Case Studies

Babraham Bioscience Technologies Ltd. delivers the Institute's knowledge exchange remit and facilitates academic-commercial links. Commercialisation is achieved mainly through licensing to companies. BBT also manages the campus Bioincubator, home to 28 early-stage bioventures, including a biopharmaceutical spin-out based on the Institute's antibody expertise.

All enquiries should be made to:

Dr. Katy Evans-Roberts
Knowledge Exchange and Commercialisation Manager

Acquired resistance to MEK1/2 Inhibitors

A growing problem in treating tumours is their ability to develop resistance to new chemotherapeutic drugs, causing disease relapse. A recent breakthrough made by Simon Cook in the Laboratory of Signalling and Cell Fate at Babraham has been the discovery of how tumour cells can acquire resistance to an anti-cancer drug (AZD6244). The research, a collaboration with scientists at AstraZeneca and the MRC Cancer Cell Unit in Cambridge, provides new insight into a protein pathway that normally controls cell division (the BRAF-MEK-ERK pathway), and greater understanding of tumour cells' versatility to overcome therapies targeting this pathway.

5-hydroxymethylcytosine Antibody

Research in the Reik lab has shown that a new type of epigenetic modification, 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmC), is enriched in euchromatic areas of the genome, and is associated with increased gene expression. It is believed that the conversion of 5-methylcytosine (5-mC) to 5-hmC increases transcriptional levels. During this study the lab generated a monoclonal antibody against 5-hmC which has now been non-exclusively licensed to several companies, and is also available through the Babraham Institute's Antibody Facility.

Collaboration with CellCentric Ltd

The Babraham Institute has an ongoing relationship with CellCentric Ltd, a Cambridge-based company which aims to discover therapeutics acting on second-generation epigenetic targets. Knowledge exchange and commercialisation in a new scientific field such as epigenetics can be challenging, as emerging information is often fragmented and difficult to contextualise. In drug discovery specifically, where the associated biology is complex, it is thus hard to identify those opportunities of real potential clinical impact and thus commercial importance. CellCentric's solution is an innovative approach to knowledge assimilation and drug discovery that addresses this. The company has a network of intellectual property agreements with multiple leading research Institutes and Principal Investigators.