Birmingham Research Park Tenant Abingdon Health Ltd today announces the signing of a collaboration agreement with Sumitomo Chemical Ltd to develop a next generation multiplexed point of care biosensor device.

This agreement follows a 2 year joint development agreement (“JDA”) between Molecular Vision, a subsidiary of Abingdon Health, and Sumitomo Chemical, to prove the feasibility of the device. The JDA focused on integrating lateral flow devices and printed electronic technologies to produce an easy-to-use compact device for a variety of diagnostic applications.

Chris Yates, CEO of Abingdon Health, said: “After a successful two year collaboration we look forward to continuing to work with our partner Sumitomo Chemical to develop our new biosensor device. With the advent of big data within medical diagnostics coupled with the increasing desire for connected point of care testing we believe that this multiplexed biosensor device will have considerable applicability now and in the future.”

Enquiries:

Dr. Chris Hand, Chairman
Chris Yates, CEO

Tel: +44 1904 406 082

Official press release:

Commercialisation agreement announced to launch new biosensor device

Hands-on Interactive Statistics Training Workshops

From Tracer Measurement Systems Ltd

Given by Dr. John Thompson, C.Chem., F.R.S.C., F.R.Stat.Soc.

In the Institute of Research and Development, Birmingham Research Park,

Vincent Drive, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2SQ

May 17th/18th Introductory Statistical Quality and Process Control

May 25th/ 26th Statistical Design and Analysis of Experiments

June 7th Introductory Clinical Statistics

June 8th Statistical Analysis of Reliability Engineering Data

June 21st/22nd Further Statistical Quality and Process Control

June 28th/29th Further Clinical Statistics

July 18th/19th Design & Analysis of Clinical Diagnostics Trials

July 25th/26th Design & Analysis of Clinical Therapeutics Trials

For more information on each workshop and for booking forms, please contact Dr. Thompson at: statisticstraininguk@btinternet  

In part one of a series about Birmingham’s Technology Transfer Offer,  Thierry Heles talks to CEO James Wilkie about Alta Innovations’ origins, ambitions and recently secured first seed fund.
Read More here: http://www.globaluniversityventuring.com/article.php/5207/alta-innovations-the-origins-of-success

With around 14,000 Life Science jobs, the West Midlands has a much stronger track record in this sector than many people realise. Large clusters such as the Edgbaston Medical Quarter have been growing steadily since the 1930’s. This growth isn’t an accident – when the original architect planned and built the old Queen Elizabeth Hospital in 1933 next door to the University of Birmingham Medical School, he said that ‘Modern hospital and medical practice demands there shall be organic and integral connection between the scientist and the clinician for the most efficient treatment of the patient.’

Read more here:http://www.bqlive.co.uk/2016/03/10/life-sciences-and-the-west-midlands

Dr David Bullock

Consultant Clinical Scientist and Director, Birmingham Quality

BIRMINGHAM QUALITY, ESTABLISHED IN 1969 AND THE PREMIER EQA PROVIDER IN CLINICAL CHEMISTRY, IN 1994 CONTINUES TO FLOURISH AFTER 21 YEARS AT BIRMINGHAM RESEARCH PARK. A RECENT HIGHLIGHT IS THE GRANT OF ACCREDITATION TO ISO/IEC 17043:2010 STANDARD FOR PROFICIENCY TESTING.

External Quality Assessment (EQA) services ensure that all hospital laboratories and other testing sites give the correct result wherever specimens are analysed, safeguarding quality, safety and equity of patient care across the UK, as all measurements (including blood tests) are subject to variation. EQA safeguards reliable patient care through assessment and surveillance of the performance both of laboratories and of the commercial products they use. The department provides consultant advice and assistance so they can maintain and improve performance.

The aim of an EQA scheme is to provide clinical laboratories with an objective assessment of their performance, to help them improve the standard of their results and hence the quality of patient care. Scheme operation includes the regular and frequent postal distribution of test materials to participating laboratories for them to analyse. Results are received from the laboratories and, using computer systems, informative reports are prepared for the participants.

The UK National EQAS for Clinical Chemistry was established in 1969 at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham with a £500 grant from the then Ministry of Health. Since then the service has developed, under the aegis of the Department of Health (DH) initially and the UK NEQAS Consortium since the mid-1990s, and currently operates more than 30 programmes with 24 staff and a turnover of £2M. We also provide software and secure web services for 7 other UK NEQAS centres, encompassing all clinical chemistry and microbiology investigations.

Birmingham Quality (BQ) is a self-financing NHS unit, operating on a non-profit basis within University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. We provide UK NEQAS services, some BQ services for point of care testing, and the International EQAS for Clinical Chemistry as a WHO Collaborating Centre. This activity requires the production and distribution of 325,000 specimens per year for over 3,000 participants in the UK and overseas, with 85,000 reports including around 1.5 million individual test results.

