Enzyme Enterprise

  A new spin-out from the School of Biosciences has become the latest portfolio company of university commercialisation company Fusion IP. Nanotether Discovery Science Limited ("Nanotether") is founded on the invention of three Cardiff academics - Professor Trevor Dale, Professor Adrian Harwood and Professor Paola Borri from the School of Biosciences. The trio's breakthrough intellectual property has the potential to improve drug discovery by miniaturising and accelerating the rate at which interactions between proteins and drug candidates can be studied for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology markets. In recent years there has been an explosion of biological information resulting from the use of high-throughput biological sensor technologies, each resulting in the creation of new analytical and diagnostic markets. However, when each new technique is created, bottlenecks are created between one approach and the next and one of the key bottlenecks is biochemical quantification. Biochemical quantification can take several months to determine using current technology, mainly due to the time taken to produce and purify proteins for assays. Nanotether's technology aims to break this biochemical bottleneck.