BioSTL

The Danforth Plant Science Center, already a biotech powerhouse, has decided to find strength in numbers by becoming a founding member of the Association of Independent Plant Research Institutes.

After roughly two years of planning, the initiative links Danforth Center with three similar facilities around the nation to increase communication, win grants and bolster the organizations' collective voice in setting the legislative agenda on the national level. In the end, the hope is to boost the growing field of plant sciences and increase the flow of research dollars. The center announced the collaboration in a news release issued Tuesday.

Like any good fishing trip, the effort to nurture entrepreneurs in St. Louis generates stories about the ones that got away. Too often, startup companies with promising technologies move to California or elsewhere in search of funding.

In the past couple of years, though, St. Louis has landed some catches of its own. Lured by the area's rich research assets and a growing number of funding sources, entrepreneurs have moved here from places such as Louisville, Nashville and upstate New York.

The city's biggest science park is about to get bigger.

CORTEX is poised to start construction next spring on a $120 million expansion that will nearly double its campus in the Central West End, said president Dennis Lower.

The Missouri Botanical Garden is one of the world’s largest repositories of data about plants, data that exists in several forms.

All of this data, from books to scanned images to specimen labels, will be online within a few years. The garden is even building API tools so others can write apps to mine it all.

BioGenerator, a St. Louis-based nonprofit investment fund led by President Eric Gulve, has launched a new “Entrepreneur In Residence” program aimed at attracting experienced bioscience entrepreneurs to St. Louis.

BioGenerator hired Harry Arader, a pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry veteran, as senior entrepreneurial adviser and the inaugural member of its new program.

The Missouri Legislature has acquired a do-nothing reputation lately, but you won't hear folks in the biotechnology industry applying that label.

Legislators passed only two bills during their fall special session, but one of them was the Missouri Science and Innovation Research Act, a longtime priority for local technology boosters. MOSIRA sets up a funding source for state investments in venture capital and high-tech research.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon signed Senate Bill 7, the Missouri Science and Innovation Reinvestment Act (MOSIRA) into law on Friday, October 21, 2011, following passage through a legislative special session.

Governor Nixon, who hailed the bill as a landmark economic development tool, said MOSIRA will provide a funding source for a wide range of programs designed to create jobs, nurture start-ups and attract technology companies to the state.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon signed Senate Bill 7, the Missouri Science and Innovation Reinvestment Act (MOSIRA) into law on Friday, October 21, 2011, following passage through a legislative special session.

Governor Nixon, who hailed the bill as a landmark economic development tool, said MOSIRA will provide a funding source for a wide range of programs designed to create jobs, nurture start-ups and attract technology companies to the state.

Gov. Jay Nixon today signed Senate Bill 7, the Missouri Science and Innovation Reinvestment Act (MOSIRA), passed by the General Assembly during the special session. Passage of the MOSIRA bill was one of the key elements in Gov. Nixon's call for a special session, and he praised the bill as an important tool to create the jobs of the future in Missouri.

"Many of the jobs and careers of the future will be created by emerging high-tech companies, and we need to encourage investment by these businesses here in Missouri," Gov. Nixon said. "The MOSIRA bill will be a valuable tool to encourage more start-up companies in science and technology to join what is an already growing area for the Show-Me State and our economy. Through MOSIRA, that continued growth will generate even more expansion in research and technology."

A new regional organization to champion St. Louis bioscience, BioSTL (evolved from the Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences), announced today a $30 million commitment from Washington University in St. Louis, BJC HealthCare, and the St. Louis Life Sciences Project to forward bioscience company creation and drive economic growth in St. Louis. These funds will increase the region’s capacity to support entrepreneurs and launch BioSTL itself, the next step in St. Louis’ 10-year-old collective effort to increase economic activity in the medical and plant biosciences.

The three funding organizations have each committed $2 million per year for five years, for a combined total of $30 million. A majority of these new funds will be dedicated to pre-seed and seed investments and associated support for newly-created enterprises. These early-stage investments will help transform innovations from local institutions and entrepreneurs into new companies and new jobs in the St. Louis region.

Researchers at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center have landed a $5.5 million government grant that will support work on biofuels — and the expanding mission of the center.

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a consortium of researchers, led by a Danforth scientist, the grant to work on an oilseed plant called camelina, which is related to canola and shows promise as a biodiesel fuel. The scientists will engineer the camelina plant to become more productive, and potentially to serve as a commercial alternative to petroleum-based fuels.

The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center announced Friday that it has hired new scientists for its expansion efforts after an extensive global search.

The scientists, who recently received $16 million in grant funding from federal research organizations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will work in next-generation biofuels, computational biology and new technologies.

Written along the 3 billion letters that make up our genetic code are clues to the origins of cancer. Researchers at the Genome Institute at Washington University have been deciphering those clues by "reading" the letters of the genetic code (A's, C's, G's and T's) so they can figure out what turns normal cells cancerous.

They're comparing all of the DNA — called the genome — in cells from tumors to all of the DNA in normal cells from the same person. So far, they've made these comparisons in hundreds of people.

In a region known for its turf battles, the creation and funding of BioSTL, an umbrella organization that encourages and supports St. Louis’ biotech community, is an important step toward a coordinated platform that attracts national attention and, more importantly, intellectual and venture capital.

The $30 million pledged over the next five years is private money from Washington University, BJC HealthCare and the Danforth and McDonnell foundations, all longtime supporters of biotech.

The scientific talent has been in St. Louis for years. The keys to transforming that talent into viable business — money and infrastructure — have not.

So on Tuesday a handful of the region's prominent research institutions and life sciences supporters took a step toward transforming St. Louis into a biosciences powerhouse they hope will rival coastal competitors.

Donn Rubin will tell you it’s not very flashy.

“We’re not trying to build an empire here,” he laughs.

A nondescript Clayton storefront on Forsyth Boulevard seems an unlikely place from which to run an imperial entity anyway. Yet for the dozens who gathered Tuesday afternoon to celebrate the birth of the organization Rubin now runs -- BioSTL -- there was plenty of excitement.

The Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences is evolving into BioSTL, a new organization to promote the growth of bioscience business in the St. Louis area, and has received an initial $30 million funding commitment.

Washington University, BJC HealthCare and  the St. Louis Life Sciences Project have each committed $2 million per year for each of five years to the BioSTL, what organizers call “the next step” in a 10-year-old collective effort to increase economic activity in the medical and plant biosciences in St. Louis.

A new coalition to push the St. Louis region's bioscience research efforts and industry announced Tuesday morning a $30 million commitment from three funding organizations.

The group, which will be known as BioSTL, evolved out of the Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences, which has worked for the past decade to bring bioscience growth to the area.

Legislation creating long-sought state subsidies for those investing in small Missouri-based life sciences companies finally is headed for Gov. Jay Nixon’s desk.

On Friday, the Missouri House approved Senate Bill 7, which creates the Missouri Science and Innovation Reinvestment Act (MOSIRA).

A St. Louis coalition will receive a multi-agency federal grant of approximately $1.75 million to help create jobs and accelerate innovations in the region’s bioscience industry.

The grant, one of only 20 awarded across the U.S., was awarded based on the strength of the St. Louis region’s bioscience sector.

Washington University has the nation's sixth-best graduate and undergraduate programs for educating entrepreneurs, according to new rankings by Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine.

According to the magazine, Washington U's Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies has 709 undergraduate and 220 graduate students. In addition to traditional classroom work, Skandalaris' programs include IdeaBounce, in which would-be entrepreneurs present their ideas to experienced business people, and the Olin Cup, an annual competition that invests $5,000 in a winning student's start-up company.

The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur said Tuesday it received additional funding totaling $11.9 million for its research to make the cassava plant resistant to viruses to help boost crop yields and reduce poverty and famine in sub-Saharan Africa.

The additional funding came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($5.6 million), The Monsanto Fund ($5.4 million) and the Howard Buffett Foundation ($860,000). The project is also supported by USAID from the American people ($2.5 million).For years, the people who are trying to build a biotech industry in St. Louis say they have been doing so with one hand tied behind their back.

Some heart problems are ticking time bombs, and doctors at Missouri Baptist Medical Center in St. Louis are utilizing a new technology to cure certain patients. For patients who suffer from an irregular heartbeat — known as cardia arrhythmia — a heart attack can happen at any time.

