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The Daily Northwestern Monday, April 11, 2016
DAILYNORTHWESTERN.COM
Cilento, Vinson win ASG election
Find us online @thedailynu
CAPS eliminates 12-session limit
In Focus
The two will be sworn in at ASG Senate on Wednesday
Service will focus more on ‘personalized care’ plans for students
By ERICA SNOW
By SHANE MCKEON
Christina Cilento and Macs Vinson narrowly won the Associated Student Government election Friday and will serve as Northwestern’s new president and executive vice president. Cilento, a SESP junior, and Vinson, a McCormick junior, won 47.78 percent of the 4,060 total votes. Cilento and Vinson beat Weinberg junior Joji Syed and Weinberg sophomore Archit Baskaran by 81 votes. Voter turnout far exceeded the 2,991 votes cast in 2015 and 1,758 in 2014. Cilento said both tickets inspired students who had little previous interest in ASG to vote, which explained the close results. “Students who feel marginalized really showed up to vote for us and students who are in Greek life and may not have normally cared about ASG really showed up to vote for them,” Cilento told The Daily after she found out the results. “When you think about it, that makes sense to me that there would be that close of a margin, that students would be inspired to be involved even if they hadn’t previously been.” Weinberg junior Lauren Thomas, the election commissioner, told The Daily this is the highest voter turnout for ASG elections in “institutional memory.” Thomas said she predicted it would be a tight race but was not anticipating the narrow margin with which Cilento and Vinson won, adding that the high turnout demonstrated how seriously both tickets took the election. “I was shocked by how close it was,” Thomas said. “I did not think it was going to be within 100 votes.” Cilento said finding out she won was “an out-of-body experience,” and that she envisioned larger change for campus. “I thought that I would cry or be so overwhelmed. I feel surprisingly calm right now,” Cilento said. “Setting a campaign that is entirely centered around marginalized voices is incredibly hard to do at Northwestern. The fact that we did (win) really shows that Northwestern is ready for this kind of change.” Cilento and Vinson’s campaign focused on improving opportunities and the culture on campus for marginalized students, pushing for widespread reform to make NU welcoming to the entire student body. Cilento said she and Vinson plan to circle back to student groups they met with during their campaign as they set priorities for their term. “Spring time is when we set ASG’s budget,” she said. “We’re really going to need to talk to groups like Quest
Beginning next Fall Quarter, Counseling and Psychological Services will no longer base its treatment on a 12-session limit. In an interview with The Daily, Dean of Students Todd Adams said a student’s number of sessions won’t factor in to the care they receive. “There is no longer a limit,” he told The Daily. “It’ll be more based on what’s needed.” CAPS will focus more on “personalized care” plans for individual students, according to an email from Patricia Telles-Irvin, vice president for student affairs. Plans could employ one-on-one counseling, group therapy, connection to other on-campus programs or referral to providers outside CAPS. Adams said the individualized approach was already in place, but this shift will make that focus “more overt.” The shift comes after years of students pushing for the change, and Adams said that effort played a role in the new plan. “Student voice was paramount in this decision,” he told The Daily. “Given where we are, and what students have been saying, we wanted to remove any barriers to students getting care.” SESP senior Chris Harlow sat on the committee that recommended the change. He said students were hesitant to use a session because of the limit, as it made them afraid they would use too many and run out. Harlow said the committee also found the limit arbitrary. None of the peer institutions they studied had a similar cap, he said, and even though the limit existed for more than 20 years, no University officials knew for sure why it was created. But Harlow said data provided to the committee showed “the vast majority” of students don’t reach 12 sessions. Students who use CAPS average six sessions, which is consistent with numbers at peer institutions, he said. And like other universities’ mental health services, Harlow said CAPS provides short-term support, which often helps students deal with more immediate issues, such as academic stress. CAPS will sometimes refer students who need longer-term support to nearby professionals. “You wouldn’t go to Searle health center for surgery,” he said. “For something that requires more, you’d be referred to an orthopedic surgeon or something else.” The Daily reported in late January that CAPS was considering such a change.
the daily northwestern @ericasnoww
daily senior staffer @shane_mckeon
DRUG MONEY
Graphic by Jerry Lee
As Lyrica profits dry up, Northwestern seeks another ‘blockbuster’ drug
By PETER KOTECKI
daily senior staffer @peterkotecki
Northwestern boasts some of the deepest pockets of any university in the country. Its more than $10 billion in net assets is the product of many factors — wealthy donors, pricey tuition, shrewd investments. But one of the largest reasons for the University’s wealth is Lyrica, a pharmaceutical used to treat fibromyalgia, epilepsy and other conditions. The discovery of this blockbuster drug in an NU chemistry lab brought the university to the top of annual rankings of income from patents and copyrights. It’s highly unusual for a breakthrough pharmaceutical discovery to originate in an academic lab, and even more unusual for such a breakthrough to become a runaway commercial success. “We were just trying to inhibit one enzyme and not inhibit another,” said chemistry Prof. Richard Silverman, who invented Lyrica. “It turned out that during the experimentation we got results that we didn’t expect, namely that our compound activated one of the enzymes — that wasn’t even something we were trying to do.” As the U.S. patents on the drug near expiration, the unpredictability of scientific discovery remains a limiting factor in developing successful pharmaceuticals despite steady increases in NU’s research funding. Sales of Lyrica, the brand name for the compound pregabalin, reached about $1.2 billion in 2006 after the drug’s first full year on the market. Since its approval, more than 9 million people in the United States have used the drug, which is marketed by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Due to an agreement between NU and Pfizer, revenue from the drug has significantly increased the University’s licensing income, money NU earns for allowing its copyrights and patents to be used by other companies. According to the Association of University Technology Managers, NU had the highest gross licensing income of research institutions nationwide in fiscal year 2014. For NU, the revenue — about $360 million — is the last large sum from Lyrica, as the University sold its remaining royalty rights for the drug in 2013,
» See ASG, page 10
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said Alicia Loffler, executive director of the Innovation and New Ventures Office. Last year, NU’s licensing income decreased more than tenfold to $32 million. The University will likely drop from the top 10 in the Association of University Technology Managers’ 2015 rankings, which are not yet available, Loffler said. However, vice president of research Jay Walsh said the drop will not have a significant effect on NU. Most of the money from Lyrica has been invested in the endowment, which means the funds will continue to help the University for a long time, he said. In addition to helping millions of patients, Lyrica benefited NU in several ways, as royalties invested in the endowment supported areas such as financial aid, campus facilities and research support. “The chunk of the endowment that is directly attributable to Lyrica is mind-boggling,” said University President Morton Schapiro in an interview with The Daily in January. “It’s an enormous amount of money.” Although no other invention has affected NU on such a large scale, the company Naurex, founded by McCormick Prof. Joseph Moskal, has the potential to produce another very successful drug, Loffler said. Naurex created the antidepressant rapastinel, which became the company’s lead compound and is now in clinical trials. “We are hoping that (rapastinel) will be a success, but you never know,” Loffler said. “If that drug makes it onto the market, it will be another blockbuster.”
An unexpected discovery
The work that led to Lyrica’s discovery began as a project for a visiting professor from Poland, Silverman said. Silverman asked the visiting professor, Ryszard Andruszkiewicz, to make a set of molecules to treat epilepsy. When Andruszkiewicz presented his findings, Silverman said he could not believe the results — instead of just inhibiting one enzyme, the compounds also activated another. “We weren’t expecting that,” Silverman said. “When Dr. Andruszkiewicz showed me those results, it just looked screwy. I said, ‘I think we ought to retest these » See LYRICA, page 8
shanem@u.northwestern.edu
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