A GENE therapy business that spun out of the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute in 2006 has received £1.2 million in government funding to work alongside a Glasgow counterpart to develop clinical-grade stem cells.
RoslinCT, which traded as Roslin Cells between 2006 and 2015, will partner with Glasgow-based ReproCELL UK on the project after receiving the cash from non-departmental body Innovate UK.
A total of £10m was made available via the second round of Innovate UK’s medicines manufacturing competition, which is designed to back projects that focus on specific technical or commercial challenges.
RoslinCT chief executive Janet Downie said the funding would allow the firms to “develop a competitive and disruptive impact on the supply of clinical induced pluripotent stem cells [iPSCs]”.
While iPSCs are considered to be a promising source of cells for regenerative medicine, they have proved difficult to produce for clinical use. RoslinCT and ReproCELL aim to find a way of producing and commercialising them.
ReproCELL chief executive Dr David Bunton added: “When combined with the automation and manufacturing capabilities of RoslinCT, we aim to make it easy for companies with new therapies to rapidly and cost-efficiently enter clinical trials and then scale-up for commercial manufacturing.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here