Submitted by L. Millard on Fri, 05/11/2021 - 10:37
Dr Paraskevi Kasapidou has been awarded a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Flexible Talent Mobility Account award that supports knowledge exchange between industry and academia.
The industrial placement will be at Aqdot, a UK based company with expertise in developing, licensing and commercialising patented pharmaceutical and biomedical products based on cucurbiturils. Dr Kasapidou currently works exclusively within an academic setting as part of Professor Oren Scherman’s research team at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis in the Department of Chemistry, but her longer-term plans are to move towards an industrial setting. The placement offers her the opportunity to begin the transition towards an industrial role and gain experience within an industrial laboratory.
I am really glad to have been awarded the BBSRC FTMA grant which will support my industrial placement in Aqdot. The BBSRC FTMA calls offer a great opportunity for postdoctoral researchers to undertake an industrial secondment and I would definitely recommend it to anyone that is interested in moving to industry after postdoc. Dr Paraskevi Kasapidou, IRC Postdoc Researcher
''I am really glad to have been awarded the BBSRC FTMA grant which will support my industrial placement in Aqdot. The BBSRC FTMA calls offer a great opportunity for postdoctoral researchers to undertake an industrial secondment and I would definitely recommend it to anyone that is interested in moving to industry after postdoc,'' said Dr Kasapidou. As part of the IRC programme, Dr Kasapidou is working on establishing a hydrogel formulation according to GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) and GLP (Good Laboratory Practice) standards to create a platform technology that provides a step-change in the current drug-delivery market – particularly in terms of localised and targeted delivery in cancer treatment.
A major hurdle in the clinical translation and integration of hydrogels is their compatibility with current good manufacturing practices. Since most hydrogel formulations are synthesised in small batches at preclinical stage, efforts to translate their synthesis to scaled systems are required. Batch variations, robustness, safety and efficiency issues are inevitable when performed at a larger scale. Dr Kasapidou has developed a robust protocol for the laboratory scale up of these hydrogels, maintaining the precise peptide functionalisation on the polymeric backbone, key to securing material integrity and minimising batch-to-batch variations.
Dr Kasapidou said: “Spending the next five months working between the IRC and Aqdot brings many opportunities to gain valuable insights into the preparation of materials which meet GMP standards and the associated protocols, and also to learn how to carry out scientific experiments for scale up and formulation within an industrial setting.”
• The BBSRC initiative at the University of Cambridge targets postdoc placements for talented early-career researchers with the potential to be the next generation of leaders within UK academic and industrial research.
