A new engineering biology alliance could deliver truly personalised ‘precision’ medicine and the next generation of antibiotics.

Product design & development firm Cambridge Consultants and London software company Synthace are bidding to unlock the full potential of biology to address many of the global challenges facing the medical world through adoption of a powerful new platform for the engineering of biological systems.

The platform – called Antha – has been developed by Synthace and is a programming language and operating system for engineering biology. It allows more automated ways of working and opens the door to widespread adoption and implementation of engineering practices in the biotechnology industry.

As well as medical breakthroughs, this could also unlock a whole host of novel applications in areas such as consumer products.

Tim Fell, CEO of Synthace, said: “Our goal is to help remove some of the manual, and often painstaking, work that scientists undertake in experimentation – and use software and processes which can exponentially accelerate bioscience. Combining our expertise with that of Cambridge Consultants will hopefully speed up the adoption of Antha and demonstrate our commitment to making engineering biology a widespread reality.”

The partnership will create a ‘one-stop shop’ for clients to ensure they get the most out of Antha. Cambridge Consultants will provide consultancy services to help with effective implementation of Antha in labs – including process development, protocol development, automation integration and custom equipment development. 

Synthace will provide the core ‘platform as a service’, maintaining Antha and managing the cloud-hosted infrastructure.

Cambridge Consultants will use Antha to run its in-house synthetic biology lab. Richard Hammond, head of synthetic biology at Cambridge Consultants, said: “We’re delighted to partner with Synthace and lead the global proliferation of synthetic biology together, while boosting the ever-growing UK scene.

“We’re also very excited to be using Antha in our own lab to plan and manage our wetware development and show the power of this approach.”

The Antha software enables labs to define, link and execute biological experimental and analysis protocols. Using the programming language, each in-lab process is fully and unambiguously defined and can be linked to other processes to form sophisticated workflows – including decision-based and recursive workflows. These systems can then be executed using automated equipment.

The UK is a strong player in the rapidly evolving synthetic biology community – number one in Europe and second globally only to the US.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Tim Fell, CEO of Synthace with Richard Hammond of Cambridge Consultants

Abzena is raising £25 million ($31.19m) from a placing and Heptares has triggered a $12m milestone payment from AstraZeneca as the East of England life sciences cluster continues to thrive.

Abzena wants the cash to further expand its service offering, capacity and capabilities in the UK and US, according to CEO John Burt. He said: “Our existing and prospective customers are developing novel but complex biological therapies for a wide range of diseases, from rare genetic childhood disorders to cancer.

“Our experience and reputation as a biopharma service and technology provider continues to grow and as a result our customers’ demand is currently outstripping our capacity.

“This new funding will enable us to build on the group’s foundations, maximising the opportunities being presented to us and accelerating progress to sustainable profitability.”

Abzena is seeking shareholder approval at a general meeting on April 21 at Babraham Research Campus.

Abzena’s services are currently provided to a global customer base, including 18 of the top 25 major biopharmaceutical companies over the past three years. Since its IPO in July 2014, the company has significantly expanded both its service offering and geographic footprint through two acquisitions in the US, substantially increasing its client base and breadth of service offering in the process.

The group has continued to secure further licence agreements for Abzena Inside technologies which have been incorporated into products being developed by its customers. Twelve ‘Abzena Inside’ products are in clinical development (compared to five at the time of IPO) and the group anticipates a further two to three such products entering clinical trials each year.

Abzena will be upgrading its biomanufacturing, biology and chemistry facilities and capabilities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Herts-based Heptares Therapeutics – a wholly owned subsidiary of Sosei of Japan – has achieved an important milestone in its immuno-oncology collaboration with AstraZeneca, which is focused on the development of AZD4635 (HTL-1071) as a potential new treatment for a range of cancers. As a result, Heptares has been notified today that the achievement has triggered a $12 million payment from AstraZeneca.

AZD4635 is a potent and selective, orally available, small molecule adenosine A2A receptor antagonist discovered by Heptares and licensed to AstraZeneca in 2015.

