The move has been driven by the company’s expansion and need for high speed internet connectivity to support its continued innovation in large scale semantic data integration and high performance computing applications. Biolauncher has been awarded funding from the Technology Strategy Board to develop its ShowcaseBio data analytics platform for life science intelligence and an exciting new peptide to small molecule platform.

From Monday, Biolauncher’s contact information will be Lower Court 6C, Copley Hill Business Park, Cambridge, CB22 3GN. Tel: +44 (0) 1223 833858

Everyone at BioLauncher has a passion for life science and the potential benefits that science can bring to all of our lives. We also understand that these benefits can only be realized when scientific innovation leads to successful commercial products. Our clients include start ups, government agencies, and technology investors. We are based on the Chesterford Research Park, just south of Cambridge, UK.

The company has developed an innovative semantic data integration system that brings together commercial and scientific information to inform strategic decision making and opportunity identification in the life science sector. We have been awarded funding from the Technology Strategy Board to find drug reprofiling opportunities using large diverse data sources. Therefore we have a new position for a data programmer to work alongside our senior consultant to develop and implement our database system.

We are seeking a smart graduate who is able to work independently in a small, dynamic environment. The ideal candidate will thrive on personal challenge and will have:

• 1-2 years experience of working in a software development environment
• C#, Java (or similar OOP)
• Good familiarity with programming relational database systems, e.g. MySql
• Previous experience of text mining and search tools such as GATE, UIMA, Sphinx, Lucence etc.
• Perl scripting experience
• Understand the use of indexes, cursors and stored procedures/functions
• Experience of data pipelining and workflows

For more information, or to apply for this position please email a CV and covering letter to Steve Gardner (jobs@biolauncher.com). Candidates presented via agencies will not be considered at this time.  We encourage all candidates to apply direct.

Cambridge, UK, June 28^th, 2011 Isogenica Ltd today announced a collaborative joint venture with Biolauncher Ltd (Cambridge, UK) and Cresset Biomolecular Discovery Ltd (Welwyn Garden City, UK) to develop an innovative end-to-end therapeutic discovery platform. Under the terms of the collaboration the parties will integrate their expertise in peptide library design, evolutionary screening, next generation sequencing, state of the art structural analytics, and molecular field-based computational chemistry to identify active compounds against high-value therapeutic targets.

The new approach harnesses the vast chemical and conformational diversity of very large (10¹⁴) peptide libraries to explore available chemical space around a novel biological target.  Enrichment of the peptide libraries towards greater specificity for the target is driven by an advanced computational biology system that is also used to identify the active conformations of populations of binding peptides.  These binding peptide conformations can then be translated into a high quality field pharmacophore (a drug template) and used to identify drug-like small molecules for testing.  This integrated set of technologies represents a unique platform that can rapidly and cost effectively progress a drug target to structurally diverse small molecule drug leads without recourse to high throughput screening.

Elements of the platform have been proven by the parties in collaboration with their own customers. The approach has been shown to be compatible with both extracellular and intracellular targets enabling a large proportion of the druggable genome to be evaluated. The next step is to validate the joint venture’s approach with third party drug targets.

The alliance illustrates how innovative companies are adapting to the changing pharmaceutical research and development business and the current equity funding gap. The collaboration has leveraged non-dilutive funding to integrate its proprietary approaches and solve the complex problem of how to discover small molecule leads against drug targets using a rapid and cost effective rational process.  The partners will develop and provide access to the system through an open innovation framework rather than through more traditional equity structures.

Kevin Matthews, CEO, Isogenica commented of the collaboration: “We are excited by the potential to integrate cutting edge molecular biology with state of the art computational biology and chemistry tools to develop small molecule drugs against novel targets using the combined expertise of the businesses.  The industry needs to leverage the significant investment in individual platform technologies to address the innovation gap and deliver shareholder value from therapeutic research and development.”

“A willingness to collaborate across the partners to deliver proof of concept developments has created a unique opportunity for us to link our world-leading technologies into a platform that can create significant value and opportunities for our underlying businesses,” said Rowan Gardner, Chairman, Biolauncher.

“By integrating Cresset’s field-based computational chemistry into this platform we will be able to apply our proven approach to more targets and demonstrate how we can find diverse small molecule leads against a range of pharmaceutically interesting new targets” said Rob Scoffin, CEO, Cresset Biomolecular Discovery.

Isogenica will be exhibiting at the 2011 BIO International Convention in Washington D.C. between June 27^th and 30^th, at the UKTI stand booth number 1405.

