Seattle-based biotech firm Regulome gets $5.3 million grant
By Luke Timmerman
Seattle Times business reporter
The next big thing in biology is the quest to make practical sense out of the massive code that emerged from the Human Genome Project, and a tiny Seattle company has raised some significant cash to try to find answers.
Regulome, a private biotech company backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan investment firm and Arch Venture Partners, spent its first two years working in secrecy. But yesterday, it said it won a $5.3 million grant out of a $36 million international project launched by the National Institutes of Health. The project is aiming to learn more about which parts of the genome switch genes on or off, a key phenomenon thought to cause disease, and may hold insights into why some people can be treated with drugs and others can't.
The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project, or ENCODE, is looking for regions along the 3-billion-letter string of human DNA that control the switches, which are located in pockets outside the roughly 30,000 genes.
Regulome
Located: Seattle, Fremont neighborhood
President and chief scientific officer: Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos
Founded: 2001
Status: Private
Employees: 16
Investors: Vulcan, Arch Venture Partners
Cash raised to date: $19 million
What it does: Seeks to identify parts of the human genome that control whether genes are turned on or off.
To hunt for those regions, Regulome is joining grant winners in academia and business, including some at Stanford, Yale, the University of California, San Diego, Affymetrix and the University of Washington. The UW is receiving $1.6 million of the grant.
John Stamatoyannopoulos, Regulome's president and chief scientific officer and a former clinician and researcher at Harvard Medical School, said the grant will help drive the company's strategy, which uses computational biology to pinpoint regulatory changes in healthy or diseased samples of human DNA.
Stamatoyannopoulos' father, George, co-founded Seattle-based Targeted Genetics.
Regulome's long-term strategy is to use its knowledge to create diagnostics and to tell which patients might respond best to a particular drug — where many experimental drugs fail. Someday, John Stamatoyannopoulos said, it could be used to develop drugs, the most lucrative market in biotech.
The young company has already hit a few bumps. It cut more than half of its staff in the spring. Stamatoyannopoulos said he hopes the company will bring in enough grants and contracts to break even next year.
Much of what the company is doing is reaching for basic research understandings. In everyday practice, researchers can already use computer chips that show which genes are turned on or off in diseased and healthy tissues. Regulome hopes to help researchers learn how that information is connected back to an individual's gene sequence.
"I like to make the analogy that genes are like programs on a computer," Stamatoyannopoulos said. "You need an operating system to make the whole thing run. These regulatory regions provide the operating system for the genes. And bugs in the operating system affect how the genes turn on or off, which can predispose people to disease."
Luke Timmerman: 206-515-5644 or ltimmerman@seattletimes.com |
