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New Hi-Tech Biotech Facility Hiring Scientists

A new biotech firm is opening in Bloomington that will employ hundreds of Hoosiers. Cook Pharmica, part of Cook Group Incorporated, plans to hire approximately 50 new employees this spring and hopes to grow this number to 500 to 600 in the future.

A contract manufacturing facility, Cook Pharmica will produce biopharmaceuticals (drugs produced by biological processes rather than by chemical synthesis) for both small and large biotech companies that lack the production capacity. The company will specialize in producing monoclonal antibodies, proteins produced by mammalian cell cultures that target receptors within cells and can be used to treat some diseases.  How are monoclonal antibodies grown and how do they work?

This biotech field is ripe for growth. Biopharmaceuticals currently make up about 35% of drugs produced, and it's estimated that this number will increase to 70% in 2012

According to Kathy Patterson, Human Resources Generalist for Cook Pharmica, the company is hiring in the areas purification, analytical chemistry, and cell culture.

Patterson prescreens the resumes of potential employees. When she chooses candidates to interview, she looks for experience. “If they've worked at a pharmaceutical company, they have the experience we need,” said Patterson. She also checks for applicants with knowledge of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), government guidelines for producing pharmaceutical, medical, and food products safely and consistently.

According to Patterson, students with bachelor's degrees and some laboratory experience will start out at the assistant scientist level. People with more biotech experience and with master's and doctorate's will be considered for associate and scientist positions.

How are you going to get this experience before graduation? Internships. And Cook Pharmica offers paid internships. To apply for a job or internship, e-mail your resume and cover letter to employment@cookpharmica.com . Note on your resume if you're applying for an internship.

Monoclonal Antibodies - Bounty Hunters of the Body

With monoclonal antibodies, researchers hope to find an effective way to treat diseases like cancer. Unlike chemotherapy and radiation treatments, which kill normal cells along with the diseased cells, the hope with monoclonal antibodies is that they can find, bind, and destroy only the diseased cells. But how do you make monoclonal antibodies and how do they work? Professor Susan Strome from the Department of Biology explains.

When your body detects the presence of a foreign substance and mounts an immune response, it produces many different antibodies in the blood that can recognize that foreign substance. These antibodies search through the body for the foreign substance "antigens" that triggered the response, and once they find those antigens, they bind to them.

The specificity of this "search and find mechanism" makes antibodies a powerful agent for human therapy, explained Strome. To target only diseased cells, however, you need to isolate the cells that produce the right antibody for the job and make lots of that antibody. The general scheme for making monoclonal antibodies, said Strome, involves "immunizing mice with foreign proteins or cells, dissecting out their spleens, immortalizing the antibody-producing spleen cells, so that they will grow indefinitely in tissue culture, and then finding those immortalized cells that make the antibody you need."

"If you inject particular cancer cells into an animal, then some of the antibodies will recognize what is foreign and hopefully cancer-specific on those cells. If you can immortalize and identify the antibody-producing cells that detect the cancer cells, then you have bullet-like proteins that can go find and destroy those cancer cells," continued Strome. How monoclonal antibody therapy kills the diseased cells is not known.

According to Strome, research on monoclonal antibodies has existed for around 30 years and its use with cancer therapy has been on people's minds for decades. However, developing "magic bullets," antibodies that detect only particular cancer cells and not normal cells, has been a long difficult process. Treatment of breast cancer by antibodies to the HER2 receptor is one of the success stories.