Regenerative Medicine
Regenerative Medicine replaces or regenerates human cells, tissue or organs, to restore or establish normal function and responds to many difficult diseases such as diabetes and to conditions such as damage to the nervous system to establish therapies.
Regener8 translates research in regenerative medicine into commercial products and clinical benefits. Working collaboratively across eight universities with over 100 academic members and over 120 industry partners, Regener8 bridges the early stage innovation gap creating commercial value from academic knowledge.
Regener8’s main objective is to encourage industry and academia to collaborate in order to commercialise or ‘translate’ regenerative therapies and get them from lab to the clinic as quickly as possible. Regener8 provides industry members with easy access to the research expertise available within the N8 universities.
Another key objective is to overcome the range of barriers faced by industry in the translation of regenerative medicine therapies. These include:
- Manufacturing
- Regulations
- Safety and efficacy testing
- Preclinical evaluation
- Scale-up
- Clinical development
- Reimbursement
- Supply/distribution chain mapping
- Development and health economics
Regener8 carries out regular consultations with regenerative medicine companies, from SME’s to large R&D companies, as well as academics from the N8 Universities and clinicians. Through these consultations, Regener8’s core objectives and strengths have been identified as being:
- Accelerating biomaterial developments
- Advancing the technologies to support cell therapies
- Moving RegenMed developments into the clinic
- Linking the RegenMed community
Successes
In its first phase 2007-2011 Regener8 has:
- Built a 200 strong collaborative network centre
- Created 22 new jobs
- Catalysed a portfolio of multi partner innovation projects, leveraging £18m direct and £35m indirect investment.
- Assisted over 100 companies in innovation and translation activities
FUTURE Objectives
Looking forward by 2014 in collaboration with the Innovation and Knowledge Centre in Regenerative Therapies and Devices, (funded by Technology Strategy Board, EPSRC and BBSRC), Regener8 will:
- Create economic growth and 30 new jobs across north from knowledge economy
- Grow innovation capabilities and shared services across N8 universities
- Shorten and remove risk from the early stages of the innovation pathway for 20 commercial products and services
- Maximise early stage relationships to maximise open innovation opportunities in India and China,
- Initiate a second round portfolio of 40 collaborative projects between academia and industry and work collaboratively with NHS to support translation
- Leverage a further £20 million investment in innovation
- Increase its industry membership to 200 and expand to cover the UK.
Contacts
Research Director: Professor John Fisher
(Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, University of Leeds)
Operations Director: Dr Mike Raxworthy
Tel: +44 (0) 113 343 0933
Email: mike.raxworthy@Regener8.ac.uk