visit each other’s labs, conduct experiments together and participate in joint team meetings, said Stephanie Robertson, Ph.D., who oversees the collaboration for the UCSF Office of Innovation, Technologies & Alliances with colleague Tuhin Sinha, Ph.D., alliance manager of the ITA.

“The proximity is key,” Robertson said. “People can literally walk across the street. That was a big reason for Pfizer locating right here.’’

As the cost of developing new drugs has skyrocketed — reaching $1.8 billion per approved drug, according to some recent research — drug companies have been searching for ways to lower the cost. Since they often spend years or months developing testing tools geared to the biology they’re interested in, the UCSF-Pfizer collaboration offers a way to jump-start that process by linking with academic researchers who know the biology and have already developed the tools.

“We are truly excited to work in this partnership with leading experts from UCSF to understand more about the mechanisms that drive diseases with high unmet medical need,” said Anthony Coyle, vice president and head of Pfizer’s Global Centers for Therapeutic Innovation. “By understanding the mechanisms underlying inflammatory diseases, cardiovascular disease and oncology, we can design better molecules to treat the right patients.”

Pfizer will have the right to commercialize the drugs and UCSF will earn milestone payments as the therapies advance through different stages of testing, as well as royalties from sales of approved therapies. This collaborative structure also provides the university the potential for a bigger return than it would normally receive when licensing out an early-stage technology.

“Best of all, it allows the scientists to be involved in turning research they’ve worked on for years into something that could actually be used to treat patients,” Robertson said.

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Fast, inexpensive, disposable point-of-care technology also planned.

Bruce Cary

A spinoff of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mesa Tech, has been awarded a $300,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will allow Mesa Tech to develop an inexpensive, instrument-free, nucleic-acid testing device able to diagnose various respiratory diseases in record time.

The managers of Mesa Tech, who are currently developing a prototype, plan to initially target the global diseases surveillance market. They also envision applications in point-of-care diagnostics, particularly in poor areas of the world, said former LANL scientist Hong Cai, who cofounded Mesa Tech and is the principal investigator for the effort benefitting from the grant.

For point-of-care applications, Mesa Tech plans to develop an inexpensive handheld device about the size of a cell phone with a disposable cartridge, Cai said. In the case of a pandemic, such as SARS or avian influenza, the device also could be made disposable, she added.

Mesa Tech’s proposed instrument expands on technology developed by Cai and colleague Bruce Cary while they were researchers at LANL, which licensed the technology to the company. It also builds on previous work conducted by Mesa Tech under an $82,000 grant awarded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Using that grant, Mesa Tech began developing the consumable portion of the platform, an inexpensive nucleic-acid “dipstick” device capable of detecting and distinguishing multiple flu-like pathogens in under an hour, Cai said, explaining that current methods take anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes.

Mesa Tech’s research and development was also sped up by a 2009 Venture Acceleration Grant from Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the company that manages and operates LANL for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The VAF, which awards grants up to $100,000, was started in 2006 to fill a funding gap that slowed the commercialization of technologies by Northern New Mexico companies. Mesa Tech also participated successfully in LANL’s New Mexico Small Business Tech Assistance Program.

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UC Irvine’s licensing officers help campus researchers protect their inventions.

Alvin Viray, UC Irvine

They call it “the baby monitor,” but it’s nothing like the ones sold at Babies “R” Us that alert parents when junior’s crying in his crib.

Developed by UC Irvine pediatrics professor Dr. Dan Cooper, the sophisticated wireless device can detect subtle movements in infants that signal increased risk of cerebral palsy, autism and other neurological disorders. It’s outfitted with a sensor created by Pai Chou, UCI associate professor of electrical engineering & computer science, and it has a special application to warn of sudden infant death syndrome.

The baby monitor and sensor are just two of many important inventions conceived at UCI. The campus holds 316 active U.S. patents and 360 foreign ones for ideas and products that do everything from quieting jet noise (Dimitri Papamoschou’s Mach Wave Elimination) to restoring hearing (Fan-Gang Zeng’s cochlear implants).

And, no matter which lab or department they originate from, all fall under the careful eye of UCI’s Office of Technology Alliances. The OTA handles the patenting and licensing of the campus’s intellectual property. It helps UCI employees – primarily faculty and graduate students – protect and market their ideas.