The milestone was triggered by the successful completion of a preclinical programme that demonstrated a clear effect of AZD4635 in reversing adenosine-mediated T-cell suppression and enhancing anti-tumour immunity. 
Tumour cells have evolved mechanisms to evade the immune system, including through the production of a natural anti-inflammatory molecule called adenosine. 

By stimulating A2A receptors, adenosine prevents T-cells within the immune system from being activated and reduces their ability to destroy cancer cells. Blocking A2A receptors can therefore promote the anti-cancer response of T-cells within the tumour microenvironment.

“The preclinical study results are very exciting and confirm that inhibition of A2A signalling offers an attractive mechanism to treat cancers by preventing tumours from evading the immune system and making them susceptible to checkpoint inhibitors,” said Fiona Marshall, CSO of Heptares and Sosei. 

“We now look forward to the results from the first clinical study with AZD4635 around the end of the year.”

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Abzena CEO, John Burt

The onset of a new season, particularly spring, seems to create a certain momentum in the business community.

This was evident a few weeks ago when our rural colleagues held a breakfast seminar on the same morning that the Carter Jonas commercial and planning and development teams hosted many in the business community at our Commercial Edge launch.

Our annual research report, the Commercial Edge provides a great opportunity to look back at how the market has performed over the last 12 months, and allows us a chance to consider what’s next for the property industry and most importantly, businesses in Cambridge.

What really struck me, when looking at the data in this year’s report, is just how much the months leading up to the EU referendum, and the immediate aftermath of the vote to leave, impacted the market. 

In the last quarter of 2016, total office and laboratory take-up reached 450,000 sq ft of space. This was a significant increase on the first three quarters of the year.

Until the final quarter, take-up in any of the three-month periods failed to record even 100,000 sq ft of space. This seems to highlight just how many business occupiers were adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach when it came to making decisions about their property needs. It also seems to demonstrate how, once people got over the initial impact of the vote to leave, many occupiers got back into a “business as usual” positon.

In the context of this uncertainty, as well as the truly stellar performance achieved in 2015, we feel pretty encouraged as to how resilient the Cambridge market was last year.

We saw demand from both domestic and international occupiers and eight transactions were recorded in the 20,000 sq ft and above category including one ‘super deal’.

Abcam took 100,000 sq ft of space at the Biomedical Campus. The average transaction size across the city also increased marginally from 7,469 sq ft in 2015 to 7,613 sq ft in 2016.

Perhaps not so encouraging is the continuing issue of availability, or lack of it. At the beginning of this year overall availability of existing office and laboratory space stood at 870,000 sq ft – marginally down on 895,560 sq ft at the same time last year.

A significant majority of this space is located within the wider business park areas, including the Cambourne Business and Cambridge Research Parks. Across the city there continues to be a distinct shortage of larger floorplates, notably of those over 20,000 sq ft – often this is the size that is most attractive to firms. Of the 96 available properties at the end of 2016, 78 were less than 10,000 sq ft while only eight could provide accommodation over 20,000 sq ft. 

Looking forward, landlords will likely benefit from this lack of space, and could use it as an opportunity to increase rents at reviews and lease renewals. 

However, all is not lost for occupiers; Cambridge has a positive development pipeline in the city centre and the surrounding areas, which I hope will redress the imbalance.

Additionally, the development of CB4 to the east of the Science Park and Cambridge Business Park will help attract and accommodate new occupiers, with the new train station, due to open in May 2017, only adding to Cambridge’s appeal.  
However, many consider this a small step in the right direction. As a city we need to continue to attract domestic and international occupiers, and benefit economically as a consequence. Because of this, I wonder if there is an argument that the allocation of land uses should be revised. 

Former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair was in Cambridge today to open a new facility for disease breathalyser pioneer Owlstone Medical.

Kate Gross, the late wife of Owlstone CEO Billy Boyle, was a former Downing Street aide who ran Blair’s Africa charity. 

Blair today visited Owlstone’s Cambridge HQ to officially open the company’s new high volume clinical laboratory.

