Having been through the startup routine a couple of times—his latest company, Inimex (Vancouver), founded in 2001, is raising money at the moment—Hancock isn't waiting around for venture capitalists to get on board. At UBC, he's been involved with two different programs that each in their own way might just get his inventions out the door and into medical practice. He has two programs that are being developed through the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle) and the Foundation of the National Institutes of Health. The initiative forges commercial partnerships for developing therapies for the first world while retaining rights to third-world markets. In addition, the Canadian government (national and provincial) is supporting the Centre for Drug Research and Development at UBC, designed to take products through preclinical toxicology testing. Raising early-stage venture capital is incredibly difficult, according to Hancock. “Venture capitalists are no longer sold on the romance [of biotech]. Early stage [seed investment] is not worth having because it's equivalent to giving away a company and idea for $1 million,” he says.
Nature Biotechnology has been the conduit for two Hancock technologies that are being taken forward. In a 2005 paper, his laboratory reported on a system for high-throughput screening of antimicrobial peptides1. Peptides with antimicrobial activity, although ubiquitous in nature, are costly to produce and thus manipulate and optimize. But in 2005, Hancock's group reported on a high-throughput luciferase monitoring system that allows them to make and test peptides by the thousands. Hancock's latest patent application describes over 100,000 novel peptides. In the 2005 paper, the group started with a 12 amino acid long-peptide, and systematically replaced each amino acid with the other 19, created double and triple replacements and measured the activity of each. This, Hancock says, led to the isolation of the smallest peptide with broad-spectrum anti-microbial activity, which is now being developed by the program that is supported by the Gates Foundation.
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