“We’re the liaison between the lab bench and the marketplace,” says Doug Crawford, senior licensing officer for UCI. “We also create alliances with companies in the private sector so that campus research has the greatest positive impact.”

The OTA’s seven officers meet frequently with investigators to learn about their latest projects. “It’s fun to see all this great new stuff,” Crawford says, “and how excited the researchers are about what they’ve invented and what their creations can do for people.”

He recently began working on a patent for a wastewater treatment devised by Betty H. Olson, civil & environmental engineering professor. “It’s not the most glamorous invention – it’s a kit for sewage,” Crawford says. “It detects bacteria that bloom in the water early, before it grows out of control and becomes a lot more expensive to treat. Her technology saves both energy and water.”

Dr. J. Stuart Nelson developed UCI’s No. 1 revenue-producing invention, the Dynamic Cooling Device, which boasts more than $40 million in royalties. The attachment allows medical lasers to penetrate deep into the skin without burning, substantially reducing pain.

“It’s great,” Crawford says. “They did a test spot on my hand with the cooling device. Then they used the laser without it, and – ow! – that hurt.” Nelson created the product for treating birthmarks and port-wine stains. Now it’s standard in all kinds of laser procedures, such as tattoo removal and wrinkle reduction.

Other leading inventors at UCI include Hans Keirstead, who holds worldwide patents for his work with stem cells and the regeneration of damaged spinal cords; Frank LaFerla, director of UCI’s Institute for Memory Impairments & Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND), who has pioneered therapies for cognitive disorders; and Jean-Claude Falmagne, professor emeritus of cognitive sciences and creator of a software program called ALEKS (Assessment & Learning in Knowledge Spaces), which helps children develop learning skills.

While benefiting people by advancing health care, technology and other fields, inventions also benefit the University of California by generating revenue for further research and education.

Intellectual assets belong to UC. Patent income is divided three ways, with UC receiving 50 percent, the inventor pocketing 35 percent, and 15 percent going to the academic department where the idea originated.

All UCI employees must file a record of invention disclosing their creation to the OTA. In 2010-11, the campus had 180 new ROIs. “We review them for patentability and commercial viability,” Crawford says.

Each licensing officer has a different specialty – such as medical devices, microbiology or engineering – to facilitate the complex patent application process. Some have degrees in law or business. “We’re in each other’s offices on a regular basis,” Crawford notes.

His background is in plasma physics. An inventor himself, he holds patents for electrodeless lighting – an alternative to fluorescent bulbs – which he came up with as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Once OTA enters into negotiations with a company for licensing an invention, the office must tread carefully:

“We don’t want them sitting on it to protect their own [possibly competing] product,” Crawford says. “We make sure they intend to get our invention out to the broadest market.”

In addition, the office assists faculty in launching startup companies to manufacture an invention, as with the HIPerWall.

The OTA continues to manage and protect UCI patents until they expire 20 years from the date of filing – and sometimes beyond if an idea is still commercially viable.

“We’re here from cradle to grave,” Crawford says.

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In last year, UCLA entered into 65 licensing agreements to commercialize novel technology.

James Economou, UCLA

Buoyed by President Obama’s recent vow to help universities foster innovation that results in new jobs and economic growth, UCLA is building upon its longstanding commitment to transition cutting-edge research into the marketplace.

The latest figures show that UCLA continues to lead the way in Southern California with a steady increase in such projects. In fact, during the 2010–11 academic year, which ended June 30, UCLA entered into 65 licensing agreements to commercialize novel technology, including 24 with small businesses. This so-called “technology transfer” increased by 81 percent over last year and is almost four times greater than it was a decade ago.

Initial counts for the last fiscal year show that 22 startup companies were formed around UCLA technologies.

“Great universities have a responsibility to address important problems with the solutions that come from innovative research,” said UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research James S. Economou. “Delivering those solutions to society by working through the marketplace is a critical part of our mission as well. These innovations often result in startup companies that create jobs — some for our recent graduates — and add to the economic development of Los Angeles, California and the nation.”

