New competitive call generates £1million for Southampton

BBSRC, in conjunction with EPSRC and Innovate UK, have developed a competitive call entitled ‘Industrial Biotechnology (IB) Catalyst’. PI, Bruno Linclau, (Chemistry) will be leading a collaborative project entitled ‘Chemo-enzymatic Production of Specialty Glycans’ with seven other UK universities and five companies.

The project is worth over £3,700,000 with over £1million awarded to Southampton.

The project's vision centres around the translation of traditional and novel biocatalytic methodologies to develop sustainable and versatile biotransformation platforms for the industrial production of glycans on scale. The project team anticipate that the technology will have significant transformational potential in human health and disease in diagnostics and glycoengineering applications.

This integrated approach features synthetic chemistry (unnatural building blocks) and biocatalysis (enzymatic synthesis of larger glycans), and showcases glycan potential in diagnostics and therapeutics (glycoarray based platforms). The significant anticipated progression of these technologies will reduce commercialisation barriers both in terms of commercial glycan production and ‘first in the market’ glycan array companies. RI&S is currently in negotiations with the other parties for contract terms with a projected start date of September 1, 2015.