A highlight in the past month was the Milner annual symposium — held online through a bespoke conference platform to maximise audience interaction. Although we very much hope to bring more partners together in person next year, the online format attracted over 650 registrants and made it possible to include more fantastic international speakers including Nevan Krogan (UCSF), David Liu (Harvard) and Jeff Settleman (Pfizer). To help us plan future events, please take a few moments to fill in our anonymous feedback form.

The symposium also provided an exciting opportunity to bring a small group of speakers together in the city for a live panel session on Cambridge and Business. Here, a key focus of the discussion was around the future of the Cambridge cluster and the central role that the new Cambridge University Enterprise Zone Connect: Health Tech will have in this. We are delighted that Connect: Health Tech officially launched last month, and this week saw the publication of its new roadmap for examining the challenges faced in futureproofing and sustaining the growth of the life sciences cluster — to maintain Cambridge as a global centre of excellence for health tech. Read more about the roadmap, and how to join our new online community (complete with mobile app!) in the Connect: Health Tech section below.

In this issue:

• Centre for Pathway Analysis Update
• Connect: Health Tech Update
• Consortium News
• Affiliated Company Spotlight: Immundnz & Testa Center
• New Affiliated Companies: Cyclica
• Affiliated Company News
• Events

Namshik Han’s group, within the Centre for Pathway Analysis here at the Milner Institute, have identified 200 approved drugs predicted to work against COVID-19 – of which only 40 are currently being tested in COVID-19 clinical trials.

In a study published last month in Science Advances, Namshik's group show how they used a combination of computational biology and machine learning to create a comprehensive map of proteins that are involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection – from proteins that help the virus break into the host cell to those generated as a consequence of infection. By examining this network using AI approaches, they were able to identify key proteins involved in infection as well as biological pathways that might be targeted by drugs.

“Our study has provided us with unexpected information about the mechanisms underlying COVID-19 and has provided us with some promising drugs that might be repurposed for either treating or preventing infection. While we took a data-driven approach – essentially allowing artificially intelligent algorithms to interrogate datasets – we then validated our findings in the laboratory, confirming the power of our approach.” said Dr Namshik Han.

Read the press release from the University of Cambridge, and check out the visual abstract below.

Connect: Health Tech has launched!

We are excited to announce that the University of Cambridge has launched the Connect: Health Tech website and online community platform, as part of the new University Enterprise Zone (UEZ) initiative.

What is Connect: Health Tech?
Connect: Health Tech has been created to build a highly effective interdisciplinary bridge between two Cambridge research hubs and beyond: the West science and technology hub anchored at the Maxwell Centre and the South biomedical hub anchored at the Milner Therapeutics Institute. The bridge will bring together and integrate a community from across the University, research institutes, NHS, industry, investors, local and national Government, with a focus on med tech, digital health and therapeutics, to create opportunities that will transform ideas at the interface between medicine and technology into reality.

Tell me more about the online community...
To create a thriving business and enterprise community that connects key stakeholders, Connect: Health Tech has developed an online community where users will be able to find new contacts and networks to discuss areas of common interest and catalyse interdisciplinary interactions across the physical and life sciences. Engaging with this online community will enable businesses to share the challenges they face and harness the power of the community to help solve real world problems. The online community comes with a mobile app (available in both Google Play and Apple Stores), meaning it has never been easier to stay connected to the Cambridge Community. You can pop the App next to your other social media icons and make Connect: Health Tech part of your daily routine without it taking up too much of your time. Check out the short video below for more!

What is the new roadmap/report designed to achieve?
Connect: Health Tech has published an ambitious but realistic roadmap for the University and its partners in the Cambridge cluster, to deliver transformative therapies at the interface between medicine and technology.

The report, Creating a University Enterprise Zone for Cambridge across the life and physical sciences, identifies and outlines the challenges, opportunities and potential solutions to support the future growth of Health Tech in the cluster and wider region. Many of the solutions identified are transferable to other hubs and demonstrate the importance of creating the right environment for ideas, innovation and co-creation to thrive. The roadmap sets out a clear plan to deliver Connect: Health Tech.

Read the new University roadmap by clicking here »

Dr Robert-Jan Lamers
Co-Founder & Director
Immundnz

Company formed in: 2016

Type: CRO

Location: Immundnz is headquartered at Alderley Park, Cheshire, UK, with a second research site in the Netherlands.

Key research or technology focus: Immundnz is a specialist immunology company providing customised and experimental immunology services using in vitro and ex vivo human cell models for preclinical drug research and development. We offer these on primary and established PBMCs. In addition, we have developed innovative predictive translational human cell line-based in vitro immunology assays with the advantage of being adaptive, consistent, reproducible and more cost-effective than conventional PBMC-based and in vivo assays.

Can provide expertise in: Immunology, immuno-oncology, inflammation, auto-immune and infectious disease drug discovery projects. Find out more about Immundnz by clicking the logo below

Dr Jesper Hedberg
Director, Testa Center for Cytiva

Testa Center: The Center was created in 2016 as a non-profit company based in Uppsala, Sweden, serving as a hub for innovation in biological manufacturing. The Center was co-created by the Swedish Government and Cytiva (formerly GE Life Sciences) to grow, develop and evolve the local biopharma landscape with a vision to adapt the concept globally. The facility includes 4 start-to-finish bioprocessing laboratories where researchers can test and evaluate their technical and biological discoveries while keeping the full ownership of their results and intellectual property.

Key Areas of Focus: Testa Center acts as a test-bed for academics, start-ups as well as large global organizations to validate and develop their methodologies and expertise. Incorporating state-of-the-art, wing-to-wing equipment for biological production with expert senior scientists, the Testa Center primarily focuses on biopharmaceutical development and production. This offering is growing to support vaccine development, as well as cell and gene therapy manufacturing and innovation.

Current Challenges: The demand for Testa Center’s services is growing in the EU and UK, and the team are working with our partners internationally on solutions to overcome restrictions (including COVID and Brexit) that have made it harder for researchers to travel and for resources to be shipped.

Find out more about how academic groups and businesses have been working together in the Testa Center labs:

• Sara Mangsbo (Uppsala University):
  Verifying technology before commercializing. Read more »
• Uppsala University:
  Masters and Ph.D student courses and projects. Read more »
• Jenny Rönnmark (Spider Technologies):
  Accelerating industrialization of a spider silk product. Read more »

  Save the date: Tuesday 5th October
  The Milner Institute will be co-hosting a Testa Center webinar in October. Register your interest now to view the meet Jesper and the team, and learn more about the Center! Register interest »

  Find out more about Testa Center by clicking the logo below.

  
  
  

Cyclica uses a first-in-class AI platform, and an innovative decentralized partnership model to create medicines with precision for unmet patient needs.

If you would like to find out more about becoming affiliated, email our Head of Partnerships and Alliance, Alison Schuldt: a.schuldt@milner.cam.ac.uk