CatSci Ltd, an award-winning innovation partner for medicines development, along with Reach Industries, have won an Innovate UK grant to accelerate the development of life-changing oligonucleotide therapeutics. This grant will fund a collaboration that combines scientific expertise with machine vision tools to streamline the synthesis, purification and analysis of RNA medicines.
Based on Lumi Visual Intelligence platform developed by Reach Industries, CatSci and Reach will build a set of tools that blend local area monitoring with multiple global 3D mapping Lumi cameras, tracking movement between local stations to offer a holistic view of sample flow across the entire lab. This will streamline workflows and ensure a seamless information transfer to manufacturing partners. Through these innovative tools, CatSci will be able to guarantee output quality and elucidate the complexities behind scale-up and synthesis parameters. Also included in this project is the creation of a customer portal that uses real-time data to keep customers up to date with the status of their projects, ensuring total transparency every step of the way.
The tools that this partnership will produce will save customers’ resources by creating a standardised workflow to generate seamless processes that follow the same precise steps. Uncertainties will be eliminated by tracking and confirming sample locations, ensuring sample history is captured for every sample, even under high throughput conditions. Integrity in results will be enhanced thanks to instrument assurance, and quality insights will enable an in-depth understanding of how processing variables impact output quality, including Synthesizer parameters, sample movement, and time intervals. Algorithms will be utilised to correlate all the rich data collected to predict quality based on the known starting parameters, enabling deep synthesis understanding and maximising quality. Finally, the project will introduce a trained visual model to assess the quality of high-throughput synthesis in 96-well plates, saving time and resources for each assessment.
Innovate UK is a part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and they are the UK’s national innovation agency. Their mission is to help companies grow through the development and commercialisation of new products, processes and services, supported by an outstanding, agile, and inclusive ecosystem. Innovate UK’s grant will empower CatSci and Reach Industries to fortify the UK’s presence in the oligonucleotides market and accelerate the delivery of life-changing medicines to patients with unmet needs.
This news follows CatSci’s recent achievement in winning a Welsh Government SMART Capital Equipment Fund grant of £230k to enhance our oligonucleotides capability. The grant will enable CatSci to invest in new cutting-edge equipment that will dramatically increase the rapid creation of a large pool of candidates of RNA/DNA sequences. CatSci are committed to driving excellence in new modalities in order to address the critical need to identify new therapies to address previously untreatable diseases.
Sam Whitmarsh, Director of Analytical Science and Digital Transformation at CatSci, commented: “I’m thrilled that we have won the Innovate UK grant. The partnership between CatSci and Reach Industries will leverage AI and machine learning tools to accelerate the development of oligonucleotide therapies. Together, we will use the funding from Innovate UK to build standardised workflows that will allow our customers to advance their RNA therapeutics seamlessly through development. Both CatSci and Reach Industries are driven by a common purpose: powering scientific expertise with cutting edge digital tools to help patients in need.”
Silas Adekunle, CEO at Reach Industries, added: “At Reach Industries, we are dedicated to pushing the boundaries of technological innovation in the life sciences. This partnership with CatSci, supported by the Innovate UK grant, represents a significant step forward in transforming the landscape of RNA therapeutics and medicines development. By integrating advanced machine vision and AI tools into the synthesis and analysis of oligonucleotide medicines development, we are not only streamlining workflows but also ensuring the highest levels of quality and transparency. Our collaborative efforts will provide unprecedented insights into the synthesis process, ultimately accelerating the development of life-changing therapies for patients who need it most.”
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