There is also a direct benefit to the campus. In 2010–11, UCLA’s licensing activity resulted in more than $20 million in royalty and fee income, which is shared with inventors, their labs and research programs at UCLA. By federal law, research conducted at tax-supported public universities must be managed diligently by the university at which the research was done.

One of the nation’s premier research institutions, UCLA in 1990 became the first UC campus to establish a technology-transfer program. Since then, the university has overseen hundreds of forward-looking technologies as they were developed in campus research labs and found their way into companies throughout the state and nation.

One of those, MediSens, a UCLA startup, is working to introduce a real-time, quantifiable, wireless medical monitoring system to help contain health care industry costs. In close collaboration with the UCLA Wireless Health Institute, MediSens has secured and patented key technologies.

ImaginAB Inc., another UCLA startup, is a biotechnology company specializing in the development of engineered antibody fragments for diagnostic imaging and novel therapeutic applications. The company has a significant pipeline of clinical products in development that are oriented toward unmet needs in cancer and immunology.

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Funding will aid development of “Ecosystem for Biophotonics Innovation,” commercialization of biomedical technologies.

Harris Lewin, UC Davis

The Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST) has received a $1 million, two-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop an “Ecosystem for Biophotonics Innovation” and to accelerate commercialization of biomedical technologies developed by CBST researchers. The grant will be matched with third-party investments from CBST partners.

CBST, headquartered on UC Davis’ Sacramento campus, is a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center that uses the science of light to advance development of new tools and technologies for life sciences, diagnosis and treatment of disease. CBST researchers have collaborated on new technologies with UC Davis faculty from both the Sacramento and Davis campuses in pediatric oncology, pathology, infectious disease, neurosciences, hematology and oncology and stem cells, among other areas.

“This grant is a major step for translational research activities and corporate partnerships at UC Davis,” said Harris Lewin, UC Davis vice chancellor for research.

The ecosystem will be nurtured by an educational and business alliance between CBST, the Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance (SARTA) and its MedStart initiative, third-party investors, a pediatric cancer foundation and a national laboratory. The goal is to foster the commercialization of innovative bioinstrumentation and medical technology while educating students and postdoctoral researchers in entrepreneurship, product design and development.

“We are very excited to develop the Ecosystem for Biophotonics Innovation (EBI) program as a unique alliance of committed partners,” said CBST Director Dennis Matthews, principal investigator of the grant. “This program will enable faster translation of research-based technologies into start-ups or existing firms, leading to new jobs and economic growth, while also providing hands-on training and learning opportunities in entrepreneurship.”

The co-principal investigator of EBI is Kyriacos Athanasiou, chair of the UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering, himself an innovator who started a number of biomedical companies. Other investigators include scientists and faculty from CBST, the UC Davis College of Engineering and Graduate School of Management, as well as the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Sacramento State University.

Beyond CBST and SARTA, the EBI alliance includes: Applied Precision Inc., a GE Healthcare company in Issaquah, Wash.; BD Biosciences in San Jose; Keaton Rafael Memorial, a Roseville-based pediatric cancer philanthropy; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Tahoe Institute for Rural Health Research; and Novartis Diagnostics.

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5-year agreement could exceed $50M.

Gary Firestein (right), UC San Diego

In an innovative collaboration designed to speed the process of drug discovery, Pfizer Inc. and University of California, San Diego, Health Sciences announced today that UC San Diego has joined the ranks of other top-tier life science research institutions across the country as part of Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI).

“The collaborative partnerships formed through the Centers for Therapeutic Innovation between Pfizer and academic medical centers such as UC San Diego allow leading medical and clinical experts to join with Pfizer’s highly skilled scientists – using Pfizer’s resources and expertise and each institution’s advanced drug development capabilities to speed the translation of innovative science into medicine for patients,” said Jose Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos, Ph.D., senior vice president and head of biotherapeutics research and development for Pfizer.

CTI differs from other such programs that seek to drive innovation in drug discovery by providing a non-traditional business model based on continuous collaboration and transparency, one which offers well-defined incentives for success to its participants.  For example, as part of the CTI program, Pfizer will provide UC San Diego researchers access to some of its antibody libraries and technologies, as well as funding to support the pre-clinical and clinical development of sponsored programs.  CTI partners receive intellectual property rights and are granted milestone payments and royalties tied to the advancement of mutually agreed-upon drug candidates. The potential value to UC San Diego over the five-year agreement could exceed $50 million.

