John Ward Awarded £568k InnovateUK Grant for Work on PolyCYP

Professor John Ward (Professor of Synthetic Biology for Bioprocessing at UCL Biochemical Engineering) has won a £568k InnovateUK grant (£200k to UCL) to work on PolyCYPs: Optimising a preclinical platform tool to reduce pharmaceutical attrition rates' with Hypha Discovery.

The major healthcare imperatives are to deliver effective prevention and treatment of diseases, but some medicines lead to adverse reactions which increase the cost of therapy. Together with Hypha Discovery, John Ward has developed a platform technology to use cytochrome P450 enzymes to make hydroxylated versions of drug molecules that mimic what happens in vivo.

John Ward, in a previous InnovateUK grant, cloned and expressed versions of over 60 cytochrome P450s for Hypha to test and this new grant will explore more P450s and look at scale-up and protein engineering of one very versatile P450.