Roger Beachy's office in the Busch laboratory building at Washington University occupies a second-floor corner where he can watch students walk between Graham Chapel and Olin Library and contemplate the statue of a rabbit mimicking Rodin's famous thinker pose.

Decorations on the walls and bookshelves show the range of his recent career as the first head of the Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur, then first director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a post he held for 20 months. The agency was created as part of the 2008 farm bill.

The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur ranked eighth in The Scientist Magazine’s 2011 "Best Places to Work in Academia" survey, up from No. 18 last year.

The survey is completed by respondents identified as life scientists with a permanent position in an academic, hospital, government or research organization. This year, the survey received more than 2,200 qualified responses ranking a total of 111 organizations, including 92 from the United States and 19 international organizations.

The Earth has more than 300,000 known plant species. With such variety, it's possible to believe that plant conservation is not a priority. But for Porter P. Lowry II, and fellow plant conservation scientists, every one of those different species of plants is crucial for life on Earth.

"Plants are important to people. We currently use a small number of plants for most of our needs, but the potential among all of the rest of the plants on Earth is there. Every species that we lose reduces the potential value of Earth's plants that we can use," Lowry said. "Plants provide the framework for all of life on Earth."

If St. Louis hopes to build up its biotech industry, it will need both cash and brainpower. Now the people who are trying to grow it here are using a little of the first to tap a lot of the second.

The BioGenerator, an arm of the Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences, said Tuesday that it is investing $50,000 from its Spark Fund into a new firm designed to help drug startups grow. SARmont will be a contract research organization (CRO) housed at BioGenerator's Central West End facility. It will work with researchers and investors who are trying to bring new drugs to the market.

Just east of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, along the south side of Interstate 70, sits one of St. Louis' most advanced biotechnology facilities.

Until recently, it also was one of the most endangered. Centocor, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, had made clear in 2007 that the drugmaking plant in Berkeley didn't fit into its long-term plans. For more than three years, workers toiled under a cloud of uncertainty.

Local biotech startup C2N Diagnostics LLC is leading the way in finding new, more effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders through a unique metabolic labeling technology.

The technology, stable isotope-linked kinetics (SILK), was discovered at Washington University School of Medicine by Drs. Randall Bateman and David Holtzman. The technique allows tracking of the brain’s production and clearance of amyloid beta, a protein that’s closely linked to the disease. This gives scientists insights into the progression of the disease and enables physicians to start an effective course of treatment before the patient exhibits clinical symptoms. The SILK technology was recognized by Scientific American as one of the top 50 scientific advancements in 2006. C2N was founded in 2007 when Bateman and Holtzman partnered with LifeTech Research Inc. of Baltimore to look for a way to commercialize the technology.

The Howard G. Buffett Foundation has given a $4 million grant to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and Dupont to bring healthier sorghum to underserved communities in Africa.

The foundation is steered by Howard Graham Buffett, the eldest son of famous investor Warren Buffett.

The biotech incubator BRDG Park has landed an exotic new tenant — one that promises 80 new jobs and helps solidify the region's international reputation.

On Tuesday, BRDG Park President Sam Fiorello and Gov. Jay Nixon announced that SyMyco, a plant science company and subsidiary of New Delhi, India-based Symbiotic Sciences will base its American operations in BRDG Park's labs, which are part of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. SyMyco's research focuses on increasing crops yields, nutrient uptake and carbon recapture through certain fungi.

Plant science company SyMyCo plans to add 80 new jobs at the Bio-Research and Development Growth Park at the Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur.

Gov. Jay Nixon held a news conference at the incubator Tuesday afternoon to announce the new jobs and tour of the company’s laboratory there.

For years, the people who are trying to build a biotech industry in St. Louis say they have been doing so with one hand tied behind their back.

This week may provide the best chance yet for that hand to be cut loose.

Researchers working to develop genetically modified, nutrient-dense cassava got another major boost Wednesday with an $8.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
For the past seven years, scientists at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center have been developing a cassava genetically engineered to contain nutrients or resist disease.