ENDS

Contact:

Rowan Gardner, Chairman, Biolauncher – T: +44 (0)1799 531635 – E: rowan@biolauncher.com

Notes to Editor:

About Isogenica

Isogenica specialises in the discovery and optimisation of therapeutic and diagnostic peptides, proteins and antibodies using its proprietary technology, CIS display.  Founded in 2000 Isogenica has developed a unique capability in the field of protein engineering.  Isogenica’s CIS display technology is an in vitro display technology that allows the rapid generation of polypeptide and antibody libraries from which it is possible to select lead molecules with high affinity and specificity for most targets. www.isogenica.com

About Biolauncher

BioLauncher was founded as an advisory firm based in Cambridge, UK specialising in providing services to grow life science businesses.  The company has leveraged its expertise in accessing non-dilutive funding to develop proprietary novel informatics and analytics systems to enable the use of information to drive efficiency in life science R&D.  The principals have a significant track record of raising capital and developing platform technologies to enhance pharmaceutical research and development.  www.biolauncher.com

About Cresset Biomolecular Discovery Ltd

Cresset develops software for calculating and comparing the molecular Field characteristics of chemical compounds.  Field technology uses the surface properties of molecules to evaluate their activities and properties, rather than relying on 2D structure similarity, which enables Cresset’s users to find more interesting, novel and relevant results than other methods.  Cresset’s Fields provide a smarter, structure independent way of hit-finding, lead switching and lead optimization in drug discovery and other chemistry-based research projects.  Cresset’s Field technologies have been successfully applied to a very wide range of target classes, with and without structural information, on over 100 projects for major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. www.cresset-group.com

The funding has made a critical difference to the development of our clients’ businesses during a challenging period. At least one company cites their TSB award as the reason they are still in business, and one client became research active with for the first time with TSB support. A venture investor has been successful in applying for feasibility funding for a new UK business. Significantly several clients were not persuaded that their product development activity fell within the scope of a competition call and were reluctant to apply until they consulted us.

Winning consortia members include CellCentric, Domainex, Sigma Aldrich, Biopharma Technology, Highland Bioscience, Thompson Reuters and Cresset Group.

BioLauncher TSB Services and Business Model

Biolauncher can provide a range of input into a company’s TSB bid that include;

• Bid Strategy – reviewing competition announcements with clients to determine which aspects of their product development would be in scope and which third parties would be desirable in a bid consortium.
• Consortia Building – Biolauncher’s network of clients and ShowcaseBio system makes it possible for us to identify and approach potential partners to build out a consortium.
• Project Design – Biolauncher can use our technology development planning skills to design the work packages that go into a bid.
• Drafting and Submission – Biolauncher will manage the bid process for clients, registering interests, completing forms and submitting the application in addition to drafting the bid document.
• Application Review – Some clients prefer to rely on in house resources to draft their bid, but ask us to review their applications prior to submission.
• Partner Participation – Occasionally it is appropriate that Biolauncher acts as a technology partner organization

Biolauncher provides our TSB services on a mixture of risk and reward, which aligns our interests with our clients. As a principle Biolauncher does not recommend writing ourselves into a grant as a project manager or subcontractor, as this compromises a client’s opportunity to provide project management as part of their in-kind contribution to the bid.

A full list of Biolauncher’s TSB Credentials can be found here.

In this wired and connected world, daily news filters past my computer screen of credit crunches, funding gaps, company closures, austerity measures. And if that wasn’t enough, along come earthquakes and floods… Is the world as we know it really coming to an end? Will it keep going long enough to allow me to have a few years of quiet retirement? It has occurred to me to switch off my email, get un-LinkedIn, de-Twitter my life, and change my internet default page from ‘News’ to ‘Entertainment’. Who can blame me for being nostalgic about a world before Internet when bad news was not delivered instantaneously in sensational blow by blow accounts?

Speaking of global disasters, you may remember the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12th of this year. It was months ago, before floods in Pakistan, another earthquake in New Zealand (see what I mean about the disasters?). It is estimated that 222,570 people died and 300,000 were injured in Haiti, and 1.5 million people were displaced from 200,000 damaged homes. This matters to me because I lived in Haiti for a few years when I was 6 years old. Almost 50 years on I have clear memories of going to school, learning to swim, and even my first (tiny!). Fragments of Haitian Creole even persist in my family. I haven’t been back to Haiti in decades, but something of that country will stay with me for ever!

Evolution tells us that those that respond to challenges succeed. I learnt how to swim in Haiti and I resolved to use that knowledge to raise some money for an organization that runs two orphanages in Haiti. Since the earthquake they have been overwhelmed by the needs of the local population. So, I signed up for the first ever organized swim down the river Dart in South Devon (UK). A 10 kilometre swim in muddy waters just 130C. It was going to be dirty and hard work.

