UNC Doc, Entrepreneur Wins Award

An entrepreneurial Chapel Hill physician whose research commercialization has been helped by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center has won a prestigious national award.

Cam Patterson, M.D., MBA, division chief of cardiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, will receive the 2012 North America Vascular Biology Organization's Judah Folkman Award in Vascular Biology.

The Biotechnology Center funded Patterson’s lab with a $112,500 Institutional Development Grant in 2001 to help buy some equipment to propel his research. Subsequently he co-founded a Chapel Hill bioscience company, Enci Therapeutics, with Nancy Klauber-DeMore, M.D., a UNC surgical oncologist who serves as Enci’s chief scientific officer.

Enci is developing a product to block malignant tumor growth by preventing a process called angiogenesis, which means the formation of blood vessels. The company is also participating in the Biotechnology Center’s Business Acceleration and Technology Out-licensing Network (BATON) program.

Patterson is also in the process of forming a second Chapel Hill start-up bioscience company called Clave Biodesign.

The Folkman award recognizes outstanding contributions from vascular biologists who are at mid-career – no more than 15 years past their first faculty appointment.

Patterson will present the Judah Folkman Award Lecture during the NAVBO Workshops in Vascular Biology 2012 to be held in Pacific Grove, California at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012. At a ceremony following the lecture, Patterson will receive a plaque to commemorate the event and a monetary award.

Moses Judah Folkman, M.D., was a Harvard Medical School professor best known as the founder  of angiogenesis research and honored for his research on tumor angiogenesis.

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