Log in
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.
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.
Research by Smales has led to IP that protects novel technologies for mammalian recombinant cell line development. Based upon mass spectrometry and in silico modelling approaches, the technology has permitted the development of highly efficient cell lines for monoclonal antibody production in the commercial environment at Lonza Biologics. This IP has three important benefits to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries:
(a) It allows key biopharmaceuticals to be made using substantially less resource and with an overall higher efficiency.
(b) It reduces the time from transfection to production of cell banks.
(c) It accelerates bioreactor evaluation and the ability to predict cell line performance at the bioreactor scale early in cell line construction.
As sophisticated proteomics methodologies are increasingly embraced by both academics and industry across the globe, growth in this area is set to explode. The University of Dundee has a leadership position in quantitative proteomics technology, through the expertise of Professor Angus Lamond. Dundee Cell Products Ltd is a University of Dundee spin-out company that was created to commercialise life sciences technology and reagents, and to exploit technology and expertise in proteomics developed at the College of Life Sciences. As of 2013, DCP offers >5,000 research products and six contract research services, centred around quantitative proteomics.
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.
The protein research of Imperial's Mass Spectrometry group led to the development of Mass Mapping /Fingerprinting for rapid protein characterisation, and new methods for disulphide bridge and glycosylation assignment. Commercialising these discoveries, the company M-SCAN has developed methods to accelerate industrial research and commercialisation of the next generation of recombinant drug therapies, such as monoclonal antibodies targeting cancers. M-SCAN is the pioneer of Biopharmaceutical Characterisation. It has influenced the regulatory advice and, in the past ten years, has assisted many hundreds of companies worldwide in developing their products for market, leading to the growth of a profitable business. In 2010, SGS S.A., a multinational company that provides inspection, verification, testing and certification services, acquired M-SCAN for an undisclosed sum, satisfying SGS's vision to become one of the top players within the Biologics testing arena.
Proteins are fundamental to life and to many drugs, vaccines and new types of applied medicine with engineered cells. For this work, it is often essential to tag proteins to enable their identification and purification. The V5 tag, which was developed in St Andrews, is used very widely in this role and has some key advantages over alternatives.
Key impacts are:
DICHROWEB is a comprehensive, user-friendly server that provides access to computational tools for the determination of protein secondary structure from data obtained through circular dichroism (CD) and synchrotron radiation (SRCD) spectroscopy. The Protein Circular Dichroism Data Bank (PCDDB) is a database of spectra obtained using these techniques and allied data. Both resources are widely and increasingly used in many countries and are proving useful in industrial research (for example, in drug discovery) as well as academia and advanced teaching. DICHROWEB currently has over 3,600 registered users and over 375,000 DICHROWEB analyses have been run. Since the launch of PCDDB in 2009, the database has had over 175,000 unique hits from 41 different countries, and 89,890 downloads.
Bacillus species constitute an industrially-important group of bacteria that are used worldwide to produce carbohydrate and protein-digesting enzymes on a large scale. While the bacteria secrete native enzymes at an economically viable rate, generating strains of bacteria that could do the same for non-native enzymes has been an industry challenge. Researchers at Newcastle University have collaborated with industry since the early 1990s to study the mechanism of protein secretion in Bacillus. They discovered bottlenecks in the protein secretion pathway and used that knowledge to engineer more productive strains of bacteria. Since 2008, companies, including Novozymes (the world's largest manufacturer of industrial enzymes), have developed strains of bacteria, based on the Newcastle findings, for use in their manufacturing processes improving yields by more than four orders of magnitude in some cases.
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.