Research & University News

A new venture fund designed to provide seed funding to start-up companies in the UK life science sector has raised £15 million. Start Codon Fund I LP was created by the Start Codon business accelerator. The limited partner investors in the fund include Novartis International AG and Cambridge Innovation Capital, a venture investor focused on opportunities in the Cambridge University ecosystem.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A Doudna for their discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 genetic scissors, a method of genome editing. It marks the first time ever that two female scientists have jointly won the award.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology has been awarded to a team of scientists who discovered the hepatitis C virus. Harvey J Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M Rice have made a “decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis,” according to the prize committee.

A case study of a 45-year old woman with severe Covid-19 has shown that administration of APN01, an experimental biologic, enabled the generation of neutralising antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and a rapid drop in virus load. The results of the study were reported online in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine on 24 September 2020.

An international research team based at the University of Bristol in the UK has identified a fatty acid binding pocket in the structure of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that they believe could be exploited to develop small molecule drugs effective against the virus. According to a report published in Science on 21 September, the pocket binds strongly to linoleic acid, an essential fatty acid.

What makes a life science ecosystem flourish? Part of the answer is good universities, venture capital and a critical mass of entrepreneurs eager to commercialise new medicines. These are all features displayed by Cambridge, UK. How this plays out, and what might be done to improve the ecosystem were the subject of discussions at the virtual On Helix meeting on 13 July, organised by One Nucleus, a membership group.

Llft BioSciences Ltd of the UK has teamed up with King’s College London to create a new version of its cell therapy for cancer which uses a special type of neutrophil to attack solid tumours. The cell therapy is still in preclinical development, but the company will work with the university to develop a new version using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). It believes the iPSC version will be easier to manufacture and will deliver significant cost savings to patients.

Human macrophages that were genetically engineered with chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) have demonstrated an anti-cancer effect in mice, suggesting a new application for cell therapy in solid tumours. Results from preclinical studies of the new molecule were published in Nature Biotechnology on 23 March 2020.

Researchers from Cardiff University in the UK have described a new type of T cell receptor (TCR) that has been shown in laboratory studies to recognise and kill many human cancer types while ignoring healthy cells. T cells equipped with the new TCR were able to kill a host of malignancies including lung, skin, blood and colon cancers in mice engineered with human cancers and a human immune system. The research was published on 20 January 2020 in the journal Nature Immunology.

The EU is to invest €10 million in a project to expand the use of structural biology in drug discovery and other disciplines. The project is being coordinated by Anastassis Perrakis from the Netherlands Cancer Institute and the Oncode Institute and will involve partners from other countries.