Business

10 Jul 09

Professor Zhanfeng Cui, one of the inventors of the microbioreactor technology, with Dr Tim Hart, the CEO of Zyoxel.

Zyoxel, a new spin-out company that is commercialising microbioreactor technology to improve drug discovery, has secured a £1 million investment from Hong Kong multinational CN Innovations Holdings. The investment was announced by Isis Innovation, the University of Oxford’s technology transfer company.

The investment marks the first time a Chinese investor has provided funding for a new Oxford spin out.

‘We estimate Zyoxel’s TissueFlex microbioreactors can reduce the average cost of drug development by at least 10 per cent, improving accuracy and time-to-market,’ said Dr Tim Hart, CEO of Zyoxel.

Pharmaceutical, chemical and cosmetic companies need better and more reliable information when testing drugs and compounds. Using microbioreactors for three-dimensional tissue culture to test chemicals on a range of lab-cultured human tissues will enable researchers to assess new drug candidates more intelligently. The inability to detect toxicity at an early stage of drug development is estimated to cost the pharmaceutical industry around $8 billion per year.’ 

Dr Hart believes the Zyoxel technology also has the potential to reduce the amount of animal testing worldwide by around 10 per cent per year.

Zyoxel is developing partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies and anticipates that the first product sales will take place within a year.

‘We are delighted to be working with Oxford and with Isis Innovation. This is a great example of bringing world-class research to rapidly expanding markets in Asia. China is stepping up as a leading innovator in the pharmaceutical and stem cell field, including therapeutic stem cells,’ said Mr Winston Chan, Chief Technical Officer of CN innovations Holdings Limited.

'CN Innovations is a science-based technology and precision engineering company, and Zyoxel will be the basis of our biomedical business, which will be a key growth area within our group in the future.’

Tom Hockaday, managing director of Isis Innovation, said:’Successfully raising funding in the current environment is a challenge, one which Zyoxel has met with a strong technology and business proposition.’

The microbioreactor technology was invented by Professor Zhanfeng Cui of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Dr Jill Urban from the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and their colleagues. It enables cells to grow as three-dimensional tissues instead of conventional single layers.

Professor Cui said: ‘Cells function very differently when grown as tissues in conditions closer to those of cells in the body. The microbioreactors are also individually perfused to mimic how cells in the body are constantly supplied with fresh nutrients and waste products removed via the blood.

'Recent research has shown our technology can be used to culture more realistic cancer tissue for testing, offering a powerful new tool for cancer drug discovery programmes.

'Stem cells have enormous potential, but there is a big gap in our understanding of how to reliably culture and grow them. Our bioreactors provide a simple format in which to culture and test stem cells, increasing the pace of screening and our understanding of these potentially very powerful therapeutic cells.’

The funding for the technology development largely came from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.