He learned more about the company’s Breath Biopsy® technology and its mission to save 100,000 lives and $1.5 billion in healthcare costs. He was also given a tour of Owlstone’s HQ including the new clinical lab and other research facilities.

The opening of a new clinical lab with increased capacity enables Owlstone Medical to offer high quality and high throughput biomarker services to academics, clinicians, pharmaceutical companies and CROs to identify novel breath biomarkers for disease diagnostics as well as precision medicine applications including therapeutic response, patient stratification and outcome prediction.

The clinical lab also provides VOC biomarker analysis of breath samples and other biospecimens from the on-going clinical trials in Owlstone Medical’s own clinical pipeline: early detection of lung cancer (LuCID), colorectal cancer (InTERCEPT) and treatment stratification in asthma (STRATA).

Billy Boyle said: “Our new high volume clinical lab follows the successful commercial launch of our biomarker services earlier this year and the announcement of our first clinical and pharma customers.

“Having a state-of-the-art and globally unique capability allows us to increase capacity to handle large service projects as well as support our ongoing clinical trials.”

Tony Blair added: “I congratulate Owlstone Medical on the opening of its new clinical lab. It was a pleasure to meet the dedicated staff of this successful, dynamic company, united in their clear vision to save lives. 

“The breath biopsy technology has huge potential to lead to great improvements in healthcare and I wish the team every success in developing a company that will become a leader in next generation diagnostics.”

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Billy Boyle with Tony Blair

A high-class hothouse has been launched in Cambridge to create a world-leading platform for collaboration between academia and industry to develop novel therapeutics against a range of diseases.

The Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences (CATS) will foster science that underpins the discovery of new treatments and diagnostics as well as the safe and effective use of existing medicines.

It aims to combine excellent science with efficient translation, working across biological, physical, clinical and social sciences and engineering, in partnership with industry. The arrival in Cambridge of major pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Otsuka, and the closeness of GSK, put Cambridge firmly at the epicentre of commercial drug discovery in the UK and internationally.

Cambridge has strong clinical trials and clinical science sectors, a network of aligned organisations supporting contract research, and excellent epidemiology and public health networks.

Many of these are situated on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, the centrepiece of the largest biotech cluster outside the United States. From early 2018, the campus will also house the Milner Therapeutics Institute, a partner organisation within CATS, which will act as a research hub and partner with institutions in aspects of drug development research.

Cambridge University vice-chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz says: “Healthcare in the future will be provided by a complex interplay of patients, industries and service operators.

“It will involve sophisticated diagnostic tools, digital scrutiny and interpretation using artificial intelligence, and access to an extensive toolbox of therapeutic approaches, all personalised to the individual patient, and available through a redesigned primary and hospital healthcare environment.

“There are few places in the world as well placed as the University of Cambridge to take advantage of this highly multidisciplinary scenario. The Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences will ensure that this capacity is fully exploited to speed up the development of new treatments that will benefit patients locally, nationally and internationally.”

The Academy will focus on three main areas:-

1  Research facilitation – through collaboration, networking and capacity building, encouraging people and skills exchanges between academia and industry in the UK, with the aim of expanding to involve international collaborations, particularly in in developing countries.
2 Education – from undergraduate through to postdoctoral, CATS will provide education and training opportunities, and facilitate networking and internships with industry partners; a key plank in this strand will be to develop a new modular Master’s course in therapeutic sciences.
3 Policy – working closely with the University’s Centre for Science and Policy, and the Research Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, CATS will take the lead in addressing key legal and policy matters across the spectrum of pharmaceutical sciences, and beyond.

One key theme that the Academy will focus on is medicine safety, through the involvement of the Cambridge Alliance on Medicines Safety, a partnership between the university, the Medical Research Council Toxicology Unit (due to transfer to the University in 2018), GSK and AstraZeneca.

Its main aim is to connect scientists at the University whose work relates to safety of medicines to build an active academic research programme with strong collaborative links to pharmaceutical and human-safety related companies.

