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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