Scottish �med-tech� firm�s partnership with university set to pay off with SensaPill
By Selwyn Parker
A UNIVERSITY of Glasgow-developed breakthrough in the fight against bowel cancer will be ready for preliminary trials this summer after going through a fast-track programme designed to bring it quickly to market.
SensaPill, a device that looks for early signs of a disease which kills 16,000 people in the UK a year, is expected to produce significant revenues for its owner, Glasgow-based company Wireless bioDevices, when it clears all the regulatory hurdles.
After the pre-clinical tests this year, the next step will be human trials, which chief executive Nick Wood expects to take place in late 2009.
"We have a very aggressive development programme in place," he told the Sunday Herald. "We are meeting very challenging targets with modest investments."
So far, SensaPill has attracted £550,000 in funding. However, Wood expects the breakthrough will require at least the same amount to bridge the gap between trials.
Wireless bioDevices is among the nominees on the shortlist for best newcomer at the Scottish Enterprise Life Sciences Awards on February 7. The awards recognise a fast-developing success story as Scottish firms win global recognition across a range of disciplines including stem cell research, medical technology and the glamour area of translational medicine, which aims to jump the divide between the laboratory and the clinic. The global value of the life sciences sector is £350 billion a year.
Scotland has been steadily attracting substantial foreign and local investment that produced 20 start-ups in 2007 and the hiring of another 1200 staff. According to Scottish Enterprise statistics, in the last five years Scotland has doubled the number of jobs and the number of companies in the sector.
The major coup was last year's commitment by US-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a specialist in the provision of property for the life sciences, to develop facilities at the £600 million Edinburgh BioQuarter at Little France. The BioQuarter is already home to 1200 researchers, as well as the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine, led by professor Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the sheep.
Public funding is seen as critical to the development of the life sciences sector because of the high research and development costs.
To attract investment, Scottish Enterprise's life sciences division has access to a wide range of funding from research grants to regional development support.
Wood, who was hired in 2005 with public money under the CEO-designate scheme run by Scottish Enterprise and the European Regional Development Fund, hopes SensaPill will be only the first of a range of "med-tech" products developed by the company.
SensaPill is based on wireless sensor technology developed by professors Jon Cooper and David Cumming of the University of Glasgow's department of electronic and electrical engineering. It passes through the body taking measurements along the gastro-intestinal tract and feeding the data via a wireless link to a unit worn by the patient.
Although still at the prototype stage, it can be expected to deliver profits much faster than pharmaceuticals.
After it clears the trials, it faces a 12 to 18 month approval stage. The final step is registration for the all-important US government's reimbursement code. This means, in effect, that government pays for its roll-out through the world's most lucrative health system.