Professor Chris Lowe, director of CATS, adds: “With CATS, we will develop a way of fostering and supporting the community in and around Cambridge to develop new concepts, deliver new knowledge, and to produce people who are better educated in all elements of modern therapeutics.

“We believe the opportunities that CATS provides for research, collaboration and education will attract academic and industrial researchers from around the world.”
 

Vernalis plc and Servier have entered into a new drug discovery collaboration that builds on their existing partnership. The companies have agreed a fresh, two-year oncology drug discovery collaboration on an undisclosed target.

This agreement extends the existing successful collaborations between Servier and Vernalis since 2007 to combine Vernalis’ proprietary fragment- and structure-based drug discovery platform with the oncology expertise at Servier. Previous successes include discovery of products targeting Bcl-2 and Mcl-1 currently in clinical development.

Vernalis will receive a €2 million upfront payment, fees, research milestones and a share in the downstream success of any products coming out of this new collaboration.

Vernalis CEO, Ian Garland (pictured), said: “This new collaboration further validates our fragment-based drug discovery platform and the strength and success of our relationship with Servier. We look forward to working together to develop exciting new cancer treatment opportunities to add to the already disclosed success in targeting Bcl-2 and Mcl-1.

Olivier Geneste, director of oncology research at Servier added: “The original structure of Servier, governed by a non-profit foundation, allows us to enter long-term collaborations with world-class partners like Vernalis, and use our expertise to bring innovative therapies to patients.”

Vernalis is a commercial stage pharmaceutical company with significant expertise in drug development. It is headquartered in Berkshire, UK and has  research operations at Granta Park, Cambridge. The company’s US commercial operations are in Pennsylvania.

The Group has three approved products: 

• Tuzistra® XR targeting the US prescription cough-cold market
• Moxatag®, a once-daily formulation of the antibiotic, amoxicillin, indicated for the treatment of tonsillitis and/or pharyngitis secondary to Streptococcus pyogenes in adults and pediatric patients 12 years and older
• Frovatriptan for the acute treatment of migraine. 

It has an exclusive licensing agreement to develop and commercialise multiple novel products focused on the US prescription cough-cold market as well as eight programmes in its NCE development pipeline. 

Servier is an international pharmaceutical company governed by a non- profit foundation with its headquarters in Suresnes, France. In 2016 the company recorded a €4 billion turnover and has a presence in 148 countries,  employing 21,000 people globally.

Servier has its eye on becoming a key player in oncology, and has nine new molecular entities in clinical development in this area, targeting breast and lung cancers and other solid tumors, as well as various leukemias and lymphomas. Its portfolio of cancer treatments is being developed with partners worldwide, and covers different cancer hallmarks, including cytotoxics, proapoptotics, targeted, immune and cellular therapies.

Cambridge UK solar technology pioneer Azuri Technologies is expanding its reach across Africa after accumulating $16 million of financial muscle.

The commercial off-grid solar business has just reached 100,000 sales of its PayGo home systems in sub Saharan Africa.

Since entering the market in 2011, Azuri has provided access to affordable clean energy for off-grid communities across 12 counties.

The company negotiated a $5m debt facility with Standard Chartered Bank in February – three months after completing an $11m equity funding round to support its sustainable growth across Africa.

The finance will underpin Azuri’s expansion in existing markets and growth in new ones; this includes the programme announced in January to provide power to 20,000 households in Nigeria.

Azuri’s technology delivers lighting, phone charging, radio and TV access via affordable packages paid for through mobile money.

The product suite includes the first PayGo satellite TV package targeting households without electricity – launched in Kenya in December – and solar lighting systems that ensure households have light all night, even following cloudy weather.

Azuri chief executive Simon Bransfield-Garth said: “The milestone of 100,000 systems sold marks the next phase of Azuri’s journey. Coupled with the recently completed funding announcements we look forward to continuing to grow our presence and serve the millions of customers who still lack access to modern electrical services.”

Still headquartered in Cambridge, Azuri also has staff based in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Azuri CEO Simon Bransfield-Garth in Kenya