Washington University's David van Essen is working on a $30-million project that he says is essentially a matter of "the human brain trying to understand the human brain." And thanks to cutting-edge technology, the brains at nine institutions nationwide are making substantial progress.

Van Essen is the lead investigator for the Human Connectome project that is aimed at creating a wiring diagram for the brain in the next five years. The hope is that the research could someday lead to therapies for neurological and psychological disorders.

Six startups can expect backing totaling at least $900,000 from the St. Louis Arch Angels.

The seed capital fund plans to invest a minimum of $150,000 into each startup, said Gil Bickel III, chairman of the group of wealthy, private investors.

The $30 million Human Connectome project, a consortium of nine institutions, is aimed at creating a wiring diagram for the brain in the next five years. The hope is that the research could someday lead to therapies for neurological and psychological disorders. And thanks to cutting-edge technology, the brains at nine institutions nationwide are making substantial progress.

The main imaging tool for the Connectome Project will be magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Many of us have undergone MRI scans that produce a three-dimensional image of soft tissue anatomy. This type of MRI will be just one of the scans done on the Connectome subjects. The MR scanner is versatile. Changing the settings allows its computer to generate images based on properties of various molecules.

Few have a better view of St. Louis’ biotech pipeline than Eric Gulve.

As president of BioGenerator, an incubator for early stage bio-science businesses, Gulve directs the financing and nurturing of a half-dozen businesses he hopes could one day be the region’s next Monsanto.

Last fall, the federal government said Missouri would get $26.9 million to help boost small business. Tuesday, Gov. Jay Nixon outlined exactly how.

Most of the money, allocated through the Treasury Department's $1.5 billion State Small Business Credit Initiative, will be used to plug what's long been called a gaping hole in Missouri's high-tech sector: Early-stage financing for startups.

Duke Creighton’s biotech startup Pulse Therapeutics Inc. hasn’t lost its pulse.

Pulse had burned through much of its initial capital, spending it on research to show that its novel way to treat stroke victims works.

Derek Rapp has sat on both sides of the table. As head of acquisitions at Monsanto, he helped the Creve Coeur-based agricultural giant buy other companies. Now his St. Louis biotech company, Divergence, has been bought by Monsanto.

Privately-held Divergence works to fight against parasitic nematodes, an agricultural pest, by developing nematicides. The roundworms cost farmers billions of dollars in damages each year to crops like corn, soy, cotton and vegetables.

A Washington University student’s invention is expected to make surgeries, particularly brain operations, easier and more successful.

Synthetic dural substitutes used to mend membranes during surgeries are often inflexible and made of molecules so large, the body often walls them off as foreign objects.

Venture capital investments in St. Louis more than doubled last year, reaching $39 million on 11 deals.

That’s up from $18.1 million on nine deals in the St. Louis area in 2009. But venture capital firms were playing a more conservative game in 2010 — funneling most of their cash into existing businesses and little into early-stage companies.

Partnerships between research scientists and higher education are not unusual.

But the one forged between St. Louis Community College and the BioResearch and Development Growth Park is unique. It allows undergraduate students to work closely with top-drawer scientists at the research facility, adjacent to the Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur.

After giving away $1.25 billion over its 84-year run, the Danforth Foundation will bow out of the region's philanthropic community, leaving a parting gift to the one institution it says promises the brightest future for the St. Louis area.

On Friday morning, brothers John and Dr. William Danforth, stood inside the soaring atrium of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, pledging the center $70 million, their family foundation's last major largesse.

Today the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew announce the online publication of The Plant List, the world’s first database of all land plant species. The Plant List includes all accepted botanical names and their synonyms, as well as a number of names whose status as accepted or synonym is unresolved in the current literature.

“If we want to conserve plants, we need to know what species there are,” said Peter Wyse Jackson, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden. “We all need to work from the same page.”

[N]eighborhood-level solutions are just one part of building a competitive economy. The region needs industry, too.
In a midsize market like St. Louis, that often means focusing on a few strong sectors, building "clusters" that can compete globally. Here, that includes logistics, financial services, aerospace and information technology, fields where St. Louis has several big companies and a host of suppliers and satellites.

The Center for Emerging Technologies (CET) has received grants totaling $585,000 to lead a new training program designed to help first-time bioscience entrepreneurs launch new companies.

