Working in partnership with industry to deliver innovation
As a mechanism to improve innovation, partnerships between academia and companies are playing an increasingly important role.
Despite huge investment and changes in practices over the years, the rate of drug discovery has not increased and the cost of bringing effective drugs to market remains very high. Strong links to industry exist through Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology Innovations at Astbury and you can be connected with organisations that could benefit from the research you are carrying out. This can ensure that the research you are undertaking has the greatest relevance for the sector, and the strongest potential for translation.
Industry Advisory Board
One mechanism through which industry links are developed is the Astbury Centre Industry Advisory Board. The IAB comprises members from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry and supporting sectors with links to funding bodies and national initiatives.
Current companies:
AstraZeneca, Centre for Process Innovations Biologics, Cobra Biologics, Domainex, F-star, GSK, HealthTech & Medicines KTN, Medimmune and UCB.
Challenge-led research priorities
Researchers within the Astbury Centre have a number of distinctive capabilities, and by working closely with its industry advisory board, the hub has been able to match these to market need, to maximise opportunities for commercialising such expertise.
As a result, there are five areas of particular focus: inhibiting protein-protein interactions, targeted molecular delivery, predicting and preventing biopharmaceutical aggregation, ion channels research and translational drug discovery:
Targeted molecular delivery
Multiple systems have been developed capable of delivering reagents with control of pharmacokinetics and biodistribution. This
allows the delivery of reagents including RNAi to large proteins for applications in therapeutics, imaging and/or diagnostics.
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Predicting and preventing protein aggregation
Experimental and computational approaches are combined to understand, predict and control the properties of biological
molecules.
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Protein-protein interactions
A range of approaches has been developed to modulate protein-protein interactions, both with designed small molecules
and biomolecular probes.
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Ion channels research
Research focussing on understanding normal human functioning and the mechanisms of disease is applied to numerous ion channel
types with impact on multiple diseases.
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Translational drug discovery
Novel, primarily small molecule, agents have been developed at Leeds to modulate disease pathways in multiple
therapeutic areas.
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Welcome to the Centre
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Upcoming seminar
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