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Abstract:
The
story of TAO Biosciences will be presented. TAO Biosciences was
founded by the speaker in San Francisco in 1999 to develop a promising,
then novel, anti-microbial strategy, discovered through an application,
unusual at the time, of comparative bacterial genomics. In the talk,
the arc of the project will be described, from discovery to dissolution.
The talk will be divided into, first, a ‘technical’
section, describing the science driving the project, and subsequent
progress in made by the company in exploiting the idea, and, second,
into a ‘bio-entrepreneur’ section, where the business
and sociological aspects of TAO will be presented, specifically
the process of establishing, building and decommissioning the company.
Based on the speaker’s experience, some observations on the
dynamics of venture funding are offered. The pros and cons of taking
a scientific idea into the private sector are also addressed. The
talk touches on drug development strategy, comparative bacterial
genomics, and the dynamics of “starting-up” from the
perspective of a principle in one, ultimately unsuccessful, very
early stage biotechnology company.
Biodata
of Speaker:
Dr.
Mitchell received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley,
in Parasitology and Infectious Disease. He was a Berkeley University
Fellow (1989), and also held a joint graduate appointment in the
Division of Theoretical Biology at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
His research interests, in computational biology and comparative
genomics, converge on the fundamental processes of disease, from
the perspective of both host and pathogen. In collaboration with
the Stanford Genome Technology Center, he participated in the genomic
sequencing of two clinically important bacterial species, and his
dissertation “Comparative Genomic Analysis of an Obligate
Intracellular Taxon: Chlamydia trachomatis and Chlamydia pneumoniae”
was an early example of comparative whole genome analysis. He was
scientific founder of TAO Biosciences in 1999, a start-up biotechnology
company utilizing comparative genomics to define novel drug targets
and focused on the development of cognate broad spectrum antibiotics.
He was Chief Genomics Officer there through 2002. Dr. Mitchell is
also interested in science policy. As a MacArthur Foundation Breadth
Fellow (1991), he examined "Molecular Biology, Diplomacy by
Other Means", an assessment of bio-weaponry. He holds a Bachelor
of Science, magna cum laude (Biology) from The University of Massachusetts,
and an Artium Baccalaureus, cum laude (African History) from Harvard
University. He is, since July 2004, a Senior Scientist at the Genome
Institute of Singapore, where he leads a team of seven programmers
and bioinformaticans in the development of analysis and visualization
tools for the Institute.
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