A new collaboration has been established with Autolus, a UCL spinout, to advance the manufacture of autologous T-cell immunotherapies. The collaboration is supported by the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Bioprocess Leadership.
Latest paper from Ivan “Regulation of embryonic neurogenesis by germinal zone vasculature” has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. It has been a long but worthwhile wait for the publication, conducted when Ivan was a PDRA in the lab of Prof. Christiana Ruhrberg, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology.
We congratulate Fatumina Abukar, PhD Student, for being shortlisted to receive the Rising Star Award from the WISE Campaign. The winners were announced on the 10th November 2016.
Congratulations for this nomination! Congratulations to Fatumina Abukar (centre) for reaching the finals for the UCL 3 Minute Thesis competition. Fatumina finished a strong second in the UCL Faculty of Engineering Science Heats. The final will be held on the 27th of June. Good luck Fatumina! We are very pleased to be part of a £1.2M grant award from the Wellcome Trust Health Innovation Challenge, Working in collaboration with Prof David Choi, UCL Institute of Neurology, we will characterise regenerative cell populations from the olfactory mucosa, for their subsequent use in patients with brachial plexus injury, a debilitating type of neuronal trauma. We are designing a cell culture process that is GMP-compliant and undertaking detailed product characterisation of unique cells from the olfactory mucosa that are anticipated to restore function. The project starts January 2016.
We are very pleased to have won a large grant with ReNeuron Ltd and the Cell & Gene Therapy Catapult to develop an exosome manufacturing pathway. Exosomes are a novel class of therapeutics, produced and released by stem cells. The £2.5M grant builds on out existing collaboration successes with ReNeuron in the area of exosome purification and formulation. In this new grant, we will use novel microfluidic bioreactors that can screen 24 different input conditions in a total working volume of 120 microlitres to optimise cell culture processes and then, working with CGTC, validate these using bench- and industry-scale technologies for large scale manufacture. The project starts May 2016.
Melanie Georgiou, a PDRA in Ivan Wall's lab, has won a second early career speaker prize in a month with her presentation:"Commercial scale manufacture of adult allogeneic cell therapy for regenerative medicine" at the 12th Annual bioProcessUK Conference, Cambridge, UK. 25-26 November 2015,
Mel works on a project aimed at characterisation of conditionally immortalised olfactory cells for neuronal injury and this is the 3rd prize that Mel has won in 18 months. Well done (again!) Mel! Carlotta Peticone, a PhD student in Ivan Wall’s lab, has been awarded a UCL Advances PhD Enterprise Scholarship. The funding, worth £4000, enables her to undertake a commercial evaluation of her research. Carlotta’s PhD project is entitled ‘Phosphate Bioactive Glass Microcarriers for the Production of Vascularized Tissue Engineered Micro-Units for Bone Regeneration’ and focuses on the use of bioactive phosphate glass for bone regeneration.
Melanie Georgiou, a PDRA in Ivan Wall's lab, won the early career speaker prize for Talk title: "Commercial scale manufacture of adult allogeneic cell therapy for regenerative medicine" at the 18th Bioprocess Research Industries Club Dissemination event, held in Manchester on 21-22 October.
Olfactory ensheathing cells have significant promise as a therapy for spinal cord injury but cells isolated from biopsies are extremely hard to grow in the lab and cell quality is highly variable. Working with ReNeuron, we are creating cell lines that will overcome significant bioprocessing barriers. This prize is a wonderful recognition of the efforts by the team to generate a stable cell line for spinal cord injury. Research published on the use of silk-based drug carriers in the use of cancer treatment makes top story in Pulmonary Cell News. The article, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, draws on collaborative research conducted between the Department of Biochemical Engineering and institutions in Australia, India and the Republic of Korea. Dr Ivan Wall is one of the corresponding authors on the paper ‘Formulation of Biologically-Inspired Silk-Based Drug Carriers for Pulmonary Delivery Targeted for Lung Cancer’, which first appeared in Scientific Reports online on 3 August. The full article is available to read here.
Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 11878 (2015) doi:10.1038/srep11878 |