Alewo Idoko-Akoh speaking at a BrisEngBio training event (photo: Charlie Proctor)
The Bristol BioDesign Institute is offering an Innovation Training Programme to early career researchers looking to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and deepen their understanding of translational opportunities and innovation.
Building on the success of the BrisEngBio Innovation Programme, participants will be provided with innovation training, mentoring and networking opportunities, and support to drive the translation of their research.
The programme is primarily aimed at postdoctoral researchers, but others with a strong interest in innovation are also welcome to apply.
Monthly training sessions, running over a six-month period, will cover topics such as:
Introduction to Research Translation.
What is Intellectual Property and how can I protect it?
Developing impact from your research.
Presenting my research to a non-expert audience.
What is a start-up and how do start-up incubators work?
In addition, participants will be matched with an industry-based mentor, to gain exposure to industry and to access the broader community and ecosystem.
Participants are expected to attend all of the training days, as there will be an emphasis on cohort building and peer-to-peer learning.
At the end of the programme, participants will have:
learned new skills and knowledge, and developed an entrepreneurial mindset.
an understanding of different ways to get involved in innovation and enterprise activity (also known as knowledge exchange).
the ability to identify translational opportunities within their research.
Congratulations to Veronica Greco, Dora Buzas and Jazz Ghataora for successfully completing their PhD vivas.
Jazz Ghataora’s PhD research focused on the development of bacterial biosensors for the purpose of monitoring environmental heavy metal pollution, using the host Bacillus subtilis as a chassis. This project required the design of synthetic gene circuits, novel engineered chimeric proteins and structure guided mutagenesis. His supervisors were Prof. Susanne Gebhard and Dr. Bianca Reeksting. Jazz, a Research Associate in the BioCompute Lab at University of Bristol, is currently researching next generation reporter tags for yeast platform strain development as part of the BrisEngBio project ‘Nanopore-based physiological monitoring of yeast for bioprocess optimisation’, led by BBI Co-Director Thomas Gorochowski, and University of Washington’s Jeff Nivala.
Veronica Greco‘s PhD thesis title was: ‘Recombinase-based cellular memory: Methods for reading and reliable writing as steps towards real-world applications.’ She was supervised by Dr. Thomas Gorochowski and Professor Claire Grierson. Veronica is the Technology and Innovation Manager at CDotBio.
Zentraxa, founded on IP generated through BrisSynBio, specialises in the design, production and testing of novel biomaterials. It has received £320k funding for commercial concept development of both medical adhesives and personal care ingredients that could have use in medicine, for example, skin bonding and wound care, or in personal use, such as skin and hair products.
Glaia, which benefitted from BrisSynBio commercialisation funding and dedicated innovation support, has secured £1 million in new investment to develop its carbon-based technology, the ‘sugar dots’, which increases crop yields and reduces emissions from crops by 30% when applied to the plants.
CEO of Imophoron Ltd, Frederic Garzoni, and University of Bristol researchers, including Imophoron co-founder Professor Imre Berger, combine efforts to generate a promising vaccine candidate for COVID19.
Professor Imre Berger (left) and Frederic Garzoni (right) at the Life Sciences Building at the University of Bristol
Prior to the pandemic, Frederic Garzoni and Imre Berger bolstered their research in a synthetically engineered protein scaffold named ADDomer™, and with Oracle’s cloud computing technology and Cryo-Electron microscopy (Cryo-EM), the protein was found to be thermotolerant. Professor of Biochemistry, Christiane Berger-Schaffitzel, who was leading the Cryo-EM team, said that “seeing Fred’s vaccine design [at near atomic resolution] in such detail gave us confidence that we were on the right track”.
The protein’s novel ability to maintain its structural integrity without refrigeration, even for months on end, eliminates the cold chain problem that all other mRNA based vaccines are constricted to. To compare, COVID vaccines by AstraZeneca, Moderna and BioNTech need to be cooled at 4°, -20° or even -80°, which restricts their transportability to remote locations.
The protein contains a druggable ‘pocket’ in its surface, which can be injected with various live-attenuated diseases. Professor Imre Berger explains that the body then develops a strong immune response against the “small and harmless pieces of the virus on top of the surface of the ADDomer™”.
First tested on emerging infectious arbovirus, Chikungunya, the vaccine candidate can be used boost antibodies against a host of other viruses and diseases. Spurred on by the success of antibody development in animal models, the Cryo-EM work, accelerated by Oracle Cloud, was instrumental in fast-tracking the vaccine design with other viruses in its ‘pocket’. Today, Imophoron Ltd has secured a £4 million investment to accelerate three vaccines to clinical trials on humans; Chikungunya, RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), and COVID19.
