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Ullrich, a pioneer in cancer research and treatment, is this month launching U3 — short for Ullrich Three — his third commercial venture.
Currently director of molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, a non-profit research center near Munich, Ullrich is renowned for his research in gene technology.
As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in San Francisco in the 1970s, and later at Genentech, Ullrich worked on cloning the gene for insulin.
His research led to the development of the first commercial medical treatment, human insulin for diabetes, produced through recombinant dna technology. Since then Ullrich has been on a quest to battle cancer by concentrating on signal transduction, a means of communication between cells in the human body.
From this work came the drug Herceptin, the first treatment to aim at the cells that cause breast cancer. Ullrich’s approach is not to target the cancer cell itself but to block the mechanism that attracts blood vessels from healthy tissue to feed a tumor.
SU 5416, the signaling-inhibitor drug that he helped develop, is being studied as a potential treatment for colorectal and lung cancers as well as aids-related Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Ullrich’s U3 will attempt to identify more communication molecules that can be targeted in the war against cancer.
The Vision Thing: "If we can use target identification technology to fight tumors effectively, cancer will become a chronic disease essentially like diabetes, allowing patients to live out their normal lifespan."
Forward Spin: With gene chips and bioinformatics, it will be possible over the next five to 10 years for pathologists to analyze a malignant tumor and identify the exact cocktail of drugs needed to control its spread.
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