In 2005, Gonul Velicelebi was the vice president of research and drug discovery at TorreyPines Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TPTX]]) when scientists there determined that a molecule dubbed STIM1 played a crucial role in activating immune cells.
To Velicelebi, STIM1 was like a key that helped open a hidden pathway that scientists had been seeking for 20 years. It also opened a new path for Velicelebi, who in 2006 founded CalciMedica, a startup focused on developing a variety of small molecule drugs to suppress autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. “This is a whole new pathway for modulating immune response,” she says.
A key aspect to CalciMedica’s approach is that it appears to sidestep a buildup of toxic compounds associated with the long-term use of some drugs prescribed to prevent organ transplant rejection and to treat autoimmune diseases. “There is a huge unmet need,” Velicelebi says. “Rheumatoid arthritis alone is 2 percent of the population,” and then there is lupus and inflammatory bowel diseases, like Crohn’s disease.
The TorreyPines team had pinpointed STIM1 as a key component in
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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