Early growth was accommodated within the Hospital, but continuing expansion led to a move to the Institute of Research & Development at Birmingham Research Park. Our initial 6 units have increased to 12, with remodelling of the premises to fit our workflow. The accommodation is a mixture of office and laboratory facilities for specimen preparation and storage in 35 -40C freezers. This secure base has encouraged the consolidation of other UK NEQAS services, notably UK NEQAS for Steroid Hormones from Cardiff in 1996 and UK NEQAS for Haematinics from Sutton Coldfield in 2015.

The main advantages of Birmingham Research Park for BQ’s growth have been:

• Quality of accommodation – “the first time we weren’t ashamed to have visitors”
• Flexibility – the ability to increase contiguous space as required
• Location – near NHS Blood & Transplant and Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre (Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham and Birmingham Women’s Hospital)
• Facilities – rental of facilities (extraction hood and -80C freezer space) in the BioHub which do not justify investment in dedicated equipment within BQ

The department has pioneered the application of EQA in laboratory medicine, and other expert centres look to BQ for advice on service design and delivery. As our service assesses the performance standard of entire laboratories, quality requirements are high. Our services have been accredited by Clinical Pathology Accreditation (UK) Ltd since the introduction of Standards for EQA services in 1997. We have now achieved accreditation by UKAS against the new International Standard ISO/IEC 17043:2010 for proficiency testing.

BQ services not only underpin clinical governance for UK laboratories and monitor laboratories delivering National Screening Programmes (Newborn Bloodspot Screening, Bowel Cancer Screening) but also have global influence on diagnostics manufacturers (eg Abbott, Roche, Siemens) and contribute to the evidence base for NICE and other national guidelines.

www.birminghamquality.org.uk

One year on from the official opening by the Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir David Eastwood, we have made great progress and achieved more than 50% occupancy of The BioHub ground floor.

There’s an exciting and strong pipeline of start-up companies planning to join the community which is growing amongst the tenants. Abingdon Health, Linear Diagnostics and Analox Instruments will soon be joined by Nonacus Ltd.

The University is to receive £1.2 million from the Medical Research Council (MRC) to help accelerate the translation of innovative medical research into industry and out to patients.
The funding, which forms part of a £23.2 million boost from the MRC to UK universities, was announced by Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson on a visit to the Medical School yesterday. The awards are part of three different funding initiatives, set up by the MRC to specifically target different innovation needs including:
Discovery award mechanism which will accelerate ‘blue skies’ medical research by providing support much faster than usual funding routes and will focus on building capacity and capability in areas of high national priority.
The Confidence in Concept (CiC) awards which provide flexible funding to universities to accelerate the transition from discovery science to viability testing and take promising basic research to the industry-academia interaction stage for the development of therapies, diagnostics and medical devices.
Proximity to Discovery scheme which helps universities to build partnerships with industry by developing new collaborations and ways of exchanging knowledge and skills.
In making the announcement, the Minister said, “Britain is a global science powerhouse and the Government is backing our world-class researchers like those at Birmingham University by protecting the science budget to the end of the decade. This £23m fund will help to ensure the UK remains at the forefront of research into the new medical treatments and technologies that will save thousands of lives.”
How will the University benefit?
The University has been the recipient of four MRC Confidence in Concept awards, dating back to the scheme’s inception and will receive a further £700,000 this year. From these awards the University has leveraged more than £8 million additional funding, around £4 million of which comes from non-governmental sources. The University has also received £200,000 in the new round of MRC Proximity to Discovery funding.
With the new funding, the University will create a Creative Leaders in Industry Fellowship scheme, providing a 6-12 month training programme for industry representatives to undertake short projects with academic leaders, alongside a series of seminars and workshops designed to inspire new ways of working.
The University is also one of 12 institutions nationally to receive an MRC Discovery Award, entitled Placing Discovery Science at the heart of Big Data. MRC funding of £300k will support plans to use patient data to determine the health impact on patients of carrying particular genes. It will do this by linking hospital records with genetic data, to look for a correlation between particular genes and health conditions. Birmingham is well placed to carry out this project as it has strong partnerships with 18 local NHS Trusts, covering 20% of the UK’s patient genome samples, and has strong expertise in genomics. Birmingham aims to integrate this health data into other developing large-scale databases and informatics programmes, ultimately improving patient care.
Find out more
Applications for the latest round of funding closes on 1st April 2016.
Find out more about the awards on the MRC website https://www.mrc.ac.uk/news/browse/cutting-edge-medical-research-ideas-receive-23-2m-boost/

