A Medical Device Daily

Lorry Lokey, the founder of Business Wire has said he will give a minimum of $33 million to help build a home for the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University (Stanford, California).

Lokey said he turned his attention to stem cells in 2001, after the Bush administration limited federal funding for stem cell research, discouraging the study of these potentially powerful cells.

"The important thing to me is that stem cells might not only extend life, but also improve the quality of life, as so many people suffer in their later years," said Lokey. "But I think stem cells will have applications across the entire life span."

Lokey's contribution to the School of Medicine its largest single gift to date from an individual will help launch construction of new stem cell laboratories on campus where scientists will probe the power of these elusive cells in treating conditions as diverse as cancer, stroke and diabetes.

Lokey said he hopes the gift will be more than $33 million; the funds are being held in an account that is expected to grow in value before construction begins.

The anticipated schedule for the building calls for groundbreaking in 2009, with completion in 2011. The building will be the first in a series of structures that will house the Stanford Institutes of Medicine.

Philip Pizzo, MD, dean of the School of Medicine, said that with Lokey's gift the school "will be able to proceed with planning the space and facilities to house superb faculty and foster the process of basic discovery that ultimately leads to the translation of this knowledge to improve the lives of patients suffering from cancer, neurodegenerative processes, heart failure, immune dysfunction and others. . . . I am deeply appreciative to Lorry Lokey for his confidence in us and his support for Stanford."

Lokey graduated from Stanford in 1949 with a degree in journalism and credits the university with jumpstarting his career. "It was there that I discovered what I wanted to do," he said. "After three days on campus, I saw this [Stanford] Daily ad looking for reporters. I applied and got my first job as a cub reporter."

After several jobs in journalism, he launched Business Wire in San Francisco in 1961 with $2,000 of his own money. When he sold the business last year to Berkshire Hathaway, the company controlled by investor Warren Buffett, it was valued at roughly $500 million, he said.

Lokey previously has made gifts to multiple projects at Stanford, including $20 million to help build the new Lorry I. Lokey Laboratory Building, opened in 2004 and housing labs for the departments of Chemistry and Biological Sciences.

In contract news: VirtualScopics (Rochester, New York), a developer of image-based biomarker solutions, reported that it has begun work on two research contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense totaling $2.2 million. The contracts will explore the application of VirtualScopics' image analysis technologies to the interpretation of optical hyper-spectral reconnaissance and surveillance imagery.

Jonathan Riek, VP of government solutions at VirtualScopics, said, "These contracts give us the opportunity to take the knowledge and algorithms we have developed within medical imaging and apply them to an exciting new area."

VirtualScopics develops imaging solutions to accelerate drug and medical device development. It has developed a software platform for analysis and modeling of both structural and functional medical images.