Six Things to Watch at Biotech CEO Conference

ORIGINAL: Minyanville
By Brett Chase 

Feb 11, 2013 9:35 am

John Lechleiter, CEO of Ely Lilly @Lilly_COI: Fireside Chat #BIOCEO13. Photo: BIO I'm Biotech

Chief executives from Gilead, Onyx, and Eli Lilly are among those featured at the industry event in New York. A number of fund managers are scouting the conference.

Click here to download a PDF of the CEO Program Brochure (PDF 1.5Mb)

Dozens of fund managers will be sizing up biotech executives over the next couple of days in New York. More than 100 public companies are scheduled to speak at the Bio CEO & Investor Conference, which got underway Monday morning.

Despite Friday’s storm, conference organizers say almost all the companies will still present at the meeting. Here are some companies and themes to watch for at the event, which is sponsored by the Biotechnology Industry Organization. See the full schedule of presentations here.

Onyx Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ONXX) CEO Anthony Coles is scheduled to be interviewed by an analyst Tuesday morning at the conference as part of a program known as “fireside chats.” Onyx recently held a secondary offering of its shares to raise more than $350 million. Proceeds will go toward covering marketing and R&D expenses for cancer drug Kyprolis. The drug was approved last year as a follow-up therapy for multiple myeloma and is being studied for wider use. The shares are down 9% over the past month but are still up almost 80% over the past year.

Coles will certainly be asked about Celgene’s (NASDAQ:CELG) newly approved Pomalyst, another multiple myeloma drug that was just cleared for sale in the US. (Celgene CEO Robert Hugin spoke at the conference early Monday.)

Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ:GILD) Chief Executive John Milligan is scheduled for another fireside chat later Tuesday morning. In addition to questions about the company’s hepatitis C development program and HIV treatments, Milligan may be asked to explain the recent purchase of YM BioSciences, which is developing a blood cancer drug.

Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY) CEO John Lechleiter should be asked Monday afternoon about his company’s challenges developing new drugs. Last week, Lilly said it is halting a development program for an experimental rheumatoid arthritis treatment. Unfortunately, Lilly is one of the few companies that won’t be webcasting their CEO’s comments from the conference.

BioMarin Pharmaceutical (NASDAQ:BMRN) CEO Jean-Jacque Bienaime is scheduled for a fireside chat Tuesday afternoon. BioMarin, a company that specializes in drugs for inherited rare conditions, will report fourth-quarter and full-year results next week. So Bienaime may not reveal a lot at the Bio conference. Some analysts have expressed a great deal of interest in recent weeks over BMN-673, an early-stage drug for genetically defined cancers. 

Shares of Keryx Biopharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:KERX) exploded in late January after the company said its experimental drug for kidney dialysis patients worked in a late-stage study. A day after announcing the news, the company said it would sell stock in a secondary offering to raise $55 million. CEO Ron Bentsur is scheduled to present at the conference Monday afternoon.

Two diet pill makers, Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ARNA) and Orexigen Therapeutics (NASDAQ:OREX), will be updating investors Tuesday afternoon. Arena has an approved diet drug, Belviq, which is still waiting for clearance from the Drug Enforcement Administration before it can be sold. Orexigen is testing the safety of its drug contrave and hopes to apply for US approval of the drug in the second half of this year. A third company, Vivus (NASDAQ:VVUS), is already selling a drug, Qsymia, but early sales have been slow.

Twitter: @brettchase

Bionengineers introduce "Bi-Fi" — the biological Internet

ORIGINAL: Stanford

BY ANDREW MYERS

Drew Endy

If you were a bacterium, the virus M13 might seem innocuous enough. It insinuates more than it invades, setting up shop like a freeloading houseguest, not a killer. Once inside it makes itself at home, eating your food, texting indiscriminately. Recently, however, bioengineers at Stanford University have given M13 a bit of a makeover.

The researchers, Monica Ortiz, a doctoral candidate in bioengineering, and Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering, have parasitized the parasite and harnessed M13’s key attributes — its non-lethality and its ability to package and broadcast arbitrary DNA strands — to create what might be termed the biological Internet, or “Bi-Fi.” Their findings were published online Sept. 7 in the Journal of Biological Engineering.

Using the virus, Ortiz and Endy have created a biological mechanism to send genetic messages from cell to cell. The system greatly increases the complexity and amount of data that can be communicated between cells and could lead to greater control of biological functions within cell communities. The advance could prove a boon to bioengineers looking to create complex, multicellular communities that work in concert to accomplish important biological functions.

