Life Sciences
The Burgundy Gold Team ate active throughout the Life sciences sector and have wide experience of the Pharmaceutical Industry (including Drug Discovery, Drug Delivery Technologies and Tissue Engineering), the Healthcare sector (including Medical Devices and Diagnostics) as well as more generally in the Fermentation, Enzyme, Food and Beverage sectors.
Drug Discovery
Pharmaceutical companies spend at least 20% of their revenue - 25.1 billion by 2006, an increase of 29% from 2002 (Drug Researcher, 2005).
With generic competition eroding profits from traditional blockbuster drugs, pharma operations must optimise their R&D programmes and outsourcing activities. In order to meet the increasing costs of drug development, utilizing the latest technological advancements in drug discovery is essential to develop the next potential breakthrough in the global healthcare markets.
Focus on quality not quantitiy: The disappointing results of the High Throughput Screening (HTS) approach have led developers to focus on quality rather than quantity. A more rational approach, obtaining more information about fewer, more promising compounds is the way forward.
Drug Delivery
Microencapsulation
Microencapsulation refers to a process by which minute particles of liquid or solid material are coated with a uniform and continuous film. A range of materials are suited for use as the capsule material: lipids, wax, crystal starch, modified starch, cellulose, phospholipids and other polymers.
Microencapsulation has a variety of purposes, such as the controlled release of active ingredients, coating
liquid substances, masking or protecting core material as well as reducing volatility.
Active Ingredient->Process->Coated Particle or Droplet
Tissue Engineeering
Tissue engineering aims to create medical devices that, once implanted, will replace or enhance tissue function that has been impaired by disease, injury, or age.
These devices are typically created by seeding a biomaterial scaffold (a sculpted porous sponge) with cells. It is preferable that the cells be harvested from the patient - a device made from cells that are a genetic match are less likely to be rejected by the immune system. If the patient's own cells are not an option, cells from another human donor can be used. The type of cell depends on the tissue - engineered liver tissue would require hepatocytes to restore liver function, while tissue engineered cartilage would make use of chondrocytes.
Medical Devices
The healthcare services remain under considerable pressure to identify and commercialise simple medical devices quickly to lower costs, reduce hospital stay, control infections, reduce liability and eliminate preventable errors. The trend toward more user-friendly home health care products will also spur the demand for innovative medical devices. With the convergence of scientific, electronic and digital technologies; new breakthroughs in medical devices will play a critical role in solving the problems in healthcare and enhancing the human condition.
The global market for medical products and hospital supplies is over $220 billions. Innovation is the life-blood of the industry. The medical supply industry has had a consistent growth rate of over 10% for the last several years. The leading companies struggle to maintain 30% of their revenues from new products introduced in the last 3 years.
Medical Diagnostics
In the last few years there has been something a revolution in the medical diagnostics industry. Clinical laboratories in hospitals have been improving their efficiency with the installation of large automated instruments. Alonside these developments technological advances in solid-phase chemistry, electronics and miniaturisation of instrumentation have led to a new breed of diagnostic tests that can move diagnostics out of the traditional laboratory and closer to the patient. This type of near patient testing, or point of care testing as it has become known, is set to expand dramatically. In the United States it now accounts for around one fifth of all tests and European countries are quickly following suit
As part of this development non-invasive techniques are being developed which allow more and more diagnosis to be carried out by the non-specialist in non-specialist faccilites such as outpatient clinics and GP surgeries. These techniques greatly reduce the cost of diagnosis to the healthservice and usually reduce discomfort and pain for the patient.
Biotechnology / Fermentation
There are 5 major groups of commercially important fermentation:
- Microbial cells or biomass as the product, e.g. bakers yeast, lactobacillus, etc.
- Microbial enzymes: catalase, amylase, protease, pectinase, glucose isomerase, cellulase, hemicellulase, lipase, lactase, streptokinase, etc.
- Microbial metabolites :
Primary metabolites – ethanol, citric acid, glutamic acid, lysine, vitamins, polysaccharides etc.
Secondary metabolites: all antibiotic fermentation - Recombinant products: insulin, HBV, interferon, GCSF, streptokinase
Biotransformations: phenyl acetyl carbinol, steroid biotransformation, etc.