Commercialization, life science

The use of radioactive tracers was pioneered by Georg von Hevesy, a Hungarian physical chemist, who received the Nobel Prize in 1943 for his work on radioactive indicators (1). Radioisotopes have become indispensable components of most medical and life science research strategies, and in addition the technology is the basis for numerous industries focused on the production and detection of radioactive tracers. Thousands of radioactive tracers have been synthesized and are commercially available. These are used worldwide in tens of thousands of research laboratories. 

The final section in this volume deals with applications of adhesion science. The applications described include methods by which durable adhesive bonds can be manufactured by the use of appropriate surface preparation (Davis and Venables) to unique methods for composite repair (Lopata et al.) Adhesive applications find their way into the generation of wood products (Dunky and Pizzi) and also find their way into the construction of commercial and military aircraft (Pate). The chapter by Spotnitz et al. shows that adhesion science finds its way into the life sciences in their discussion of tissue adhesives. 

The commercialization of developments in biotechnology will require a new breed of chemical engineer, one with a solid foundation in the life sciences as well as in process engineering principles. This engineer will be able to bring iimovative and economic solutions to problems in health care delivery and in the large-scale implementation of advances in molecular biology. 

Whether life sciences informatics software ultimately becomes a commodity, with the commercial rewards for software companies being in packaging, integration, support, and deployment (in a similar way to the Linux community), and what impact the open source movement will have. In bioinformatics and chemoinformatics, open source, free software, and shareware are increasing in quantity, and it is becoming common for smaller software companies at least to release reduced-functionality versions of their software into the public domain at no cost. 

Figure 5.8 Typical industrial-scale fermentation equipment as employed in the biopharmaceutical sector (a). Control of the fermentation process is highly automated, with all fermentation parameters being adjusted by computer (b). Photographs (a) and (b) courtesy of SmithKline Beecham Biological Services, s.a., Belgium. Photograph (c) illustrates the inoculation of a laboratory-scale fermenter with recombinant microorganisms used in the production of a commercial interferon preparation. Photograph (c) courtesy of Pall Life Sciences, Dublin, Ireland...

While large-scale commercialization of the 3D chip has taken considerably more hme than expected, several companies now offer such surfaces. Motorola Life Sciences abandoned the Mirzabekov gel (Chapter 3) in favor of SurModic s PhofoLink surface chemistry (www.surmodics.com), chemistry which it then brought to market as the CodeLink . Amersham Biosciences acquired CodeLink from Motorola in 2002 and obtained a license to the Southern patents in 2003 to expand the product into the clinical diagnoshc arena. 

Motorola Life Sciences and Packard Biosciences (now Perkin Elmer Life Sciences) established a development partnership with ANL to commercialize the technology in 1998 but later abandoned the technology in favor of the SurModics hydrogel introduced in 1999 (3D-Link ). Motorola introduced the CodeLink microarray product based upon the SurModics PhotoLink chemistry. Amersham Biosciences acquired Motorola s biochip business in 2002 and now offers CodeLink microarrays. Perkin Elmer sells a similar product under the trade name of HydroGel 3D. 

In 1886, Henri Moissan achieved the isolation of elemental fluorine, and this discovery was awarded twenty years later by the Nobel Prize (1906). At the time of this discovery, Moissan was working in a place that was not geared toward this kind of research the Faculty of Pharmacy in Paris. These studies were certainly not oriented toward potential commercial products, and Moissan could not imagine the important applications that took place one century later in the field of pharmaceuticals. Indeed, pharmacy and more generally life sciences have become major fields in fluorine chemistry. This story is instructive in the current debate between pure and applied research. 

One of the early concerns about the application of DNA microarray to toxicology has been how to properly compare experiments that use a wide variety of commercial and proprietary platforms, protocols, and analyses methods. The Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI) of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) has... 

OctaBDE commercial mixtures caused skeletal ossification variations in rats and rabbits at maternally toxic levels and other indications of fetotoxicity at lower doses (Argus Research Laboratories 1985b Life Science Research Israel Ltd. 1987). No maternal effects were observed in rats that were administered 2.5, 10, or 25 mg/kg/day doses of octaBDE (FR-1208) by gavage on Gds 6-15 (Life Science Research Israel Ltd. 1987). Fetal death, as measured by post-implantation loss, was somewhat elevated among litters from... 

Different authors and commercial suppliers have assigned different names to signal amplification using tyramine. For example, tyramine signal amplification (TSA) system and the catalyzed signal amplification (CSA) system are comma-daily available from DuPont NEN Life Science Products, Boston, MA, and DAKO Corporation, Carpinteria, CA, respectively. In addition, the tarns CARD (catalyzed reporter deposition) (Bobrow et al., 1989), TA (tyramide amplification) (Shindler and Roth, 1996), and ImmunoMax (Merz et al., 1995) have been used for the tyramine amplification technique. The use of different names for almost identical procedures has resulted in confusion. To standardize the terminology, the neutral abbreviation, tyramide amplification technique (TAT) should be accepted (Von Wasielewski et al., 1997). 

Initially, there was a real distinction made in the minds of biologists between applied, commercially oriented work and exciting innovative basic research. Two things have happened that have accelerated the cultural evolution of attitudes away from that point. The first is that research faculty has found that it is possible to do exciting innovative life science research and have elements of that work that are extraordinarily important in terms of a variety of practical applications and commercial exploitation. Second, it has been helpful that a few professorships have been created this way. That is a nice role model that some faculty have seen. 

Fishbein went on to lament efforts of some patent-holding universities even to bar scientists at other institutions from using their inventions for research purposes The similarity of these concerns to those heard so loudly in recent years, about the impact of commercial involvement on academic life science, and the possible economic causes underlying the congruent situations of yesterday and today, will be discussed further in the conclusion. 

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