BOSTON, July 3, 2003 (PRIMEZONE) -- Cellicon Biotechnologies, a Boston-based drug discovery company (www.cellicon.com), has appointed biotechnology industry veteran Dr. Skip Shimer as the new Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Shimer's main focus will be applying Cellicon's breakthrough technologies to expand the company's proprietary drug discovery platform.
Most recently, Dr. Shimer served as the VP of Research at Cubist Pharmaceuticals, where he built a team of 70 scientists, successfully established several new drug discovery efforts, advanced novel antibacterials to pre-clinical testing, and guided daptomycin through pre-clinical and NDA filing. At Cubist, he also spearheaded successful M&A, research collaborations, and licensing transactions. Prior to joining Cubist in 1999, Dr. Shimer was the Senior Director of Pathogen Genomics at Genome Therapeutics Corp., where he led the company's effort in functional genomics to identify validated drug targets in multiple bacterial and fungal species, and established and managed research relationships with several Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies.
"As researchers from a variety of disciplines study complex phenomenon such as economic systems, social and political interactions, the Internet, the brain, etc., they understand that many of the behaviors of these systems stem from their organization into complex networks of interacting components," said Dr. Shimer. "Cellicon has developed a simple and direct way to map interacting components in biological networks that represents an extremely powerful tool in understanding disease."
Breakthrough Network Mapping Approach
Scientists at Cellicon are reporting a breakthrough in the effort to understand the behavior of complex biological networks. The results, published in the July 4 edition of Science, represent an important step towards the discovery of safer therapeutics that specifically target critical genes and proteins in human disease. In the publication, Professor James Collins, Dr. Timothy Gardner, Dr. Diego di Bernardo, and David Lorenz of Boston University describe an approach that combines experimental and computational techniques to reveal how specific genes and proteins regulate behaviors within a cell, tissue, or organism.
The researchers describe the first systems biology approach to mapping complete biological network structures using a minimal set of experiments, a result not previously possible using traditional genetic approaches. The method involves genetically or chemically perturbing a cell and measuring the effects on mRNA or protein expression levels. This is followed by the application of computational algorithms based on systems engineering techniques to determine the strength and direction of every regulatory interaction within a cellular network. The resulting network map can be used to identify the major pathway regulators and elucidate the mechanism of action of a drug. The authors also demonstrate the robustness of the algorithms in the presence of measurement errors and the scalability of the methods to large networks, both of which are important for effective elucidation of the structure of complex biological systems.
Applying Systems Biology Breakthroughs
Chief Scientific Officer and inventor of Cellicon's network mapping technology Dr., James Collins is a pioneer in systems biology -- the study of the cell as a system of biological components -- and a world leader in the use of nonlinear dynamical techniques to reverse-engineer gene regulatory networks. Dr. Collins is a University Professor and a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. He is also the co-director and co-founder of the Center for BioDynamics at BU, where he directs a group of 24 researchers that has developed three complementary sets of network mapping algorithms and tools in the past twelve months as part of its ongoing research.
About Cellicon Biotechnologies
Cellicon Biotechnologies has licensed the relevant patents and is applying Collins' methods to the discovery of drugs that target complex biological networks previously inaccessible via other research approaches. The initial application of Cellicon's platform is in anti-infectives discovery, where the company is building functional maps of critical bacterial regulatory pathways and using those maps to identify promising novel antibiotic compounds.
For more information, please contact:
David Steinberg Cellicon Biotechnologies 75 Park Plaza, Box 35 Boston MA 02116 617-482-2333, ext. 30 dsteinberg@cellicon.com
WEBSITES: http://www.cellicon.com, http://www.puretechventures.com/portfolio/cellicon_bgrnd.php
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