BioWales 2012 – Innovation, Translation and Commercialisation
Rowan is delighted to speak at BioWales 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the international life sciences event, and to celebrate, the event on March 13 and 14 will be the biggest yet – in its new home, the iconic Wales Millennium Centre overlooking the waterfront of Cardiff Bay, and with a much broader global focus.
To keep up-to-date with conference announcement visit the event website or
Follow @BioWales
Monday 14th November 2011, Biolauncher moves to new premises at the Copley Hill Business Park today. Biolauncher’s new offices are conveniently located on the south east of Cambridge in the triangle formed by the Babraham Research Campus, the Cambridge Biomedical Campus at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus at Hinxton.
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
Joint venture aims to rapidly identify small molecule therapeutics to pharma targets
Cambridge, UK, June 28th, 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 27th and 30th, 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
Since 2009, Biolauncher under the direction of Dirk Gewert has helped clients prepare 15 Technology Strategy Board (TSB) bids, 11 of which have been successful and 2 are still in the award process. Successful awards have funded a total of £5.3m projects at an average of 55%, with the balance of project costs been met through in kind contribution from the successful consortium.
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 can provide a range of input into a company’s TSB bid that include;
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.
A few weeks ago Rowan presented at the excellent Babraham Investment forum in Cambridge, UK. For once we were pitching for hearts and minds instead of cold hard cash for our cause. We were highlighting the need for greater participation of women entrepreneurs in high growth business, and the excellent work of the Global Astia Network.
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.
