NIBRT and GE Healthcare Announce Biopharmaceutical Research Collaboration
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The National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT), Ireland and GE Healthcare Life Sciences has announced a joint research collaboration to drive advances in technologies for the development and functional analysis of therapeutic antibodies, protein-based drugs that are increasingly used to treat diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
The NIBRT and GE Healthcare are investing $0.5 million the first year in this project, which is planned to run for two years.
The goal of the collaboration is to develop new, robust and reproducible biochemical assays for the analysis of the biological activity of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.
Current industry-standard techniques for research and manufacture often rely on cell-based assays, which can be non-quantitative, labour intensive and highly variable.
The collaboration will combine NIBRT’s leading expertise in in glycobiology and novel bioanalytical techniques with GE Healthcare’s capabilities in protein-protein interaction analysis, particularly the company’s Biacore™ SPR technology.
Welcoming the collaboration, Professor Ian Marison, NIBRT Interim Director said: “We are delighted with this research collaboration with GE Healthcare, which will allow NIBRT to apply its bioanalytical expertise to develop novel analytical platforms for the determination of monoclonal antibody biological activity. We look forward to working with GE Healthcare on this exciting project and developing our relationship further over time”.
The research will be led by NIBRT’s Principal Investigator and global leader in glycobiology, Professor Pauline Rudd, in conjunction with researchers from GE Healthcare Life Sciences laboratories in Uppsala, Sweden.
Dr. Lotta Ljungqvist, Head of Research and Development for the BioTechnologies business of GE Healthcare Life Sciences said, “Our goal is to help our customers optimize every step of their discovery, development and biopharmaceutical manufacturing process, and so help reduce cost of entry, deliver higher yields of finished product and reduce time to market. This collaboration will help us to drive the development of new, biologically relevant and fully characterized binding assays for measuring antibody activity, a critical step in the design and manufacture of effective monoclonal antibody based therapies. We look forward to a productive collaboration with the talented team at NIBRT.”
