Public Funding for Synthace Limited

Cell and gene therapies offer unprecedented promise for the cure, treatment or long term management of disease. However, the challenge facing the industry is the need for viral vectors which can be consistently manufactured to commercial scale with rigorous tolerances for purity, potency and safety. This collaboration to support advanced therapies is led by Oxford BioMedica (OXB) and includes 2 UK SME's; using OXB's existing leadership position in the development and manufacture of lentiviral vectors to meet in-house and partner organisation needs. Our aim is the development and application of novel advanced technologies to further evolve the current manufacturing platform, leading to an increase in the ability to deliver high quality vector for clinical and commercial applications. The project has the real potential to deliver tangible benefits to patients in shortening time-to-clinic and time-to-market as well as to improve the cost and access of bringing these novel therapies to patients. Each partner holds proprietary technology and know-how which will be leveraged to develop this innovative approach to viral vector manufacturing. The partners will look to access new market opportunities in cell and gene therapy resulting in economic growth and increased employment of highly skilled staff. The exploitable outcomes of this innovative project are closely aligned with the current government national priorities to make the UK a global hub for manufacturing advanced therapies.

The bioscience industry currently relies on a small number of organisms to produce the majority of the recombinant products on the market. A collaboration between two UK synthetic biology Synthace and Synpromics and University College London, this project combines cutting edge computational techniques with multifactorial experimental design to develop a novel toolset that will allow the rapid bootstrapping of novel chassis organisms for synthetic biology. This will enable future processes to use chassis that are far better suited to the industrial conditions they are used under, and accelerate the use of synthetic biology in healthcare, food production, chemicals and energy. Outputs of the tools will be fully characterised to ensure they are fully robust under a range of conditions, making sure that they will be of maximum use to the synthetic biology industry

This project will integrate a number of novel synthetic biology technologies in a demonstration project to rapidly engineer a cellular factory. This includes a novel biopump from UCL which will allow the selective import of a hydrophobic substrate into the cell, where a short synthetic pathway will transform it into a higher value aroma chemical, before the final specialty chemical product is exported from the cell. This short synthetic pathway will be rapidly optimized by a combination of a novel gene expression control technology, RiboTite, from University of Manchester and the statistical optimization technology of Synthace. A successful outcome is expected to both yield a process for the production of a high value specialty chemical, as well as a demonstration of a new methodology for the rapid engineering of a bioprocess.