This issue of Breathe highlights some of our young scientists undertaking unique

and nationally important biomedical research that bridges the gap between the

immediate national defense and public health needs of the country “all the way” to

the understanding of fundamental mechanisms of disease at the cellular level. One

area that has received much attention has been in drug development. We have

created two spin-off companies that focus on a number of aspects of respiratory

inflammatory disease. LRRI now has a new approach to our mission statement:

utilizing our intellectual property (either home grown or as licensed from our

partners) to commercialize products designed to rapidly improve public health.

At a cost of over a billion dollars per drug, this drug development effort is not a

process that we can undertake alone, and we have identified numerous partners

to work with in this endeavor. Our goal is to more directly meet our mission of

improving the public health while supplementing our revenue during a prolonged

period of reduced federal biomedical research funding.

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