IGSP News Stories

“A company that is widely regarded as being an efficient laboratory, was a startup that helped discover the genetic cause of two dread cancers and provides a service that allows people at risk to mitigate the risk is nonetheless reviled,” wrote geneticists Robert Cook-Deegan and A.L. Baldwin of Duke University last January in the journal Genome Medicine. “This should be a hero story, but is ...

cDNA is not useful for diagnostic tests, but it is crucial for producing protein-based drugs, explained Robert Cook-Deegan, a professor of genome ethics, law, and policy at Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. “Those are the billion-dollar molecule patents,” Cook-Deegan said. “Biotech companies care a great deal about cDNA patents, and it should be reassuring to them ...

“I think everybody that was paying close attention to this case pretty much guessed what they were going to do,” said Robert Cook-Deegan.

Professor Patrick Tan described how he has used exome sequencing to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying various cancers endemic to Asia.

“I think it does matter what court says and how broadly it says it,” Bob Cook-Deegan said. It will affect not patients, but business decisions about getting into the genetic testing market, he predicted.

This summer, a group of statisticians, mathematicians, and engineers will move into Gross Hall, one floor up from SSRI West. The group is collaborating to build a Big Data toolbox techniques to analyze enormous datasets such as the billions of daily posts on social media websites; or the 600 million proton collisions per second at the Large Hadron Collider; or the three billion A, C, G, ...

Meet two Duke entrepreneurs who made their homework into thriving companies.