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Fostering Strategic Research Collaborations With Industry
2009-10 Highlights:
Here is a select list of significant sponsored research agreements over the past fiscal year. For a list of licensing transactions, click here.
Note: The Harvard University fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30; hence, Fiscal Year 2010 includes July 1, 2009 - June 30, 2010.
Translating Research into Novel Anti-Cancer Therapeutics
Egenix, Inc., a biotechnology company developing cancer therapeutics and diagnostics for the early detection of prostate cancer, has licensed a technology from Harvard and is supporting ongoing research in the Harvard Medical School laboratories of Drs. Jose Halperin and Gerhard Wagner for characterizing small molecule inhibitors of translation initiation as candidate anti-cancer therapeutics. The inhibitors target the eIF4F and ternary complexes, the two critical regulators of messenger RNA translation into protein. Egenix believes that small molecules for the inhibition of translation initiation are at the forefront of modern cancer therapeutics under development and that this cutting-edge platform has the potential to yield significant breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer.
Exploring the Potential to Block Pain Without Affecting Motor or Other Functions
Harvard University's Office of Technology Development signed a research collaboration agreement with Endo Pharmaceuticals to develop novel treatments for pain. A new pain-drug-delivery technique discovered by Bruce Bean, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School Professor of Neurobiology and Clifford Woolf, M.D., Ph.D., Director, F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School Professor of Neurology and Neurobiology, targets pain-sensing neurons without affecting motor neurons.
Advancing Innovative Research Using Stem Cells for Drug Discovery
Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development concluded a large-scale multi-year sponsored research agreement with Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research to advance an innovative line of research focused on the use of stem cells for drug discovery. Under terms of the Agreement, Harvard and Novartis will collaborate and Novartis will support ongoing research in the laboratory of Lee Rubin Ph.D., Director of Translational Medicine at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI). Dr. Rubin, a recognized leader in the field, is deeply involved in the development of novel assays using cells derived from embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells to identify new targets and pathways implicated in human disease.