City of Hope Is Leader in Field

One of the key launch points for the modern biotechnology industry was not in the Bay Area or San Diego or Cambridge, Massachusetts: It took place some 50 years ago in the San Gabriel Valley at the City of Hope research center and cancer hospital in Duarte.

That’s when and where a team of researchers, led by the late Arthur Riggs and the still-living Keiichi Itakura made one of the first therapeutic uses of recombinant DNA technology to genetically modify bacteria.

That enabled them to produce synthetic insulin, which in ensuing decades would become the lifeblood for many patients suffering from diabetes.

Riggs and Itakura teamed up with Herbert Boyer, one of the founders of a then little-known startup called Genentech to develop the synthetic insulin; they eventually licensed their technology to Genentech.

In 1982 Genentech, in partnership with pharma giant Eli Lilly and Co., won approval to market the synthetic insulin developed with Riggs and Itakura. That milestone helped turn Genentech into the world’s first successful biotech company.

Emergence as research powerhouse

For City of Hope, this was a key milestone for its research programs targeting cancer and diabetes treatments that would eventually turn the nonprofit institution into a major research powerhouse.

Since 1985, City of Hope has received nearly $1.4 billion in research grants from the National Institutes of Health – the main federal medical research funder – and another $218 million in research grants from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (better known as the Stem Cell Institute). City of Hope research programs have also received hundreds of millions of dollars in research funds from private foundations and from pharmaceutical companies.

This is a long way from City of Hope’s relatively humble beginnings in 1913 as a sanitorium for tuberculosis patients. After World War II, with tuberculosis on the wane, the sanitorium’s scientists turned their research focus to treatments for two seemingly intractable diseases: cancer and diabetes; in 1949, it rebranded as City of Hope.

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