The Yale BioHaven Entrepreneurship Seminars series will begin its fall schedule with a program on the New Haven start-up company BioRelix Inc. on Wednesday, October 24 from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Anlyan Center Auditorium, Yale School of Medicine, 300 Cedar Street.
BioRelix, Inc. is working to identify antibiotics that target pathogens resistant to currently available drugs using novel patented bacterial RNA targets called “RiboSwitches™.”
The featured speakers will be Ronald W. Lennox, the interim CEO of BioRelix and a partner in CHL Medical Partners; and Ronald Breaker, the Henry Ford II Professor in Yale’s Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, and founder of BioRelix. Breaker is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale.
Antibiotic resistance is becoming a major health concern, say experts, and finding new ways to attack pathogenic organisms is important for world health in the future. BioRelix’ competitive advantage is the use of novel patented bacterial RNA targets. RiboSwitches™ are short stretches of messenger RNAs that bind small metabolites and control genes that are essential for the survival of many disease-causing microbes. They were identified by Breaker’s laboratory In fact, the Yale researchers identified 14 different classes of RiboSwitch™ RNAs, and each potentially could serve as a novel antibacterial drug target. BioRelix owns a worldwide license to develop and market RiboSwitch™-target antibiotics.
Lennox and Breaker will discuss how they are moving the basic research on riboswitches to commercialize their RiboSwitches™. The company raised $25.75 million in initial funding earlier this year.
Refreshments and networking will follow the seminar from 5 to 7 p.m. Registration is free, but advanced registration is required. To RSVP, send an e-mail to biohaven@yale.edu or call the Yale Office of Cooperative Research at 203-785-6209 Directions to the event are available online at http://info.med.yale.edu/maps/cab.html
Yale BioHaven Entrepreneurship Seminars are sponsored by the Yale Office of Cooperative Research and Connecticut United for Research Excellence (CURE), and jointly promoted by Yale Entrepreneurial Society and Yale Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical Society. For further information on the seminar, please contact Tracy Huang at 203-436-8096 or tracy.huang@yale.edu.
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