“Public-private partnerships are increasingly important in science, especially in an era of limited federal grant support, when new resources are needed to commercialize innovations related to health care,” said UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox.  “The UC San Diego-Pfizer agreement is an example of how we can work together and will hopefully serve as a model for other collaborations with industry.”

According to Gary S. Firestein, M.D., dean and associate vice chancellor of Translational Medicine and director of the Clinical and Translational Research Institute (CTRI) at UC San Diego School of Medicine, the collaboration utilizes UC San Diego’s medical research strengths in key areas including neurosciences, cancer, inflammation, metabolism, clinical pharmacology, HIV and pain.  It will also build upon efforts of the School of Medicine’s expanding CTRI, launched in 2010 to emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration among UCSD scientists and develop innovative approaches to solve difficult medical challenges.  Last year, the CTRI received a five-year, $37.2 million award from the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health – an award also designed to improve biomedical research by accelerating the application of laboratory discoveries into effective treatment for patients, more actively engaging communities in clinical research and training future generations of researchers.

David Brenner, M.D., vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the School of Medicine at UC San Diego, concurred that more research collaborations between academia and industry will be critical in the face of the uncertain support from the state and federal government.

“As medical science evolves and grows, the demand for creative research projects – such as this agreement with Pfizer – and the need for people who can translate this basic research into real, beneficial therapies and treatments will only increase,” said Brenner. “From the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center and the many other leading-edge research institutes on campus, to our deep involvement in major clinical trials and status as one of the nation’s top teaching hospitals, UC San Diego has established itself as a vital hub for this kind of innovative work. The Pfizer collaboration allows us, with CTRI leading the way, to push ahead in new and even more imaginative ways to advance medical research.”

CTI laboratory staff will include Pfizer employees plus leading basic and translational science investigators and doctoral candidates from UC San Diego School of Medicine and the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, along with other UCSD researchers in biological sciences, bioengineering and at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

“The CTI model offers leading investigators the resources to pursue scientific and clinical breakthroughs by providing access to select Pfizer compound libraries, proprietary screening methods, and antibody development technologies that are directly relevant to the investigators’ work,” said Firestein, adding the hoped-for result will be better testing of clinical hypotheses, increasing the speed with which medicines can be delivered to patients in need.

Agreement will support research into delivering drugs directly to the small intestine and colon.

(Left) Tejal Desai and Daniel Lim, UC San Francisco

A pill filled with microscopic, drug-laden adhesive patches is at the center of an agreement between UCSF and Zcube srl, the research corporate venture arm of Italian pharmaceutical leader Zambon Co. SpA, to license UCSF-developed microtechnology and support early research into new ways to deliver oral medications directly to a targeted site in the body.

This is the first sponsored research agreement between Zcube and UCSF, but is expected to be one of several such agreements with the biomedical university.

Sponsored research agreements underscore UCSF’s commitment to finding innovative ways to bridge the gap between basic research and real-world applications. They reflect continued efforts by the UCSF Office of Technology Management and Industry Contracts Division to help faculty research efforts bear fruit, while protecting the academic freedom and basic research for which UCSF is widely known.

The initial two-year agreement will support research in the UCSF Desai Laboratory into delivering drugs directly to the small intestine and colon. The exclusive, worldwide license agreement will offer milestone payments and royalties for a UCSF-patented microdevice developed by the Desai Laboratory to deliver medications for various diseases, including colitis and irritable bowel syndrome.

“This partnership is unusual because it goes beyond licensing a technology, to fund early-stage innovation in drug delivery systems,” said Tejal Desai, PhD, a professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences in the UCSF School of Pharmacy. “That research is exactly what we need to do to see whether these systems will work.”

The microdevice resembles a tiny, square Band-Aid with reservoirs in the middle for medication. Hundreds of these structures, each as wide as a human hair, would be packaged into a normal-sized pill, which would break down and release them into the intestine. The micropads would then stick onto the gastro-intestinal tract and deliver medications directly into the intestinal lining, then dissolve.

