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Professor Malcolm Young and colleagues at Newcastle University developed new mathematical and computational tools with which they could analyse large amounts of data on connections in the brain and produce models of how the brain is organised. Young realised that those research tools could also be used to analyse networks of proteins involved in disease processes and predict their susceptibility to drugs and in 2003 he set up the medicines discovery company e-Therapeutics to exploit the technology. The company listed on the AIM of the London Stock Exchange in November 2007 and in May 2013 became the eighth largest company in the biotechnology/pharmaceutical sector listed on the index, with a market capitalisation of over £90 million.
The CATH classification of protein structure, developed at the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology, UCL, by Janet Thornton and Christine Orengo, has been used widely across the pharmaceutical industry and academia to guide experiments on proteins. This has led to significant cost and time savings in drug discovery. The UCL-hosted online CATH database receives around 10,000 unique visitors per month, and is a partner in InterPro — the most frequently accessed protein function annotation server available.
A computer technology has been invented to accelerate drug discovery. It predicts locations in disease-associated biomolecules where drug molecules could bind, induce shape changes, and thereby bring the activity of the biomolecule under control. A U.S. drug discovery company, Serometrix, has exclusively licensed this technology and incorporated it within their core discovery process. The impact upon them has been:
Collaborations funded through EPSRC Interact and RCUK UK-China Science Bridge resulted in QUB's advanced control research having important economic and environmental impact in China, Pakistan, Vietnam. This includes the creation of new core modules for the Shanghai Automation Instrumentation Co (SAIC) SUPMAX Distributed Control System series of products now in use for whole plant monitoring and control to maximise energy efficiency and reduce pollutant emissions. These products have since 2008 increased SAIC's revenue by over $50M p.a. Related networked monitoring technologies have been successfully deployed in Baosteel's hot-rolling production lines and in the Nantong Water Treatment Company that treats 20,000 tonnes of industrial waste water daily.
Researchers at Queen Mary have applied mathematical modelling techniques to understand how and when problems may arise in complex man-made infrastructure networks including electricity, gas, global shipping and haulage networks. Many of these networks have points of vulnerability where a local issue such as an earthquake, a terrorist attack or even a simple engineering problem can bring down widespread areas of the network. Our research and the associated modelling techniques have impacted on organisations including the UK Treasury Office and the European Commission's Joint Research Centres at both Petten and Ispra, where it has been used to inform UK and European policy guidelines and legislation for infrastructure projects.
Essex research identified a novel bioprocessing matrix which has since been developed into commercial products and recently launched into external markets by Porvair Filtration Group Ltd. The discovery involved the chemical modification of sintered thermoplastic materials in order to attach biological molecules, so conferring highly specific functionalised properties to an otherwise inert base material. This enabled a new approach for protein immobilisation, having technical and practical advantages over existing processes. As a direct result, Porvair has adopted a new technology and invested £900k in R&D over eight years. Essex research has supported a change in business strategy, enabling entry into new markets, which has in turn both safeguarded and created jobs at Porvair.
Combinatorial Domain Hunting (CDH) technology is a technique for producing fragments of proteins that are soluble and tractable for biophysical analysis. It was developed between 1999 and 2008 at Birkbeck College, in the laboratory of Dr Renos Savva. This technology was patented in 2001 and the biotech company Domainex Ltd was then formed to commercialise it. In 2007, Domainex merged with a UCL spinout company, NCE Discovery Ltd. The company has attracted over £3m in investment and employs about 31 people. In addition to its contract research programme, it has developed an in-house drug discovery programme utilising CDH. Early in 2012 a patent was filed on a series of inhibitors of the protein kinases IKK03b5 and TBK1, which are validated drug targets for cancer and inflammation, and the first of these are expected to begin clinical trials in 2014.
Novel rapid methods for predicting protein structure, particularly functional loop structures, have been developed by researchers at the University of Oxford. These have been made accessible to a large audience through a suite of computational tools. The methods have had general impact through download and online access and specific impact through extensive use within UCB Pharma. The tools are much faster than other methods, creating equal or better predictions in approximately a thousandth of the time. Commonly exploited by UCB Pharma in their drug discovery pipeline, they have cut computational cost, but, more importantly, they have greatly reduced the time for process improvements. UCB Pharma estimate that the tool pyFREAD alone saves over £5 million in the discovery costs for a single drug molecule. FREAD (a version of pyFREAD coded in C) is also being used more widely, for example by Crysalin Ltd and InhibOx.
Protein modification represents a highly significant and growing source of new products for the biopharmaceuticals market. This case study outlines the development of PolyTherics, a highly successful spin-out company from the UCL School of Pharmacy, and the impact that their enabling technology has had on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The company was developed as a direct result of new conjugate technology developed by Professor Steve Brocchini and coworkers at the School. The company moved to independent premises in 2006 and now manages a portfolio of over 100 granted and pending patents. Several licensing agreements are in place, including with Celtic Pharma Holdings for haemophilia treatments and Nuron for a multiple sclerosis treatment based on PEGylation conjugation technology. Revenue is expected to be £8m in 2013. The impact of Polytherics is therefore as a significant and effective technology provider to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
Researchers in the Centre for the Mathematics of Human Behaviour at the University of Reading have developed a novel approach for the real-time monitoring of evolving social networks. These networks, in which connections between individuals change over time, are an important opportunity for online advertising. The research has been used in collaboration with Bloom Media Ltd to develop a new tool that gives their clients a better understanding of the impacts of social media campaigns. As a result Bloom are leading the field in this area, allowing them to attract major new clients and leading to significant growth of the business. The company now directly employs highly skilled mathematics graduates specifically to work in this area.