Science Market Update

The University of Utah College of Pharmacy just celebrated the opening of its new 150,000sf research building, the L.S. Skaggs Pharmacy Institute, on Medical Drive South. Located adjacent to the 1965 facility named after the senior Mr. Skaggs, the newly-expanded research institute will continue to advance drug development and teaching excellence, much the way the first Skaggs building vaulted the University into the ranks of top pharmaceutical colleges within a few years of its construction. The college currently ranks #10 out of 125 doctor of pharmacy programs according to US News & World Report. The NIH ranks it #3 in research productivity, and it has been among the top 4 pharmacy colleges in NIH funding every year since 1975. 2012 NIH funding was over $20M. The Skaggs family, through their charitable organization, the ALSAM Foundation, gave $50M towards the building costs of the institute.

If a person is suddenly seeing flashing lights, their fingers are tingling, and they are having trouble speaking, all these symptoms mean they are suddenly experiencing a migraine aura. Aura migraines affect more than 7,000,000 people in the United States, and are usually quite debilitating. Thanks to K.C. Brennan, M.D, a researcher at the University of Utah, we now know a lot more about what causes aura migraines.

In today’s research, it seems that the 6 Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman are moving closer and closer to reality. Nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The University is a frontrunner in research technology that can interface between computers and neurons. According to Andrew Gotshalk, CEO of Blackrock NeuroMed, “Utah is widely recognized across America and around the world as a hotbed of neuroscience research and technology.”

(Courtesy of Home-HIV-Tests)

The University of Utah has explored and expoited a number of successful strategies to commercialize its intellectual capital in recent years. Their tech commercialization office is tireless in promoting its proprietary scientific solutions (see last month's blog: Science "Speed Teching" Drives Rapid Commercialization in Utah). But now we're starting to hear about another seriously innovative and fast-moving "laboratory" for cultivating new Salt Lake businesses, and it's a fairly new entity from the U of U's David Eccles School of Business called The Foundry. Instead of creating companies or corporate leaders, the Foundry is a hands-on training program designed to produce entrepreneurs who can identify a successful startup product/business and put together a qualified team to launch and run it.

We've heard for a while now about the aggressive, determined way Utah is working to grow its biotech economy, particularly through advancing university research and commercializing the technology that comes out of it. Since getting private capital interested in university science invention is a major step in making that commercialization happen, the University of Utah Technology Commercialization Office (TCO) has come up with an innovative arena for matching inventors with backers, and it looks a lot like...speed dating. They call it science "speed teching," and the first University Innovators Speed Teching Showcase event took place May 22nd in a large conference room at Salt Lake City's Zions Bank.

Sometimes sacrifices have to be made in the name of progress. In the case of Utah's just-opened USTAR collaborative research building on the Salt Lake City campus of the University of Utah, no one seems to be lamenting the loss of a golf course that used to lie between the Medical School and an engineering complex. Not when the new 208,000sf, $130M, state-of-the-art Sorenson Molecular Biotechnology Building is there instead, with all of its bright and shiny promise to drive innovation and economic development in the Beehive State.

Last year in a blog of ours on the future of genome sequencing we referenced a July appeals court ruling that protected Utah's Myriad Genetics' patent on two genes known to be indicators of breast cancer risk.  Now, in a recent Supreme Court ruling on that same case, the previous ruling has been overturned and the case returned to the lower court for rehearing.  This decision follows another important high court ruling on the patentability of genes: Mayo vs. Prometheus Labs (San Diego), which also just ruled against a company's right to hold patents on human genes, and which was quoted as a precedent in the latest Myriad judgement.

On October 21, President Obama presented the National Medal of Science awards to the 2011 recipients in a ceremony at the White House.  The award program is administered for the White House by the NSF to recognize individuals who have made outstanding lifetime contributions to science and engineering. 

According to Richard Resnick, CEO of GenomeQuest: "The world has completely changed and none of you know about it."