“We have a substantial shortage of bioscience entrepreneurs,” said Marcia Mellitz, president and CEO of CET. She said her organization has been working for more than a year to develop the Bio Entrepreneur Development program. It will target individuals who were laid off from the region’s bioscience companies.

St. Louis County’s own double Helix is already paying dividends for bioscience businesses, and county officials hope it will boost the region’s economy the way the discovery of the DNA double helix galvanized genetic research 60 years ago.

The Center for Emerging Technologies (CET), the primary business incubator for life science companies in St. Louis, is combining operations with CORTEX, the local organization that oversees the Midtown biotech research district.

The deal will place the two small but influential nonprofits — their combined budgets are less than $3.5 million — under a single management structure controlled by CORTEX, which hired Dennis Lower as president and CEO in May. The change, effective Nov. 12, has been under discussion for more than a year and is designed to create jobs and highlight St. Louis as a center for innovation.

"Nanotechnology is not science fiction. It is science. It's not just 'Honey, I shrunk the kids,' but a potential solution to many real-world problems we face."

Sen. Christopher S. "Kit" Bond ended his keynote speech at the 2010 Missouri NanoFrontiers Symposium with this endorsement of the new technology and exhorted the attending scientists and businesspeople to bring the discoveries of the laboratory into the home, the hospital and the battlefield.

Maurice Green, a prominent Saint Louis University virologist, went out of his way not to push his children toward medical careers. But it didn't take long for him to realize that the younger generation had inherited his interest in science.

Green's oldest child, Michael, asked for a microscope around his 10th birthday and later worked at his father's laboratory at SLU School of Medicine. His youngest, Eric, was in preschool when he began accompanying the elder Green to his lab on weekends.

In the beginning, there was Gatorade.

Well, maybe not at the very beginning, but the sports energy drink may be the most prominent example of how university research can be turned into a profitable product -- "a blockbuster," in the words of Washington University Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton.

Global Patent Group moved its life sciences and pharmaceutical focused patent law firm to the BioResearch and Development Growth Park at the Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur.

The firm, led by founder and managing partner Dennis Bennett, has in-house global patent filing and prosecution capabilities, and serves life science and pharmaceutical industries, from major corporations to venture capital start-ups.

When drug giant Pfizer Inc. shuttered its research facilities in Chesterfield last year, hundreds of scientists started looking for jobs in other parts of the country.

But a handful had an idea they hoped could evolve into a business that would allow them — along with their Ph.D.'s and potentially lucrative talents — to stay here.

Creative business ideas bubble up from underground every day. Making one take flight is a lot more complicated. It takes vision, yes, but it also takes capital. It takes marketing muscle, for sure, but also proof that the idea works.

Efforts to create businesses around scientific innovations in the St. Louis region got an important boost Thursday through a $1 million government grant.

The grant was awarded to a collective of area research and business entities headed by the Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences and BioGenerator — area organizations working to help the region capitalize on the scientific innovation taking place here.

A small office building St. Louis County bought in March will become the Helix Center, a $7.5 million incubator for new businesses in the region's bioscience industry.

The center, scheduled for completion early next year, will be for "very early" startup firms seeking office and lab space, said Denny Coleman, president of the St. Louis County Economic Council.

St. Louis County hopes that establishment of its own version of the double helix will do for bioscience research and development here what discovery of the double helix structure of DNA did for science nearly 60 years ago.

The $1.5 million Helix Fund is designed to provide seed money for startup businesses in the plant and life sciences. The Helix Center, located in 33,000 square feet at 1100 Corporate Square in Creve Coeur, will provide office and lab space to entrepreneurial scientists who are trying to grow their ideas into businesses.

Converting scientific research into products and practices that help feed more people more productively is not simply a matter of better seeds or advanced technology, the chairman and CEO of Monsanto says.

Making the most progress will require the ability to nurture partnerships, Hugh Grant (right) said Thursday, and St. Louis provides fertile conditions to nourish collaborations between private industry and nonprofit institutions that can lead to breakthroughs in agriculture and biotechnology.

Women who are diagnosed with breast cancer may soon be helped by a discovery made in 1880 by Alexander Graham Bell.

