Cellular Makeup
Paradigm magazine | Fall 2003
By Kelli Whitlock
David Sabatini was studying a group of proteins that control cell growth when he hit a roadblock. He needed to exam-ine gene and protein function in thou-sands of living cells all at once, in real time—something not possible with conventional technology.
So, Sabatini did what many scientists do when faced with such a dilemma: He invented a new technique to help him figure out the relationship
between genes, proteins, and human diseases.
That was two years ago. This spring, Sabatini and Whitehead Institute, where Sabatini is an Associate Member, received a U.S. patent for the technology. Cell microarrays, as they’re called, make possible the study of thousands of proteins simultaneously in a living cell. The invention also gave Sabatini an opportunity to merge intellectual curiosity with a process that has aided many scientists with unlimited ideas, but limited resources: commercialization.
Business lessons in the lab
As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Sabatini entered the lab knowing that commercialization was an important part of scientific discovery. His first steps into that field weren’t as tentative as they may have been for researchers prior to 1980. That year, Congress passed the Bayh-Doyle Act, which removed barriers preventing institutions that receive federal funds from jumping into the world of technology transfer—a process by which universities and research institutes transfer their faculty’s inventions and discoveries to businesses for commercial development. A 2000 report from the Association of University Technology Managers found that more than 300 new products—drugs, materials, diagnostics, etc.—were made available to consumers in that year alone, all developed from academic discoveries.
“I came in knowing that commercialization could be useful, and in fact, interesting,” Sabatini says. His discovery launched Akceli, a Cambridge-based company that Sabatini helped create.
“This is all an extension of the intellectual domain of the lab,” Sabatini says. “They’re doing things at Akceli that I don’t have the resources or time to do in my lab here.”
Many biologists like Sabatini have created tools to carry their research to the next level. But they must direct their time and resources to their science, not product development. By licensing the cell microarray to Akceli, Sabatini could focus on his research without worrying that his technology would languish. Akceli will prepare the microarrays for distribution and, in the future, researchers around the world can use them to advance genetic studies.
The Path to Discovery
When Sabatini joined Whitehead in 1997 as a Fellow, avail-able arrays allowed him to study only a fraction of what high-throughput technology makes possible today. When the first high-throughput arrays were put into use, scientists finally were able to run assays on thousands of cells and genes all at once, an advance that led to a better understanding of life at the molecular level.
Sabatini took things a step further with his cell microarray, which uses small glass slides printed with as many as 10,000 pieces of DNA that encode individual proteins or RNA molecules that inhibit the expression of specific proteins. Clusters of live cells are grown on the surface of the slide in defined areas called “features,” where the DNA is imprinted. The cells absorb the DNA, and begin expressing whatever protein for which the DNA in that feature codes. Sabatini’s technique can be used to assay the location of proteins, study their function, and predict their reaction to pathogens and drugs designed to attack those pathogens.
Adding “inventor” to his list of accomplishments gives the 33-year-old biologist pause. To him, creating the cell microarray technology was a necessary step along the path of scientific discovery. “It was just something we developed along the way.”