Fuelling Innovation in UK Life Sciences

ANNA MACDONALD | November 4, 2019 | 134 views

Life science start-ups face several hurdles along the path to success, with many never reaching their potential. A lack of adequate funding and support can limit the development of potentially game-changing technologies. Increasingly, business accelerators especially designed for the life sciences and healthcare, such as Start Codon, are working to help early stage innovative start-up companies become commercially successful businesses, by providing the tools they need to grow. We spoke to Daniel Rooke, Head of Operations and Legal at Start Codon, to learn more about the company and how they can help early stage healthcare and life science businesses in the UK to get off the ground.

Spotlight

Castle Biosciences, Inc

Castle Biosciences, Inc. specializes in diagnostic tests for cancers. Founded in 2008, the company goal has been to help advance the care for cancers through objective testing. Our team works with outstanding members of the oncology community throughout the discovery, development and utilization of these tests.

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Medical

Top 10 biotech IPOs in 2019

Article | August 16, 2022

The big question at the start of 2019 was whether the IPO window would stay open for biotech companies, particularly those seeking to pull off ever-larger IPOs at increasingly earlier stages of development. The short answer is yes—kind of. Here’s the long answer: In the words of Renaissance Capital, the IPO market had “a mostly good year.” The total number of deals fell to 159 from 192 the year before, but technology and healthcare companies were standout performers. The latter—which include biotech, medtech and diagnostics companies—led the pack, making up 43% of all IPOs in 2019. By Renaissance’s count, seven companies went public at valuations exceeding $1 billion, up from five the year before

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MedTech

Cell Out? Lysate-Based Expression an Option for Personalized Meds

Article | September 22, 2022

Cell-free expression (CFE) is the practice of making a protein without using a living cell. In contrast with cell line-based methods, production is achieved using a fluid containing biological components extracted from a cell, i.e., a lysate. CFE offers potential advantages for biopharma according to Philip Probert, PhD, a senior scientist at the Centre for Process Innovation in the U.K.

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MedTech

Closing bacterial genomes from the human gut microbiome using long-read sequencing

Article | July 20, 2022

In our lab, we focus on the impact of the gut microbiome on human health and disease. To evaluate this relationship, it’s important to understand the particular functions that different bacteria have. As bacteria are able to exchange, duplicate, and rearrange their genes in ways that directly affect their phenotypes, complete bacterial genomes assembled directly from human samples are essential to understand the strain variation and potential functions of the bacteria we host. Advances in the microbiome space have allowed for the de novo assembly of microbial genomes directly from metagenomes via short-read sequencing, assembly of reads into contigs, and binning of contigs into putative genome drafts. This is advantageous because it allows us to discover microbes without culturing them, directly from human samples and without reference databases. In the past year, there have been a number of tour de force efforts to broadly characterize the human gut microbiota through the creation of such metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs)[1–4]. These works have produced hundreds of thousands of microbial genomes that vastly increase our understanding of the human gut. However, challenges in the assembly of short reads has limited our ability to correctly assemble repeated genomic elements and place them into genomic context. Thus, existing MAGs are often fragmented and do not include mobile genetic elements, 16S rRNA sequences, and other elements that are repeated or have high identity within and across bacterial genomes.

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Selexis Cell Line Development Strategies

Article | February 11, 2020

In today’s biotechnology landscape, to be competitive, meet regulations, and achieve market demands, “we must apply Bioprocessing 4.0,” said Igor Fisch, PhD, CEO, Selexis. In fact, in the last decade, “Selexis has evolved from cloning by limiting dilution to automated cell selection to nanofluidic chips and from monoclonality assessment by statistical calculation to proprietary bioinformatic analysis,” he added. Single-use processing systems are an expanding part of the biomanufacturing world; as such, they are a major component of Bioprocessing 4.0. “At Selexis, we use single use throughout our cell line development workflow. Currently, we have incorporated single-use automated bioprocessing systems such as ambr® and the Beacon® optofluidic platform for accelerated cell line development. By using these systems and optimizing our parameters, we were able to achieve high titers in shake flasks. Additionally, the Beacon systems integrate miniaturized cell culture with high-throughput liquid handling automation and cell imaging. This allows us to control, adjust, and monitor programs at the same time,” noted Fisch.