When the first lockdown hit in 2020, a group of clinicians, virologists, chemists, biologists and other academics mobilised as the University COVID19 Emergency Research (UNCOVER) group to tackle the global health crisis. “Scientists everywhere mounted an unprecedented effort to decipher SARS-CoV-2 and the disease, in record time” says Adam Finn, UNCOVER lead and Bristol Professor of Paediatrics. UNCOVER labs urgently needed SARS-CoV-2 antigens to create tests to detect antibodies in the blood of people who had contracted the virus.
SARS-COV-2 virus image (left) and ADDomer™ COVID vaccine image (right)
Fred Garzoni volunteered to assist UNCOVER with supplying the reagents they needed, having worked closely with Bristol researchers Berger and Berger-Schaffitzel on ADDomer™. This was also a unique opportunity to test Imophoron’s protein scaffold technology and develop, as fast as possible, a thermotolerant COVID-19 vaccine candidate with the protein. Within weeks, a viable vaccine had been developed for use on animals in preclinical tests.
“We had access to everything and everybody through UNCOVER” said Fred Garzoni, who worked tirelessly with the Vet School and the ASU’s UNCOVER researchers including Mick Bailey, Jamie Mann, Joe Roe, and David Morgan. Their trials on animal models showed incredibly promising results. Not only did the COVID-19 vaccine candidate induce strong immune responses in subjects, but it critically interrupted virus transmissibility.
In addition, the vaccine may not need trained healthcare professionals to administer the dose. The vaccine was just as effective when administered intranasally as with a syringe, which would reduce the cost and complexity of rolling out worldwide pandemic vaccine programmes. In theory, you could self-administer the COVID vaccine as a nasal spray at home!
The distinctive features of this vaccine candidate – its thermostability and various methods it can be administered- truly set the ADDomer™ apart from existing vaccines. Now that the global uptake of the COVID vaccine stands at 47%, this discovery made by Imophoron Ltd and UNCOVER at the University of Bristol could truly transform the accessibility of vaccines to the most remote corners of the world.
In a recent policy paper, the UK Government have outlined an Innovation Strategy, which sets out their ambitions for an innovation-led economy. Zentraxa, an exciting spin-out of bioengineering researchers from the Bristol BioDesign Institute and the University of Bristol, have been featured in the document ‘UK Innovation Strategy: Leading the future by creating it’. This strategy focuses on how the government can support businesses innovate by making the most of the UK’s research, development and innovation system, to make the UK a global hub for innovation.
Zentraxa is manufacturing biopolymers for use in highly functional adhesives in medical and industrial settings and are establishing a new niche in the synthetic peptides market. They have been highlighted in the UK Innovation Strategy as an example of a highly-successful pioneer in this type of research. Co-founder and Director of Zentraxa, Paul Race, is a University of Bristol Professor of Biological Chemistry who set up the spin-out in 2017. From 2014-17 he served as Co-Director of the >£14M Bristol Centre for Synthetic Biology Research (BrisSynBio) and was a founding Director of the Bristol BioDesign Institute.
2019 has been a great year for the Bristol BioDesign Institute. We have seen and actively partaken in some truly amazing advancements in synthetic biology, formed some new and exciting international partnerships, hosted an array of remarkable speakers and produced some groundbreaking academic papers. From synthetic biology’s obscurity at the turn of the millennium to the bio-industrial revolution we are now facing, we have no doubt that our work in 2020 will continue to transform the global ecosystem as we currently conceive it. But before we enter the New Year – and the new decade – here are some of our best bits of 2019…
Internationalisation
In the last 12 months alone, we have curated relationships with several international institutions to pool our synbio expertise. The Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology launched back in March. The UK continues to collaborate closely with Germany in particular, with the University of Bristol co-authoring 3.1% of all scientific publications produced from 2013 to 2017 between the two countries. In May, our Bristol Max Planck Centre was 1 of 10 European institutions selected to showcase their work at the British Embassy in Berlin. Most recently, one of our BBI Directors, Imre Berger, went to a meeting with Vabiotech representatives in Hanoi, Vietnam to share state-of-the-art vaccines technologies that could help prevent future global outbreaks of avian flu and rabies.
