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The University Of California Santa Barbara College of Engineering
The University Of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) College of Engineering is a worldwide leading entity in the field of bioengineering, chemical and computational engineering, materials science, nanotechnology and physics. UCSB has had four Nobel prize winners in sciences and engineering and one recipient of the international Millennium Technology Prize. Both students and professors delve deep in a cross-discipline and business oriented ambiance. Research done at this higher learning institution is often cited among scientists, a testament to the relevance of the faculty's work. The College of Engineering is always looking for opportunities to grow and is not against establishing fruitful alliances.
Frank Doyle, PhD, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Associate Director of the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (CB) at UCSB personifies this spirit, as the CB that he heads started a collaborative effort in 2008 with Pfizer (developers of the chemical Sildenafil), three other top research universities, Caltech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Massachusetts, and with Entelos, a physiological modeling company. The goal is to identify new targets for medications to treat diabetes. The three year project, called Insulin Resistance Pathway, was funded by Pfizer with a $14 million contribution, and overseen by Pfizer's Worldwide Exploratory Science & Technology organization senior director Preston Hensley, PhD.
The project's duties were broken down as follows: first, Pfizer, MIT and University of Massachusetts researchers performed data collection and analyses, which were then passed on to computational groups at MIT, Caltech and UCSB. The UCSB team was responsible for assessing the data provided by other computational groups and coming up with mathematical models of insulin signaling pathways; those models were then applied to detect targets for therapeutic action. If this stage of the project succeeded it was expected that follow up two year stage would expand this research to insulin susceptible tissues like liver, muscle and potentially hypothalamic or beta cells.