Collaboration enhances Cheshire site’s expertise in drug discovery sector
Medicines Discovery Catapult has today, (April 9) agreed to integrate Alderley Park’s imaging services and expertise into its pre-clinical imaging capability, further enhancing the offering to UK SMEs.
The company, which operates from a base at Alderley Park, Cheshire, has established itself rapidly within the UK community and is now engaged in multiple R&D collaborations with UK biotech and academia.
Alderley Park, part of Bruntwood SciTech, is home to the UK’s largest single-site life science campus which offers more than one million sq ft of high specification lab space, a range of scientific services and the Alderley Park Accelerator which provides a comprehensive programme of business support for start-ups and scale-ups.
Medicines Discovery Catapult will now offer collaborative research programmes across a range of advanced pre-clinical imaging and bioanalysis technologies that will drive future drug discovery and development across the UK.
Chris Molloy, Medicines Discovery Catapult chief executive, said: “We work at the forefront of drug discovery technology innovation so that UK SMEs can access scarce, state-of-the-art technologies and expertise that enable their projects.
“The incorporation of Alderley Park’s imaging capabilities enhances our portfolio, with the ability to prove that these techniques are on the critical path for the future of medicines R&D.”
Monitoring, assessing and characterising novel therapeutics is an essential part of drug development.
Pre-clinical imaging allows non-invasive assessment of biochemical and biological processes, enhancing our understanding of a drug’s safety, efficacy and mode of action.
Pre-clinical imaging can also be applied in combination with Medicines Discovery Catapult’s wider Discovery Science & Technology and Informatics capabilities.
The unique combination of pre-clinical imaging capabilities and expertise, alongside mass spectrometry, biomarker profiling, molecular pathology and super-resolution imaging, provides deeply informative data sets for better project decision-making.
Dr Chris Doherty, managing director of Alderley Park Limited, said: “By transferring Alderley Park’s imaging services to the Medicines Discovery Catapult we are able to help progress the creation of what will be a nationally-significant imaging centre, which will benefit the park as a whole.
“The imaging service we had complements the imaging service the Catapult already provides and there’s more value to be had by putting the two services together.”
Alderley Park’s Mereside campus is continuing to flourish as a biotech cluster and is already home to some 70 SMEs and 200 start-up and virtual businesses, many of which may use these services.
It is also home to a number of leading institutions in addition to Medicines Discovery Catapult, such as the AMR Centre and CRUK MI.