The University of Birmingham’s expertise in health sciences has been in focus. Professor Julian Bion was among those interviewed for BBC Radio 4’s The Report to discuss the reality of a seven-day NHS, Professor Peymane Adab was quoted in The Daily Telegraph on effective methods for weight management, and Dr Hannah Batchelor was featured on BBC Midlands Today and regional radio stations talking about the ACCEPT trial for developing child-friendly medicines. Professor Iain Chapple and Praveen Sharma’s research on the link between periodontitis and a higher mortality rate in patients with kidney disease was covered in the likes of The Sun and Medical News Today, and Professor Robin May’s work with colleagues at the University of Sheffield into specialised white blood cells found in birds that can destroy a fungal infection in humans, received attention from the BBC, Independent, and Daily Express.
Following the ground-breaking news that LIGO detectors had observed evidence of gravitational waves, proving Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Guardian put an extra spotlight on Professors Andreas Freise and Alberto Vecchio and their crucial role in the breakthrough.
Research by Dr Claudio Tennie, Birmingham Fellow in Psychology, which found that young children will spontaneously invent tool behaviours to solve novel problems without the help of adults, much as non-human great apes have been observed to do, has received significant national and international coverage including the Guardian, The Daily Mail and the Discovery Channel.
Our public intellectuals have also been busy. Professor Isabelle Szmigin was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours and by The Daily Telegraph on the change of trend in gift giving on Valentine’s Day, and further afield, our work with the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia on the impact of its character and civic education programmes was highlighted in international media outlets including Bloomberg, Reuters, and the International Business Times Australia.

Birmingham could become the centre of entrepreneurial biotech businesses with a new purpose-built laboratory facility – the first of its kind in the UK.

The Biomedical Innovation Hub (BioHub) is a £7 million facility located on Birmingham Research Park at the heart of Edgbaston Medical Quarter.

The idea is based on similar shared working spaces that have proved a success in the US, which enable start-ups and growing medical companies to access the best laboratory facilities as well as business support.

The city is now being billed as the perfect place for the medical innovators of the future to get started – because of the host of new developments such as the Life Sciences Campus which is due to open next year – and the BioHub’s proximity to the University of Birmingham and the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

Helen Miller-Viney, business development manager of the BioHub, believes start-ups based there could follow in the footsteps of companies like The Binding Site, which developed initially at the University of Birmingham and is now a Birmingham-based global business at the forefront of producing antibodies for the detection of cancers and other serious diseases.

Ms Miller-Viney said: “We will be helping to create the small and medium-sized enterprises of tomorrow and perhaps even the large enterprises of a few decades time – to create more jobs around the West Midlands. We do hold up the Binding Site as a gold standard of how a company can be created. It was the idea of academics, grown at the University of Birmingham and it is now a multi-million-pound business with its headquarters on Five Ways island.”

Until now biotech firms wanting to develop in the UK have gravitated towards Oxford, Cambridge or London, but Ms Miller-Viney believes the BioHub will be a real alternative.

“I know previous companies that have come about have had to go to places like Oxfordshire to find facilities,” she added.

“This will keep jobs and research in the West Midlands and ultimately create wealth.

“We have already got a lot of medical device companies in the West Midlands. We now need to nurture a second phase of that and grow some big medtech companies and this is one of those places where this will begin to happen.

“One company which came to look around had started at Birmingham University but because it couldn’t get the facilities here it relocated to Oxford.

“That business has taken off, has had to move to bigger premises and now employs 11 people.

“That sort of growth is dissipating out of the West Midlands but this facility, along with the Life Sciences Campus down the road, will keep it here. This is perfect for growing that type of company.”

The BioHub’s central laboratory is supported by a variety of specialist rooms for microbiology, a freezing capability of down to –150°C, a microscopy lab, a wet room with specialist cleaning and sterilisation facilities, and a cryogenic suite for housing liquid nitrogen.

Tenants will have the use of all laboratory equipment and the support of on-site laboratory managers.

An office provides hot-desking, high speed internet and administration facilities and the adjacent BizzInn offers additional flexible office space and meeting rooms.

BioHub tenants will also benefit from access to the network of businesses, research scientists and clinicians based at the University of Birmingham and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

When fully operational, there will be 24 shared spaces for individuals or start-up businesses to use on the ground floor.

The first floor is being fitted out as larger laboratory and office space suitable for small to medium-sized companies and start-ups that need to grow.

The BioHub’s first tenant, NanoTi, a Hungarian medtech start-up specialising in dental implants, is arriving in early 2015 and it is also welcoming Sartorius Stedim Lab as a temporary tenant.

Speaking about its role in the wider Edgbaston medical community, which is home to 64 per cent of the city’s healthcare economy and 180 medical organisations, Ms Miller-Viney said: “The idea is to build up a community of different businesses and become part of the wider research park facility, the vast majority of which are medically-related organisations.”

She added: “The university and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital are all within a few hundred yards.

“Then there’s the medical and dental schools, the School of Biosciences, the blood and transplant unit, the cancer research centre and the new Institute of Translational Medicine all within a square mile.

“It makes it easier for companies to get to and talk to the right people, do clinical trials and get funders.”

The next open day for prospective tenants takes place on January 21, 2015.

full article:
http://www.birminghampost.co.uk/news/health-news/birmingham-biohub-paves-way-growing-8279203

Analox Instruments Ltd develop, manufacture and supply analytical measurement systems (analysers and biochemical reagent consumables) for the scientific research markets.