UCI to Sign $9.6-Million Research Pact : Medicine: The deal is the largest of its kind for the college. It will allow for the study and marketing of natural antibiotics.

Officials at UC Irvine today will announce a seven-year, $9.6-million agreement with a Vacaville biotechnology firm for the research and development of powerful but natural antibiotics that fight infection.

The agreement with Biosource Genetics, the largest of its kind ever involving UC Irvine, will allow university researchers and the company to make drugs to combat such illnesses as tuberculosis and AIDS-related diseases, university officials said Sunday.

The agreement, which will be formally announced in a signing ceremony on campus, also allows privately owned Biosource to “tap into the intellectual resources of the university,” UC Irvine officials said.

“This industry-sponsored research collaboration is a genuine public/private partnership,” Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening said in a written statement. “This agreement benefits one of the university’s ongoing scientific research efforts while facilitating the transfer of promising technology to the public.”

The pact lets UC Irvine scientists handle the research while Biosource actually develops the new drugs, said Dr. Michael Selsted, professor of pathology at the UC Irvine College of Medicine and a leader of the research team.

“The main message here is that we are in collaboration with Biosource in an attempt to develop a whole new class of drugs for treating infections,” Selsted said. “We have a specific role in research and Biosource has a specific role in development.”

A key factor of the agreement is its seven-year length, enough time for a research team to stay together and “maintain momentum,” Selsted said.

“This allows us to do some very risky exploration research and at the same time have the security of multiyear funding,” Selsted said. “We can now expand into areas we could not afford to otherwise and use some techniques that otherwise would not be available.”

The research will focus on a group of very small proteins, called peptides or defensins, which are made up of amino acids and occur naturally in the human body, Selsted said. These peptides “kill bacteria, kill fungi and some viruses,” basically the same things as the antibiotics that can be bought in a pharmacy, Selsted said.

“We have been studying for a dozen years what they look like, what they are made of, how they kill microorganisms in the body naturally,” Selsted said. “One of the goals is to identify which ones are the most therapeutic.”

The peptides are valuable because, unlike conventional antibiotics to which organisms become easily resistant, they are less likely to become obsolete, Selsted said. These naturally occurring antibiotics have evolved over millions of years and kill dangerous microorganisms at their fundamental, cellular level, Selsted said.

“They literally punch a hole in the cell . . . which kills the microorganism by causing them to leak all their intercellular substances,” Selsted said.

Biosource Genetics is a world leader in genetic engineering, one of only two ways known to produce peptides, Selsted said. The only other way is synthetically, through organic chemistry.

Biosource plans to mass produce the peptides using tobacco plants as chemical factories, Selsted said. The process calls for an adult plant to be infected by a genetically engineered virus containing the peptide gene, which then reproduces itself billions of times.

After only a few weeks, the plants are harvested and the peptides are extracted and purified.

“Biosource is the only one in the world doing this,” Selsted said.