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Science making an economic difference

Although the case studies on this page are primarily of economic impact (EI), many will also have scientific, social and policy impact.

March 2010 - Innovations with impact

BBSRC’s Innovator of the Year award is designed to recognise and reward high-impact science that has potential to revolutionise a research field and bring major scientific and economic benefits.

The 2010 main prize was scooped by the University of Cambridge’s Professor Shankar Balasubramanian who invented Solexa Sequencing, an ultrafast way to sequence DNA, and collected £10,000 at the gala award ceremony at Canary Wharf, London.

Balasubramanian’s invention has revolutionised bioscience. By exploiting the fluorescence specific to each of the 4 base chemicals in DNA and building the system onto a microchip that can handle millions of DNA fragments at the same time, Solexa Sequencing has decreased the time it takes to read a genome by up to 10,000 times – an astonishing advance over previous sequencing techniques.

The latest systems can sequence a human genome for under $10,000. It means that the era of personalised medicine is a step closer, where drug treatments and nutritional regimes could be tailored to an individuals’ genetic makeup.

Starting with £2.2M seed funding in 1998 to found Solexa Ltd., Balasubramanian eventually sold the company for $600M on the back of its first commercial product – The Genome Analyser. Today, Solexa’s buyers Illumina are worth around $2B and have 50% market share. Hence, Professor Balasubramanian was also the winner of the Commercial Innovator of the Year.

Now in its second year, the awards were expanded to include other prizes. Prof Goulson of Stirling University was the winner of Social Innovator of the Year for his work on bumblebee conservation through the founding of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

Goulson formed the Bumblebee Conservation Trust (see external links) in 2006 to increase the practical impact of his work on the ecology and behaviour of bumblebees to farmers and politicians. The trust now has 7,000 members and 6 staff members that help to disseminate policy ideas and public awareness of the importance of these pollinators that are essential for ecosystems. He hopes to have 20,000 members by 2015 to widen his impact to local councils, garden centres and other parties.

In the last award, Dr McArthur of the John Innes Centre (a BBSRC funded institute) was the winner of Most Promising Innovator of the Year for his work on using short DNA loops as novel antibacterial compounds to combat drug resistant infections.

McArthur’s approach throws a spanner in the works of bacteria’s DNA by using Transcription Factor Decoys (TFDs) that lock onto the bacteria’s DNA and prevent gene expression. But that’s only half the work – much of the problem-solving centres around how to get the TDFs into cells where they are needed.

Early trials have shown that the approach can combat hospital superbugs such as MRSA. McArthur has now secured nearly £1M to develop the strategy and has benefitted from a BBSRC Follow-on Fund and the support of a BBSRC/RSE Enterprise Fellowship.

Dr McArthur and Professor Goulson both received prizes of £5000.

February 2010 - IBERS grassland research seed sales and cost savings

Research at the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS) has increased the dietary quality of forage, reducing the need for additional feeds by 30% and saving UK agriculture £400M a year.

Scientists took the high sugar characteristic from alpine grasses to breed forage grass with higher energy levels. These high sugar varieties enhance the conversion of forage protein into meat and milk.

Seeds of the Aber varieties developed at IBERS have a 28% UK market share with an annual retail value of £5.5M. In addition, the private sector has made an annual investment of £500k to fund near market costs of developing grass and clover varieties at the institute.

November 2009 - Animal health vaccines

Research at the Institute for Animal Health (IAH) led to the development of Paracox vaccine by Schering-Plough Animal Health Ltd. This protects chickens against the economically important disease, coccidiosis. Around 1Bn doses of the vaccine are sold annually worldwide.

Coccidiosis is caused by the single-celled parasite Eimeria, which lives and reproduces in the cells lining the bird’s intestine. Infection causes swelling of the gut, bleeding and fluid loss and has a high mortality rate.

Manufactured in the UK, the vaccine is regularly exported to more than 30 countries. It protects virtually all the highly valuable chickens kept for breeding purposes.

