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A new family of antiviral agents, bicyclic nucleoside analogues (BCNAs), discovered in Cardiff University has led to a highly potent anti-VZV (shingles) molecule, FV-100. On a worldwide basis more than two million patients are affected by shingles annually. FV-100 has successfully completed Phase II clinical trials, showing it is safe, potent and effective and with clinical advantages over the current standard of care. FV-100 has received more than $30 million in R&D investment, generating patents and creating highly skilled jobs in the UK and the USA, with the parent company currently valued at $397 million. It will enter registration trials in late 2013.
Cardiff University research led to second-generation chemiluminescent technology. The invention allowed for internal amplification control in nucleic-acid based clinical diagnostic assays for infectious disease and produced results with greater accuracy and fulfilled previously unmet regulatory standards. Adopted by the market leader in nucleic acid diagnostics (a sub-licensee of Cardiff University) the Cardiff technology is used globally in more than 60 million in vitro diagnostic tests annually. Sales of the tests approach $500 million per year and the sub-licensee was subsequently sold for $3.8 billion.
Economic impact is claimed through the growth of the biopharmaceutical spin-out company Q Chip Ltd. During the REF period, this has created 19 new jobs, £7.5M investment, a new Dutch subsidiary (Q Chip BV), and staged-payment, six figure contract sales to four major international pharmaceutical companies.
Q Chip has generated over £928K in contract sales from the pharmaceutical industry from 2008-2012, with further sales of over £1M projected in 2013-14.
Originally established by Professor David Barrow in 2003 from his micro technology research, Q Chip has developed new processes and miniaturised equipment to encapsulate materials, including drugs, within uniform polymeric microspheres as injectable therapeutics.
ProTide technology, discovered by the McGuigan team at Cardiff University, is a pro-drug strategy with proven capacity to generate new drug candidates for nucleoside-based antiviral and anti- cancer indications. In the assessment period the McGuigan team has attracted more than £2 million direct research funding through sustained collaborations on ProTide technology with global pharmaceutical companies and smaller biotech firms in the USA and Europe. In the same period, either through working directly with Cardiff or by independent adoption of McGuigan's research, eight ProTide entities have progressed to clinical trials as cancer, HIV and hepatitis C treatments. The technology is demonstrating significant commercial impact for companies with ProTide-based drug candidates.
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.
From 1993 to 2005, Professor Errington and his colleagues at the University of Oxford addressed the increasingly serious global emergency of treating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Their research led to the establishment in 1998 of the university spin-out company Prolysis Ltd and the discovery and development of two innovative series of antibiotics. The success of Prolysis Ltd was confirmed in 2009 when it was acquired by Biota Europe for £6.4 million, and gained an additional investment of £14.9 million. The subsequently formed Biota Pharmaceuticals Inc. continues to support the development of innovative broad-spectrum antibiotics essential to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Impact: Economic. The EaStCHEM spin-out company Deliverics has commercialised biodegradable transfection reagents for both the "research tool" and the "RNAi therapeutics" markets (globally valued at £400M and £4 billion respectively). Beneficiaries are the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, and clinicians. The turnover since 2010/11 is £330k and the company currently has five employees.
Significance: Deliveric's agents out-perfom existing materials in term of efficacy and reduced levels of toxicity. They are not hampered by the immunogenicity, manufacturing issues, and carcinogenicity previously seen for viral vectors used as delivery agents. This presents a wide ranging ability to deliver nucleic acids into cells and tissues for biological applications.
Research; date; attribution: EaStCHEM research (2008) led by Bradley reported a family of non-viral DNA delivery agents that offered a highly-efficient and non-toxic method of delivering siRNA/DNA into mammalian cells and tissues. Development and patenting of this technology led to the spin-out of Deliverics Ltd. in 2010.
Reach: International customer base (20 research groups and 10 companies) including specially appointed distributors in Spain (Albyn Medical), South Korea (CoreSciences), and US (Galen).
Cardiff University's research has provided quantitative characterisation of transient fuel sprays under engine condition for the first time. This has enabled integrated design optimisation of Gasoline Direct injection (GDi) engines, through computer simulation validated by Cardiff's experimental measurements. The method has been developed and used in collaboration with Ricardo, a world-leading engine design consultancy, and has resulted in:
Economic impact
Environmental impact There have been substantial reductions in global CO2 emissions. Prior to 2012, GDi engine production had resulted in over 20M tonnes CO2 reduction globally, including 10M tonnes across Europe. A global reduction of 10M tonnes/year is predicted by 2020. Gasoline engines designed or developed by Ricardo in collaboration with Cardiff have provided a considerable contribution to this reduction. Cardiff's measurement techniques provided an essential step in designing these engines. For example, the PETRONAS engine uses 20% less fuel and produces 80% less NOx.
Improved Professional Engineering Practice Cardiff's experimental validation methodology has enabled Ricardo to design engines through simulation rather than step-wise empirical development, significantly reducing lead time.
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.
Imperial researchers in Prof Paul French's photonics group demonstrated one of the first practical FLIM instruments in 1997 using a prototype gated optical intensifier (GOI) developed by Kentech Instruments Ltd and a home-built solid-state ultrafast laser. They subsequently pioneered the use of ultrafast supercontinuum sources (USS) for FLIM. Today wide-field time-gated FLIM is a commercial success and is being widely applied for biomedicine, including for imaging of diseased tissue [e.g. 5] and for FRET (Fluorescence resonance energy transfer) microscopy to assay protein interactions [e.g. 3, 4]. This research thus helped translate FLIM to a wider community, highlighting the potential for tissue imaging, cell biology and drug discovery. It stimulated about £5M of GOI sales for Kentech [section 5, source A], with whom they developed time-gated FLIM technology and applications, and millions of pounds worth of sales of supercontinuum sources for Fianium Ltd [B].