Sweet smell of success
THE north-west of England around Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster continues to pump out ideas, people and companies fuelling a thriving biotechnology sector. Last week at the Bionow awards, 快猫短视频 presented the Young Biotechnologist of the Year award to Andrew Powell of the University of Liverpool for his pioneering work on generating heparin-based potential drugs.
Heparin is well known and has long been used as an anticoagulant. Not so widely known is that it is member of a 鈥渟uper-family鈥� of sugar molecules called heparan sulphates that adorn the surfaces of cells and are active in a wide range of processes in the body. Heparan sulphates are suborned by pathogens to infiltrate cells and may have roles in cancer, Alzheimer鈥檚 and inflammatory disorders such as arthritis. This behaviour makes them of immense interest to the pharmaceutical industry.
Together with colleagues Jerry Turnbull and Ed Yates, Powell invented a method for producing libraries of molecules based on the heparin sugar backbone with varying numbers of sulphate groups attached, and so creating diverse members of the super-family. These can be tested for activity against different diseases. Powell helped to write the patent for the technology, and with Turnbull and Yates created a company to commercialise it.
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Called Intellihep, it is talking to partners who want to screen its library of molecules. It also wants to 鈥渒eep some diseases for itself鈥� to develop drugs, says Powell. To make screening easier, he is working on 鈥済lycochips鈥� 鈥� micro-arrays that present many different heparan sulphates at once.
Powell makes light of venturing from academia into industry. Academia is about selling ideas to peers, he says, while in commerce you sell products to a market. As a 31-year-old postdoctoral research fellow, Powell鈥檚 future is still not clear: it could be in academia or in industry. Not that he鈥檚 worried. 鈥淚f the big boys come and snap up Intellihep,鈥� he says, 鈥淚 know I鈥檇 have to give up my baby and invent another.鈥� Now there鈥檚 confidence.