WNY – major chemical industries in early/mid 1900s and dumped a lot of chemicals in ground

Interested in modeling mud flows and lava flows and volcanic plumes – end goal is to predict where flows will occur

•(has 4 heme groups that combine 4 oxygens) – usually find either all or none of hemes bound with O2 •Want to know after bind a single oxygen why affinity for binding other oxygens go up •During simulation – oxygen is bound to lower heme and then see that phenyl group rotates out of the way, which allows another O2 to bind to the top heme •Bottom line is that binding of an Oxygen to lower Phe group produces a structural change at the other Heme location – provides greater access to oxygen

•PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) Test for early detection of Prostate Cancer – IP owned by RPCI – receive royalties •Avonex – most widely prescribed drug for relapsing MS – first treatment shown to slow progress of the disease – approved in 1996 - developed by Larry Jacobs group – sold by Biogen ($0.5B per year) – WNY/UB doesn’t receive any direct funds from the sale of Avonex •Nicorette Gum – Developed by professor doing decompression studies on sailors who needed to keep taking a break to smoke a cigarette, so developed this to enable him to finish his decompression studies – do we make anything?? •Tarantula Venom – prevent atrial fibrillation, which is a leading cause of death following a heart attack – so far, works for rabbits (Fred Sachs) •Developed and patented a high-throughput search process for structural biology that tests 1536 “chemical cocktails” to enhance method of crystallization.

•Example on Vancomycin is a good example – drug that interacts with particular protein to keep cell wall from healing •Developed modifications of Vanco to make it bind more effectively to protein produced by bacteria