Despite routine prophylaxis with drugs, coccidial infection costs the UK poultry industry around £40M a year, with global costs estimated to be hundreds of millions. The parasite is developing resistance to the drugs, and the EU is likely to ban the use of them in poultry feed in the future. Paracox has reduced the reliance on chemical feed additives to control coccidiosis.

Effective vaccination is vital to the long term future of the poultry industry.

Timeline

• 1970s: Research in the USA with one species of Eimeria showed the presence of mutants that produced lower numbers of progeny in chickens did not produce disease but did induce protective immunity.
• 1980s: IAH scientists proved beneficial mutants exist for the other 7 species of Eimeria, and reasoned together they would form an attenuated vaccine able to protect chickens from every type of Eimeria. They produced pure lines of the mutants for each of the 8 species, which paved the way to Paracox.
• 1989: The first live attenuated vaccine, Paracox-8, was developed from IAH research with additional financial support from the British Technology Group and Schering-Plough Animal Health.
• 2000: A new product, Paracox-5, was launched for the control of coccidiosis in birds kept for their meat.
• 2002: Launch of the Eimeria tenella Genome Project, a collaboration between the IAH and the Sanger Institute. The genome has been sequenced, and interpretation of the sequences is nearing completion.

October 2009 - Novel approach to antibody therapeutics reaches Crescendo

Crescendo Biologics, a spin-out company from the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, UK, has successfully raised £4.5M of funding to further develop novel technologies designed to bring human antibodies suitable for use in medicine closer to everyday use.

The company is founded on research by scientists at Babraham, an institute of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), principally Dr Marianne Bruggemann, an expert in the development of human antibody transgenics, and Dr Mike Taussig, who specialises in protein display and array systems.

The original research was funded in the 1980s by various bodies including the Medical Research Council (MRC) and AFRC, the forerunner of BBSRC, and was first described in 1989. The research has since received backing from the BBSRC-supported Follow-on Fund, which helps develop early ‘proof of concept’ work into a commercial proposition.

It is hoped that Crescendo's in vitro and in vivo technology will enable the generation of diverse, stable and optimised human heavy chain (VH) fragments, the smallest functional binding units of an antibody molecule.

For the development of novel therapeutics, VH fragments offer several advantages: they can be administered topically, orally or by inhalation (as well as by injection), they penetrate tissues rapidly and deeply, they are stable and easy to manufacture, and can target binding sites inaccessible to conventional monoclonal antibodies.

The monoclonal antibody market (total sales of around $32Bn in 2008) makes up over 30% of the global biological drug market. But technologies that exploit antibody fragments, as in Crescendo’s case, are a growing focus for the industry.

Crescendo’s platform, which is still under development, uses transgenic mice to produce human heavy chain antibodies in response to immunisation. Therefore, the system has the potential to generate reliable VH fragments that have evolved high affinity and solubility through in vivo maturation, a process that also means there are no further humanisation requirements before products can be tested.

October 2009 - New technology could save pharma industry £billions

Being unable to identify and reject toxic compounds early in drug discovery programmes costs the global pharmaceutical industry an estimated $8billion a year, in wasted development and testing.

A new technology that provides a more realistic tissue environment for drug testing offers a way of significantly reducing this loss and saving around 10% of animal testing.

The microbioreactor technology, in which cells are grown as 3-D tissues instead of conventional single layers, was developed by Oxford spin-out company, Zyoxel, largely with Follow-on funding from BBSRC. It takes forward ideas from research led by Professor Zhanfeng Cui.

The company has recently secured £1M from Hong Kong based CN Innovations Holdings to commercialise the technology.

Also see Profile feature: Tim Hart

October 2009 - Pill that could report back on the state of your gut

Electrical engineers at the University of Glasgow have developed a sensor for detecting blood in the gastrointestinal tract that is so small it could be swallowed on a pill.

Several companies are now exploring with the researchers, Jon Cooper and David Cumming how their ‘lab on a pill’ might be used to complement ‘camera-based’ diagnostics, for example by providing information about gut health in the folded tissues of the colon where lesions and polyps may be obscured and inaccessible to imaging.

October 2009 - Speedy new test for bluetongue virus

A new molecular test detects and distinguishes between serotypes of bluetongue virus now present in Europe. Two of these serotypes, type 1 and type 8 are in Northern France and so pose a particular threat to UK livestock.

