Officials with Vanderbilt University Medical Center announced the creation of a wholly owned subsidiary, Nashville Biosciences, to harness the power of its extensive genomic and bioinformatics resources to advance drug and diagnostics discovery and development.

The Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology (VICB) will hold a Founders’ Celebration mini-symposium on March 28 to acknowledge the contributions of its founders, Lawrence Marnett, PhD, and Ned Porter, PhD, and to celebrate 15-plus years of success as a trans-institutional scientific incubator.

MCL-1 is a member of the BCL-2 family of proteins important for blocking apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Many types of cancer cells escape the body’s effort to kill them by overexpressing MCL-1.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is recruiting volunteers to participate in a national study of an investigational vaccine against the H7N9 influenza virus, also known as “bird flu.”

K. Dane Wittrup, PhD, a pioneer in protein engineering technologies who has helped accelerate development of antibody therapies for cancer, will deliver the next Flexner Discovery Lecture on Thursday, March 22.

New agreement will pursue therapies targeting MCL1 (myeloid cell leukemia 1), which is highly prevalent in many difficult-to-treat cancers.