Nuclera, a biotechnology company accelerating protein expression and purification workflows through its benchtop eProtein Discovery system, has been awarded two Innovate UK grants totalling GBP £1.14m.
The funding consists of a £790,000 flexible, agile, scalable and sustainable technologies (FASST) grant awarded in collaboration with DeepMirror and a £350,000 Engineering Biology grant, which will assist in further developing the eProtein platform.
Evaluations on the technology will also be carried out by Dr Konstantinos Beis, an independent expert from Imperial College London, and Dr Andrew Quigley from Diamond Light Source.
FASST
The FASST grant is part of the Innovate UK Transforming Medicines Manufacturing (TMM) programme and has been designed to support and grow the UK’s capabilities in manufacturing medicines.
It endeavours to do this by developing first-of-a-kind technologies to accelerate patient access to new drugs and treatments.
Engineering Biology
Nuclera is one of 48 companies to be awarded the Engineering Biology grant, which aims to use engineering biology to tackle challenges in the fields of health, environment, food production and sustainability. The funding is provided by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Technology Missions Fund and delivered by Innovate UK.
eProtein's capabilities
Custom protein reagents, required in drug discovery, are challenging to manufacture both in terms of cost and time associated.
The eProtein Discovery platform overcomes this unmet need by providing access to challenging proteins within the benchtop system in less than 48 hours. Accelerating drug discovery processes by up to 30x, the platform provides sequences and optimal conditions to inform protein manufacturing.
Dr Andrew Quigley, group leader of Diamond’s Membrane Protein Lab (MPL), added: “Nuclera’s proposed platform aims to assess the most suitable conditions to obtain functional protein, and the MPL is well positioned to assist in this development with over 30 different membrane protein controls available.”