The new test has been developed and commercialised by scientists at the Institute for Animal Health and Laboratoire Service International. For the first time a single molecular assay kit is available that will positively identify and distinguish seven of the European BTV types.

This real-time technology used can be used on blood samples making it much faster and more reliable than conventional serological typing methods, generating results in a matter of hours rather than weeks.

Vaccination against a serotype of BTV that threatened the UK in 2008, is estimated to have avoided losses of around £400M.

August 2009 - John Innes spin-out attracts over £13M financing

Novacta Biosystems, the first company to spin out of the John Innes Centre and Plant Bioscience Ltd., has received £13.1 million of investment from Celtic Pharma Holdings and existing investors to develop its novel antibiotics platform to address major challenges such as hospital acquired infections of C. difficile and MRSA.

Novacta technology manipulates biosynthetic pathways in microbes rationally to produce new bioactive compounds against new targets in disease-causing organisms. By harnessing natural biosynthetic mechanisms, products can be made which are not accessible by conventional chemistry.

The company is taking forward ideas and technologies originally based on world-leading Streptomyces research at the John Innes Centre.

Promising drug candidates from amongst its novel and naturally derived lantibiotics are in pre-clinical testing.  

June 2009 - Commercialisation of insecticide 'crystals' offers exciting prospect for farmers world-wide

Time-delayed insecticide ‘crystals’ could revolutionise pest management in agriculture following a deal between researchers from Rothamsted Research, an institute of BBSRC, New South Wales Department of Primary Industries (NSWDPI), Australia, and the Italian chemical company Endura.

Dr Graham Moores from Rothamsted Research, explained: “The beauty of the concept is that it should act on any insect pest. In terms of value, one could almost take the cost of insecticide-resistance as a whole to be the possible saving by this technology. Clearly this would be unrealistic, but the point is, it is difficult to assess a possible monetary or crop saving, as it is potentially so vast.”

For more information, see page 13 of October 2005 BBSRC Business magazine and our media release from 19 June 2009: Commercialisation of insecticide ‘crystals’ offers exciting prospect for farmers world-wide.

Earlier impacts

Antibiotics research

Scientists at the John Innes Centre (JIC) produced the world's first hybrid antibiotic in 1984 by combining gene clusters from two different strains of Streptomyces. JIC researchers contributed to the sequencing of the Streptomyces genome and have identified the role of several regulatory genes that regulate antibiotic synthesis.

In the early 1990s, scientists at the University of Oxford discovered a class of proteins that is essential for bacterial cell division, but which does not exist in mammalian cells. This led to a new approach for screening for potential new antibiotics, which is being taken forward by the spin-out company Prolysis Ltd.

Our brochure 'Bioscience behind tackling superbugs' illustrates the role of bioscience in tackling Hospital Acquired Infections, and spin-out companies involved in this area (see Related links).

Biopharmaceuticals

The biopharmaceuticals drug market is projected to generate over $50Bn in sales by 2010. BBSRC-supported scientists pioneered the use of transgenic animals to produce therapeutic proteins.

Early examples of therapeutic proteins in milk of sheep were human blood clotting factor IX and elastase inhibitor alpha-1-antitrypsin, which has potential for treating degenerative lung disorders. Research was developed further in the UK by Pharmaceutical Proteins Ltd. The first drug derived from milk of GM animals (goats) was approved by the European Medicines Agency in 2006.

Scientists at Roslin Institute are pioneering a new technology for low-cost production of protein drugs in the white of eggs of transgenic hens. In partnership with Viragen Inc and Oxford BioMedica plc, they have produced functional 'humanised' antibody and an interferon in this way.

Biosensors and diagnostics

In the mid 1990s, scientists at the Institute of Biotechnology, Cambridge, pioneered the design and development of novel hologram biosensors. The sensing unit was a gel within which a hologram of a mirror is embedded. When the unit senses its target molecule, minute changes in the gel alter the optical properties of the hologram.  The spin-out company Hologram Sensors Ltd, formed in 2003, is developing new generation sensors for the medical devices and diagnostics sectors.

