It’s been a challenging few months since the global spread of the Coronavirus pandemic, like many other Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), we’ve been working as normally as we possibly can with reduced staff capacity and working hours. However, we’ve been delighted to still be forming new partnerships and adding new tools to our portfolio. Here’s some of the latest Ximbio partnership and portfolio news from the past few months.
Continued interest in research tools
Although we’ve seen a decrease in the number of enquiries we’ve received since the UK lockdown started in March, this decrease is only slight compared to the number of enquiries we received in the same period during the previous year. It’s been great to see a continued strong interest in the research tools on our portfolio even though many laboratories have been shut and with researchers returning to laboratories, we expect to see an increase in this interest over the next few months.
New partnerships and research tools
We’ve been lucky over the past few months to continue to expand our global technology transfer office partnerships. We now have over 150 partnerships across 6 continents. Here are some of our newest partners and latest types of research tools that have been added to our portfolio:
Africa:
A new partnership with the University of Ilorin, in Nigeria, has led to the addition of two new vectors to our portfolio (pCRBLUNT-HBsAg Vector and pGEM-β-globin Vector).
Asia:
We’re delighted to have established new partnerships with institutions in Israel including Tel Aviv University (Ramot) and Hadassah Medical Centre (Hadasit). These new partnerships have led to the addition of prostate, breast and ovarian cancer cells as well as a range of fluorescent markers for the endoplasmic reticulum (ER).Australasia:
The first Ximbio-New Zealand partnership has recently been established with the University of Auckland. Several of our Australian Technology Transfer partners have also added new research tools to our portfolio including cytokines, polyclonal antibodies used in immunotherapy studies and a range of CRISPR vectors.Europe and the UK:
Several new partnerships have been established recently across Europe including the University of Tartu in Estonia, I&I Prague and Institute of Biotechnology Prague (IBT) in the Czech Republic and Toulouse Tech Transfer (SATT) in France. New research tools have also been added to the portfolio including a series of small molecules capable of replacing antibodies in biomedical applications and a group of peptides, useful as an affinity ligand to deliver diagnostic compounds into solid tumours.North America:
Our network of partners in North America has expanded to include the University of Miami, the Puerto Rico Science, Technology & Research Trust, Rush University Medical Center and the University of North Texas. New research tools have been added to the portfolio including a series of small molecules that can be used to inhibit the growth of several cancer cell line models.South America:
We are proud to announce our first partnership in South America with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.Although there is still some uncertainty at the moment, we will be continuing to help accelerate life science research by meeting researcher requests for research tools and adding new partners and research tools to our portfolio. Our portfolio continues to grow in diversity, adding new and novel research tools from our partner institutes. If you have any new tools you would like to add or if we can provide further support to you, we would love to hear from you: