Page 30 - Gates-AnnualReport-2018

“The Gates Center has been phenomenally helpful in accelerating our work,” Liechty said. The Grubstake model and the Gates Biomanufacturing Facility address three keys to the drug commercialization process, he said: “It’s one thing to say, ‘Okay, we can manufacture things.’ Or another thing to say, ‘We have people who know the ins and outs.’ And another to say, ‘How do you pay for it?’ We’re a relatively new campus for that kind of idea, and this is what’s needed to really jumpstart this.”
The call for applications for the Grubstake awards also gives the university and the Gates Center another opportunity to promote the kind of cross-disciplinary and cross-campus collaboration that leads to some of the most potent research. Grubstake awardee Steven Dow, DVM, Ph.D., of Colorado State University is a prime example.
The Gates Center membership includes researchers at CSU and other Colorado institutions beyond the Anschutz Medical Campus, and Dow is a professor and Director of CSU’s Center for Immune and Regenerative Medicine. He was a featured speaker at the Gates Center and CSU Zoobiquity Colorado Conference in 2018, drawing together collaborators studying how human and animal medicine can share discoveries for the good of both.
Dow works with a type of stem cell (mesenchymal stem cells) that has proven useful for treating wounds and chronic wound infections. Work began with chronic staph infections in mouse models mimicking antibiotic-resistant MRSA infections that develop in human knees and other implants after surgery. The activated cells then proved to be efficacious in a clinical trial in dog patients with post-surgical infections treated at the CSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital.
The Gates Center Director, Dennis Roop, Ph.D., encouraged Dow’s group to apply for Grubstake funding, which they received in 2015, an award Dow calls “transformational.”
The expertise of the Gates Biomanufacturing Facility staff has been particularly helpful as part of the Grubstake education process, Dow said, knowing they can produce clinical trial- size amounts of activated cells “in our backyard.”
Dow has also lined up the infectious disease and orthopedic surgery teams at the School of Medicine and UCHealth who will be key to human trials, while drawing on CU Innovations for the complex regulatory steps.
The assistance network is “moving our work pretty efficiently from bench – the mouse studies – to our ‘bedside’, which is dogs, and eventually into human clinical trials,” he said.
The annual Grubstake award process has helped everyone involved with the Gates Center and wider campus research efforts keep an eye on the true significance of the scientific pursuit, Petrash said.
“This is an important part of the mission of the university, to not only do good research but to make it of practical use to society.”
The next Grubstake Award application process will begin in June 2019, with written applications due at the end of August. Interested applicants are encouraged to reach out to the Gates Center’s Entrepreneur in Residence, Heather Callahan, for guidance.
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