Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Biotech / Medical : Seattle Biotech -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (53)	10/10/2003 10:33:58 AM
From: keokalani'nui	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70

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