Paul W. Cook

PAUL W. COOK, Ph.D., Chief Scientific and Executive Officer In 1987 Dr. Cook earned his doctorate in cell physiology from UC Berkeley, where he received the Chancellor’s Patent Fund Research Award. As a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU), Dr. Cook and collaborators conducted the first complete characterization of autocrine-driven proliferation in a normal, non-transformed cell type (human keratinocytes). Subsequent purification and characterization of an autocrine-acting growth factor from human keratinocyte-conditioned medium demonstrated its identity to be that of amphiregulin (AR / AREG), a heparin-binding, heparin-inhibited EGF-related ligand. At OHSU, Dr. Cook was awarded an American Cancer Society research fellowship. Dr. Cook joined California Biotechnology (Scios-Nova) as a scientist in Cell Biology and Tissue Repair before returning to OHSU in 1994 as a research assistant professor of dermatology and molecular medicine. During his tenure at OHSU as an assistant professor, Dr. Cook received the Dermatology Foundation Career Development Award. With collaborators at the Mayo Clinic and Bristol-Myers Squibb, Dr. Cook demonstrated that the constitutive expression of AR in the epidermis of transgenic mice induced a severe, early-onset skin pathology with almost all the clinical and pathophysiological features of psoriasis. In 2000, Dr. Cook joined Cascade Biologics as a research scientist and then was appointed manager of Research & Development. Because the use of animal-derived products in cell culture systems can increase the risk of contaminating cell-based therapeutics with xenopathogens such as prions and viruses, Dr. Cook’s work at Cascade Biologics focused on the development of chemically-defined animal component-free (cdACF) cell culture systems. Dr. Cook undertook key experiments in 2001-2003 that led to the world’s first efficient cdACF cell culture system for normal animal cells (human keratinocytes). This cdACF cell culture system was capable of promoting the efficient primary isolation and expansion, as well as the sustained serial propagation, of normal human keratinocytes. Dr. Cook’s novel research also created the first example of engineered animal tissue (reconstructed human epidermis) generated under cdACF conditions. The chemically defined cdACF cell culture technologies developed by Dr. Cook during his tenure at Cascade Biologics has been extensively tested for proposed for use in cell therapies that avoid the inherent pathogenic risks associated with generating therapeutic cell preparations in cell culture systems that include human and non-human derived animal products such as human serum, plasma or platelet lysate, bovine serum, bovine serum albumin, bovine pituitary extract, and murine feeder layer cells. In January 2008, Dr. Cook and Dr. Rolf W. Winter launched AvantBio Corporation, a new company that leverages expertise in bioscience and chemistry to develop new products for the cell therapeutic, bioresearch and fluoro-chemical reagent (AvantFluor) markets. At present, under Dr. Cook’s direction, AvantBio has now developed new and improved 100x cell culture supplement formulations that can support the efficient primary isolation (from tissue) and serial propagation of clinically-relevant cell types that have proven difficult to efficiently propagate under cdACF conditions (i.e. no serum, plasma, serum derived albumin, pituitary extracts, amniotic membranes or feeder layer cells required). The clinically-relevant cell types include mesenchymal cells, such as normal human (dermal, corneal) fibroblasts (precursor to iPS cells), human mesenchymal stem cells, hair follicle dermal papilla cells and epithelial cells such as normal human skin/oral-derived keratinocytes and normal human corneal epithelial cells.