Life sciences and software security commercialisation licences accelerate company growth plans
Two companies located in Scotland have licensed technology from Scottish Enterprise to help them create innovative products, enabling them to enter new global markets which have significant sales potential.
Translating our strengths in research into large-scale commercial companies is an area where Scotland has traditionally lagged behind other countries. Scottish Enterprise’s commercialisation activities aim to increase the commercial outcomes from academic and business research to create more new spin-out and start-up companies capable of becoming global leaders in their field. In addition, Scottish Enterprise’s large scale R&D commercialisation programmes deliver opportunities for new and existing companies to licence technology that they can use to grow their business.
Merck Millipore, the global life sciences division of Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany, has secured a non-exclusive licence to commercialise reagents for an emerging research market and create a brand new product that is used in the drug discovery process. Merck Millipore is known as EMD Millipore in the United States and Canada.
The licence allows Merck Millipore to become the first to market in ubiquitin ligase selectivity profiling. As drug discovery in this area is at a very early stage there are no market forecast statistics available, however the equivalent selectivity profiling market for kinases (a similar class of protein targets) was worth $45 million in 2010.
A second exclusive licence has been agreed between Contemplate, which provides software products to help investment banks avoid costly software defects, and Scottish Enterprise. The licence will enable the company to use highly sophisticated static analysis technology, which out-performs other comparable technology, to develop its first product. The licensed technology is from Scottish Enterprise’s £4.3m Software Integrity Engineering (SIE) large scale R&D programme.
Umesh A. Patel, Ph.D., Director, Lead Discovery, EMD Millipore, said, “Licensing Scottish Enterprise’s intellectual property has allowed Merck Millipore to launch our latest service for compound testing, UbiquitinProfiler™ Service, and related products for screening and profiling against E3 ligase cascades. By bringing this technology into our site in Dundee, Scotland, we provide innovative solutions for advancing the development of drugs targeting the ubiquitin/proteasome pathway."
Derek James, Chief Executive of Contemplate Ltd, stated, “The licence will save us around six to nine months of development work, which will accelerate the release date of our first product. As well as the initial opportunities in the Investment Banking sector, there are further opportunities in other areas of financial services, the outsourced software industry, and detection of security vulnerabilities and further classes of software defects. Industry analysts estimate the overall market for static analysis and security tools at £800m in 2011. This licence will give us the technology on which we can build a global company capable of becoming a world leader in software security tools.”
Dr Eleanor Mitchell, director of Commercialisation at Scottish Enterprise, commented, “These license deals are great news as they demonstrate that companies based in Scotland can access home-grown technology. And with the public sector investing in the technology’s early research, the companies can focus their resources on rapid product development, helping them get to market quicker.
“At one end of the scale we have Merck Millipore, an established global market leader with operations in 67 countries, and at the other end there’s Contemplate – a new start-up company with ambitions to grow quickly.
“Both are reaping the benefits of new technology to secure new customers, new markets and new growth opportunities at home and abroad. Scotland needs more of these high growth, globally ambitious companies to help our economy recover.”
Merck Millipore – life sciences tools
As a major supplier of tools to the life sciences industry, the licence has helped Merck Millipore to create and bring to market its UbiquitinProfiler™ Service. This new service determines the potency and selectivity of compounds targeting ubiquitin ligases, key enzymes linked to many serious diseases. Through this service, compounds sent to Merck Millipore by researchers are assessed via a panel of validated assays for their ability to enhance or inhibit ubiquitin pathways.
With a central role in trafficking proteins for degradation, the ubiquitin pathway is an attractive target for drug discovery efforts in many areas including neurodegeneration, cancer and inflammation. With hundreds of proteins involved, however, the complexity of the ubiquitin cascade has presented a formidable barrier to efficient drug discovery.
With its new service, using licensed technology, Merck Millipore is able to more rapidly and effectively assess how potential drug compounds impact the ubiquitin pathway.
Contemplate Ltd – software security tools
Contemplate Ltd, a University of Edinburgh spin-out company, creates products using innovative static analysis methods for the automatic detection of software defects. These techniques allow software developers to improve their code during development, assisted by visualisations which highlight problem areas.
Scottish Enterprise has been working with Contemplate since July 2010, primarily through its High Growth Start Up team. Assistance has included management team mentoring, creation of its business plan and investment and funding strategy, introductions to industry contacts to help secure early adopter customers and a SMART: Scotland award to further build on its intellectual property platform.
The company’s first product will be a software tool to automatically detect defects in multi-threaded enterprise Java applications supporting front and middle office functions in the investment banking sector.
The bank software applications, which include information systems displaying real time information to traders, automatic and algorithmic trading systems and risk management systems, are key elements of a bank’s competitive position.
The software code used in these applications is notoriously difficult to design and debug and make the process risky, potentially leading to expensive failures including incorrect trades and downtime.
Contemplate’s product will automatically detect and help to eliminate defects that cause these costly problems and help developers to produce higher-quality concurrent Java applications. The company will initially target top-tier investment banks for sales, and has already had meetings with around half of these banks and identified problems that the proposed product is likely to be able to address.
Two global investment banks have already joined Contemplate’s Early Adopter programme, which means the company has access to user feedback to help shape its first product.