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Spotlight

Castle Biosciences, Inc

Castle Biosciences, Inc. specializes in diagnostic tests for cancers. Founded in 2008, the company goal has been to help advance the care for cancers through objective testing. Our team works with outstanding members of the oncology community throughout the discovery, development and utilization of these tests.

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Industrial Impact

The Bracken Organizations Merge to Create a Global Platform to Support Life Science and Digital Health Teams

The Bracken Group | October 11, 2021

Three unique companies with shared origins have now united to better serve their clients in the life sciences industry. The new entity will be known as The Bracken Group (Bracken) with three divisions of the original three companies. The combined companies' mission continues to be supporting the success of companies that improve health, using an integrated network of clients, consultants, and employees across the globe. I am delighted to bring the companies together under the one outstanding leadership team which further improves the services we provide to our clients. The benefits of the synergy that comes from a closer inter-team relationship will be apparent as the cross communication will be immediate. - Dr Colin G. Miller, CEO of The Bracken Group Bracken has been specializing across the life sciences and digital health arenas since inception, This highly regulated life science industry includes high stakes and complex processes. We have created and continue to cultivate an integrated platform to help organizations in this industry succeed. - Elliot Miller, Chief Growth Officer. About Bracken Data Bracken Data was founded in 2016 to improve how the industry can use public clinical trial data. Bracken Data offers a suite of clinical trial dashboard products, and custom data science and analytics services. For more information, please visit BrackenData.com. About Bracken Marketing Bracken Marketing was founded in 2017 to support the success of digital health and life science teams through marketing services, and custom marketing programs. Services include website design, content development, advertising, sales collateral production, and multi-media production. About The Bracken Group The Bracken Group, founded in 2018, provides highly experienced consultative support for the development of products that are designed to improve life, in an ethical manner, underpinned with integrity and quality. Bracken offers biopharmaceutical consulting in the development of drugs, biologics, and medical devices, as well as in the use of medical imaging in clinical trials. Clients leverage The Bracken Group's team of executive consultants across a range of specialties through Virtual C-Suite services and related offerings.

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Research

Synthace Unveils First Life Sciences R&D Cloud Addressing Complexity, Speed & Reproducibility for Scientists

Synthace | August 03, 2021

Synthace, a leading life sciences software company, today announced the first life sciences R&D cloud that includes a no-code software platform addressing the largest barriers to innovation that R&D life scientists currently face. With the release of this new platform, Synthace is also the first vendor to enable scientists to automate experimentation and insight sharing in a unified, global R&D environment. Scientists can now focus on asking the most impactful questions and unlock the true potential of biology. To solve humanity’s hardest problems, such as delivering breakthrough therapies or alternative food sources, the life sciences industry is under tremendous pressure to simultaneously overcome biology’s complexity, accelerate speed to scientific insight, and ensure the reproducibility of experiments. Synthace alleviates these challenges by empowering scientists to improve and accelerate decision-making with more statistically powerful, automated experiments that can minimize human error. Furthermore, Synthace’s cloud platform leverages intelligent, dynamic automation to produce the highest quality data sets that are primed for machine learning (ML) and other advanced analyses to lead to better insights. With Synthace, the life sciences can now benefit from a quantum leap in experimentation capabilities, accelerating development timelines that would have previously been impossible. Customers Accelerate R&D with Synthace Ipsen has been using Synthace to automate the design and construction of therapeutic candidates. With Synthace, Ipsen produced approximately 90 constructs five times faster than previous methods, substantially increasing the number of molecules entering the screening cascade. The platform also achieved a 10-fold reduction in costs associated with DNA synthesis. Karen Bunting, Director of Protein Sciences at Ipsen commented, “Synthace sits very well at the beginning of our drug discovery process. It allows us to explore larger drug design space by simplifying planning and production of multiple molecule variants with combinatorial construct assembly. These throughput improvements help us deliver well-tolerated and effective therapeutic solutions more rapidly to our patients.” Microsoft Research also uses Synthace to automatically generate biological data at a volume that allows its ML algorithms to rapidly improve. As part of reporting on advancements in programming biological systems, a member of its Biocomputation Group noted: “Synthace really comes into its own when we’re performing experiments with complex layouts like combinatorial construct assembly and design of experiments. When we’re building 12 constructs at a time, Synthace automates all the planning that would go into setting up such an experiment and allows it to become routine.” Synthace Life Sciences R&D Cloud The platform provides end-to-end management of the experimental lifecycle, from design through execution to data visualization and knowledge transfer. Synthace adheres to FAIR principles to support interoperability with other major lab informatics platforms to ensure streamlined data management for all of its customers. Only the Synthace Life Sciences R&D Cloud delivers: Complete experimental design, planning and automation, requiring no coding expertise. Scientists can define more informative and impactful experiments that would otherwise be impossible to run and easily implement Quality by Design (QbD) and Design of Experiments (DOE). Seamless, cloud-based data capture, processing, and visualization. R&D teams can deliver deeper and faster insights from fully contextualized, machine learning-ready data sets that are automatically generated from the laboratory. Minimal deployment and onboarding. Customers experience rapid time-to-insight through Synthace’s out-of-the-box platform features and pre-validated protocols for common applications such as ELISA and high-throughput purification, helping them shorten R&D cycles and study more candidates per program. About Synthace Synthace is a life sciences software company enabling life science the way it should be done. Delivering a life sciences R&D cloud to scientists who want to innovate faster, the Synthace platform seamlessly automates experimentation and insight sharing so that scientists can focus on asking the most impactful questions to unlock the true potential of biology. Top global pharmaceuticals, high-growth biotech companies, leading CDMOs, and innovators in artificial intelligence all turn to Synthace to discover solutions to humanity’s hardest problems.

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Medical

Precision NanoSystems is Now a Part of Danaher's Life Sciences Platform

Cytiva, Pall Corporation | June 02, 2021

Danaher Corporation's Life Sciences platform has acquired precision NanoSystems (PNI). PNI is a global leader in technologies and solutions for developing genetic medicines, including mRNA vaccines and therapeutics. PNI will join Danaher's Life Sciences platform and complement other businesses in the forum, including Cytiva and Pall. "PNI has advanced several exciting innovations, and we're thrilled to welcome this talented team," says Emmanuel Ligner, Danaher Group Executive. "As mRNA has matured as a successful technology in some COVID vaccines, we see huge potential for this technology to accelerate other therapies. The work done thus far by the PNI team will also enable our customers at Cytiva and Pall to take a huge step forward in advancing their science to improve the lives of patients." James Taylor, co-founder, and CEO of Precision NanoSystems, says: "Over the last ten years, PNI has been a leading technology company, enabling the development of genetic medicines. Joining Danaher's Life Sciences platform allows our world-class team to accelerate and expand the work we do to support our customers with comprehensive technology platforms and the expertise to manufacture transformative medicines for the benefit of humanity. With the global reach of the Danaher Life Sciences platform and customers who are leaders in biotechnology, this is an incredible opportunity to bring PNI's innovations to market and expand our impact." The overall mRNA therapeutics and vaccines market was growing rapidly and accelerated with the development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. It is anticipated that mRNA technology will be used to develop other vaccines and to treat other conditions of high unmet medical need, such as cancer and genetic diseases. At present, most mRNA therapies and other types of genetic medicines in clinical development are designed to be delivered with the help of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). PNI's Genetic Medicine Toolkit, including its proprietary GenVoyTM LNP delivery platform and NanoAssemblrTM microfluidic-based nanoparticle manufacturing platform, enables the rapid development of genetic medicines. PNI's validated technologies increase the stability, efficacy, yield, and quality of non-viral genetic medication and lower the barrier to develop these essential medicines. PNI is developing a new center of manufacturing excellence in Vancouver, which will proceed as planned. When complete, the biomanufacturing center will further advance Canadian therapeutic and vaccine manufacturing capabilities, broaden the domestic life sciences sector, create new jobs in the region, and foster a new generation of scientific talent. About Pall Pall Corporation may be a filtration, separation, and purification leader providing solutions to meet customers' critical fluid management needs across the broad spectrum of life sciences and industry. Pall works with customers to advance health, safety, and environmentally responsible technologies. The Company's engineered products enable process and product innovation and minimize emissions and waste. Pall Corporation serves customers worldwide. About Cytiva Cytiva is a global life science leader with more than 8,000 associates across 40 countries dedicated to advancing and accelerating therapeutics. As a trusted partner to customers that range in scale and scope, Cytiva brings speed, efficiency, and capacity to research and manufacture workflows, enabling the development, manufacture, and delivery of transformative medicines to patients.

