BioInnovator Spotlight

Our immune system is like an army, constantly fighting to keep invaders at bay. When faced with solid tumours, that army is at a major disadvantage. Tumours can build walls around themselves making it hard for the immune cells to penetrate and subsequently target the cancerous cells. Neobe Therapeutics , a spinout of Deep Science Ventures and Cancer Research UK , is looking to an old idea of using...

Since 2014, the Nagoya Protocol has protected the intellectual property of genome sequences by ensuring their countries of origin are entitled to full ownership. Rather than triggering a wave of global genome sequencing and licensing deals, the Protocol seems to have done the opposite - genome exploration for the bio-industry has been stymied for fear of getting bogged down in red tape and legal i...

Solid tumours can be roughly classified into two groups - hot and cold. Hot tumours experience inflammation and are susceptible to drugs like checkpoint inhibitors, and so are more treatable than cold tumours. Cold tumours are just the opposite - they actively dampen the immune system, reducing the effectiveness of cells like macrophages by turning them from the pro-inflammatory M1 type to the ant...

In-vitro fertilisation is a costly treatment involving a long patient journey where patients must receive regular injections of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH). The dosage of FSH is critical to treatment success - too much or too little can result in failure. Currently, the method for calculating each patient dose varies between clinics, with no clear standard or objective diagnostic tool. IVF...

Despite the successes of therapies like Kymriah and Yescarta against blood cancers, solid tumours remain difficult to treat. Finding appropriate molecular targets such as cancer-specific receptors is an ongoing challenge, while the physical environment of a solid tumour also plays a role in suppressing immune responses within it. That said, immunotherapy/cell therapy, like chimeric antigen recepto...

When we think of cell therapies, we almost immediately think of immunotherapies for cancer or other deadly diseases. But there are myriad indications where cell therapy solutions could make major improvements to a patient's quality of life. Take for example muscle degeneration, where conditions such as urinary incontinence affect millions of people (especially as we age) resulting in a poor qualit...

The gut is home to trillions of microbes and, through its mucosal layer, the large intestine offers attractive access to the immune system. But getting drugs delivered to the gut presents a major challenge and, as a result, inflammatory diseases of the gut, like Crohn's disease and Ulcerative Colitis, are difficult to treat. . Systemic IV injection is non-specific while oral drugs must brave the a...

After COP26, all nations recognise that Carbon waste must be reduced but we still derive many high-value chemicals and products from petrochemicals - a carbon source locked away underground for millennia and now polluting our atmosphere as waste Carbon. Atmospheric CO2 is a well known driver of global climate change and some 50 billion tons of CO2 are emitted. As we transition to low-carbon econom...

Humankind's greatest infectious threats are posed by viruses. Even before COVID-19 made a global impact on health and economies, Dengue and West Nile Virus have long been endemic threats in warmer parts of the world and Zika emerged as a local threat in South America. As climate change drives insect migration, these viruses may soon pose a threat outside their current ranges. Protinhi have a new a...

Epigenetics is the study of the changes that occur on top of the DNA without changing the genome sequence. These still affect the expression of our genes, and thereby shape our phenotype. Like the genome, epigenetic traits can be inherited. But unlike the genes, epigenetic traits are flexible and can be lost or regained and are influenced by our lifestyle. This makes them a tantalizing pharmaceuti...

Neoantigens are new proteins that form on cancer cells when certain mutations occur in tumour DNA. These proteins may play an important role in helping the body make an immune response against cancer cells. MyNEO has developed a bioinformatic platform for identifying, exploring and validating alterations leading to neoantigens on cell surfaces which can be used in personalised immunotherapy a...

Access to chemical matter is a major bottleneck in drug discovery. Established industry standards and screening methods often fail to deliver molecular starting points for drug design. Despite accumulating large collections of compounds and screening millions of molecules, the industry struggles to unlock chemical matter. Serghei Glinca founded CrystalsFirst as a spin-out from Prof. Dr Gerhard Kle...

Muscle diseases come in a variety of forms. Among the more common conditions are muscle wasting, which can occur in cancer patients and the elderly. But there are also hundreds of genetically caused muscle diseases as well as local muscle defects that altogether affect more than 15 million in Europe. MyoPax is a muscle stem cell-producing platform for the treatment of muscle defects and genetic mu...

The ageing process afflicts all of us and is the underlying cause of many diseases, creating a significant social and economic impact. Despite humanity's increased longevity in recent decades, the quality of life in our twilight years does not often match up. Dr Daniel Ives is the CEO of Shift Bioscience , based at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge, UK. They have identified a list of genes...

This week on BioInnovation Spotlight I am joined by Dr Maria Vistnes who is based at the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, and whose work is supported by SPARK Norway . Maria has developed a novel concept for treating heart failure based on enzyme inhibition that has a potential first-in-class use of drugs modulating the extracellular matrix. Heart failure is the end-stage of all ty...

As a rule, prevention is often better than cure. When it comes to personal health, we often rely on our doctor and regular check ups to tell us how our body is doing and what we can do to improve. Now, in the age of modern diagnostics, we can take our health firmly in our own hands. In this episode of BioInnovation Spotlight, we talk to Dr Nina Patrick, the CEO and co-founder of MiProbes , an earl...

Traditional vaccines lack specificity in activating the immune system and can take quite a long time to design and produce. Dr Gunnveig Grødeland at the University of Oslo is developing a DNA Vaccine platform that aims to make vaccines much more specific. DNA can encode the sequence to an antigen fused to a protein that presents it to immune cells specifically, resulting in higher efficacies than...

Solid tumors make up 90% of the cases in cancer patients worldwide but the standard of care has not changed in decades. Chemotherapies are still widely used and are non-specific, often with a wide range of negative side effects for the patient. To address this, Dr Felix Lorenz and his team started the Captain T-Cell project. Based at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin and supported by GO-Bio and SP...

A Podcast Series produced for and with LifeScience ORG Molecular Microbiologist and Podcast Producer, Dr David Kirk, talks to the people behind early-stage translational life science across Europe whose innovative research today may be the blockbusters and game-changing technologies of tomorrow. Join the conversation: www.lifescienceorg.com Episode length: 12-15 Minutes