Success Stories

AIM listed and based in the Manchester Incubator Building, Renovo is a biopharmaceutical company developing novel products to prevent scarring or accelerate healing following trauma, injury or surgery to any body site. The initial focus is on the skin, which alone represents a multi-million dollar market of unmet medical need. Renovo will develop pharmaceutical products at least up to Phase II clinical development and is also open to research collaborations at earlier discovery and development stages.
A high performance culture of innovation and scientific and clinical excellence has allowed Renovo to rapidly pursue pioneering programmes of drug discovery and development in the rapidly evolving fields of scar prevention and wound healing. Renovo has its own fully staffed Clinical Trials Unit and a productive R&D programme focussed on wound and scar biology, pharmacology, genomics and proteomics.
Renovo intends to launch its products globally and anticipates partners for several of the range particularly those already identified with blockbuster potential.

Motac was founded in 1999 as a spin-out company of the University of Manchester. The company was built upon 25 years of experience in the field of movement disorders developed in the laboratory of Professor Alan Crossman.

Motac Neuroscience provides highly specialised laboratory services for pharmaceutical and biotech companies to support the discovery and development of therapeutics for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Motac personnel have particular expertise in neurodegenerative conditions, including Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders. Motac also has an intellectual property portfolio covering therapeutic targets for movement disorders, which it is developing through strategic alliances and partnerships.

EpiStem is an independent contract research company, providing pre-clinical research services to the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical industries. Founded in 2000, the company arose from the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research, UK. The founders are international experts in the field of epithelial, tumour and stem cell biology and lead a team of experienced scientific staff, with specialist skills in the field.

Located in purpose built office and laboratory facilities adjacent to The University of Manchester, UK, EpiStem maintains close links with clinicians and academics in the field, ensuring that the company remains at the forefront of science and technology.

EpiStem provides interactive and intelligent pre-clinical solutions to assist companies in the development of novel therapies for proliferative disease. Their scientific staff and directors have an impressive publication record and use their expertise and hands-on experience to develop assays to answer specific pre-clinical questions, to present and interpret results and to suggest further studies to progress pre-clinical drug development.

F2G Limited is an early stage UK based Biotechnology Company, which is focussed exclusively on the discovery and development of improved treatments for systemic fungal infections. The Company received its first major institutional funding in August 2002.

F2G was founded on its patented platform technology, MycoBank?, which is a leading edge functional genomics technology that allows the Company to identify essential gene targets that can be used in the drug discovery programme.

F2G has assembled an outstanding team of scientists to address the growing clinical need and market opportunities in antifungals. The team's expertise includes fungal molecular biology, biochemistry, medicinal chemistry, infectious disease biology, drug-discovery research and development (R&D), and clinical development expertise. The MycoBank? technology and F2G's expertise in handling live fungal pathogens within robotic screens sets the Company apart from its competitors. The Company's drug discovery programme is based on complementary approaches of the classical whole cell screens and enzyme-based high throughput screens (HTS) based on target genes identified via MycoBank? . F2G is exploiting its MycoBank? technology to identify essential gene targets that will help pinpoint drugs with target product profiles that meet the greatest market needs. Using F2G's library of over 500,000 diverse compounds, proprietary in vivo models, medicinal chemistry and proven discovery expertise, F2G aims to generate a pipeline of antifungal compounds to meet current market needs.

NeuTec Pharma is a biopharmaceutical company which evolved from the Infectious Diseases Research Unit at the University of Manchester. NeuTec now has two antibody products in multi-national clinical trials.

The development of NeuTec's products differs from the traditional approach used by conventional pharmaceutical companies which screen numerous chemical compounds for activity against bacteria and fungi. Many of these compounds will be too toxic for human use. In contrast, NeuTec identifies naturally occurring potentially protective antibodies from patients who have recovered from bacterial and fungal infections and then uses these to generate "grabs" to treat these infections. As a result, these "grabs" are likely to be intrinsically safer than antibiotics.