Raising money for charity is like raising cash for a business. You cannot ask too often, but when you ask, you contact everyone. I emailed every person on my email contacts list, and the Biolauncher team Tweeted (#FF @biolauncher, @showcasbio, @treeberries) and posted messages on LinkedIn We achieved an amazing response. Donations and messages of support came in from far and wide: friends, family, work colleagues, my PhD students from years ago, school and University friends, work colleagues, business clients, employers, employees,…from Australia, Canada, UK, Germany, Spain, USA… people I haven’t seen in decades, to colleagues I see every day, and even people who I have never met. With support like that I was never going to fail!

And yes, I successfully completed my swim in just over two and a half hours, raising in excess of £1200, more than I had achieved in all my previous efforts put together. And what did I learn?

• Fund raising is a global effort
• Its easier to do difficult things when you get support from lots of people
• Don’t be shy to ask for help
• Email, LinkedIn, Twitter can help (are tools that maintain connections)
• Swimming through muddy water is hard work, but lots of fun and very rewarding
• Mud squishes through your toes – but doesn’t harm you.

You can still donate to my Haiti appeal: http://www.justgiving.com/Dirk-Gewert, and to prove that there is no dignity in fund raising of any kind check out the slides below.

Schrödinger’s cat and business start up – Like the health of the physicist’s feline trapped for ever in that thought experiment, you can only be certain about the viability business idea when you act upon it. It is important to canvas and consider opinion from trusted parties but finding reasons not to do something is much easier than finding the reason to just do it. Equally you can debate the ideal time for starting a new business, but the reality is your time may be right now. Remember if you operate as a microenterprise you can adapt and refine your business as you develop.

From thinking to doing – Our advice is if you want to be taken seriously as a business, start behaving like a business. Work out your start up budget. You will need to decide on a (memorable) name, find an accountant and get registered and register and build your website. We recommend that you register both the .com and the .co.uk address. It is a signal of intention and global engagement. You will also need a basic website, this should not cost a lot of money, and if the site is built in Wordpress you can integrate your site into the wider world of social media for next to nothing. Plan your launch and goals for the first 100 days of the business.

Now for networking – We still remember our first networking forays, and how hard it is to walk into a room full of strangers with a pocket of new business cards. Get over it – most people in the room feel exactly the same. So walk up to someone and introduce yourself and ask them a question about them. Try and think of a few icebreaker questions before you enter the room – “what are you hoping for from this event?” is a safe opening gambit.

Remember that you need to circulate around the room. If you are enjoying the conversation, use the need to move on as a reason to get their card and agree to follow up and meet another time.

There are a lot of free networking events, in the first place aim for quantity not quality. Get out there and find out what people need.

Business Card Marketing – At Biolauncher most often it is our business card that is the intro to the business, the company brochure and leave behind. It is pretty much the ONLY printed material the business uses. Small businesses can make their cards work much harder than your contact details. Moo print enables you to put product shots, customer testimonials, or just about anything on the back of your cards, you can even get a free sample pack, so no excuses for turning up at a networking event without a card. Biolauncher prints everyone’s cards in portrait and landscape format with different graphic representations of our logo on the back. By asking which card format or reverse design someone prefers recipients spend more time looking at our logo. It builds brand recognition and there is a full set to collect .

Lean marketing – if you are pre revenue or pre VC you need to think about how you market your business with minimal cash outlay. There are lots of great tips out there on the internet search for “lean marketing”. You also need to develop your Social Media skills. If you run a Wordpress blog you can integrate it directly to a LinkedIn company page. If you sync your twitter account and personal LinkedIn account your status line will update to show your tweets. Post your PowerPoint presentations to Slideshare.net and embed them in your website and tweet the URL to all your followers. Look for opportunities to speak at events or put up a poster/roller banner.

Useful Links

A great value and talented Wordpress developer Kirsty Burgoine
Moo Business Cards and tips for using them
Budget Roller banners £45.00 (special offer)

Astia is a global business network that operates on a lean, not for profit basis. The organisation has an exceptional track record of success (see the presentation below) and one that is well worth bringing to the UK/European market. BioLauncher volunteers time to Astia cause because we regularly encounter clients that have challenges with globalising, funding or scaling their business. A global network can provide the advice and connections to achieve these goals and therefore increase business value. We also recognise that Astia promotes diversity in management teams, so it is not a women only network.

The first Doing IT Right programme and subsequent Astia Investment Forum was held in London in 2009. Helena Kyttari Djupesland, CEO of Optinose was one of our presenters. This week, Optinose secured $48.5M from New York based Avista Capital Partners, a huge success which was well deserved. The deal is also an eloquent demonstration of how European companies need to access the US capital markets.

Next week, the second annual Astia Investment Forum will be held in London. It will be an excellent opportunity to see some of the most promising women led businesses, and meet the Astia executive and advisers. Simon Walker, Chief Executive Officer, British Venture Capital Association will also make a keynote presentation. Bona fide investors can register here.

