Pleasanton's IntegenX buys GE subsidiary

IntegenX Inc. will buy a wholly owned subsidiary of GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences, a move that the Pleasanton-based company said will help its DNA identification system get to market sooner. Financial terms of the deal around the intellectual property and the patent portfolio held by General Electric Co. subsidiary SV Corp. were not disclosed.

Innovation dies in the budget-cutting process

Give someone enough rope, my mother would say, and he’ll hang himself.
Now wrap that metaphor around California and a small investment/big return proposition around leukemia.
With an investment of only $290,633, the University of California Office of the President — or UCOP, as it’s known — will support research seeking a way to expand the population of stem cells in cord blood transplants for leukemia patients. Coupled with cash from GE Healthcare Life Sciences’ cell technologies unit, the UCOP Discovery Grant will take research teams led by UCSF’s Andrew Leavitt and Michelle Arkin to the starting line of essentially curing the deadly blood cancer.
These types of projects, however, are finding cash tougher to come by.

GE-UCSF stem cell program gets boost with grant program cut due to budget woes

A public-private partnership, funded in part by a grant program killed earlier this year by the state’s fiscal crisis, could within a decade help adult leukemia patients fight off the disease.
The $841,000, three-year project at the University of California, San Francisco, seeks to discover compounds that expand the number of stem cells found in umbilical cord blood and the placenta. If successful, that could increase the chances of adult leukemia patients receiving bone marrow transplants with blood-forming stem cells.
The cost of the project is covered by a “Discovery Grant” from the UC Office of the President and GE Healthcare Life Sciences’ cell technologies unit.
The UC grant program was set up to encourage projects between UC scientists and companies. In May, however, UC told researchers the program would be eliminated to help reduce a projected $500 million cut in state funding in fiscal 2012. Only the best of the best projects already in the pipeline would be funded, a UC spokeswoman said.

UCSF, GE Healthcare program seeks to boost number of disease-fighting cord blood cells

A group of UCSF scientists will seek chemical compounds that can be added to blood-forming stem cells and progenitor cells in cord blood to increase their population and boost cord blood treatments for adult patients.
The $841,000, three-year program, funded by GE Healthcare Life Sciences’ cell technologies unit and the University of California’s Office of the President, initially will screen about 120,000 chemicals to find those that could expand the population of hematopoietic, or blood-forming, stem cells and progenitor cells.
The work is important because cord blood — a rich source of stem cells and progenitor cells — often doesn’t provide a large enough number of stem cells to treat adults with life-threatening diseases like lymphoma, leukemia or sickle cell anemia.

GE, UCSF technology IDs aggressive tumors

Technology developed out of a partnership between the University of California, San Francisco, and GE Healthcare is giving prostate cancer patients a real-time look into the aggressiveness of their tumors, potentially changing the course of treatment and lowering health care costs.
The technology, now in an early-stage trial at UCSF's Mission Bay campus, could reduce the time it takes to diagnose prostate cancer and prevent some of the roughly 200,000 men diagnosed each year with the disease from undergoing surgery that may not be necessary.