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.
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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

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

ShowcaseBio system has been built by BioLauncher using advanced semantic data integration techniques. The system brings together relevant publicly available industry data from over 300 sources to build and map the world’s life science industry and supply chain. Company contact information, key people, scientific publications, clinical trials, investors, business profiles and partnerships are automatically identified and entered into the system.

In addition, the system enables the benchmarking of the region’s Life Science capabilities and resources against competing regional clusters. As a result, EEI can target their marketing by sector and identify potential companies that would benefit from an East of England connection.

The partnership has already delivered tangible outcomes as EEI intervened to persuade a client to keep its UK operations open. “Working with BioLauncher, we were able to show the client that their regional base was strategically important. ShowcaseBio demonstrated to the client that they were in the centre of the largest market for their goods and services and that all of their potential European customers were located within fifty mile radius of airports served by Stansted” said Nicola Rogers, Business Development Manager – Life Sciences, EEI. As a consequence the client has started recruitment and committed to remain in the region.

“Our partnership with EEI builds upon the commercial strategy work that we undertake with our clients. Biotechnology is an international business and value is created by integrating local businesses with global markets for innovative technologies and novel medicines” commented Rowan Gardner, BioLauncher Ltd. “ShowcaseBio is a tool that allows us to capture and expand our knowledge of the worldwide industry and place it in the hands or our clients”, she added.

About BioLauncher Ltd

BioLauncher is a management consultancy business based in Cambridge, UK specialising in providing services to life science businesses. The company’s clients include Universities, SMEs, large multinational companies, public sector bodies and investors.

About EEI

East of England International (EEI) works with companies seeking to trade internationally and assists foreign-owned businesses looking to invest and grow in the region. EEI is funded by and works in partnership with the UK Government, the East of England Development Agency (EEDA) and a wide range of businesses and partners in the region. In the East of England, EEI’s Trade Team delivers UK Trade & Investment’s export services.