The Buffalo News

SEARCH NARROWS FOR BIOTECH CHIEF

Published on February 10, 2002
Author:    FRED O. WILLIAMS - News Business Reporter
© The Buffalo News Inc.

Major pieces of Buffalo's $200 million medical research center are moving into place, with a supercomputer upgrade under way and corporate partners lined up.

Now a scientist is about to be chosen to lead the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, according to people familiar with the process. Jeffrey Skolnick, a gene research pioneer and founder of a San Diego biotech company, has been asked to head the Buffalo center, sources familiar with the selection said.

Among the job requirements: giving instant scientific credibility to the fledgling institution, which was announced by Gov. George E. Pataki last year.

The director will also shoulder the region's hopes for spawning a biotechnology industry cluster to lift its economy.

"The leader of this center is going to be an extremely important position," said Brian J. Morra, president of Veridian's information systems sector, one of the center's corporate partners.

The director will attract other senior researchers whose ongoing projects are expected to yield scientific breakthroughs, university officials said.

UB officials would confirm only that Skolnick, currently a lead researcher at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, is on a "short list" of three candidates, all highly qualified.

"The bar was set very high," said Bruce A. Holm, UB senior vice provost who oversees the administration of the research center.

But people familiar with the selection -- a group that seems to include most scientists in Buffalo -- say that the St. Louis researcher is the lead candidate, and that extensive talks with him about his role in Buffalo have reached the final stages.

"A formal offer has recently been extended," a knowledgeable source said. "We have a good feeling."

Skolnick was unavailable to comment.

Holm said that the two other candidates include a scientist working at the National Institutes of Health and a researcher at another unnamed academic institution.

The author of more than 230 scholarly papers, Skolnick is currently director of computational and structural biology at Danforth, where he was recruited to help establish the agriculture research center in 1999. Before that, he was a professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., for 10 years.

In published material, the plant science center described Skolnick as a "world-renowned computational biologist and informatics specialist."

The praise is backed by a track record of academic laurels from Skolnick's discoveries in how genes govern biological processes.

In 1997, he and two other researchers patented a method for predicting the shape of proteins -- which are keys to biological processes -- by analyzing and comparing them to known molecules.

In addition to serving on the review boards of scholarly journals, Skolnick was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship, a prestigious grant given to researchers with special promise.

What interests the Buffalo center's corporate partners are his commercial accomplishments. Skolnick is the scientific founder of Geneformatics, a San Diego company that performs gene research for drug and agrochemical development. The company in October raised $22 million in its third round of venture funding and recently announced a collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.

In addition to scientific credentials, the director of Buffalo's center should have "an understanding of how business can parter with the center," said Morra of Veridian.

Holm said the director will have to have a rare combination of scientific ability and leadership qualities.

Whoever leads the bioinformatics center won't lack the computing power needed for modeling molecules and imaging biological processes, officials said. UB's Center for Computational Research, already a major academic computing center, is preparing for a two-stage upgrade that will increase its peak processing power at least fourfold by the fall, Director Russ Miller said. Much of the increased power will be installed in the spring when equipment from Compaq, one of the bioinformatics center's corporate backers, is set to arrive.

Skolnick received his doctorate in chemistry from Yale in 1978, and worked in a postdoctorate role at Bell Labs the next year before joining the faculty at Louisiana State University as an assistant professor, according to his background material published byGeneformatics. In 1982, he went to Washington University in St. Louis and was promoted to full professor in 1988. The next year, he was hired as a professor in molecular biology by the Scripps Research Institute.

e-mail: fwilliams@buffnews.com
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