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About Us
nanoTherics was established in 2007 with technologies and products resulting from more than 30 years combined leading edge research into use of magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical applications conducted at Keele University and University of Florida. The Company now provides a range of magnetic nanoparticle-based products.
These innovative technologies and products have been designed to offer faster, more efficient, scalable tools to improve research into genetic disease disorders with potential of taking these from research laboratories to the clinic.
A key range of products that the Company provides use nanoparticles and oscillating magnetic fields to accurately and rapidly transfect biomaterials including deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) and ribonucleic acids (RNA) into cells. It applies a novel technique, which is proprietary to nanoTherics (patents pending), with the key major advantages over currently available transfection systems being:
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Rapid, scalable transfection. |
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Significant performance improvements over other non-viral techniques. |
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High transfection efficiency with lower vector and DNA doses. |
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Excellent cell viability. |
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Safer and less toxic. |
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Ability to easily scale-up for high-throughput applications. |
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Potential use in clinical applications. |
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Significantly lower reagent costs compared to electroporation. |
nanoTherics’s gene transfection studies have shown a significant performance enhancement over the best non-viral techniques currently on the market, demonstrating high levels of transfection whilst maintaining the viability of transfected cells - all at shorter transfection times and a lower cost. These key attributes afford a significant advantage over currently available transfection methods.
The Company also provides the only commercially available hyperthermia system which includes frequency selection capability for optimisation of particle testing parameters.
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nanoTherics aims to become a leading supplier of magnetic nanoparticle-based devices and associated reagents to the life science research and development market. |
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nanoTherics’s mission is to position its novel transfection technology as the “gold standard” for transfection, underpinning the research and development of current and future drug & genetic screening and gene therapy programmes. |
The nanoTherics management team combines strong, world-leading scientific acumen, with proven entrepreneurial and industrial expertise. The team has experience across life science and pharmaceutical industries, with track records in building successful start-up ventures from academic research.
Dr Linda E Cammish - Chief Executive Officer - has 25+ years experience in the life science sector, with 20+ years of this being in a commercial environment. Her strong life science background includes a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (with research conducted at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology) and her business education includes an MBA from Henley Business College. She also has considerable practical, hands-on experience in growing businesses in the high technology life science sector involving products and services (including reagents, hardware, software as well as drug discovery services and technology access programmes) for the academic, pharmaceutical and biotechnology markets. She combines this technical and business education with extensive practical experience in senior business development, sales and marketing roles in companies including Millipore, PerSeptive Biosystems, Applied Biosystems and Abcam.
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Dr Neil Farrow - Director/COO - received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology and has worked in both industry and academia. His work at Keele University focussed on applying his broad knowledge and experience in biology, biophysics and chemistry to a project entitled, ‘Use of magnetic nanoparticles and macrophages to target two novel therapies to hypoxic areas of tumours: a combined biological and mathematical study’. On this project Neil was for developing the electronic hyperthermia instrumentation, nanoparticles for hyperthermia, magnets for targeting and contributions to the cell biology. Neil received a B.Sc. from the Department of Biology at the University of Portsmouth and then worked in the USA developing clinical applications for in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy at the Huntington Medical Research Institute. After completing his Ph.D in the Department of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (1997) he returned to the UK to work for Cobra Therapeutics to research the biophysical and biological problems of human gene therapy. Neil has published a number of journal articles in the area of medical biophysics and in 2007 was nominated for Regional Citizen of the Year for his work on nanoTherics technologies.
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Professor Jon Dobson – Non-Executive Director - holds a personal chair in Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering at the Institute for Science & Technology in Medicine (ISTM), Keele University and an Eminent Scholar Visiting Professorship at the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Florida. He has a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zurich, 1991). In 2004, Professor Dobson became a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Fellow and was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and Fellow of the Institute for Nanotechnology in 2007. He has more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and has been an invited speaker at more than 25 institutes & scientific meetings, including the recent Royal Society of Medicine / US Food & Drug Administration Conference on Gene Therapy: State of the Art. Since 2003, he has authored 17 invited reviews and articles for journals such as Nature Nanotechnology, Journal of Physics D and Gene Therapy.
Professor Dobson was the recipient of a UK Medical Research Council Milstein Award in 2008 and co-recipient of a Wellcome Trust Showcase Award in 2002. He is on the editorial board of seven journals, including IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience and Recent Patents on DNA and Gene Sequences and is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College.
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Stefan Ogrodzinski - Director/Chairman - received his BSc (Hons) in Toxicology and Pharmacology from The School of Pharmacy, University of London, in 1987 and his MBA from De Montfort University in 1999. Stefan's career has spanned the pharmaceutical industry, the healthcare sector, the voluntary sector and the educational sector, giving 20 years of sales, marketing, management and directorship experience. In 2000, Stefan founded Biostatus and since that time has led the company as its CEO.
Stefan
is also
a
Director
of
Medilink
East
Midlands
Limited,
BioCity
Nottingham
Limited,
BioSuspensions
Limited,
BioTherics
Limited,
OncoTherics
Limited,
nanoTherics
Limited,
Mobius
Life
Sciences
Investment
Fund, a
member
of the
third
mission
committee
at the
Cardiff
Institute
of
Tissue
Engineering
and
Repair
(CITER),
a member
of the
advisory
panel
for the
Astra
Zeneca
Post
Doctoral
Training
Centre
at
Nottingham
University
and
Senior
Partner
at
Ogrodzinski
Consultants.
Contact Stefan
Dr Mark Payton - Director - is the fund principal for the Mercia Technology Seed Fund. Mark has a PhD from King's College (University of London) and an MBA from Warwick Business School. Prior to joining the fund, Mark was a research fellow at the Department of Pharmacology (University of Oxford), played leading roles within Isis Innovation (the technology transfer arm of the University of Oxford, ranked as the premier technology transfer office in the UK) and was VP Corporate Development at Oxxon Therapeutics Inc (before its sale to Oxford BioMedica Plc). Mark benefits from in excess of 15 years experience from the commercialisation of life science opportunities in the biotech, niche pharma, medtech and diagnostics fields.
Contact Mark
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magnefect-nano™ Reagents
These reagents are very cost-effective and, when used in the magnefect-nano device, offer significant improvements, including faster and higher transfection efficiencies, over other non-viral transfection systems
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News, Events & Publications
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Yiu, HHP, SC McBain, ZAD Lethbridge, MR Lees, J Dobson (2009) Preparation and characterization of polyethyleneimine(PEI) coated Fe3O4-MCM-48 nanocomposite particles as a novel agent for magnet assisted transfection (MATra). J. Biomed. Materials Res. A In Press. |
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Dobson, J, SC McBain, N Farrow, CD Batich (2008) Oscillating magnet arrays for enhanced magnetic nanoparticle-based gene transfection. Eur. Cells & Mater. 16 (Supp. 3): 48. |
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