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Stem cells play an important role in drug discovery and development of therapeutic interventions. Differentiation (and maintenance) of stem cells into specialised cells is achieved by controlled application of specific, expensive growth factors.
Dr Hyvönen has developed an efficient method for producing highly purified, bioactive human growth factors from E.coli, reducing costs by up to 10-FOLD. tHE TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN LICENSED TO A major international manufacturer of growth factors (PeproTech Inc.), and to a UK-based specialist stem cell company (CellGS Ltd), enabling them to implement new products and business strategies. Through a departmental facility, material is also being sold to external companies and Cambridge Stem Cell Consortium members. In addition, Dr Hyvönen has made his expertise available to biotech companies through consultancy.
Research at the University of Oxford's Glycobiology Institute (OGBI) has led to the development of `state-of-the-art' platform technologies for the analysis of oligosaccharides (sugars) that are linked to proteins and lipids. These enabling technologies have had major impacts worldwide on drug discovery programmes, have enabled robust procedures to be developed for the quality control of biopharmaceutical production, and have been widely adopted by the pharmaceutical industry.
Impact: Public engagement and education, influence on public ethical and scientific policy.
Significance: The first demonstration of cloning from an adult mammalian somatic cell has stimulated rolling religious, ethical, cultural, political and scientific debates. Dolly has become a scientific icon entering the public and educational lexicons in addition to scientific ones.
Beneficiaries: Human society, culture, education.
Attribution: Wilmut and colleagues (Roslin Institute, UoE), undertook somatic cell nuclear transfer and used it to perform the first successful cloning of an adult mammal.
Reach: Worldwide: Dolly became a scientific icon that is recognisable all around the world, representing a major public engagement with bioscience. For example; cloning principles are part of high school education including the International Baccalaureate (implemented in >3600 schools on five continents).
3D polyHIPE scaffold materials and synthetic retinoids developed at Durham University for applications in cell biology have been commercialized by Reinnervate, a Durham spin-out company, using a patent/licensing strategy. Reinnervate has raised £8m venture capital investment and has employed an average of 12 FTE staff since 2008, peaking at 27 in 2012. Polystyrene-based highly porous polyHIPE materials which act as 3D in vitro cell culture scaffolds were launched under the Alvetex® brand in November 2010 and a retinoid derivative, designed to control cellular development including stem cell differentiation down neural pathways, was launched as ec23®. The products have won several awards and Alvetex® was voted one of "The Scientist" magazine's top 10 Life Science Innovations of 2010.
Professor Neil Barclay and Dr Nick Hutchings established Everest Biotech Ltd in 2000 in response to the increasing demand for high quality antibodies within the research community. This successful spin-out company has since become a major power in antibody research and production, a position reflected by its portfolio of more than 6,000 antibodies recognising human, mouse and rat proteins, and the generation of 60 new antibodies each month. With offices in the UK and Nepal, Everest Biotech Ltd also benefits one of the poorest communities in the world by providing additional income to hundreds of farmers in the Nepalese foothills.
Research by Professor Parmjit Jat (first at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, then part of UCL; later at the UCL Institute of Neurology) established and applied the critically important scientific concept of conditional immortalisation to a wide variety of cell lines, enabling cells to be grown indefinitely in vitro but differentiate upon altering the growth conditions. Two companies were established in partnership with Jat to exploit this research, ReNeuron (now worth £63.5m and publicly traded on the London AIM market) and XCellSyz (now part of Lonza AG). More than 20 patents based on Professor Jat's work have been issued. Reagents based on his research have been evaluated, licensed and used by 17 companies worldwide: Amgen, Amylin, Boehringer Mannheim, Cell Genesys, Chiron, Eli Lilly, Genentech Inc., Genetics Institute, Immunex, Johnson & Johnson, Medarex, Novartis, Ortho Pharm., Pfizer Inc., Regeneron, ReNeuron, Takeda, EMD Serono, and XCellSyZ/Cambrex Bioscience/Lonza.
Pioneering research in miniature in-vitro microfluidic diagnostic systems at the University of Southampton has produced major economic impacts by driving new business activities in major multinational corporations. Philips Research Cambridge are investing £5 million p.a. and employing 12 FTEs to develop new Point of Care systems for rapid diagnosis and management of disease based on the research. Patented advances in electronic fluid-handling technologies is driving £3 million R&D investment in Sharp Labs Europe in partnership with Southampton to develop a rapid assay platform for prompt detection of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. Health impacts from the research are the provision of new home based diagnostics that provide targeted and early risk identification resulting in improved patient healthcare and reduced costs.
The quantum well solar cell (QWSC) was invented, developed and patented by the Quantum Photovoltaics (QPV) research group at Imperial. QuantaSol was spun out of Imperial college in 2007 and was awarded Guardian CleanTech Top 100 awards in 2008 and 2009. In May 2009 it received £1.35m of funding from a syndicate of investors. In 2011 QuantaSol was bought by JDSU, a leading US semiconductor manufacturer, for US $3.7million. The quantum well (QW) technology developed by the QPV group enabled QuantaSol, and subsequently JDSU, to manufacture QWSCs with efficiencies above those of the then market leaders, Spectrolab and Solar Junction. Uniquely, QWs will allow JDSU to optimise cells for maximum energy harvest in different solar spectra. This will increase world-wide the beneficiaries of concentrator technology and enable other low-carbon applications in building integration and electric transport. The Imperial research has thus had (i) economic impact through the adoption of improved technology and (ii) environmental impact through the take up of QWSCs by JDSU.
We were the first to show that human stem cells could be used to create functional organ replacements in patients. These transplants, first performed to save the life of an adult in 2008, and then repeated to save a child in 2010, have changed the way the world views stem cell therapies. We have opened the door to a future where conventional transplantation, with all its technical, toxicity and ethical problems, can be replaced and increased in range by a family of customised organ replacements, populated by cells derived from autologous stem cells. This has altered worldview, changed clinical practice and had key influences on UK policy.
Mouse disease models provide an invaluable tool to the medical sciences, underpinning the understanding of disease mechanisms and the development of therapeutic interventions. A new cultivation protocol for deriving mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells was developed by Dr Nichols between 2006 and 2009. This has facilitated the production of ES cells from disease model mice that can be manipulated in vitro and used to establish modified transgenic mice with the required genetic profile, in a single generation. This method reduces the number of mice needed, as well as associated costs and staff time, by 90%. Dr Nichols has trained industry delegates from international transgenics companies and transgenic facility managers in the new technology. As a consequence, a minimum of 26820 fewer mice have been used in experiments, and a minimum of £536k have been saved since 2009.