̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Chris Lowe

From sick-care to health-care

skbf2 — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 18:23:18 +0000

Meet the young biotech entrepreneur with two companies to her name and a plan to revolutionise the way we manage our health.

Young at heart

cjb250 — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 14:03:28 +0000

Improvements in public health, education and medicine mean that our lives are much longer than at any point in human history. Thanks to studies of volunteers from the eastern region, we may be able to spend these extra years living independently and in good health.

Synthetic organs, nanobots and DNA ‘scissors’: the future of medicine

lw355 — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 08:00:43 +0000

In a new film to coincide with the recent launch of the Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences, researchers discuss some of the most exciting developments in medical research and set out their vision for the next 50 years.

Professor Jeremy Baumberg from the NanoPhotonics Centre discusses a future in which diagnoses do not have to rely on asking a patient how they are feeling, but rather are carried out by nanomachines that patrol our bodies, looking for and repairing problems. Professor Michelle Oyen from the Department of Engineering talks about using artificial scaffolds to create ‘off-the-shelf’ replacement organs that could help solve the shortage of donated organs. Dr Sanjay Sinha from the Wellcome Trust-MRC Stem Cell Institute sees us using stem cell ‘patches’ to repair damaged hearts and return their function back to normal.

Dr Alasdair Russell from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute describes how recent breakthroughs in the use of CRISPR-Cas9 – a DNA editing tool – will enable us to snip out and replace defective regions of the genome, curing diseases in individual patients; and lawyer Dr Kathy Liddell, from the Cambridge Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, highlights how research around law and ethics will help to make gene editing safe.

Professor Gillian Griffiths, Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, envisages us weaponising ‘killer T cells’ – important immune system warriors – to hunt down and destroy even the most evasive of cancer cells.

All of these developments will help transform the field of medicine, says Professor Chris Lowe, Director of the Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences, who sees this as an exciting time for medicine. New developments have the potential to transform healthcare “right the way from how you handle the patient to actually delivering the final therapeutic product - and that’s the exciting thing”.

Read more about research on future therapeutics in Research Horizons magazine.

Nanobots that patrol our bodies, killer immune cells hunting and destroying cancer cells, biological scissors that cut out defective genes: these are just some of technologies that Cambridge researchers are developing which are set to revolutionise medicine in the future.

̽��ֱ��Future of Medicine

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Future therapeutics: the hundred-year horizon scan

lw355 — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 08:04:43 +0000

It used to be all about fleabane for bites from venomous beasts, mugwort to induce and ease the pain of labour and boiled bedstraw to stimulate clotting. According to Nicholas Culpeper in his 1652 book ̽��ֱ��English Physitian, “a man may preserve his Body in Health; or cure himself, being sick, for three pence charge, with such things only as grow in England”.

Prescient words, in some respects – today it’s still all about giving the right patient the right drug, at the right dose at the right time, but it’s called precision medicine.

In fact, herbal remedies and small-molecule pharmaceuticals have dominated therapeutic medicines since Culpeper’s time, before being joined in the 1980s by ‘biologics’ when it became possible to build new forms of proteins, hormones, receptors and monoclonal antibodies after the DNA code was cracked in Cambridge in 1953.

Science moves fast and we now stand at the threshold of not one but several step changes. New understanding of the structures of cells and systems biology is pioneering the use of human and microbial cells as therapeutic agents. Meanwhile, novel bioelectronic medicines or ‘electroceuticals’ are shifting the therapeutic approach away from traditional medicines into optics, electronics, instrumentation and software. What will these and other developments in areas such as immunotherapy and nanotherapy mean to medicine over the next hundred years? And what’s taking place now in Cambridge to help this happen?

There seems little doubt that with increased genetic knowledge, precision medicine will define the 21st century. ̽��ֱ��development of massively parallel DNA sequencing by the Department of Chemistry moves us closer to the prospect of sequencing one billion kilobases per day per machine. Genomic information and computational approaches will refine diagnoses, stratify cancer into subtypes, guide personalised treatments and improve the efficiency of clinical trials.

Meanwhile, cell-based technologies provide exquisitely selective delivery agents that are naturally able to perform therapeutic tasks. In Cambridge, progress in regenerative medicine promises benefits for replacing human cells, tissues or organs; and the use of stem cells to manage and treat diabetes, degenerative nerve, bone and joint conditions, and heart failure.

̽��ֱ��convergence of information technologies like augmented reality, cloud-based applications, artificial intelligence and deep learning in digital healthcare will play an increasing role in medical decision support, robotic nursing and surgery, sensors and diagnostics, and so on.

So-called beyond-the-pill services, such as wearables, apps, medical tattoos and point-of-care sensors will offer consumers digital devices for monitoring health and compliance, although issues such as privacy, data integrity and cybersecurity remain concerns to be resolved satisfactorily in the ‘internet of people’.

