Bioinformatics & Digital Health

PRECISION MEDICINE

The availability of large amounts of omics (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microbiome) and medical data has opened new possibilities for diagnostics and prognostics, enabling patient stratification (the identification of subgroups of patients, such as subgroups that are likely or unlikely to benefit from specific therapies or subgroups with different prognosis, etc.), increasing diagnostic accuracy, reducing the need for invasive tests via liquid biopsies and imaging.

Companion diagnostics enable patients to be treated with the right approach for them, which is essential in disease areas such as cancer, which is a deeply heterogeneous disease. Targeting the right patient population (patient stratification) is essential from the very early stages of the clinical journey of a therapeutic, and increasingly at the core of successful clinical trials design.

Personalised immunotherapy is one of the most promising avenues for beating cancer, and one that is by definition data driven. We have experts in this field who understand the ins and outs of developing such advanced therapeutics, from analysis of patient omics data to optimisation of delivery vectors.

PATIENT MONITORING 

Healthcare is changing beyond recognition, in part driven by the fact most of us have powerful computers in our pockets, on our wrists, and in our homes. Digital health apps are being developed to leverage this capacity, as well as dedicated smart devices, to make patient monitoring, assessment, etc. cheaper, more efficient and less time consuming. These are increasingly essential to deliver healthcare in a way that can reach more patients, is less burdensome to patients, and ultimately also provides a more complete picture of a patient’s status and treatment response that is more relevant to patients than traditional biochemical markers.

We have extensive experience dealing with protection of digiceuticals and digital patient monitoring solutions. Practices around the world in relation to software as a medical device varies widely, and we specialise in drafting and prosecuting to successfully navigate this complex and changing landscape.

MEDICAL IMAGE ANALYSIS, DIGITAL PATHOLOGY & CELL CULTURE IMAGING 

Medical imaging (PET, MRI, XRI, EEG, etc.) and digital pathology are at the core of modern medicine in many therapeutic areas, and particularly in oncology and neurology. This has been the case for many years but progress in AI in the last few years has truly supercharged this field. This has also enabled us to learn much more from images of a cell culture than many of us would have dreamt, from predicting other modalities to complex cellular phenotypes and fates. An image is truly worth a thousand words, and it’s even possible to use AI to write those words, or combine words and image analysis!

We are very proud to work extensively with some of the biggest names in the field and cutting edge academic researchers using the latest AI to bring new hopes for diagnosis and prognosis using medical image analysis and digital pathology, and new possibilities for R&D using cell culture image analysis.

DATA DRIVEN ADVANCED BIOPROCESSING 

Making bioproducts is far from easy, often requiring an in-depth understanding of cellular culture dynamics, cell biology & metabolism, fluid dynamics, process engineering, bioreactor design, biochemical and dynamic aspects of purification processes, process control, and data driven modelling. This work is absolutely crucial, without bioprocessing there is no product!  Conversely, improvements in any aspect of bioprocessing can have enormous value as even small productivity or quality improvements to such high value products are impactful, and improvements can often apply to multiple products.

Modern bioprocessing increasingly relies on software for control, monitoring and prediction strategies to optimise production of biologics, both in upstream and downstream processes. From soft sensors to advanced controllers, and in silico process optimisation methods, we have specialist bioengineers and a multidisciplinary team with extensive experience dealing with the technologies that underpin the bioprocess of the future.  

CELL & BIOMOLECULE ENGINEERING

Cells, cell communities and their products have the potential to solve many of the world’s biggest problems from food security to pollution, health and everything in between. Synthetic Biology (SynBio) including the generation of novel metabolic pathways, redesigned enzymes, and even cells controlled by completely artificial genomes emerged as a field driven by modelling, and has boomed in part due to increasing omics data availability and computational methods to mine and model it. Similarly, modern microbiome understanding and manipulation simply would not be possible without in silico analysis. 

We have multidisciplinary teams with a passion for these fields, deep expertise in the biology, the data science and the biochemistry aspects that come into these projects, and extensive knowledge of the IP peculiarities of working with natural and enhanced natural building blocks. 

OMICS & SEQUENCE ANALYSIS

Omics and sequence analysis were at the root of the bioinformatics revolution. They have become so mainstream and embedded in modern life sciences that it’s almost easy to forget quite how pivotal they are, and how much new and exciting potential they still hold. From new sequencing technologies to omics based patient stratification, cross-modal and multimodal predictions, innovation at all levels is still unlocking new potential all the time.  

Our bioinformatics team knows this data inside and out, it’s our native language. 

BIO-LANGUAGE & MULTIMODAL AI 

Language models are not only revolutionised how we write emails or school assays, they are also opening up new ways of understanding the language of biology. The central dogma (DNA, RNA, proteins) being sequence-based, it’s perhaps no surprise that language models could be applied. Quite how widely and how successfully they have been applied to biology, from foundation protein language models to immunogenicity prediction, may have been more of a surprise to the biologist of 20 years ago. With multimodal AI and models that can understand links between sequence and structure, the horizons have broadened once more. The once futuristic ideas of accurately predicting structures of even complex assemblies of biomolecules, or obtaining a comprehensive digital twin of a patient are now within reach. For example, real world evidence such as medical data records can now be seamlessly integrated with imaging, omics and anything in between.

We work with the latest AI technology and those who build it and use it. We understand the AI ecosystem better than most, and support our clients to flourish in it, by developing an IP strategy that properly protects their assets, navigates open source software (OSS) intricacies and supports their need to publish (fast).