To keep in touch with the Astia’s development in the UK and keep up to date follow @astiaUK and @vosmek on Twitter of become a friend of Astia on Facebook. Alternatively get in touch with Katie Nittler (Katie@astia.org) who leads the Astia programme in the UK.

You can see the map here

The data can be sliced and diced by clicking on the boxes below the map, making it easy for example to find API manufacturing sites in Singapore with support for specific bioprocessing procedures and full commercial GMP certification.

Of course this is a fairly basic example of ShowcaseBio’s data integration, analysis and presentation capabilities. We use this regularly on our customer projects to provide rich evidence bases that can be interrogated to define strategy and support real business decisions. We will be posting more examples of some of the work we do with ShowcaseBio in the future on this blog, so keep an eye out.

A little while ago we were asked to pull together a map of foreign direct investment in bioprocessing capability made around the globe in the previous decade. We wanted to know how difficult it would be for a region to make a difference to the competitiveness of its bioprocessing industrial capacity and skills and what form that intervention might take.

Using a variety of sources from news feeds, web sites, directories and personal information we pulled together the map that you see at the bottom of this article. It became clear pretty quickly that the scale both of the investments and the associated incentives would dwarf anything that could realistically be offered. In total over that decade at least $12B was invested in new plant with approximately $3.6B of declared incentives. Other incentives in the form of tax reliefs, land/plant deals and competitive corporate tax rates would add significantly to this number over the lifetime of the investment.

The data are interesting to play with, and you may know of deals that we missed or that have happened since we did the analysis. The version in this post is just a static image, but there is an interactive version of the map here

The real map is interactive, so you can subselect bits of the information that you are interested in, e.g. just to show fill and finish facilities for small molecule products or manufacturing sites for vaccine production. Just click on the lists at the bottom (underneath the map) to select the bits you are interested in. Click on a spot on the map to find out a bit more about the investment.

I am in the process of pulling together a more complete map of all biopharmaceutical manufacturing and processing facilities as part of a LinkedIn discussion in the Professionals in Pharmaceutical Industry and Biotech Industry group. The good folks there have identified about 500 sites worldwide, and I’ve said I will map them for them once we have sufficient data, so check back in a while for the updated map.

Bioprocessing manufacturing investments from 1998-2008

Interactive version of the map here

Quite a while ago now I wrote a series of articles on our experience of developing large scale semantic systems for drug discovery and drug development work.  You can find the links either at Slideshare or directly as PDFs on this site:

DDT – Ontologies and Drug Discovery (http://slidesha.re/d8GqQV)

DDT – Ontologies and Semantic Data Integration (http://slidesha.re/d0z4j3)

DDW – Ontologies: Networks of Pharmaceutical Knowledge (http://slidesha.re/c7btI5)

To give a flavour of my perspective in the LinkedIn discussion, here is my initial answer:

“Depends whether you are a computer scientist, linguist or philosopher – and therein lies the problem. Semantics is about understanding the meaning of information and as Rudy says this is inherently subjective depending on the context that the objects are observed in and the experience of the observer, and voila we’re back to semiotics, ontology and epistemology.

As someone specializing in semantic search, a really big thing to bear in mind here is that most semantic web stuff focuses on the objects themselves, giving them unique identifiers and tags of their attributes. The more useful thing about ‘truly’ semantic applications is when you can start to understand more of the nuance of the relationships between objects in a given context. My standard example is a glass of wine sitting on a table. You could classify this as a clear drinking vessel for most contexts, but in a bar fight it becomes a lethal weapon. Same object, different context, very different experience.

The true goal of semantic applications is to be able to bring a user to a set of data aggregated and integrated from a wide variety of sources and let them find the information that is relevant to them (the right objects in the right context with sufficient trustworthy evidence) and let them visualize and use it in ways that make sense to them.

We do this everyday in our heads – a good example is planning a night out on the town, integrating train and bus timetables, cinema listings and restaurant reviews and plotting everything in the context of a timeline and geolocation. We are beginning to get mashups of this type where there are common semantic maps (a literal Google maps being a good starting point), but we can also do it is chemistry, and parts of biology now to a reasonable degree. What we need are good starting points (defined domain nomenclatures – note not always necessarily ontologies in a CS sense) and tools that let us map these together.

We also need a cultural shift – we have become so Google bound that we can’t see the results for the tool. Very quick example – drug researchers spend a lot of time looking for info in scientific literature. They use keyword search tools including Google. They seem happy to get back 3 million hits to a simple query like ‘Which compounds cause asthma’ and then reading through a few hundred abstracts to convince themselves of the answer (obviously ignoring the vast bulk of the hits). In fact the answer is about 500 give or take, and a semantic search tool can get you there instantly and (if done well) its answers are very nearly complete. Interestingly that seems to freak people out a bit as they seem to think this is less comprehensive than the Google search that gave them 2.999 million wrong or redundant hits. Go figure – back to epistemology… “