Babraham Institute Science and its Translation
At the heart of the campus is the internationally-regarded Babraham Institute, a charitable life sciences organisation carrying out world-leading innovative biomedical research. Babraham is an institute of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and underpins government’s national responsibilities for healthcare research and training. The latest technologies are used to study how normal cellular processes operate and change during development, and with age, and also to understand how they can go wrong in disease. In this way, the Institute serves society by directing discoveries to the improvement of the quality of life. With a strategic focus on ‘healthy ageing’, novel approaches for tackling chronic diseases and public health concerns like obesity are also being identified.
The Institute is the leading European epigenetics research centre, the UK’s premier Institute focusing on epigenetics in regenerative medicine. Following a major investment of £1.65 million from the BBSRC and Medical Research Council, the Babraham Institute has established a new state-of-the-art genome sequencing facility at the campus. This new ‘high throughput’ facility will enable researchers to more rapidly and cheaply mine the genome for insights into how and why we get diseases, how environmental factors can modify the genome and potentially unlock the processes governing healthy ageing.
The Institute's research aims to provide novel targets for the development of therapies and diagnostics; where relevant, our scientists work with clinicians or with companies to translate the research for social and economic benefit. However, the Institute’s research is not immediately close to application and timescales to reveal opportunities for translation can be lengthy, requiring years of focused and evolving research effort. For example, licensing royalty income from Abgenix Inc. only came on stream in 2007 following a patent obtained in 1988 jointly with the MRC involving expression of humanized antibodies in mice. This technology has led to the company developing a therapeutic product to treat metastatic colorectal cancer (Vectibix TM –the first fully human anti-EGFR monoclonal antibody).
See www.babraham.ac.uk/about/commercial.html for more information.