NeuTec's pioneering approach to the identification of new microbial targets has given it a strong patent position for the development of new therapeutic agents against a diverse range of infectious diseases. The intellectual property rights were transferred from the University of Manchester into the new company in 1997, and the company has steadily grown since this time. It floated on the Alternative Investment Market in February 2002.

Real-time video enhancement technology has been developed as a result of original research conducted initially by Dr John Oakley at the University of Manchester and more recently within UMIST's Dept. of Electrical Engineering & Electronics. The unique, patented technology permits the enhancement of video images (live or recorded) acquired under adverse environmental conditions, such as in the presence of fog, mist, rain or smoke.

Near normal video images (in terms of colour and detail) are automatically recovered, in real time, from the original obscured scenes. This capability is of great benefit in circumstances where optimum clarity and visual identification of people, vehicles and other objects is extremely important at all times. For example, considerable sums of money are now invested in CCTV surveillance systems for the purpose of identifying individuals and vehicles either in real time or at a later date from archived video footage. The effectiveness of such systems lessens as visibility is obscured in conditions of adverse weather or smoke.

The Dmist product is a small unit that is installed between a video camera and a monitor, requiring no user intervention once installed. The product is equally suitable for existing or new video camera installations. This unit will also enhance archived video material.

Dmist has proven to be of great interest to a wide range of sectors, such as: shipping, ports, airports, aircraft, security surveillance, traffic monitoring, defence,outside broadcast television, underwater and medical applications. Each of these applications individually represents a tremendous worldwide market for products based upon the technology.

Robertson Cooper Limited is a business psychology firm that was spun out of UMIST in late 1999. We combine innovative research and managerial experience to provide organisations with products and services that maximise the performance and well being of their people. Since our inception, we have worked with over 200 clients, helping them to improve their people management processes.

We deliver our products and services in four main areas, these are; stress prevention programmes, teamworking and teambuilding programmes; performance management programmes, and talent mangement programmes. Our programmes are made up of a combination of 'products' and consultancy. For example, when we deliver a workplace stress prevention programme for a client we use three key products, a validated stress audit questionnaire, a validated resilience building workshop, and an e-learning package. We support the products with consultancy support including the processing and interpretation of the audit questionnaire, facilitation of the resilience building programme, and technical support for delivery of the e-learning package.

Our clients come from a range of different business sectors. We have undertaken market research that shows that our products and services are applicable to most organisations, hence we have clients in both the public sector and the private sector. Most of our clients are large organisations with complex human resource management requirements, mostly blue chip clients in the private sector, and public sector organisations such as large local authorities, central government departments and the emergency services.

We have grown rapidly in the last three years. We now have twenty two people in the business with more recruitment planned over the course of the next six months. We have four core teams; two consulting teams, one based in our London office and one based in our head office in Manchester, a business development team responsible for new client sales, and a product development team.

We have a product development strategy that is underpinned by a market-led sales strategy. It is our intention to continue to grow our product development capability with significant investment in on-line product delivery capability. The products that we develop are based on market-led ideas. Hence, we invest significant resource into market research and intelligence. We develop 'people-management' products and services that line managers want and need. Allied to this is a sales strategy that emphasises a broadening of our routes to market through partnerships with a high quality sales partners.

Founded in 2000 by lecturer Alasdair Rawsthorne, Transitive exports computing technology conceived at the University of Manchester to Silicon Valley, continuing a tradition of nearly 60 years standing.

QuickTransit, Transitive's product, allows any software application binary to run on any processor and operating system which breaks the hardware/software dependency. This is now included in every system shipped by Silicon Graphics, from deskside visualisation systems to high-end supercomputers with hundreds of CPUs.

Transitive's highest profile event to date came in June 2005 at an Apple Computer event in San Francisco, when CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated on stage Transitive's part in Apple's plans to migrate from PowerPC to Intel CPU chips.

www.transitive.com