As a result, Desai said, the device has the potential of targeting the colon directly and increasing drug safety by reducing the amount of medication required in each dose. When properly targeted to other intestinal areas, the device also can significantly increase the amount of medication that reaches a patient’s bloodstream.

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Collaborations will help advance research in multiple therapeutic areas, including cancer.

Issued jointly by UC San Francisco and Sanofi-Aventis

Sanofi-Aventis (EURONEXT: SAN and NYSE: SNY) and UC San Francisco have formed two research and development collaborations that join together leaders from academia and industry to more rapidly advance groundbreaking innovation from the lab to the patient. The collaborations, which will be formalized today, include an oncology partnership that will focus on project-based collaboration to accelerate the progression of research through the clinical proof of concept stage. The second collaboration promotes innovative research in pharmacological science and in multiple therapeutic areas, such as oncology, aging, diabetes and inflammation.

Sanofi-Aventis will be the first industry partner for UCSF’s Program for Breakthrough Biomedical Research (PBBR).  The PBBR program awards funding to projects of potentially high impact, greater creativity and with an innovative approach to scientific discovery. The partnership with UCSF enhances Sanofi-Aventis’ approach of setting up a unique structure revolving around networks of creativity spread across regions, technologies and scientific areas of excellence.

Under the terms of the agreement, a UCSF/Sanofi-Aventis Joint Steering Committee will choose from among UCSF-generated proposals identified for their scientific excellence. Sanofi-Aventis will fund up to five grants a year, with additional funds being available for students or fellows to intern at Sanofi-Aventis to conduct collaborative research.  To further this exchange of ideas, Sanofi-Aventis will fund an annual research forum that will bring together Sanofi-Aventis and UCSF researchers to share knowledge and perspectives on relevant scientific matters and to review progress of research projects funded through the collaboration.

“As the largest public biomedical research institution in America, UCSF is dedicated to accelerating the translation of leading-edge research into state-of-the-art care for patients,” said UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH. “These collaborations will help support ground-breaking projects that could offer the greatest possibilities in each of these fields.”

“Joining forces with UCSF researchers emphasizes Sanofi-Aventis’ commitment to establish strong relationships and collaborations with the best innovators in the world,” said Christopher A. Viehbacher, chief executive officer, Sanofi-Aventis.  “By promoting open and deep scientific exchange between UCSF’s leading researchers and Sanofi-Aventis’ drug development experts, we aim to generate significant health care advances in multiple therapeutic areas, to discover and develop comprehensive health care solutions for patients.”

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UC Davis plant sciences professor Jorge Dubcovsky looks for ways to improve the quality and nutritional value of wheat. California growers are grateful, and pasta, tortilla and bread lovers will be, too.

Robert Cattolica, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC San Diego, heads a team of UC Davis and Berkeley researchers that is converting biomass waste streams into power and alternative biofuels. The new biofuels may help reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly in California.

Both scientists are recent recipients of UC Discovery Grants, which support innovative research with matching funds from UC and industry collaborators. From food and fuel to medicines and microprocessors, the grants hope to produce valuable products and technology that may help people in California and beyond for years to come.

This summer, UC awarded 27 Discovery Grants, totaling $5.8 million, to researchers at seven UC campuses. Industry partners will pitch in an additional $9.1 million.

“One of the goals of the Discovery Grant program is to accelerate the transfer of discoveries and technological advancements to California industry, so that the public benefits from the research as soon as possible,” said Mary Croughan, executive director of the Research Grants Program Office at the UC Office of the President. “At the same time, we hope to build lasting relationships between UC researchers and industry partners to enhance the state’s economy and address critical problems facing California.”

Among the awarded projects this year are:

• A UC Berkeley project with PG&E, which will develop strategies to reduce the company’s carbon emissions and develop a model that other utility companies can follow.
• A UC Irvine collaboration with Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development to study novel drug targets for the treatment of schizophrenia.
• UCLA researchers are developing more reliable electronic circuits and systems for Internet networking and wireless communications.
• UC Riverside scientists will seek a new laboratory technique to more rapidly detect viruses and diseases that threaten the citrus industry.
• UCSF researchers will work with GE Healthcare on magnetic resonance imaging technology to better monitor and treat diseases such as brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis and prostate cancer.

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