The 5th SABPA Entrepreneur Symposium was held on Dec 12.  Close to 100 people came to this event despite the unusual raining weather in San Diego.  The event speaker Dr. Larry Mimms presented an evening of interesting tales of how intrapreneur can find entrepreneurship within their own employment.

Dr. Mimms started the lecture by clarifying the difference between pharmaceutical and in vitro diagnostic industry. Then he told an intricate story on how he and a team of people at Gen-Probe developed a diagnostic system to screen HIV/HCV for blood supply using a new nucleic acid based method rather than the standard immunochemistry based method. The most captivating part of his talk was how they worked with NIH (funding), FDA (regulation), Chiron (patent) and Red Cross (blood supply) to launch this unique diagnostic system. He also presented another work at Gen-Probe on developing a diagnostic test for predicting aggressive form of prostate cancer using PCA3 miRNA (biomarker). The event concluded with a lively discussion on how pharmaceuticals and diagnostic company should and could work together.

Summaried by Marie Zhang

Photo by Wei-Wei Zhang