Currently, the removal of the lymph nodes draining the breast is a routine diagnostic procedure to see whether the cancer has spread. The surgery is invasive and often has significant side effects, including fluid retention, swelling and limited range of motion. In most cases—80 percent—the test shows that the cancer hasn't spread. That is a relief to the patient. But both doctors and patients have long hoped for a way to learn these results without surgery.

In a first-of-a-kind collaboration between academia and industry, Pfizer Inc. will give scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis unprecedented access to information regarding more than 500 pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical candidates in a partnership that focuses on discovering new uses for existing compounds.

Under the five-year, $22.5 million agreement announced Monday, May 17, Pfizer will provide access for Washington University scientists to view extensive research data on a large array of Pfizer pharmaceutical candidates that are or were in clinical testing.

I didn't have room in today's column to mention all of the 11 St. Louis-area companies that made presentations at Thursday's InvestMidwest Venture Capital Forum. It's an interesting list, so here are a few details on each:

• Roger Beachy, National Institute of Food and Agriculture
• Donn Rubin, Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences
• John Dubinsky, CORTEX
• Vicki Gonzalez, Nidus Center for Scientific Enterprise
• Marcia Mellitz, Center for Emerging Technologies
• Peter Raven, Missouri Botanical Garden
• Robb Fraley, Monsanto
• Sam Fiorello, Bio-Research & Development Growth Park

Pepex Biomedical, Inc., a privately held company that has developed an all new proprietary sensor technology known as "CCM™", announced today it has reached an agreement with The Tech Group , a division of West Pharmaceuticals Services, Inc., to be the premier manufacturer of the Trio™ systems and sensor modules. 

Sigma-Aldrich Corp. said today that it has agreed to acquire biopharmaceutical testing company BioReliance Holdings Inc. from Avista Capital Partners for $350 million in cash. Rockville, Md.-based BioReliance Holdings provides biologic, specialized toxicology and animal health testing to pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical, diagnostics and other life science companies.

Appistry, Inc., the world's best company at solving complex, data intensive problems, today announced the opening of its new corporate headquarters in The Art of Living Building--located in downtown St. Louis.

For years, many people have said this region doesn't do enough to boost entrepreneurship. Now some of those people are putting some money where their mouth is. A group of local businessmen today will unveil Arch Grants, a new program designed as a national competition to bring entrepreneurs to St. Louis by giving the best of them $50,000 apiece to start a company here.

The National Science Foundation said today it awarded $1.3 million to support research to reduce the amount of fertilizer required to grow corn, and a researcher at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur is leading the project.

Today, I was pleased to join St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and colleagues from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (DOL/ETA) at an event to spotlight federal investments that are catalyzing the growth of the critical, job-creating St. Louis biosciences cluster.

Officials from three federal agencies visited St. Louis on Tuesday to applaud the region's efforts to boost bioscience businesses. Matt S. Erskine, of the Economic Development Administration; Lance Potts, of the Employment and Training Administration; and Pat Brown-Dixon of the Small Business Administration gathered at the Center for Emerging Technologies, in the Central West End to congratulate the city's bioscience business leaders for receiving two major grants in recent years.

St. Louis was one of 20 sites selected for the Obama administration's initiative to invest $1.8 million into local high-tech industry. The metropolitan area was the only strictly bioscientific cluster in the nation included in the award, which saw about 130 applicants.

CORTEX life-sciences campus' big expansion in the Central West End will include a public plaza and perhaps a new MetroLink station. Final agreements on projects totaling $140 million should be reached by March with construction soon afterward, said Dennis Lower, president of CORTEX. The projects will double its office and lab space to about 800,000 square feet.

A new collaboration using high-performance pipeline automation technology has been initiated to accelerate next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics capabilities. Moreover, the collaborative program supports the advancement of bioinformatics, genetic pipelines, and applied high-performance computing.

Mobius Therapeutics LLC officials said today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted final approval for the company’s new drug for glaucoma surgery, Mitosol.

Mobius Therapeutics LLC, a St. Louis-based life sciences company, won approval Wednesday from the Food and Drug Administration to manufacture and sell an improved version of a chemical compound used in eye surgery.