Breaking new ground in Welsh universities
Innovation at CITER Cardiff Institute for Tissue Engineering and Repair, created in 1993, is a network of scientists principally within Cardiff University. Interests and expertise include basic, translational and clinical research in stem cell science, tissue engineering and repair, and disease translation. Within these broader remits, the research interest of individual colleagues is diverse.
CITER embraces translational research that is conducive to commercial exploitation and encourages partnership with the industry. A core strength is its network expertise enabling it to address complex problems, accessing skill from different disciplines. To support the network, CITER organises several workshops, seminars and conferences throughout the year, encouraging and fostering new research collaborations, and promoting expertise to external researchers and stakeholders. Industrial partners are encouraged to attend and showcase collaborative works and solutions tailored for researchers. CITER is particularly supportive of early career scientists with financial packages and organisational experience. CITER also recognises the importance of communication with the public, so supports public events and engages with primary and secondary school children through a number of different activities. The use of academic knowledge, technology, skills and innovation by industrial partners has been highly successful for improving competitiveness
72
and productivity in Wales and in the UK. CITER is fully supportive of such partnerships and aims to promote academic-industry networking though its activities. Here are some examples of projects carried out by CITER members.
particularly prominent with the clinically approved Herceptin (trastuzumab) antibody whose target, HER2, is usually resistant to internalisation and a represents a major driver of cell growth and division in some breast cancer types.
Driving Therapeutic Antibodies and Nanoparticles into Cancer Cells
The work, published in late 2015, resulted in further national, international and industrial collaborations, leading to recent publications describing studies on nanoparticles decorated with cancer targeting ligands. With the University of Padova in Italy, they demonstrated how pH responsive nanoparticles, decorated with folic acid, target and enter cancer cells that overexpress the folic acid receptor. Working with polymer chemists at Nottingham University, they showed how thermoresponsive polymer nanoparticles drive endocytosis in a temperature dependant manner.
A Cardiff University team at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the School of Biosciences at Cardiff University, led by Professor Arwyn T. Jones, has made significant inroads to delivering therapeutic molecules to cancer cells by targeting receptors on their cell surface. They have identified how strategic targeting and clustering of plasma membrane receptors on cancer cells leads to their internalisation by endocytosis and intracellular degradation. This was
