Donny Strosberg / TSRI
The scientist had just won a major grant to develop new drugs to inhibit HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
The National Institutes of Health had awarded him and two other scientists a significant $1.5 million to be spent over three years.
Their goal? Find a new approach to block the virus, which has been gaining resistance against some older drugs.
Strosberg’s proposal was to employ the $10 million robot Florida taxpayers purchased for Scripps back in 2005, and test hundreds of thousands of possibly effective drug-like compounds for a few that showed an ability to latch onto a key protein that makes up the outer shell of the HIV virus.
Disrupting the viral shell might prevent new virus particles from forming, and thus halt the progress and spread of the disease, he reasoned.
“Because of the growing resistance of HIV against current treatments, a new, differently targeted approach to treating the disease is urgently needed,” Strosberg said in an announcement about the grant.
Strosberg has used a similar approach to develop promising potential drugs against Hepatitis C.
Strosberg, a cancer survivor, died on March 15, while undergoing a medical procedure at Good Samaritan Medical Center. At 67, he had suffered a heart attack during the procedure.
At his memorial service on Monday, his son Serge recalled how energized his father had been about his work since moving to Florida. He said he told his son he felt like a young post-doc again, Serge Strosberg said, adding that his father rarely slept more than five hours a night, often rising before 5 a.m. to write new grant proposals.
Born in a Swiss refugee camp to parents who had fled across the Alps amid the Holocaust, Strosberg was laid to rest on a green hillside off Northlake Boulevard, not far from the disputed Mecca Farms orange grove where Scripps had originally been slated to rise.
There were few people at Scripps Florida who were as enthusiastic about biotechnology as Strosberg. At every opportunity, he would speak before county commissioners, the general public, biotechnology leaders in the state.
In June of 2005, he went to the podium to tell the county it should support construction of a business incubator for small biotech start-ups, because there was no suitable lab space in the area.
In the face of a tongue-lashing from a typically acerbic County Commissioner Mary McCarty, he didn’t cower.
“The Palm Beach County Commission and, I believe, the state legislature, feel they have given a lot of money,” McCarty said. “We’re kind of done with that.”
Strosberg fired back.
“You’re not ‘giving,’ you’re investing. This is not a gift. This is something you’re going to recoup 10 times, 100 times,” he said.
The incubator was eventually built by a private firm.
Strosberg had arrived in Palm Beach County just five months earlier, making him one of the first “big-name” scientists to arrive in Florida, after interferon-discoverer Dr. Charles Weissmann. Both had been recruited by then-Scripps President Dr. Richard Lerner.
Strosberg had the launching of a string of successful biotechnology companies on his resume, and that alone made him an important hire.
The most recent start-up, Hybrigenics, specialized in the study of protein-protein interactions. His other companies included Chemunex SA, Nouveau Marché, Incyte, Praecis.
Lerner said Strosberg’s business experience and his relationships with the private money likely to support biotech startups would prove important to the successful creation growth of a biotech cluster here.
David Willoughby was one of the entrepreneurs who moved to Florida to launch a bioscience business, Ocean Ridge Biosciences, which is a service laboratory that helps other scientists and biotech companies with genetic biomarker discovery.
“He was really helpful to my company in the beginning,” Willoughby said.
He said the grant Strosberg had recently won was an important one for the scientist, a large R01 grant shared with Florida Atlantic University’s Massimo Caputi and Scripps’ Susana Valente. He said Strosberg had sent in many other grant proposals to the NIH, only to have them rejected.
Scripps’ spokeswoman Mika Ono said the institute intended to continue Strosberg’s project.
“We’re planning to continue the project funded by the grant, including the portions conducted by Drs. Valente and Caputi,” Ono said. “We’re currently in the process of finding a new principal investigator for the project.”