researchers more chances of finding the right drug-target combination.
The technology also could be used to develop new ways of producing nanomaterials, research reagents, and aptamers, which are molecules that bind to a specific target molecule.
Synthorx has licensed the technology from Scripps, and received an undisclosed investment from two San Diego venture firms, Avalon Ventures and Correlation Ventures.
The same techniques used to develop new drug compounds could be used in materials science to create DNA-based scaffolds for assembling polymers that act as semi-conductors or have other special characteristics, said Court Turner, the Avalon partner overseeing the Synthorx deal.
Developing useful nanomaterials could take an approach that would be similar to creating libraries of therapeutic compounds, Turner explained.
“What if you could make a polymer, but with 10 million variations?” Turner asked. “You could sort them, use PCR [polymerase chain reaction technology] to amplify them, and we could literally apply the principles of evolution to develop non-biological materials.” Scientists could then screen the library of compounds to identify the specific molecules with the most optimized characteristics needed.
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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