2001–2002 - California Sea Grant - UC San Diego

industry fellow…
NOAA’s National Sea Grant
College Program began the Sea
Grant Industry Fellows Program in 1995.
Through a national competition, the
program provides support for graduate
students pursuing research and development
projects on topics of interest to a
particular industry or company and
requires matching funds from the private
industrial sponsors.
Sea Grant Industry Fellow Christopher Stevenson worked for
GlaxoSmithKline in Philadelphia, developing a new anti-inflammatory
drug isolated from blue-green algae. Photo: UC Santa Barbara
California Sea Grant Industry Fellow Christopher Stevenson worked
at a laboratory at GlaxoSmithKline in Philadelphia, studying the
biomedical properties of scytonemin, a pigment molecule found in bluegreen
algae, one of the most primitive photosynthetic organisms on Earth. During
his tenure, Stevenson consulted with his thesis advisor, Robert Jacobs, a pharmacologist
and Sea Grant researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
who was the first to discover the pigment’s bioactivity. Stevenson also worked
closely with company researchers.
“We got together with the common goal of using this marine natural product as
an inhibitor of enzymes important in cell proliferation,” said Lisa Marshall, a
project director in the oncology department at GlaxoSmithKline. “The idea was: if
we could inhibit cell proliferation, scytonemin could potentially be an interesting
new medicine.”
Through his experiments, Stevenson was the first to show that scytonemin
inhibits aberrant cell division. He was later able to demonstrate that scytonemin
also reduces skin irritations. Stevenson’s effort lays the groundwork for an exciting
new class of medicines for treating skin inflammation, or potentially any disease
that involves aberrant cell division.
Stevenson was awarded a
Young Investigator Award at the
International Association of
Inflammation Society’s conference
in Edinburgh, Scotland, in
September 2001, and second
prize at the Inflammation
Research Association’s national
conference in October 2002.
Stevenson completed his
doctoral degree in pharmacology
from the University of California,
Santa Barbara in 2002 and
is a postdoc at Novartis in
England.
“I was in an industry setting where
there were enormous resources.
People were always available for
questions and happy to help overcome
any problems I encountered
along the way. I now have a better
understanding of what is expected of
researchers at industrial scientific
institutions.”
—Christopher Stevenson
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