The PoC panel was made up of external experts from pharma and small biotechs. They were knowledgeable and asked some insightful questions. After I found out of our success, I was provided with feedback that has helped steer the direction of our work.

This funding will help us to develop our project to stage to apply for more substantial funding that support drug development. The support from QMI and their encouragement to apply for the funding has made a great difference to how this project has progressed. I am very pleased that the panel chose us and very grateful for the support of QMI!

Senotherapy is an exciting, emerging anti-cancer concept that offers a potential to maximise therapeutic efficiency and patient outcome. Senotherapy harnesses a new class of small molecules, called senolytics, to selectively kill senescent cells. Our proposal aims to perform further pre-clinical validation of novel senolytic compounds utilising our panel of novel targets and established 2D and 3D in vitro models.

The PoC panel contained external experts in drug discovery pipelines, providing an important commercial assessment of the scientific feasibility, patentability and industry appetite for our proposal outcome. During the interview, the panel’s questions probed our workflows, technical expertise and approaches, as well as how our research aims sat within the wider pharma landscape.

The PoC funds provides with timely funding to enable us to continue with the drug discovery workflow, and to generate data to pump prime larger grant applications, potentially in collaboration with industrial partners.

The PoC grant application was straightforward and the feedback received from the panel was useful. Drug resistance is major problem that limits the success of anticancer therapies. The research that this grant will support relates to how understanding the mechanisms of how cells communicate may be used to prevent or reverse drug resistance to a class of drugs that target kinases. I anticipate that this research will be extremely useful for us to identify new ways of treating drug-resistant cancer cells so that they become sensitive to therapies.

This project will identify compounds for the treatment of a rare genetic disease, Jeune Syndrome, that disrupts skeletal formation. The disease is caused by mutation in the genes that regulate primary cilia – the tiny hair-like cellular structures that coordinate a variety of important signalling pathways. The PoC project builds on our recent work conducting a high throughput screen of compounds. We will test whether hit compounds can correct the genetic defect in primary cilia and prevent life-threatening skeletal malformation.

The interview panel, led by Prof David Lee, included a mixture of academics, industrialists and potential investors, and provided a useful experience with challenging questions and feedback. We are excited to start this project and hope that it will open the way to new treatment for Jeune Syndrome as well as other conditions associated with disruption of primary cilia. Working with the team at QMI has already been valuable in helping us to think about potential IP and commercialisation pathways to ensure our research has maximum clinical and societal benefit.

We are developing novel machinable ceramics for the rapid and most efficient digital processing and fabrication of dental restoration. Our plan is to a develop material which will have reduced time and cost to its production. The final restoration will have superior aesthetics and strength but will incur much lower wear to the opposing teeth compared to the existing digitally processed ceramics.

Our team uniquely combines fundamental and applied science expertise with clinical dentistry and dental technology. This helped us in preparation of grant applications as well as during the interview by the PoC panel.