Profession Notes

Quark Biotech Inc. has moved its company headquarters and some research activities--lock, stock and barrel--onto the Cleveland Clinic campus, and the two are pursuing a multiyear collaboration. While industry and academia have collaborated for years, companies usually locate their headquarters off campus. This stance may be changing. Company headquarters on campuses "is not very usual, but it's becoming more and more common," says Andrei Gudkov, the newly named head of the department of molecular biology at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation's Lerner Research Institute, and principal investigator for the first company-clinic research project. "I think it's very natural at this stage, where some of the information we have about diseases in the genomics era is so rich that the feeling is that it can be translated into practically applicable findings." Unlike a National Institutes of Health grant, Quark Biotech's grant to the clinic is designed to support research that can...