Read More

Industrial Impact

The Bracken Organizations Merge to Create a Global Platform to Support Life Science and Digital Health Teams

The Bracken Group | October 11, 2021

Three unique companies with shared origins have now united to better serve their clients in the life sciences industry. The new entity will be known as The Bracken Group (Bracken) with three divisions of the original three companies. The combined companies' mission continues to be supporting the success of companies that improve health, using an integrated network of clients, consultants, and employees across the globe. I am delighted to bring the companies together under the one outstanding leadership team which further improves the services we provide to our clients. The benefits of the synergy that comes from a closer inter-team relationship will be apparent as the cross communication will be immediate. - Dr Colin G. Miller, CEO of The Bracken Group Bracken has been specializing across the life sciences and digital health arenas since inception, This highly regulated life science industry includes high stakes and complex processes. We have created and continue to cultivate an integrated platform to help organizations in this industry succeed. - Elliot Miller, Chief Growth Officer. About Bracken Data Bracken Data was founded in 2016 to improve how the industry can use public clinical trial data. Bracken Data offers a suite of clinical trial dashboard products, and custom data science and analytics services. For more information, please visit BrackenData.com. About Bracken Marketing Bracken Marketing was founded in 2017 to support the success of digital health and life science teams through marketing services, and custom marketing programs. Services include website design, content development, advertising, sales collateral production, and multi-media production. About The Bracken Group The Bracken Group, founded in 2018, provides highly experienced consultative support for the development of products that are designed to improve life, in an ethical manner, underpinned with integrity and quality. Bracken offers biopharmaceutical consulting in the development of drugs, biologics, and medical devices, as well as in the use of medical imaging in clinical trials. Clients leverage The Bracken Group's team of executive consultants across a range of specialties through Virtual C-Suite services and related offerings.

Read More

Research

Synthace Unveils First Life Sciences R&D Cloud Addressing Complexity, Speed & Reproducibility for Scientists

Synthace | August 03, 2021

Synthace, a leading life sciences software company, today announced the first life sciences R&D cloud that includes a no-code software platform addressing the largest barriers to innovation that R&D life scientists currently face. With the release of this new platform, Synthace is also the first vendor to enable scientists to automate experimentation and insight sharing in a unified, global R&D environment. Scientists can now focus on asking the most impactful questions and unlock the true potential of biology. To solve humanity’s hardest problems, such as delivering breakthrough therapies or alternative food sources, the life sciences industry is under tremendous pressure to simultaneously overcome biology’s complexity, accelerate speed to scientific insight, and ensure the reproducibility of experiments. Synthace alleviates these challenges by empowering scientists to improve and accelerate decision-making with more statistically powerful, automated experiments that can minimize human error. Furthermore, Synthace’s cloud platform leverages intelligent, dynamic automation to produce the highest quality data sets that are primed for machine learning (ML) and other advanced analyses to lead to better insights. With Synthace, the life sciences can now benefit from a quantum leap in experimentation capabilities, accelerating development timelines that would have previously been impossible. Customers Accelerate R&D with Synthace Ipsen has been using Synthace to automate the design and construction of therapeutic candidates. With Synthace, Ipsen produced approximately 90 constructs five times faster than previous methods, substantially increasing the number of molecules entering the screening cascade. The platform also achieved a 10-fold reduction in costs associated with DNA synthesis. Karen Bunting, Director of Protein Sciences at Ipsen commented, “Synthace sits very well at the beginning of our drug discovery process. It allows us to explore larger drug design space by simplifying planning and production of multiple molecule variants with combinatorial construct assembly. These throughput improvements help us deliver well-tolerated and effective therapeutic solutions more rapidly to our patients.” Microsoft Research also uses Synthace to automatically generate biological data at a volume that allows its ML algorithms to rapidly improve. As part of reporting on advancements in programming biological systems, a member of its Biocomputation Group noted: “Synthace really comes into its own when we’re performing experiments with complex layouts like combinatorial construct assembly and design of experiments. When we’re building 12 constructs at a time, Synthace automates all the planning that would go into setting up such an experiment and allows it to become routine.” Synthace Life Sciences R&D Cloud The platform provides end-to-end management of the experimental lifecycle, from design through execution to data visualization and knowledge transfer. Synthace adheres to FAIR principles to support interoperability with other major lab informatics platforms to ensure streamlined data management for all of its customers. Only the Synthace Life Sciences R&D Cloud delivers: Complete experimental design, planning and automation, requiring no coding expertise. Scientists can define more informative and impactful experiments that would otherwise be impossible to run and easily implement Quality by Design (QbD) and Design of Experiments (DOE). Seamless, cloud-based data capture, processing, and visualization. R&D teams can deliver deeper and faster insights from fully contextualized, machine learning-ready data sets that are automatically generated from the laboratory. Minimal deployment and onboarding. Customers experience rapid time-to-insight through Synthace’s out-of-the-box platform features and pre-validated protocols for common applications such as ELISA and high-throughput purification, helping them shorten R&D cycles and study more candidates per program. About Synthace Synthace is a life sciences software company enabling life science the way it should be done. Delivering a life sciences R&D cloud to scientists who want to innovate faster, the Synthace platform seamlessly automates experimentation and insight sharing so that scientists can focus on asking the most impactful questions to unlock the true potential of biology. Top global pharmaceuticals, high-growth biotech companies, leading CDMOs, and innovators in artificial intelligence all turn to Synthace to discover solutions to humanity’s hardest problems.

