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Seattle Biomedical research group gets $10 million

The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute continued its rise from obscurity to the big time yesterday by landing a $10 million, three-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create building blocks of a malaria vaccine for pregnant women.

By Luke Timmerman
Seattle Times business reporter

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001817955_sbri18.html

The money comes four years after the Gates Foundation put the institute, known as SBRI, on the map with a $5 million malaria research grant. The nonprofit institute used the money to recruit a handful of star malaria researchers and snagged double that amount from the National Institutes of Health. It got the latest Gates grant by spotting genetic bull’s-eyes that arise on malaria-infected blood cells, findings that could be the basis for developing vaccines.

The institute will give $1 million of the grant to its subcontractors at the Pasteur Institute in France. SBRI will use the rest to boost a field lab in Tanzania, where it collects placentas and blood samples from malaria-infected mothers, and in Seattle, where its computers are loaded to find genetic patterns in the samples.

SBRI expects to move out of its cramped Queen Anne labs into a state-of-the-art research building in South Lake Union in March. It plans to build its research team from 155 to 300. Besides malaria, SBRI also researches other major killers in the developing world, such as AIDS and tuberculosis.

"We will really now be able to expand the scientific strength SBRI has been building over the last decade," said Jim Gore, chief operating officer.

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Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI)

Status: Nonprofit

Located: Seattle, moving to South Lake Union in March

Employees: 155

Founded: 1976

Annual budget: $11 million

Backers: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, National Institutes of Health

What it does: Basic research toward developing vaccines for malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis and other fatal diseases of the developing world.

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Dr. Regina Rabinovich, director of the infectious disease program at the Gates Foundation, said SBRI earned the grant because of its progress.

"It’s not a lottery," Rabinovich said.

There’s much to do in the next three years in identifying malaria-related proteins, prioritizing them and proving their connection to the disease. It will be years before a vaccine can be developed, but Rabinovich said she expects SBRI to play an ongoing role.

"They’re a group to watch, not just because of their focus on global health, but they’re so ambitious and collaborative and committed to global health on an individual level," she said.

Dr. Patrick Duffy, an SBRI malaria researcher and lieutenant colonel at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland, said the Seattle group and partners around the world have found two dozen microscopic targets — antigens — commonly found on malaria-infected cells.

Malaria, which kills about 1 million people a year in the developing world and leads to many stillbirths, is transmitted by mosquitoes. When mosquitoes bite, they release a parasite that infects oxygen-carrying red blood cells and breaks them down, causing severe anemia.

What confounds scientists is that the parasite also releases a protein that coats the cells and cloaks them from the immune system, Duffy said.

Researchers know the protein coating is constantly morphing, outpacing the immune system’s ability to recognize them as a foreign invader worthy of attack, Duffy said. But researchers have learned that the protein coating apparently doesn’t change nearly as much with pregnant women in the developing world, providing a more stable target to hit, he said.

Plus, he said, many women seem to develop immunity to the parasite in their second or third pregnancy, a phenomenon scientists are trying to copy in the broader population. The goal is to identify protein snippets that could further development of a vaccine in three years, Duffy said.

Luke Timmerman: 206-515-5644 or [email protected]

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