February 13, 2010
Show Archive/Podcast: Hour 1 – Hour 2 – Hour 3 – Hour 4
Recombinomics, Inc. Founder and President, Henry L. Niman earned a PhD at the University of Southern California in 1978. His dissertation focused on feline retroviral expression in tumors in domestic cats.
He took a postdoctoral position at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation where he developed monoclonal antibody technology. He fused monoclonal antibody and synthetic peptide technologies and accepted a staff position at Scripps.
In 1982, he developed the flu monoclonal antibody, which is widely used throughout the pharmaceutical, biotech, and research industries in epitope tagging techniques. He also produced a broad panel of monoclonal antibodies against synthetic peptides of oncogenes and growth factors. These monoclonal antibodies were distributed worldwide to researchers by the National Cancer Institute. The antibodies identified novel related proteins which correlated with clinical parameters.
This technology was used to form ProgenX, a cancer diagnostic company that became Ligand Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Niman subsequently identified protein expression patterns at the University of Pittsburgh. More recently, he became interested in infectious diseases while at Harvard Medical School. He then founded Recombinomics and discovered how viruses rapidly evolve. These latest findings are the subject of recent patent filings.
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