Key events

JANUARY

With assistance from the Genopole Medicen European Office, the companies Innavirvax and VitamFero submit two European grant applications.
The Genopole-incubated start-up Innavirvax has submitted a grant application to the European Union for the THEVA project, the goal of which is to develop an anti-HIV therapeutic vaccine candidate and take it into the clinic. The start-up VitamFero was incorporated in 2005 and has received business support from Genopole since December 2008; in January 2009, the company also submitted a grant application to the European Union for the ANBAB project. The goal of the VitamFero-led project is to develop new vaccine candidates against the most serious ovine and bovine babesioses.

MARCH

A Genopole seminar: Genopole to coordinate the BIO-Common Tools project.
Genopole is to coordinate the European Union FP7-Knowledge Regions project called “BIO Common Tools” (BIO-CT). The goal is to assess the value of cluster-development tools and expertise for start-ups and disseminate them throughout Europe. The BIO-CT project’s partners include clusters from Berlin, Barcelona, Debrecen and Turin, the consultancy firm INNO TSD (which will perform a SWOT analysis) and the Council of European Bio-Regions (CEBR, which will be responsible for disseminating the results). The project’s kick-off meeting took place in Paris on March 9-10, with support from the Ile-de-France Regional Council.

Gene Signal’s GS 101 is rated as one of the world’s five most promising drug candidates.
Each year, Thomson Reuters (the global leader in business intelligence solutions) publishes its “Ones to Watch” ranking of the 5 most promising compounds in various categories (registered products, those in clinical trials, etc.). According to Thomson Reuters, Gene Signal’s GS 101 antisense oligonucleotide was one of Q4 2008’s five most promising products in Phase III clinical trials (all disease areas considered).
[+] download the Q4 2008 version of the “Ones to Watch” ranking

JUNE

A decisive step towards the industrial production of fluorescent nanodiamonds.
In collaboration with the Materials Centre at the Ecole des Mines (Evry, France), the Belfort-Montbéliard University of Technology and the Physics Institute at the University of Stuttgart, the joint INSERM/University of Evry Val-d’Essonne “Structure and Activity of Normal and Pathological Biomolecules” lab has discovered a way to custom-produce fluorescent nanodiamonds from sub-millimeter synthetic diamonds.
[+] press release in French

Genopole’s Expert Committee approves incubation support for the companies Inatherys, Aelred and GenoSplice
Inatherys’ mission is to develop, produce and commercialize therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. Aelred is a plant biotech company specializing in the targeted improvement of plant varieties for research labs and seed companies. GenoSplice offers bioinformatics services for transcriptome and alternative splicing analyses. A bioinformatics platform for identifying splice variants as new biomarkers is under development.
[+] GenoSplice

JULY

Genoscope becomes a scientific partner in the “Tara Oceans” project
On September 5, 2009, the research vessel Tara will set out on a unique, 3-year scientific expedition across the world’s oceans. The goal is to study the marine ecosystems, which are still poorly understood but are nevertheless critical for our planet. As a scientific partner, the Genoscope lab will contribute its know-how to the expedition (notably genomic analysis for the study of microbial biodiversity).

OCTOBER

InnaVirVax signs its first worldwide licensing agreement 

InnaVirVax, the Genopole®-based emerging biopharmaceutical company in the field of HIV1 infection and cancer has signed its first licensing agreement, covering four products in its R&D portfolio.

[+] press release in French

From RNA to diagnostics: GenoSplice Technology and alternative splicing arrays. 

The biotech company GenoSplice Technology was created in November 2008 and then incubated by Genopole®. The company is an expert in alternative splicing and has contributed its know-how to the European Network of Excellence on Alternative Splicing (EURASNET). GenoSplice Technology’s core business is the development of innovative bioinformatics tools for the analysis of gene regulation, the transcriptome and alternative splicing. The company’s tools are already compatible with the Exon Array© system and will soon be available for use in high-throughput sequencing.
[+] press release in French

Genopole cooperates with the Medicen Paris Region cluster within the “Advanced Biotech Cluster Platforms for Europe” (ABC-Europe) project

Medicen is one of the partners in the “Advanced Biotech Cluster platforms for Europe” (ABC-Europe) project launched as part of the European Union’s Innovation and Competitiveness program. The project is coordinated by the Milan InnovHub and covers 14 European bio-regions: Cambridge, Munich, Barcelona, Berlin, Turin, Medicon Valley, Heidelberg, Israel, Stockholm, Wallonia, Debrecen, Strasbourg (Alsace BioValley) and Medicen. As the coordinator of a similar project (Bio-CT), Genopole will closely monitor ABC-Europe alongside Medicen Paris Region, in order to ensure coherence between the two efforts. In fact, ABC-Europe and Bio-CT have the same objective: sharing innovative tools for start-ups between European bio-regions.

DECEMBER

Construction work starts on the University of Evry-Val-d’Essonne’s Institute of Biology, Genetics and Bioinformatics 

The ground-breaking ceremony for the University of Evry- Val-d’Essonne’s Institute of Biology, Genetics and Bioinformatics took place on December 4 in the presence of Valérie Pécresse (France’s Minister of Higher Education and Research), Congressman Manuel Valls (also Mayor of Evry), Marc Lipinski (Vice President of the Ile-de-France Regional Council), Michel Berson (President of the Essonne County Council), Richard Messina (President of the University of Evry) and Pierre Tambourin (Genopole’s Chief Executive). With the first phase of the 15,000 m2 building set for completion in 2011, the Institute will host at least 400 researchers and 900 students by 2014. “The goal is to bring together all our research and teaching activities in genomics, post-genomic sciences and bioinformatics as applied to healthcare and the environment under one roof”, explained Richard Messina.

Sigma-Aldrich signs a licensing agreement with Polyplus-transfection 
_ Sigma-Aldrich has signed a licensing agreement with Polyplus-transfection for the sale of its new ZNATM oligonucleotides. Commercialization of the ZNA technology offers new opportunities for increasing the affinity of oligonucleotides for nucleic acids.

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