Drug Discovery and Advanced Therapeutics Innovation Lab 2024

by | Jan 23, 2025 | Events, News, Past events | 0 comments

Enabling academia-industry collaborations

Translation Manchester, in collaboration with the Business engagement team at the University of Manchester and The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), hosted an Innovation Labs event funded by the Wellcome Trust Translational Partnership award and the NIHR Manchester BRC.

Innovation Labs comprise a half day workshop, designed and facilitated by creative consultancy FutureEverything. Businesses are invited to submit a challenge and work with a small group of University of Manchester academics from various disciplines, to co-develop a project and pitch for £20k seed corn funding.

This is the third event of its kind organised by Translation Manchester, following the 2022 Innovation Lab on Digital Health and AI, and the 2023 Innovation Lab on Diagnostics in Healthcare.

The 2024 Innovation Lab was themed around “Drug Discovery and Advanced Therapeutics” and took place on 20th June 2024 at Hyatt Recency, Manchester. The key aim was to partner companies at the forefront of drug discovery and therapeutics innovation with University of Manchester academics to unblock bottlenecks and support the development of transformative methods and therapy applications, to understand, manage and improve human health.

Amongst the businesses from the UK and beyond that submitted challenges, four companies were invited to take part to the event:

 

Business Challenges:

The challenges included specific bottlenecks the companies face within the field of drug discovery and advanced therapeutics, and for which they seek academic expertise to overcome. The following challenges were identified by the participating companies:

  • Cellestial Health – Identify minimally-invasive, patient-friendly methods for measuring CNS biomarkers of astrocytic network disruption in Parkinson’s in order to assess mechanism engagement of the relevant astrocyte-targeted drugs that protect astrocytic networks.
  • Stratastem – Characterisation of the in vitro phenotype of induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-derived neurons, from Alzheimer’s disease patients and healthy controls as proof-of-concept for the use of a novel in vitro model for testing and screening new therapeutics (i.e. clinical trial in a dish)
  • Exogems – Optimise drug loading to Extracellular Vesicles derived from adipose tissue
  • Tabrix – Explore the effects of proven anti-microbial small molecule inhibitors in a wide range of infections beyond the original indented use of the inhibitors.

 

Power of Collaborations:

Each of the four businesses was matched with 4-5 academics, from various disciplines across the University. The workshop involved participants engaging in structured collaborative tasks to co- develop innovative solutions to the presented challenges.

The solutions were subsequently presented to and assessed by a panel of experts. All four proposals were deemed to be of high-quality and well-suited to addressing the respective challenges, thus each was awarded £20,000 of funding in principle, subject to the submission of a comprehensive research plan.

The funded projects, together with the associated business, lead academic and project title are listed below:

Cellestial Health (business)– Richard Unwin (UoM academic): Exploration of human CSF biomarkers indicative of stable astrocytic networks in Parkinson’s disease

StrataStem (business) – Cerys Manning (UoM academic): Lost Alzheimers – defining the 40% of patient cells that don’t produce amyloid beta

Exogems (business) – Christos Tapeinos (UoM academic): Development of an advanced drug delivery system through upcycling of micro-fragmented fat tissue

Tabrix (business) – Margherita Bertuzzi (UoM academic): TABRIX 2050

This workshop is a prime example of the transformative power of collaboration, as experts from academia and industry joined forces to tackle challenges in the Drug Discovery and Advanced Therapeutics space, and paved the way for future collaborations potentially leading to follow-on funding opportunities.  The success of the event was made possible thanks to the invaluable support of the Wellcome Trust Partnership Award and the NIHR Manchester BRC.

I found the matching event by Translation Manchester quite unique and very helpful. For most funding applications, if a crucial piece of expertise is missing, the funding opportunity may be lost for a whole year or longer, and a promising idea may never get a chance to take off even if we know that the correct support is available somewhere within our network. Translation Manchester helps to both make connections within the ecosystem and support these newly formed collaborations with rapidly available translational capital, giving new partnerships a real momentum to grow into long-term, fruitful relationships.”

Nataly Hastings – Chief Executive Officer of Cellestial Health

Feedback from the event highlighted that “the meeting is absolutely worth to be organised again” as they found it “well-structured and yet dynamic”. All survey participants said that the workshop helped them make new connections. Specifically, attendee testimonials mentioned that the innovation lab was able to bring “brilliant people from different areas to collaborate together on some really innovative ideas which can make our future better”.

Some images from the event are available in the gallery below:

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