Researchers and pharmaceutical companies working together to develop better medicines
Illustration of a nerve cell
The recently-launched Milner Therapeutics Institute and Consortium aims to tackle some of today’s most globally devastating diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s.
It will be a hub in Cambridge in which pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers come together to study and develop better treatments for these diseases.
The building of the Institute was made possible by a £5 million donation from entrepreneur Jonathan Milner. A former researcher of the University’s Gurdon Institute, in 1998 he co-founded biotechnology company Abcam, which today employs more than 800 people and supplies research products and tools to more than 60 per cent of life scientists globally.
Better medicines through partnership
The Milner Institute and Therapeutics Consortium are led by Professor Tony Kouzarides, a former research collaborator of Jonathan Milner’s, and co-founder of Abcam.
The Milner Therapeutics Institute will open in early 2018 within the cutting-edge Capella Building on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. It will host senior and junior scientists and provide communal facilities, such as bioinformatics and robotics, to aid drug discovery.
We hope many more pharmaceutical companies will join the Consortium and believe this form of partnership is a model for how academic institutions and industry can work together to deliver better medicines.
The Milner Therapeutics Consortium will focus on connecting Cambridge scientists at the University, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Babraham Institute with major pharmaceutical companies Astex, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Shionogi. This exchange and collaboration will enable the smoother and swifter translation of Cambridge’s scientific research into treatments and therapies for patients.
Further reading
About The Milner Therapeutics Institute and Consortium
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