Briefs: Uni biotech spin out Horizon moves closer to prize; Autonomy declared “2008 Trendsetter”
University of Cambridge biotech spin out Horizon Discovery said that after two rounds of judging it has made it to the final stages of the Medical Futures Innovation Awards.
It has made the short-list for an Innovation in Cancer award and will present to a judges panel in early September in an attempt to win recognition. If it gets through, Horizon will participate in the November awards ceremony in London.
Horizon has pioneered the use of a gene-engineering technology that allows any endogenous gene in a human cell to be modified into a disease inducing version of that gene; causing either a gain or loss in gene function. Horizon is able to create cellular models of human cancer that accurately reflect the way the disease genetically-manifests itself in any given patient-type.
The future benefits to patient-care (the primary interest of the MFIA judging panel) are that these models can be used to; identify novel cancer drugs that are optimally ‘targeted' to specific patient-populations; select genetically-relevant patients for shorter, more focused and cheaper clinical trials and; to identify biomarkers related to disease-causing mutations or polymorphisms that predict disease-onset, prognosis and drug-responsiveness.
Horizon has rapidly moved into the market with its range of X-MAN disease-models, gene-engineering, drug-profiling services. The company is working with; leading Cancer Pharma companies including Genentech, Millennium and AstraZeneca; the EUFP7 Migrating Stem-Cell Consortium and; the Cancer Research UK funded flag-ship VIMCAD cancer drug discovery consortium..
Horizon Discovery is a Cambridge Enterprise portfolio company and is HQed at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge.
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Autonomy Corporation plc, a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, said its pan-enterprise search platform, Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), has been selected by KMWorld magazine as a "2008 Trendsetter" for its ability to simultaneously meet an organization's litigation and knowledge management requirements.
The Company said this has become a critical need as information officers, knowledge officers, and corporate librarians look for ways to manage their electronically stored information in compliance with the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Autonomy's technology makes this possible by automating the retrieval, processing, and management of all information throughout a global organization, including text, data, voice and video, to find relevant information for litigation with auditable and repeatable results.
Autonomy also said it has entered into an agreement with Kadaster, the Dutch Land Registry Office, to license Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer software.
