Huntsville’s Biotech Engine
On summer days in the 1960s, Alabama residents three counties away could sit on the front porch, drinking iced tea, and listen to the distant rumble of rocket engines in Huntsville. As NASA test-fired the Saturn V, the propulsion system that lifted Apollo spacecraft moonward toward the first manned lunar landing, it also powered the north Alabama economy and built a science and technology community that would thrive for decades.
Today, almost half a century later, Huntsville’s science community is launching a second stage of growth powered by biotechnology. Like NASA spin-offs before it, this new economic engine is generating the commercial development of a wide spectrum of new ideas.
At the heart of Huntsville’s biotech boom is HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology in Cummins Research Park, the second largest research park in the United States. HudsonAlpha’s 153-acre campus is home to 23 biotech companies.
President, director and investigator Richard M. Myers has a close-up perspective on some of the most intriguing biotech research being done in Alabama today. Former director of the Stanford Human Genome Center, Myers has guided the nonprofit HudsonAlpha Institute since it opened in 2008 to fulfill its three-fold mission: sparking scientific discoveries that can impact human health and well-being, fostering biotech entrepreneurship, and encouraging the creation of a genomics-literate workforce and society
“Biotechnology is advancing at lightning speed, bringing new capabilities to the bedside to directly improve patient care,” Myers said. “For example, the high-throughput genetic sequencing technology we work with is now so fast and efficient that it can provide near real time information to help physicians make medication decisions based on the patient’s DNA. We can look at target genes in a breast cancer patient to determine which drugs are more likely to be effective. When a patient with atrial fibrillation needs blood thinner, genes can tell us whether Warfarin is the best choice, and how much is too much or too little. Being able to access genetic information quickly and affordably will be a key factor in making personalized medicine a more effective approach to patient care.”
With new capabilities come new questions. Beyond the logistics of bringing biotech applications into mainstream medicine and training health professionals to use them, there is also the human side of the equation.
When you have individual patients’ genetic codes in hand—the information that makes them who they are—how do you make the best use of that information for their benefit while protecting it from misuse? When details in that data have implications for the health of others in the patient’s family, how do you communicate it?
HudsonAlpha is engaged in a project to help answer some of these questions. With a grant from the NIH through the National Human Genome Research Institute's Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research program, the institute is working with UAB researcher and professor Martina Bebin, MD, a clinician at North Alabama Children’s Specialists in Huntsville, to sequence the genes of 500 Alabama children with undiagnosed congenital disorders and the genes of their families.
“For families with kids who have such severe problems, just knowing the cause can be a relief. They can stop blaming themselves and end the expensive odyssey of going from one medical test to the next, trying to find an answer,” Myers said. “We’re excited that we’re having an even higher hit rate than we had hoped for in identifying the mutations that are likely to be involved.
“We’ve also come across dozens of incidental findings, including two parents with a mutation strongly associated with cardiac arrhythmias. They are actionable, and knowing about them could save their lives. We’re working on procedures for communicating genetic information that can be a template for handling the emotional, legal and privacy issues in the future. We don’t want to panic patients when we find concerns, but we do want to explain potential risks in a way that will put them in touch with their doctors for follow-up. “
Now that genome sequencing is becoming increasingly affordable, such potentially life-saving information should soon be within reach of just about anyone. However, that doesn’t mean everyone will be able to rush out and get their genes sequenced right away.
The next bottleneck science must solve is how to handle the incredible volume of information generated by genetics.
“A tidal wave is coming,” Myers said. “There are around three billion base pairs of DNA in every human genome, and more than 317 million people in the US alone. Add to that the number of plant and animal species scientists are studying and want to sequence. There is no way silicon-based computer chips could handle it. There isn’t enough energy to run that much information on silicon-based computers, and not enough people to determine what the data means and apply it.”
While computer scientists and geneticists are working on solving those issues, bioinformatics, a field of biotechnology that is growing in importance, is developing new methods of managing high volume data to provide a clearer view of what it means.
One project that has made progress in this area is a new algorithm called CADD, developed as a cooperative effort between researchers at HudsonAlpha and the University of Washington. CADD organizes and prioritizes genetic data, distilling an enormous volume of information into a single score that provides a framework for estimating the relative pathogenicity of genetic variants.
Another major success story in Huntsville’s biotech community this year came from CFD Research Corporation, which is also headquartered on the HudsonAlpha campus. Its SynVivo® microfluidic cell-based assay platform was recognized as one of the "Top 10 Innovations of 2013" by The Scientist magazine for enabling faster, more efficient drug development by combining the control of in vitro testing with the realism of in vivo studies.
Other biotech companies on the HudsonAlpha campus that have been making recent news include Serina Therapeutics, who is developing polymers to deliver “smart bombs” with cytotoxic agents to cancer cells, and Kailos Genetics, which is testing DNA for personalized medicine, and EGEN, a company working on clinical trials of a novel immunotherapy agent.
HudsonAlpha’s mission also includes education. The institute is involved in programs to inspire an interest in science in Alabama’s school children and they offer training and tools to help Alabama’s life science teachers continue that inspiration in their classrooms. The institute also provides information on science education to governmental bodies involved in science education funding.
Another area of education is the networking of information within the scientific community through seminars and special programs. A prime example will be September 29 through October 2, when HudsonAlpha partners with Science magazine to host Immunogenomics 2014, an international and interdisciplinary conference that will bring together preeminent leaders and thinkers at the intersection of genomics and immunology.
As neighbors at NASA continue to blaze new frontiers in outer space, HudsonAlpha and the biotech researchers and businesses of Alabama will continue to explore the inner workings of the human genome and life itself.