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Medium and message

M13 is a packager of genetic messages. It reproduces within its host, taking strands of DNA — strands that engineers can control — wrapping them up one by one and sending them out encapsulated within proteins produced by M13 that can infect other cells. Once inside the new hosts, they release the packaged DNA message.

The M13-based system is essentially a communication channel. It acts like a wireless Internet connection that enables cells to send or receive messages, but it does not care what secrets the transmitted messages contain.

“Effectively, we’ve separated the message from the channel. We can now send any DNA message we want to specific cells within a complex microbial community,” said Ortiz, the first author of the study.

It is well-known that cells naturally use various mechanisms, including chemicals, to communicate, but such messaging can be extremely limited in both complexity and bandwidth. Simple chemical signals are typically both message and messenger — two functions that cannot be separated.

“If your network connection is based on sugar then your messages are limited to ‘more sugar,’ ‘less sugar,’ or ‘no sugar’” explained Endy.

Monica Ortiz

Cells engineered with M13 can be programmed to communicate in much more complex, powerful ways than ever before. The possible messages are limited only by what can be encoded in DNA and thus can include any sort of genetic instruction: start growing, stop growing, come closer, swim away, produce insulin and so forth.

Rates and ranges

In harnessing DNA for cell-cell messaging the researchers have also greatly increased the amount of data they can transmit at any one time. In digital terms, they have increased the bit rate of their system. The largest DNA strand M13 is known to have packaged includes more than 40,000 base pairs. Base pairs, like 1s and 0s in digital encoding, are the basic building blocks of genetic data. Most genetic messages of interest in bioengineering range from several hundred to many thousand base pairs.

Ortiz was even able to broadcast her genetic messages between cells separated by a gelatinous medium at a distance of greater than 7 centimeters.

“That’s very long-range communication, cellularly speaking,” she said.

Down the road, the biological Internet could lead to biosynthetic factories in which huge masses of microbes collaborate to make more complicated fuels, pharmaceuticals and other useful chemicals. With improvements, the engineers say, their cell-cell communication platform might someday allow more complex three-dimensional programming of cellular systems, including the regeneration of tissue or organs.

“The ability to communicate ‘arbitrary’ messages is a fundamental leap — from just a signal-and-response relationship to a true language of interaction,” said Radhika Nagpal, professor of computer science at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, who was not involved in the research. “Orchestrating the cooperation of cells to form artificial tissues, or even artificial organisms is just one possibility. This opens a door to new biological systems and solving problems that have no direct analog in nature.”

Ortiz added: “The biological Internet is in its very earliest stages. When the information Internet was first introduced in the 1970s, it would have been hard to imagine the myriad uses it sees today, so there’s no telling all the places this new work might lead.”

Funding for the research was provided by NSF Synthetic Biological Engineering Research Centerand Stanford University. Stanford's Department of Bioengineering is jointly operated by the Schools of Engineering and of Medicine.

Schematic of DNA information storage

RESEARCH ARTICLE 

Engineered cell-cell communication via DNA messaging

Monica E Ortiz and Drew Endy

Journal of Biological Engineering 2012, 6:16 doi:10.1186/1754-1611-6-16

Published: 7 September 2012

Abstract (provisional)

Background

Evolution has selected for organisms that benefit from genetically encoded cell-cell communication. Engineers have begun to repurpose elements of natural communication systems to realize programmed pattern formation and coordinate other population-level behaviors. However, existing engineered systems rely on system-specific small molecules to send molecular messages among cells. Thus, the information transmission capacity of current engineered biological communication systems is physically limited by specific biomolecules that are capable of sending only a single message, typically “regulate transcription.”

Results

We have engineered a cell-cell communication platform using bacteriophage M13 gene products to autonomously package and deliver heterologous DNA messages of varying lengths and encoded functions. We demonstrate the decoupling of messages from a common communication channel via the autonomous transmission of various arbitrary genetic messages. Further, we increase the range of engineered DNA messaging across semisolid media by linking message transmission or receipt to active cellular chemotaxis.

Conclusions

We demonstrate decoupling of a communication channel from message transmission within engineered biological systems via the autonomous targeted transduction of user-specified heterologous DNA messages. We also demonstrate that bacteriophage M13 particle production and message transduction occurs among chemotactic bacteria. We use chemotaxis to improve the range of DNA messaging, increasing both transmission distance and communication bit rates relative to existing small molecule-based communication systems. We postulate that integration of different engineered cell-cell communication platforms will allow for more complex spatial programming of dynamic cellular consortia.

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