NCTimes.com Blogs

Rituxan, the blockbuster cancer drug developed in San Diego, protects insulin-making cells in Type I diabetics, according to a new study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The drug partially preserved the “beta cells” that produce insulin, said Dr. Mark D. Pescovitz of Indiana University, who led the study. The results, documented in patients over a one-year period, were encouraging enough that the patients will be studied for a second year.
“What this study showed is that a single treatment early in the course of diabetes had a positive effect,” Pescovitz said.
In Type I diabetes, the beta cells, found in the pancreas, are gradually destroyed. It’s an auto-immune disease, in which the body’s disease-fighting immune system turns against the body. About 5 to 10 percent of the 23.6 million Americans with diabetes have Type I, according to the American Diabetes Association. The rest have Type II diabetes, in which insulin becomes less effective.
Rituxan was developed by San Diego’s Idec Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company since merged into Biogen Idec, based in Cambridge, Mass. The drug being co-marketed by Biogen Idec along with Genentech, a South San Francisco-based subsidiary of the Swiss drug company Roche.
Rituxan attacks certain white blood cells called B cells that can go awry in various diseases. It was originally approved in 1997 to treat a form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma in which B cells become cancerous.
Since then, Rituxan has been approved to treat rheumatoid arthritis, another disease in which B cells have been implicated. It is now being studied as a treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Rituxan sales in the United States reached $670 million in the third quarter, compared to $655 million in the same quarter of 2008.
Pescovitz said the study began as a “proof of concept” that B cells were involved in the development of Type I diabetes.
“People did not believe that B cells were involved in the disease. They thought it was the T-cells,” Pescovitz said, referring to the other major type of white blood cell. “We showed if you get rid of the B cells, you can have an actual benefit. In future studies, we’ll now be able to optimize the treatment, perhaps giving additional courses of the drug.”

Vista’s Javo Beverage Co., has raised $4.1 million in a private placement, the company announced in a Nov. 19 filing..
Javo makes coffee and tea for vending machines and other drink dispensers.

Isis Pharmaceuticals has had a rough ride with its flagship drug for lowering cholesterol, mipomersen. The drug has shown effectiveness in reducing lipids in patients with a hereditary disease that causes extremely high levels of cholesterol. But safety concerns have sent the stock down.

Despite progress in Phase III clinical trials for mipomersen, Isis stock has fallen back from its late summer high of more than $18 to just over $11 a share, about where it started the year.

So Isis CEO Stanley T. Crook addressed shareholders today, thanking them for their support and saying the company is on the right track:

“We are disappointed with the reaction on Wall Street to what we believe is very positive news. We believe mipomersen will continue to provide results that speak for themselves. Each success brings us closer to getting mipomersen to the market and making the drug available to patients in need.”

Crooke urged investors to listen to a replay of the mipomersen presentation conducted last week at a meeting of the American Heart Association.

Stepping up its focus on biotech, California State University San Marcos Extended Learning will begin offering a Biotechnology Laboratory Technician Certificate program.

According to CSUSM’s press release, “The program is specifically designed to provide program participants with the skills necessary to secure entry-level positions as biotechnology lab technicians or research assistants. Consisting of five classes (16 semester units), the part-time program is tailored to be completed within two semesters of study or approximately eight months.
The Biotechnology Laboratory Technician Certificate courses cover a range of topics deemed crucial in supplying a solid science foundation, supplemented by hands-on training in a laboratory setting. All courses are taught by CSUSM faculty from the Biology, Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Biotechnology departments, and will train students to be well-versed in cutting edge technologies and current market trends.”

For those who need a better scientific background to meet the program’s prerequisites, CSUSM offers a two-week “Biotechnology Boot Camp,” giving basic instruction in mathematics, chemistry and biology .

Federal funding is available for the program. Students who qualify as “Adult” or “Dislocated Workers” under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) may be eligible to have all costs associated the program paid. The cost for the program is $$10,000. Without the Boot Camp, the cost of the program is $9,000.

To learn more about the program, go to www.csusm.edu/el or call 760-750-4020.

For a quick overview of what California’s new water bill package means, I can do no better than point you to the blog post by Steve Doyle of Brookfield Homes.

There’s lots more devilishly intricate parts of this legislation, of course, but this overview lets you grok the purpose of each of the five bills.

Doyle helpfully included links to each bill, so you can read the full text. Would that I had found this post sooner! I just spent much of the morning tracking this down.

As universities go, The House That Roger Revelle Built is a puppy, founded just four decades ago. But it’s one of the top dogs in pulling in federal research dollars. And according to the National Science Foundation, UCSD has once again ranked 6th nationwide.

UCSD got $491 million in federal R&D money and spent a total of $842 million in total R&D activities for fiscal year 2008.
(more…)

(This is my early report from Biocom’s investor conference today and Tuesday).

By BRADLEY J. FIKES

SAN DIEGO —- Biotech’s golden allure is mostly tarnished for investors, who have crammed into the technology sector chasing after the Apples and Googles. But there’s some signs of a modest turnaround, experts said Monday at a life sciences investors forum.

