B.U. Bridge

DON'T MISS
Muir String Quartet Concert at 8 p.m., Thursday, April 7, at the Tsai Performance Center

Week of 25 March 2005· Vol. VIII, No. 24
www.bu.edu/bridge

Current IssueResearch BriefsBulletin BoardCalendarAdvertisingClassified AdsArchive

Search the Bridge

Mailing List

Contact Us

Staff

BU start-up Modular Genetics, Monsanto partner to modify crops

By Tim Stoddard

A small biotechnology company founded by BU faculty and nurtured by the Office of Technology Development (OTD) will soon be thriving across the river in Cambridge, where it will help agricultural giant Monsanto Company develop new crops. Modular Genetics, Inc., is in the gene-building business, pioneering new ways of manipulating DNA to create novel genes, the blueprints that living organisms use to build proteins. Monsanto has signed a three-year license to use the company’s patented technologies to genetically engineer new crops with enhanced traits.

Founded in 2000 by Kevin Jarrell, a former MED assistant professor of pharmacology, and Temple Smith, an ENG professor of biomedical engineering and director of ENG’s Biomolecular Engineering Research Center, Modular Genetics has dramatically streamlined the process of creating new genes and proteins and screening them for useful properties. It has since 2002 been a portfolio company of BU’s Technology Development Fund (TDF), formerly known as the Community Technology Fund, which provides venture capital and access to the scientific resources of BU and Boston Medical Center for nascent companies, and licenses the University’s technologies to corporations. Terence Brennan, director of life sciences at TDF, has been helping Modular Genetics hone its business strategy and focus its efforts on CombiGenix, the company’s patented approach to gene engineering. Brennan led a round of financing for the company last year, and assisted Jarrell in negotiating the terms of the agreement with Monsanto.

“This is a huge deal,” says Brennan, who is also on the company’s board of directors. “It’s unusual for start-ups of this size to attract a company with several billion dollars in annual sales.” Specific financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but later this year Monsanto and Modular Genetics will jointly open a new research facility in Cambridge, where Monsanto scientists will work to identify and develop new agronomic traits such as drought tolerance and insect resistance in corn, cotton, and soybeans, the company’s major products. Modular Genetics’ current staff of 8 full-time scientists will grow to about 35, and the team will continue to work on research and development in the pharmaceutical and chemical fields.

“A deal of this size dramatically enhances the growth prospects for our company,” says Jarrell, Modular Genetics president and chief scientific officer. “This puts us into a very rapid growth phase, and I believe it’s sustainable. It also demonstrates that our technology is useful and valuable in a commercial setting, and should set us up to complete deals with other large, significant companies.”

Smith will continue as Modular Genetics chief information officer. Widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of bioinformatics, Smith is one of the original organizers of GenBank, the international repository of genetic sequence information, including the recently completed human genome. His expertise in bioinformatics, which generally involves manipulating and making sense of vast troves of biological data, such as DNA and protein sequences, has contributed greatly to Modular Genetics’ approach to streamlining gene engineering.

The result, says Brennan, is a faster and more efficient method of engineering useful genes. “This industry is all about who can put out better products in shorter amounts of time,” he says. “If you can create a new corn seed with much higher insect resistance faster than the competition, you’ve got the market. We feel strongly that Modular Genetics has the best technology out there to enable companies to do that.”

Shuffling the deck faster

Gene engineering has driven the biotech industry since the early 1970s, but until recently, Jarrell says, it’s been a slow and laborious process. Scientists have traditionally worked with one gene at a time, slicing and rearranging strings of DNA to produce new gene variations, with only a few resulting in desirable products. Brennan compares the current state of genetic engineering to the automobile industry circa 1900, when “we were making cars one at a time in garages. All of sudden, Henry Ford comes along and automates the process, and the industry is forever changed. Modular Genetics has the platform to automate gene assembly and screening of potentially useful genes.”

The oldfangled way of gene building takes a long time because many variations of genes need to be created, isolated, and tested for their function. Modular Genetics, however, is among several companies working to automate that process with robots. “We’ve taken gene engineering from this sort of craftwork state,” Jarrell says, “where you’d have the individual craftsmen working in the lab pipetting samples one at a time, to a point where it’s a process controlled by a computer system using robots. People are involved, but the basic manipulation of the material can now be done in an automated fashion.”

Jarrell and Smith have developed a system that simplifies the process into steps that machines can easily replicate at high speed. “When you’re performing gene engineering,” Jarrell says, “it’s very complicated at a certain level, but at another level it’s very simple. There really are only four functions that you’re performing — it’s like the four functions of arithmetic. Basically all we’re ever doing as gene engineers is insertion, deletion, modification, and recombination of DNA. You’re not going to find another system out there that allows you to do all four of those basic functions as efficiently as ours.”

A new shepherd for technology transfer

       

25 March 2005
Boston University
Office of University Relations