It was like being asked to start a monoclonal antibody therapeutics company in the late seventies or early eighties with founding technology (and IP) from Georges Kohler and César Milstein. At the same time, it was clear that achieving delivery of siRNA would be the technology’s key hurdle.ĭriving into work each morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about the potential of RNAi as a new approach. Although content at Millennium, I began to dig into RNAi further, clearly recognizing its potential to create a new class of innovative medicines. It’s hard to decline a meeting with Phil, and I spoke to him later that summer. They wondered if I might be interested in joining Alnylam as CEO, and suggested a follow-up meeting with Phil to hear his thoughts on the science. In a call with Jean-Francois Formela and Peter Barrett at Atlas Ventures in the early summer of 2002, I learned that they had joined Bob Nelson at Arch Ventures as Series B investors to round out the Alnylam syndicate. Paul’s favorite aunt was an Arabic scholar, and “al nilam” means “string of pearls” (a nod to the strands of nucleotides in RNA) as well as being the name of the central star of Orion’s belt. Paul (at Phil’s request) was there to help navigate the world of startups, and he has the distinction of having changed the company’s blasé original name of ‘Precision Therapeutics’ to ‘Alnylam Pharmaceutics’. Phil and his four collaborators were joined by the Scripps Research scientist and bioentrepreneur Paul Schimmel as company founders. Christoph brought intensity and passion to this effort, while John brought some needed gray hair and wrinkles. Christoph Westphal, then at Polaris Ventures, and John Clarke of Cardinal Partners had seeded the new company with a $2.5 million Series A round of financing. Within a year, I began to hear of Alnylam’s beginnings. Millennium thus became one of the first licensees for the ‘Tuschl I’ and ‘Tuschl II’ patents for research use. But after conferring with his collaborators and MIT’s technology license office guru, Lita Nelsen, Phil proposed a nonexclusive research license and indicated reluctance about starting a therapeutics company. For a company toiling in post-genomics research, as Millennium was, a tool to interrogate gene function by specifically silencing any single mRNA would be immensely powerful.ĭays after the meeting, I called Phil to inform him that Millennium would be interested in an exclusive license to the RNAi IP for research use and would be open to investing in a new company to explore the therapeutic potential of siRNA. The significance of the findings was immediately clear. Tuschl presented the findings from his laboratory (later published in Nature in May 2001 2) showing that synthetic small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) could mediate targeted gene silencing through a sequence-based mechanism in mammalian cells. Within a matter of weeks, a group of Millennium scientists met with Phil, Dave Bartel (Whitehead Institute), Phil Zamore (University of Massachusetts) and Tom Tuschl (then at the Max Planck Institute, now at Rockefeller University). I didn’t know much about RNAi at the time and had the general impression that it was a biological process limited to invertebrates and plants. In our call, Phil wanted to know if Millennium was interested in learning more about the work he and collaborators had conducted on RNAi and mammalian cells. Phil and I had a longstanding relationship from my decade-long tenure at Biogen, where he was a founder, board director and chair of the scientific advisory board. The vignette containing a step-by-step tutorial for using RNewsflow can be called from within R.In early 2001, while at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, I received a phone call from Phil Sharp, a well-known Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor and Nobel laureate. Install_github("kasperwelbers/RNewsflow") Vignette You can install the development version of RNewsflow directly from github: library(devtools) Furthermore, the package introduces an approach for analyzing the news similarity data as a network, and includes various functions to analyze and visualize this network. By using a sliding window approach to only compare messages within a given time distance, many sources can be compared over long periods of time. The content of news messages is compared using techniques from the field of information retrieval, similar to plagiarism detection. RNewsflow provides tools for analyzing content homogeneity and diffusion patterns using computational text analysis. Given the sheer amount of news sources in the digital age (e.g., newspapers, blogs, social media) it has become difficult to determine where news is first introduced and how it diffuses across sources. RNewsflow: Tools for analyzing content homogeneity and news diffusion using computational text analysis
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