For the past two decades, Steven Dowdy, now a professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has been investigating how the cell cycle stops and starts, a question key to understanding cancer. Along the way, Dowdy hit upon an efficient method for delivering large molecules into cells. The technique turned out to be useful for his cell-cycle research, but its application wasn't limited to basic science. After he filed two patent applications on his methods in 1998 and 2001 and published related work in Science (285:1569-72, 1999), bio-tech companies began asking him to give talks on the techniques and their application to drug delivery. His group has since published more than two dozen papers on ways to escort large molecules into cells, obtained an additional patent and applied for multiple others, and founded three start-up companies.
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