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BIOTECH START-UP DEVELOPED, GROWN WITH HELP FROM BU'S TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT FUND
28 March 2005 - Boston University
| Genes that could bolster crop yields, improve nutritional content, or make food crops more disease resistant can now be more easily identified and developed because of breakthrough technology developed by Modular Genetics Inc., a Woburn, Mass.-based biotechnology company. |
MGI recently struck a three-year collaborative deal with St. Louis-based agribusiness giant Monsanto to apply MGI’s technology to agriculture. The patented technology, known as a protein optimization platform, assembles and screens proteins that have promising agricultural traits. The deal marks a huge step forward for MGI, a company that has been growing for the past four years with the help of Boston University’s Technology Development Fund (TDF, formerly the Community Technology Fund). According to Terence Brennan, who heads up life science investing for the fund, TDF led the last round of financing for MGI in May 2004. “It can take five or more years to move a company like MGI from seed to full-fledged company,” says Brennan. “The rough economic patch we’ve recently weathered has made fund-raising difficult. But we’ve remained innovative in how and where we look for support to grow our companies. This collaboration between Monsanto and MGI reflects one success from that sort of innovative approach.” MGI co-founders, Kevin Jarrell, a former BU faculty member, and Temple Smith, a professor of biomedical engineering in BU’s College of Engineering, developed the company’s technology. Fundamentally a system for building and modifying genes by selecting and linking together segments of DNA, MGI’s high-throughput gene-engineering platform cuts the time needed to identify useful protein products. The technology provides a big advantage to researchers who seek to discover genes that help produce new crops, drugs, or other products. “We are very pleased to have established a strong collaborative relationship with Monsanto,” say Jarrell, who is president and chief scientific officer of MGI. “We feel this relationship validates our technology, demonstrating its utility as a tool for creating valuable new bioengineered products.” The Technology Development Fund, the oldest university-affiliated venture capital firm in the nation, invests in early-stage technology and life science companies and builds new companies around promising technologies developed by researchers at Boston University or Boston University Medical Center.
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Boston University has a well-deserved reputation for excellence in research in a wide range of disciplines and a demonstrated commitment to fostering innovative interdisciplinary research. The Office of the Associate Provost for Research and Graduate Education supports the University in facilitating research at the both the student and faculty levels.Our mission is to enhance and encourage research at Boston University and to provide a climate conducive to maintaining the University at the cutting edge of research and scholarly activities. We work with the Boston University community to plan and coordinate interdisciplinary research and represent the University in research matters related to Inter-University consortia. To encourage new, innovative, and cross-disciplinary efforts, this office administers the Special Program for Research Initiation Grants (SPRInG). We showcase graduate research at Science & Technology Day. This annual event features nearly 200 research posters by graduate students from both the Medical and Charles River Campuses working in a wide range of disciplines. Our annual research magazine, Research at Boston University, informs a wide audience about a selection of our significant research findings and ongoing studies at Boston University. We also maintain a strong presence on the web through this site and through the Science Coalition’s website, which brings our research successes to the attention of Congress and other policy makers in the federal government. To assist Boston University researchers, this office oversees the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and coordinates with the Office of Sponsored Programs on the Charles River Campus , the research administration on the Medical Campus, the Office of Research Compliance, and the various graduate programs. For the development of commercially viable ideas, we administer the Provost's Innovation Fund and work closely with the Office of Technology Transfer. We also coordinate proposals where there are institutional limits to the number of proposals that may be submitted, cost sharing requirements, significant laboratory renovations, or other special circumstances. This office assists departments and centers to achieve a diverse faculty and graduate student body through our membership and activities with the Northeast Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate and through our affiliation with the Clare Boothe Luce program of the Henry Luce Foundation. |
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