Research into these key future technologies is being conducted in the Departments of Engineering, Materials Science and Physics, and the Centre for the Physics of Medicine. Meanwhile, the newly established Alan Turing Institute and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence bring world-leading expertise in big data, computer science, advanced mathematics and artificial intelligence.

How is the pharmaceutical industry responding to these shifting patterns in modern medical treatments? Global research-based companies have suffered from the downturn in the global economy, the demise of the blockbuster era and the rise in specialist markets. Industry is adapting by placing more emphasis on new therapeutic modalities and repurposing existing drugs, as well as strengthening academic–pharma collaborations at earlier stages of the drug discovery process.

̽��ֱ��Milner Therapeutics Institute, due to open in 2018, will foster close collaborative interactions between academia and industry to accelerate medical advancement via an ‘open borders’ paradigm. So too will Apollo Therapeutics, a £40m collaboration between the tech transfer offices of Cambridge, Imperial College London and ̽��ֱ�� College London and three global pharmaceutical industries (AstraZeneca, GSK and Johnson & Johnson) to streamline the academia-to-industry pipeline.

New technologies are likely to change the regulatory, legal and policy environments, and business models. For example, some forms of medicine – like gene editing – are both personalised and curative. How will the costs of research, development and marketing for ‘cures’ be met if the business model is more likely to be a service than a product?

Understanding complex issues such as these will be aided by the networks and convening power established by the Centre for Science and Policy, which coordinates the best scientific thinking to inform public policy, and the Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, which focuses on the legal and ethical challenges at the forefront of biomedicine. Meanwhile, the Institute for Manufacturing is analysing supply chains, and the Judge Business School is studying the management of innovation and entrepreneurship.

It’s likely that future healthcare will have a different geometry. A complex interplay of patients, industries and service operators will use sophisticated diagnostic tools, digital scrutiny and interpretation using artificial intelligence, and have access to an extensive toolbox of therapeutic approaches, all personalised to the individual patient, and available through a redesigned primary and hospital healthcare environment.

Cambridge is well placed to drive innovation in this highly multidisciplinary therapeutic scenario.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� has expertise relevant to all stages of the drug discovery, development and manufacturing process, from fundamental biology/chemistry, through drug development and clinical trials, to imaging, safety, delivery, supply-chain management and entrepreneurship.

There’s also large-scale investment in research and infrastructure for tackling disease. Take dementia, for instance: more than £17m awarded by the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund will help build a Chemistry of Health building for chemistry-based research in neurodegenerative diseases. Cambridge also hosts one of three UK Drug Discovery Institutes funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK), and is one of five centres that will form the UK Dementia Research Institute, funded by the Medical Research Council, Alzheimer’s Society and ARUK.

Against this backdrop of activity, the Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences (CATS) has been established to increase the linking of academic research to big pharma, biotech and NHS structures on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and in the region. ̽��ֱ��idea is to create a networking, training and enterprise structure that transcends traditional boundaries between clinicians, academics and industrialists, in which fundamental and applied research into diagnostics and therapeutics can flourish and be translated into patient treatments with maximum efficiency.

̽��ֱ��time is ripe for this to happen. AstraZeneca’s move to Cambridge, combined with close links with GSK and other big pharma companies, as well as the thriving local biotechnology industrial environment and sister institutes like the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, provide substantial impetus to co-develop and co-deliver these programmes.

In fact, one might thank Nicholas Culpeper for his vision for the future of medicine and at the same time upgrade his estimate of ‘three pence charge’ with 36 decades of financial inflation.

Inset image: Read more about research on future therapeutics in Research Horizons magazine.

How will precision medicine define 21st-century therapeutics? What will future healthcare look like? And what actually lies ‘beyond the pill’? Professor Chris Lowe, inaugural Director of the Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences, takes the long view on the future of therapeutics.

Future healthcare will have a different geometry... sophisticated diagnostic tools, cloud-based applications, artificial intelligence... an extensive toolbox of therapeutic approaches, all personalised to the individual.

Chris Lowe

̽��ֱ��District

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Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences aims to create world-leading industry-academia collaborations

cjb250 — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 09:00:21 +0000

CATS will foster science that underpins the discovery of new treatments and diagnostics, and the safe and effective use of existing medicines. It will combine excellent science with efficient translation, working across biological, physical, clinical and social sciences and engineering, in partnership with industry.

̽��ֱ��arrival in Cambridge of major pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Otsuka, and the closeness of GSK, put Cambridge firmly at the epicentre of commercial drug discovery in the UK and internationally. Cambridge has strong clinical trials and clinical science sectors, a network of aligned organisations supporting contract research, and excellent epidemiology and public health networks.