Biotech companies will have to squeeze to make every dollar count, and more mergers and acquisitions will take place for lack of any alternative, said panelists during a morning discussion. The forum was sponsored by Biocom, the San Diego-based life sciences trade group.

However, federal stimulus money is at last flowing to the life sciences sector, providing some reason for optimism, said panelist Dan Owczarski, a senior health care analyst at Avondale Partners, LLC.

“We’re seeing big numbers coming out in grants being awarded,” Owczarski said. “Now the cash is going to start flowing down.”

The largest slice of the money so far appears to be going to the life science “tool companies,” which provide research products used by academic researchers, government agencies and other biotech companies, Owczarski said. These tool providers include companies such as Illumina Inc., based in San Diego, and Carlsbad’s Life Technologies.

Some smaller biotech companies are benefitting from federal grants for H1N1, or swine flu, and biodefense research, said Jason Kantor, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. However, Kantor described those as “niche” areas, not enough for an industrywide upswing.

The various federal grants are mostly going for early-stage research, the panelists said. That’s a good thing, they said, because investors aren’t willing to fund early-stage research anyway.

Panelists agreed that biotech as an investment sector is at the bottom of the cycle of investment popularity. Companies hoping to get funding over the near term will have to show results within about 18 months to get funding interest.

The forum takes place Monday and Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency in the UTC area.

bfikes@nctimes.com

Seven research centers around the country are sharing a $12.2 million grant to create a kind of Facebook for scientists. The goal is to help scientists find potential research collaborators, speeding up the process of scientific discovery.
The two-year grant, from the National Center for Research Resources, goes to a consortium led by the University of Florida, It includes The Scripps Research Institute; Indiana University; Weill Cornell Medical College; Wahington University at St. Louis and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.
The network is being named VIVO, after open-source search software that categorizes and organizes results to make them more usable for researchers. Eventually, the NIH wants to make VIVO a national network for scientists.

San Diego County is facing tougher competition in the growing cyber security sector, and could lose business if it’s complacent, local business leaders said.
With the Obama administration pouring billions into the technology sector, areas around the country are competing fiercely, said Duane Roth, director of the technology entrepreneur group Connect, and Michael Jones, president of The Security Network, a local trade group.
Charleston, S.C. has mounted a particularly significant challenge, Roth said. A business alliance there is seeking to gain cyber security work now handled in San Diego by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, or SpaWar. The agency administers a total of about $2.4 billion in contracts per year.
Since Charleston has its own SpaWar facilities, the challenge is particularly serious, Roth said.
“Cyber security’s a huge area, not only in defense, but in everything —- patient records, business practices, all kinds of things,” Roth said. “We just can’t take it for granted.”
Cyber security’s reach keeps expanding as the Internet and related communications technologies move further into the nation’s infrastructure, Jones said. The “smart grid” that brings two-way communications between utilities and users is one example.
“There’s a huge need to protect the information,” Jones said. “If a bad person gets in, they could turn off the electricity. There’s all kinds of things that could be done.”
Military networks face the same challenge as they move toward being “interoperable,” with common standards, Jones said. The easier it is for the networks to communicate with each other, the easier it will be for intruders to get in.
Part of the region’s expertise will be put on display next week at a conference by The Security Network on robotics, information security and sensors.
San Diego is one of the top areas for cyber security work, Jones said, but quantifying it more precisely is difficult because much of the activity is classified. It includes research centers such as UC San Diego and work performed by the region’s large defense industry.
Stefan Savage, a noted cyber security expert at UCSD, said academic research is less vulnerable to a change in SpaWar operations than business activities, because SpaWar typically passes along money already allocated to a particular researcher.

LA JOLLA —- Genes that regulate insulin also influence the body’s circadian clock, according to a study by scientists at UCSD and the University of Pennsylvania.
The finding help explain links between sleeping disorders and development of other major health problems. Moreover, the scientists say, the finding provides insight into possible treatments.
The study, published online Thursday in the journal Cell, found 200 genes that affect the circadian clock. Seven of these genes are already known to help regulate insulin.
(NOTE: I’ll put up a link to the article when it’s up.)
Sleep disorders often occur along with obesity, high blood pressure and insulin resistance. The latter three are part of “metabolic syndrome,” which can lead to heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes.
“People knew that the clock regulates many different processes, but what they didn’t realize what that when you tweak those processes, it feeds back and alters the clock,” said UCSD’s Steve Kay, in a press release. Kay, dean of biological sciences, led the study with John Hogenesch of the University of Pennsylvania.
The genes were found in cell cultures; even outside the body, the cells retain their daily activity cycle.
The study also found evidence that genes governing three other control systems also affect the circadian clock, one that governs the use of folate, a B-vitamin; and two that control cellular life cycles.
The researchers are sharing their discoveries; they’ve put information about the genes into an open-access database called BioGPS, at http://biogps.gnf.org.