Good­bye, San Fran­cis­co. Stan­ford spin­out heads to Hous­ton af­ter bag­ging a $20M CPRIT grant

Two years ago an as­so­ciate pro­fes­sor of bio­engi­neer­ing at Stan­ford named Jen­nifer Cochran and co-au­thor Am­a­to Gi­ac­cia came up with a new ap­proach for throw­ing a mon­key wrench in­to the me­chan­ics of metas­ta­sis. Pick­ing up on the role that a pair of Gas6 pro­teins play when they link to two Axl pro­teins — a sub­fam­i­ly of re­cep­tor ty­ro­sine ki­nas­es found on the sur­face of can­cer cells, al­low­ing them to roam from a tu­mor — they de­vel­oped a de­coy pro­tein that harm­less­ly binds to Gas6 and scram­bles the un­teth­er­ing process, ef­fec­tive­ly tak­ing it out of the bi­o­log­ic loop.

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