Many of these are situated on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, the centrepiece of the largest biotech cluster outside the United States. From early 2018, the Campus will also house the Milner Therapeutics Institute, a partner organisation within CATS, which will act as a research hub and partner with institutions in aspects of drug development research.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz says: “Healthcare in the future will be provided by a complex interplay of patients, industries and service operators. It will involve sophisticated diagnostic tools, digital scrutiny and interpretation using artificial intelligence, and access to an extensive toolbox of therapeutic approaches, all personalised to the individual patient, and available through a redesigned primary and hospital healthcare environment.

“There are few places in the world as well placed as the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge to take advantage of this highly multidisciplinary scenario. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences will ensure that this capacity is fully exploited to speed up the development of new treatments that will benefit patients locally, nationally and internationally.”

̽��ֱ��Academy will focus on three main areas:

Research facilitation – through collaboration, networking and capacity building, encouraging people and skills exchanges between academia and industry in the UK, with the aim of expanding to involve international collaborations, particularly in in developing countries;
Education – from undergraduate through to postdoctoral, CATS will provide education and training opportunities, and facilitate networking and internships with industry partners; a key plank in this strand will be to develop a new modular Master’s course in therapeutic sciences.
Policy – working closely with the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Science and Policy, and the Research Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, CATS will take the lead in addressing key legal and policy matters across the spectrum of pharmaceutical sciences, and beyond.

One key theme that the Academy will focus on is medicine safety, through the involvement of the Cambridge Alliance on Medicines Safety, a partnership between the ̽��ֱ��, the Medical Research Council Toxicology Unit (due to transfer to the ̽��ֱ�� in 2018), GSK and AstraZeneca. Its main aim is to connect scientists at the ̽��ֱ�� whose work relates to safety of medicines to build an active academic research programme with strong collaborative links to pharmaceutical and human-safety related companies.

Professor Chris Lowe, Director of CATS, adds: “With CATS, we will develop a way of fostering and supporting the community in and around Cambridge to develop new concepts, deliver new knowledge, and to produce people who are better educated in all elements of modern therapeutics.

“We believe the opportunities that CATS provides for research, collaboration and education will attract academic and industrial researchers from around the world.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences (CATS), a new initiative that aims to establish a world-leading platform for collaboration between academia and industry in the development of therapeutics, will be launched today by the Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

With CATS, we will develop a way of fostering and supporting the community in and around Cambridge to develop new concepts, deliver new knowledge, and to produce people who are better educated in all elements of modern therapeutics

Chris Lowe

Sir Cam

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Phone for a doctor

cjb250 — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 12:29:19 +0000

It’s the middle of the afternoon. You hear the trill of an incoming text message on your phone. You pick it up, expecting it to be from a friend.

Skipping breakfast will make you overeat at lunch.

Ah yes, this must be from Professor Ambady Ramachandran. You’ve never met him and he doesn’t know you personally, but he has sent you this helpful reminder because you are one of over 20 million Indians at a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Tomorrow, you tell yourself, you will make sure you eat before going to work.

“It seems paradoxical that something as simple as text messaging could help prevent you from developing diabetes,” says Professor Nick Wareham, Director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. And yet, the evidence suggests it might work.

In 2013, Ramachandran, who founded and runs a diabetes hospital in Chennai, India, and is President of the India Diabetes Research Foundation, reported the results of a study that found almost a third fewer men in the high risk group went on to develop diabetes if they received between two and four texts a week giving advice on diet and exercise.

“This is a big – and surprising – effect,” says Wareham. And India, as with many other countries worldwide, needs something big (and, possibly, surprising) to help it tackle the growing burden of diabetes and obesity. Recent estimates suggest there are 68 million people living with diabetes in India, the majority with type 2 diabetes. A mixture of poor diet and lack of exercise, low birth weight followed by rapid growth, and genetic predisposition – Indians tend to develop diabetes at a lower body-mass index than Caucasians – means that diabetes is twice as common in India as it is in the UK.

While targeted strategies aimed at high risk individuals are likely to be effective, there is no way they could be rolled out to 20 million people, says Wareham. “If you had to individually counsel that many people, it would be unaffordable. Simple, pragmatic, scalable approaches are the only ones that are feasible.”

Ramachandran’s study involved a relatively small sample, but such was its promise that he and Wareham have teamed up to see whether text messaging might be scaled up to a larger population, with support from the MRC and the Indian Council for Medical Research. An additional arm of the study, being carried out by Imperial College London, is looking at whether the same concept would work in the UK.

Wareham and colleagues use a combination of a risk score that they have developed, which looks at factors such as age, sex and weight, and a simple blood test to identify people at risk of developing diabetes: these are the individuals who are targeted by the text messages.