Read More

Medical

Precision NanoSystems is Now a Part of Danaher's Life Sciences Platform

Cytiva, Pall Corporation | June 02, 2021

Danaher Corporation's Life Sciences platform has acquired precision NanoSystems (PNI). PNI is a global leader in technologies and solutions for developing genetic medicines, including mRNA vaccines and therapeutics. PNI will join Danaher's Life Sciences platform and complement other businesses in the forum, including Cytiva and Pall. "PNI has advanced several exciting innovations, and we're thrilled to welcome this talented team," says Emmanuel Ligner, Danaher Group Executive. "As mRNA has matured as a successful technology in some COVID vaccines, we see huge potential for this technology to accelerate other therapies. The work done thus far by the PNI team will also enable our customers at Cytiva and Pall to take a huge step forward in advancing their science to improve the lives of patients." James Taylor, co-founder, and CEO of Precision NanoSystems, says: "Over the last ten years, PNI has been a leading technology company, enabling the development of genetic medicines. Joining Danaher's Life Sciences platform allows our world-class team to accelerate and expand the work we do to support our customers with comprehensive technology platforms and the expertise to manufacture transformative medicines for the benefit of humanity. With the global reach of the Danaher Life Sciences platform and customers who are leaders in biotechnology, this is an incredible opportunity to bring PNI's innovations to market and expand our impact." The overall mRNA therapeutics and vaccines market was growing rapidly and accelerated with the development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. It is anticipated that mRNA technology will be used to develop other vaccines and to treat other conditions of high unmet medical need, such as cancer and genetic diseases. At present, most mRNA therapies and other types of genetic medicines in clinical development are designed to be delivered with the help of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). PNI's Genetic Medicine Toolkit, including its proprietary GenVoyTM LNP delivery platform and NanoAssemblrTM microfluidic-based nanoparticle manufacturing platform, enables the rapid development of genetic medicines. PNI's validated technologies increase the stability, efficacy, yield, and quality of non-viral genetic medication and lower the barrier to develop these essential medicines. PNI is developing a new center of manufacturing excellence in Vancouver, which will proceed as planned. When complete, the biomanufacturing center will further advance Canadian therapeutic and vaccine manufacturing capabilities, broaden the domestic life sciences sector, create new jobs in the region, and foster a new generation of scientific talent. About Pall Pall Corporation may be a filtration, separation, and purification leader providing solutions to meet customers' critical fluid management needs across the broad spectrum of life sciences and industry. Pall works with customers to advance health, safety, and environmentally responsible technologies. The Company's engineered products enable process and product innovation and minimize emissions and waste. Pall Corporation serves customers worldwide. About Cytiva Cytiva is a global life science leader with more than 8,000 associates across 40 countries dedicated to advancing and accelerating therapeutics. As a trusted partner to customers that range in scale and scope, Cytiva brings speed, efficiency, and capacity to research and manufacture workflows, enabling the development, manufacture, and delivery of transformative medicines to patients.

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