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 A sampling of Yale's portfolio of vaccines & drugs in development and on the market |
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Why is Richard Flavell, Ph.D., working in his laboratory on Saturday morning? Chair of the Section of Immunobiology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, he doesn’t need to deliver a baby or resuscitate a man who just had a heart attack. He could be walking the beach near his home or practicing with his “biorock” band, the Cellmates. But he’s talking to his students about “cellular assays that determine what defects in immune response result from cell death” induced in transgenic mice. What’s the hurry? “Figuring out how these basic processes work in the cell is tremendously absorbing,” says Flavell. “But the endpoint of the science is never far from our minds. The investigations we’re conducting have very direct implications for treatment of diseases that are quite prevalent today, and that adds urgency to our work.” Indeed. Lyme disease, first identified by Yale scientists in 1975, now affects more than 14,000 people each year. Flavell and his colleagues were able to analyze Lyme disease at the molecular level by injecting mouse eggs with spirochete DNA–a revolutionary procedure also developed at Yale, which allows researchers to study human genetic conditions using animal cells. Now the team is focusing on autoimmune responses in asthma and juvenile-onset diabetes, even more widespread diseases. And Flavell is hardly alone on the weekend. Yale’s dedicated scientists work long hours to achieve new insights into disease processes and then push on toward therapeutic applications of these findings. To help move biomedical innovations from laboratory to bedside, the university’s Office of Cooperative Research fosters partnerships with industry, both through licensing arrangements with established companies and through development of venture funding for new enterprises built on the work of Yale researchers. The New Haven region as a whole has become a center for biotechnology and pharmaceutical research and development. Four multinational pharmaceutical firms–Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, and Boehringer Ingelheim–have major facilities in Connecticut. Nearly a dozen fast-growing biotechnology firms, virtually all of them spin-offs from Yale-developed technologies, are based in and around New Haven, includin g t h e p u b l i c l y t r a d e d fir m s A l e x i o n , C u r a G e n , N e u r o g e n , a n d V i o n . I n a d d i t i o n , Y a l e - g e n e r a t e d s c i e n c e s e r v e s a s a t e c h n o l o g y b a s e f o r m o r e t h a n f o r t y o t h e r p u b l i c a n d p r i v a t e b i o t e c h n o l o g y c o m p a n i e s . A l l o f t h e s e c o m p a n i e s m a i n t a i n c l o s e t i e s t o Y a l e , d r a w i ng upon faculty and student talent and providing opportunities for contract research and employment. |
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 Richard Flavell’s laboratory is working to understand, at the cellular level, how organisms discriminate between self and not-self. Flavell talks with Abdullah Badou, a postdoctoral fellow from Morocco. |
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Last modified: Wednesday, 11-Aug-2004 15:00:20 EDT. (PL) |