It is the pervasiveness of mobile phones that could make this scheme work: there are almost a billion mobile phones in India – the country ranks second only to China. Smartphones are still much less common, with just around one in six people in the country owning one, but this is expected to increase significantly, potentially making India the second largest market worldwide.

If, as expected, smartphones really do take off, they could hold the answer to helping those people unfortunate enough to develop diabetes to monitor their condition, says Chris Lowe, Emeritus Professor of Biotechnology at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology in Cambridge.

“We’re interested in developing diagnostics that are appropriate for taking measurements at home or in the doctor’s surgery, without the need for a specialist,” says Lowe. For over a decade, he has been looking at making ‘smart’ holograms that are sensitive to chemicals or biological compounds.

Unlike conventional holograms, which are two-dimensional, Lowe’s holograms are three-dimensional, created by shining a one-nanosecond laser pulse into a gel, suspended in which are silver nanoparticles. ̽��ֱ��silver nanoparticles arrange themselves into planes, giving the hologram a particular colour. But when glucose – from a blood or urine sample – comes into contact with the hologram, it binds to sensors within the gel, known as receptors, causing the hologram to expand or contract; the planes move closer together or further apart and the light given off by the hologram changes colour, moving towards the blue or red end of the spectrum.

“You can see these changes visually, but to increase the accuracy you need to be able to quantify the change, and this is where smartphones come in,” he says. Using the phone’s camera and a downloadable app, it could be possible to give an accurate measurement of the level of glucose in the body. His colleague Dr Gita Khalili Moghaddam is working on software that would enable the app to operate in a real-world setting, compensating for variability between phones and the environment.

̽��ֱ��technology works in a similar way to QR codes – the black-and-white square patterns which, when scanned on a phone, redirect you to information online. In fact, says Moghaddam, the holograms could themselves be QR codes. “You can save the patient’s information in the holographic QR code, so when you scan it and send off your glucose levels, embedded in this are your own details,” she says.

Lowe and colleagues are exploring ways of delivering the holograms, from strips of holograms through to contact lenses that measure glucose in tear fluid as a surrogate for blood sugar levels, and even to having holograms that can be tattooed onto skin. These could even do away with the need to take regular blood finger-prick tests.

Despite the hi-tech nature of this technology, part of its beauty lies in its cost. ̽��ֱ��holograms could be mass-produced at a very low cost – even if they were embedded into daily-use contact lenses, the cost would be negligible, making them particularly attractive in the developing world. At the moment, patients need special instruments to monitor their glucose levels – in areas such as rural India, these are often given away, but their cost then has to be incorporated into the disposable strips used by the instruments.

“With smart holograms, there is no instrument,” says Lowe. “It’s just your smartphone. And soon, almost everyone will have one of those.”

Worried you might be at risk from diabetes? Check your phone: it might help stop you getting the disease. And if you already have diabetes? Your phone might even help you monitor your condition at home.

With smart holograms, there is no instrument. It’s just your smartphone. And soon, almost everyone will have one of those

Chris Lowe

James Theophane

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Institute of Biotechnology wins Queen's Anniversary Prize

bjb42 — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:00:26 +0000

Since the establishment of the Institute in 1988, its ethos has been to provide a centre of excellence in biotechnology research and training within a flourishing entrepreneurial environment. ̽��ֱ��Institute has an annual research income of £3.5 million and has generated no less than nine spin-out companies – whose products range from glucose-sensing contact lenses for diabetics to hand-held devices for detecting food pathogens – with a current market capitalisation of approximately £250 million. In 2005/6, 19% of the ̽��ֱ��’s new UK patents were filed by members of the Institute.

̽��ֱ��Institute’s research activities are underpinned by an intensive Master’s of Bioscience Enterprise (MBE) course that combines science, technology and business training. It is this unique combination of innovative multidisciplinary research, education and entrepreneurialism that has been recognised by ̽��ֱ��Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education, awarded at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace in February.

‘Entrepreneurially inclined business-trained graduates rarely have sufficient fluency in science and technology to recognise opportunities or to gauge the intrinsic value of emerging developments in high technology,’ said Professor Chris Lowe, Director of the Institute. ‘ ̽��ֱ��Institute of Biotechnology is a global exemplar of how to ensure that entrepreneurial scientists can be nurtured within a well-managed academic environment.’

For more information, please visit the Institute of Biotechnology website (www.biot.cam.ac.uk). Professor Lowe is an Enterprise Champion for Cambridge Enterprise Ltd.

̽��ֱ��Institute has been recognised for its initiative, innovation and originality.

̽��ֱ��Institute of Biotechnology is a global exemplar of how to ensure that entrepreneurial scientists can be nurtured within a well-managed academic environment.

Professor Chris Lowe

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Kings College, Cambridge

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