Organon and the Irish National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) enter into research collaboration
The Irish National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) and Organon, the human healthcare business of Akzo Nobel, announced the formation of a research collaboration which will focus on the control and understanding of Glycosylation in CHO cell culture. The collaboration is designed to combine NIBRT's academic resources with the existing manufacturing know-how of Organon to improve the control of the cell culture process.
The research program will study the regulation and expression of those enzymes active in cell cultures which are highly relevant for their role in glycosylation. Using a combination of systems biology modelling and experimental validation in vitro, key optimisation data will be generated under the collaboration which will advance the understanding of glycosylation-related enzyme expression, regulation and action in production systems. The research will move from computational prediction and wetlab experiment through to up-scaled cell culture bioreactors for reduction to practice.
According to the company, this is the first industry research collaboration to be announced by NIBRT, which was incorporated early in 2006. The academic portion of the collaboration will be supported by Prof. Keith Tipton and Dr. Gavin Davey of the Systems Biology Group in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Experimental work will be carried out in TCD and later in collaboration with Prof. Pauline Rudd's group (NIBRT) in Belfield. Scale-up work will be carried out in the new NIBRT research facility, currently under construction.
This collaboration is targeted as a multi-annual research programme with associated milestones and will be reviewed and directed by the programme team on a continual basis. The programme costs for the collaboration will be shared by NIBRT and Organon.
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