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Five Scientists Awarded Industry Fellowships via the North Carolina Biotechnology Center

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. Dec. 11, 2008 — Five freshly minted North Carolina scientists have been awarded first-class tickets on a fast train from academia to industry via the North Carolina Biotechnology Center's new Industrial Fellowship Program.

The program matches recent North Carolina Ph.D.s with biotechnology companies around the state. The Center pays the fellows' salaries and benefits for two years as employees of the sponsoring companies. In addition, the Center helps these junior scientists learn the commercial culture through training on intellectual property, government regulation and other non-technical business topics.

"It's hard for scientists to go from academic research to industry research," said Shobha Parthasarathi, Ph.D., technology development director at the Center and director of the program. "We wanted to create a way to help with that transition. This program will keep in-state more of the scientists who come through North Carolina universities for their training."

The five companies were selected through a competitive process that evaluated commitment to mentorship and professional development as well as technical merit. "We had 18 quality companies apply for the five positions," said Parthasarathi. "This unique endeavour offers a wonderful opportunity for these scientists to work with corporate mentors who can help shape their entrepreneurial experience for maximum benefit."

The candidate Ph.D.s also faced rigorous screening by the Center and the prospective employers.

"This is for young scientists who really want to establish a career in industry but don't see a clear path to get there," said Rob Lindberg, Ph.D., R.A.C., director of the Center's BATON business-development program and one of the fellowship program's architects.

"It's very tough for many of these individuals to compete for industry jobs without having industry experience," added Lindberg, "even if they've been successful in their academic careers. The goal of this fellowship program is to provide these individuals with legitimate industry experience to overcome this Catch-22 situation."

The 2008 North Carolina Biotechnology Center Industrial Fellows include:

* David Culp, who earned his Ph.D. last year from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. He's been working as a research associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Culp's fellowship is with Affinergy, a company spun out of Duke University research in 2003. He'll be part of a team developing specially adapted antibiotics that can be used to coat medical devices.

* Dawn Delo, a product of Wake Forest University's Institute of Regenerative Medicine, where she studied stem-cell therapies for muscle diseases. Her fellowship takes her to the Winston-Salem research labs of Tengion, where she'll try to coax cells isolated from specific tissues to regenerate the entire organs.

* David Hubert, who tested more than a million individual plants in his search for disease-resistance genes as a Ph.D. student at UNC-CH. He brings this expertise to BASF Plant Science in Research Triangle Park, where he is devising new ways to find valuable traits that allow plants to fend off infection and tolerate drought and other stressful growing conditions.

* Joann O'Connor, a 2007 Ph.D. from Emory University, who brought her research into the effects of anti-psychotic medication on brain function to Cato Research in Durham. She's now a fellow at Targacept, headquartered in Winston-Salem, joining the effort to find a smoking-cessation drug by studying the slight changes in brain receptors. These changes may explain nicotine's addictive effects.

* Liisa Smith, who studied changes in blood-vessel cells as a graduate student at UNC and postdoctoral scientist at Duke. Her fellowship is taking her to Aldagen, of Durham, to research new cell-therapy tests and to explore product development and manufacturing methods.

The Biotechnology Center is a private, non-profit corporation supported by the N.C. General Assembly. Its mission is to provide long-term economic and societal benefits to North Carolina by supporting biotechnology research, business and education statewide.
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Contact: Robin Deacle, director of corporate communications, North Carolina Biotechnology Center, 919-541-9366.