A year of success for Ximbio's Commercial Partnerships family

Ximbio is part of Cancer Research UK, the world’s leading cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research. Within Cancer Research UK, Ximbio works closely with the Commercial Partnerships team. Recently Commercial Partnerships released its Annual Report, showing significant benefits to both cancer researchers and industry. As part of Commercial Partnerships, Ximbio can provide additional benefits to its partners.

Who is Commercial Partnerships

Commercial Partnerships acts as the meeting point between Cancer Research UK funded research and industry. The team partners with industry to gather the expertise and resources needed to translate promising research into new therapeutics, diagnostics and other innovations that help benefit cancer patients. The mission of Commercial Partnerships is to maximise the translation of cancer research for patient benefit. This links with Ximbio’s mission to accelerate life science research by making life science research tools widely and easily available.

Commercial Partnerships also works with cancer researchers, to help them achieve their academic goals whilst also being translational or entrepreneurial.

Over the past year, Commercial Partnerships has signed 92 commercial deals and received 137 new ideas for drugs, tests and devices. To date Commercial Partnerships and the Centre for Drug Development has helped bring 10 drugs to market. Currently the team has a portfolio of over 90 assets in active development. In total over £500m has been generated in cumulative royalties to date and has been reinvested into research by Cancer Research UK and its academic partners.

How does Ximbio’s working relationship with Commercial Partnerships affect you?

There are different benefits for each of Ximbio’s partners from our close connections with the Commercial Partnerships team. Overall however, being connected with Commercial Partnerships allows Ximbio to provide greater support to its partners, through connections that can help translate technologies with clinical and therapeutic applications:

• For Cancer Researchers: There is expertise in spin-outs, clinical trials and drug development as well as the ability to provide researchers with entrepreneurial and translational support and training within Commercial Partnerships.
• For Technology Transfer Offices: Ximbio can connect Technology Transfer Offices with the relevant individuals within the Commercial Partnerships team who can help find industrial partners for cancer technologies or can help develop cancer therapeutics through the drug development process, including finding partners for the necessary clinical trials.
• For life science organisations and industry: Ximbio’s industry partners could find potential partnership opportunities through Ximbio’s connections within the Commercial Partnerships team to develop cancer technologies with therapeutic or clinical potential.