NIBRT Secures Funding for mAb Research

NIBRT chief science officer, professor Michael Butler, and principal investigator, professor Niall Barron, have secured funding through Science Foundation Ireland’s (SFI) Technology Innovation Development Award (TIDA) program for their work in monoclonal antibody (mAb) production.

The SFI TIDA program’s purpose is to provide the capital and training in entrepreneurship skills to researchers who are looking at commercializing their life’s work. Butler’s project, the production of single structural forms of mAbs by solid-state chemoenzymatic transformation, seeks to reduce the complexity of mAbs through chemical changes during the purification process. The result will be to decrease the complexity of each sample to produce near homogeneous forms of mAbs and enable the most efficacious forms to be used in therapy.Barron’s project, an epi-transcriptomic-based approach for development of high producer Chinese hamster cells (CHO), will be based on improving CHO productivity to help reduce the cost of production and ensure future access for all patients.

“This TIDA award will support the development of a novel approach to increasing the efficiency of production of life-changing new drugs and is based on some fundamental discoveries supported by previous SFI funding,” said Barron in a Feb. 15, 2019 press release. 

“NIBRT is delighted to receive two of the recent TIDA awards from SFI, a strong endorsement of the excellent research being conducted by Profs Butler and Barron,” NIBRT CEO Dominic Carolan remarked in the press release.

Source: NIBRT