Max Planck Inauguration
Britische Botschaft Berlin - BUILA
Synthetic Protein Scaffold | The ADDomer®
Launch: Great West Awards
Rosa Biotech at Unit DX
Synthetic Biology Seminar Series | External Speaker
Dek Woolfson | The de novo design of α-helical peptides for supramolecular self-assembly
Spin-Out Success Stories
Our award-winning BrisSynBio and Bristol BioDesign Institute spin-outs have continued to excel in their respective fields following Launch Great West Awards in June. ‘The Ones to Watch’ winners Rosa Biotech have secured significant angel investments to commercialise biosensing technology. The technology mimics mammals’ sense of smell, which could be developed to detect malaria, Parkinson’s and other chronic diseases in their early stages. Another spin-out, Cytoseek; ‘the Rising Star’ award winners, have raised £1.1 million for ground-breaking cell therapies to treat solid cancer tumours. Cytoseek use cell membrane augmentation technology to ‘supercharge’ patient’s cells against tumours, which are responsible for 85% of cancer-related deaths. Winners of ‘the Global Good’ award, Imophoron, have developed a novel vaccine platform from a synthetically engineered protein scaffold, named the Addomer®, for use on emerging infectious diseases. Most excitingly, this synthetic protein has been found to bypass the cold chain problem. Many vaccines currently require refrigeration, which makes storing and transporting them to inaccessible places a difficult and expensive challenge. The ADDomer® vaccine candidate is thermostable, which would make it an ideal vaccine vessel for delivery to Asia and sub-saharan Africa.
Synthetic Biology Seminar Series
The BBI have hosted some incredible speakers here at the University for our Synthetic Biology Seminar Series 2019, including Bert Poolman, Nico Sommerdijk, Mark Howarth and Jason Chin. All the seminars saw a massive turnout from the BBI community, with topics ranging from mineralisation of collagen fibril, to building synthetic ribosomes from scratch to reprogramming the genetic code. Our line-up of external speakers for Spring 2020 will be announced in the New Year, so keep an eye out on our website and social media (Twitter and LinkedIn) for these…
Academic Papers
Our own excellent scientists and BBI Directors have produced some fascinating academic papers this year, including but not limited to;
For more of our BBI publications visit our website.
Coming up…
Bristol Biodesign 2020, a one-day international symposium in synthetic biology and biodesign, is taking place next year on the 6th May 2020. The line-up of speakers for the programme include Doctors and Professors from the Weizmann Institute of Science, University College London, the John Innes Centre, the University of Zurich and the University of Bristol. For more details about the event, please head to our website. Hope to see you there!
Scientists at the Bristol BioDesign Institute have combined synthetic biology with Oracle’s cloud computing software, engineering nanoparticles to create a new vaccine candidate against the mosquito-borne chikungunya virus.
What is chikungunya?
Chikungunya is an arbovirus which, like zika and dengue fever, is transmitted by mosquito bites. Its name derives from the East African Makonde language, meaning “to become contorted” due to the crippling effect that the virus has on the joints. Other symptoms include fever, nausea and fatigue. Chikungunya’s varying levels of severity, from a brief episode to weeks long debilitation, and even death in some cases, means that it is very commonly misdiagnosed. Currently, there are no available treatments or vaccines.
Where is it found?
Since its discovery in 1952, more than 60 countries have identified cases of chikungunya- mostly in Africa, Asia and the Indian subcontinent. “It is usually confined to sub-saharan Africa but because of deforestation and climate change it has started to spread all over the world”, says Prof. Imre Berger, a leading scientist on the vaccine publication. In the last year alone, there have been reports of mosquito-borne viruses including West Nile virus in Germany, dengue and chikungunya in Grenoble and Tarn, France, respectively.
“A major problem with vaccines at the moment is that they need to be refrigerated for storage and for transport, otherwise they become inactivated” Imre explains. This is what is known as a cold chain. Most vaccines, from polio to Hepatitis to the flu must be refrigerated, making the transferral of vaccines to remote or less affluent locations a real challenge.
Bypassing the cold chain problem.
Researchers at the Bristol Biodesign Institute, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Imophoron Ltd have engineered a synthetic protein scaffold that could revolutionise the way that chikungunya vaccines are designed, produced and stored- without refrigeration.
To design this scaffold the collaborators created detailed 3D images of cryogenically frozen nanoparticles viewed through a high-resolution electron microscope, using high-performance cloud computing from Oracle.
How was the scaffold engineered?
“We have applied synthetic biology to engineer the surface of the ADDomerTM” (which the team have named the manipulated structure) says Imre. “By putting small and harmless pieces of the chikungunya virus on top of the surface of the ADDomer, we can create a particle which looks like chikungunya but it’s not.” This tricks the immune system into developing antibodies against the virus, effectively immunising the body before becoming exposed to the real thing.
The protein-based nanoparticle is a dodecahedron with a quasi-spherical shape capable of spontaneous self-organisation, which makes it ideal as a vaccine platform technology.
To understand the composition of the ADDomer at near-atomic resolution, massive amounts of cryo-electron microscope images of the protein were processed into Oracle’s cloud computing software to produce a single 3D structure.
What is cloud computing?
