... understanding life in molecular detail

Working in partnership with industry to deliver innovation

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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