Scientists at the Institute of Food Research have developed antibody-based tests that enable the food industry to detect allergenic peanut and sesame material in products and so improve consumer assurance.

Crop and livestock improvement

The first GM plant product in the UK (tomato puree from tomatoes modified to stay firm while ripening) derived from basic research at the University of Nottingham in the late 1980s into the mechanisms of plant ripening.

It can take between 10 to 20 years to develop a new variety of grass. Over the past decade, research at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) has led to placement of over 45 grass, legume and oat varieties on the UK national list. In the mid 1990s, scientists at IGER identified in a wild fescue grass a trait which meant that the grass stayed green. They discovered the genetic basis for this characteristic - a mutation in a gene for an enzyme that degrades the green pigment, chlorophyll. This enabled crossing of the affected gene into ryegrass suitable for lawns. In 2002, the commercial grass "So-green" was launched by British Seed Houses.

Genomics research at IGER has contributed to the commercial development of several new grass varieties. These include the award-winning AberDart (Germinal Holdings), a perennial ryegrass that combines high digestibility and water-soluble carbohydrate content with high dry matter yield and good persistency. Tennis courts at Wimbledon contain two amenity grasses developed by British Seed Houses from IGER research - AberImp and AberElf.  

Research at the John Innes Centre has provided new information about the structure and working of a gene complex that stops wheat chromosomes from pairing effectively with those of wild relatives. This offers the first realistic prospect of being able to overcome this mechanism and so develop new varieties of wheat with useful traits such as drought tolerance from wild relatives.

DNA sequencing spin-out

Solexa, a spin-out company from the University of Cambridge, formed in 1998 and inspired from some basic research funded by BBSRC, was sold to US-based Illuma for $600M in January 2007. The research by Drs Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman on DNA chemistry led to novel sequencing and detection systems which the scientists commercialised through Solexa.

Grain stripping header

A unique stripper system for combine harvesters that strips grain and heads from plant stalks in situ, was developed at the former Silsoe Research Institute, and licensed to Shelbourne Reynolds Engineering Ltd in 1987 through British Technology Group. The system increases harvesting rates by 100%, reduces grain losses, enables earlier harvesting, and harvesting in wetter weather.

Liposomes

Liposomes are used widely to carry a great variety of molecules, such as small drug molecules, proteins, nucleotides and even plasmids. They are widely used in the cosmetics industry as well as in medicine and scientific research. Liposomes, are now used world-wide in anti-ageing creams, a market estimated to be worth around $7Bn.

Natural methods of pest control

The 1993 Queen's Award for Environmental Achievement was granted to the former Horticulture Research International (HRI) and the Agricultural Genetics Company (AGC) for new commercial bio-control agents for glasshouse crops, based on research at HRI and part funded by what is now BBSRC. BBSRC-supported research at the former Long Ashton Research Station (now part of Rothamsted Research) contributed to the development of a commercial product for controlling slugs.

Safer insecticides

Synthetic pyrethroid insecticides were developed at Rothamsted Research in late 1960s and early 1970s. Key features were their high insect specificity and activity, and outstandingly low mammalian toxicity. By early 1990s, the annual value was >£1Bn worldwide - approximately half of the sales based on Rothamsted-discovered compounds.

Stem Cells as potential therapies

Basic research on stem cell biology has revealed information about how cells replicate and differentiate. This knowledge is crucial for the controlled growth of stem cells in the laboratory and for their eventual safe and effective use in modelling diseases, testing the effects of new drugs and repairing diseased or damaged tissue.

Research funded by BBSRC and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is supporting new technological approaches for growing, storing and manipulating stem cells. Examples include exploration into the potential for long-term frozen storage of stem cells, use of engineered scaffolds to improve the effectiveness of implanted cells in brain repair, and new technology for marking and tracking stem cells.

Several spin-out companies are taking forward outputs from BBSRC-funded research in potential healthcare applications of stem cells.

Plant-based products

Molecular Nature formed in 1999 to capitalise on technology developed at IGER for rapid isolation and identification of plant chemicals with useful biological properties.

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