“Cloud computing fundamentally is the ability to be able to get computing or storage or networking access as a utility”, says Phil Bates, Oracle.
The unique combination of University of Bristol’s state-of-the-art cryo-electron microscopes used in conjunction with cloud computing meant that huge swathes of data could be analysed “in a fraction of the time and at much lower cost than previously thought possible” Dr Christopher Woods explains.
So how is it different to the other vaccine candidates?
“Completely by chance, we discovered that this particle was incredibly stable even after months, without refrigeration” explains Pascal Fender (CNRS). Unlike the previous chikungunya vaccine candidates, the ADDomer is thermostable- meaning that it can be stored for weeks at warm temperatures- thus eliminating the need for a cold chain.
Josh Bufton, from Bristol’s cryo-EM facility, says that “determining the structure of the ADDomer at near atomic resolution by cryo-Electron Microscopy allowed us to both validate the design of the ADDomer as an effective scaffold for vaccine development and gain insights into its exceptional thermostability.”
In short, the accuracy of cryo-electron microscopy, the speed and affordability of cloud computing and the synthetic engineering of the proteins has created a cheap, thermostable chikungunya vaccine candidate that can be produced en masse.
What does this mean?
“What we need to do now for the next step, is to continue the validation in other infectious disease areas and to continue to develop our technology” concludes Frederic Garzoni, Director of Imophoron Ltd. The viability of the ADDomer as a chikungunya vaccine candidate is just the beginning of addressing an entire universe of infectious diseases- both human and veterinary.
Imre adds “in our current paper, we already show more than a dozen other vaccine candidates which we have made. We now have more than 30 altogether and we are very interested to see how powerful our technology really is.”
Our Bristol BioDesign Institute is partnering with the Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre (QTEC), a world leading incubator of entrepreneurially minded scientists with a passion for quantum research.
We are offering two 12-month Bio-Design Innovation Fellowships in order to produce the pioneers that will place the UK at the forefront of the transforming synthetic biology and biodesign sectors.
The QTEC programme, funded by the EPSRC Training and Skills Hub, is a full-time placement with taught courses that cover entrepreneurship, business and innovation with aspects of systems and design engineering. It includes;
6 months of in-house, world-class teaching comprising of six units of of MBA level training and tutoring,
6 months of developing innovations into start-up businesses culminating in investor pitches,
Travel and subsistence funding to meet customers and partners,
Access to the incubator space and research facilities,
Mentoring and coaching from Bristol BioDesign Institute experts, industrial partners and visiting entrepreneurs.
Closing date for applications: 23:59 on Monday 30th September 2019
Please note that this opening will close as soon as all positions have been filled. If interested, please apply for this fellowship as soon as possible.
Last night we got dressed up in our best frocks to attend the first Launch: Great West awards. The event aimed to celebrate the growing number of new companies in the SW that leverage the world-class science base of our local universities. It was a buzzing and incredibly professional evening thanks to the hard work of the organisers at Spin Up Science. As a headline sponsor, the Bristol BioDesign Institute was there on mass and we were over the moon to see that companies that use biodesign technologies swept the board, winning five of the eight awards.
The Ones to Watch Award:Rosa Biotech who use biodesign to develop novel sensors inspired by the mammalian olfactory system
The Rising Star Award:CytoSeek who develop new biodesign technologies to enhance cell therapies
The BioDesign Award:Ceryx Medical develop bioelectronics to mimic nerve centres within the body
The Global Good Award:Imophoron use biodesign to develop new types of vaccines to emerging developing-world diseases
The Deal of the Year Award: Ziylo/Carbometrics who took a biodesign approach to the development of new glucose binding molecules leading to a trade sale to Novo Nordisk of up to $800M
This event really shows how far the science entrepreneurship community has grown in the last few years. As our local MP Thangam Debbonaire said in the opening speech, Bristol is growing an amazing innovation ecosystem that builds on the best elements of the University, local industries and city as a whole.
We are very much looking forward to the next event to see if biodesign companies can do even better!
Business Minister Lord Henley visits the Bristol BioDesign Institute
Lord Henley meets with Bristol BioDesign staff at the University of Bristol
From the left Andy Boyce, Lord Henley, Nishan Canagarajah, Imre Berger, Dek Woolfson, Stephen Mann and Kathleen Sedgley
Lord Henley gains insights about the work of the Bristol BioDesign team
Lord Henley joins the team for coffee in the Life Sciences Building, University of Bristol
Lord Henley tours the teaching lab at the Bristol BioDesign Institute, Life Sciences Building
During October Bristol Biodesign received a visit from the Rt Hon Lord Henley, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). His visit is significant in that it recognises the innovation ecosystem that has developed in Bristol over the past two years.
Zentraxa
