News

Welcome to 2016 dear readers, which will be an exciting year for the new Venomtech team. We are proud to announce on the on the 16^th March 2016 Venomtech will be six years old.

2015 brought many changes to the UK’s only commercial venom lab including; first shipments to Australia, tentative steps into the European cosmetic market and three new members of our team. Our global reach now includes Europe, India, USA and Australia. New team members for 2015 include Claire Merritt our volunteer technician who has made a massive impact on improving venom yields from difficult species, (this is before she starts her undergraduate studies).  We will be publishing some exciting work of Claires’ later this year. In October we welcomed Stuart Baker our new Senior Technician who comes well qualified with a first in zoology and many years experience with arachnids. In December our long standing collaboration with Canterbury Christ Church University took a new turn and we welcomed Emily Knight as our joint PhD student. Emily’s work will be building on previous work within this collaboration to discover novel tools to combat pancreatic cancer, a very aggressive disease with a high mortality rate.

With this amazing team we are pleased to be nominated for the 2016 Biotechnology Award from Global Health and Pharma magazine, voting is currently taking place at the link here. We hope to hear we’ve been successful in March 2016. Thank you to everyone who has nominated and voted for us already.

We’re proud to be part of the expanding Discovery Park which is growing right in front of our eyes.  Our facilities here have impressed all our guests which included Steve Backshall from TV’s deadly 60, land of the Jaguar and also Strictly Come Dancing. We are excited to be working with Steve to help him characterise an exciting new venom from a species not thought to be venomous.

Merry Christmas and Happy 2016

Thank you to all our customers, shareholders and collaborators for all your support throughout 2016. We couldn’t and wouldn’t have been able to do it without you all. 2015 has been an exciting year where we have entered a new global market, cosmetics and personal care as well as expanded our global reach.  The great community of companies at Discovery Park has been a significant advantage that has expedited our growth and helped us serve customers from west coast USA through Europe and India to Eastern Australia. 2016 holds excitement and challenges which we are ready and prepared to tackle, including the first in human trial of our cosmetic active ingredient.

Until then we hope you have a great Christmas holiday and Happy 2016 from all of us at Venomtech, Thank you.

Venomtech are proudly supporting World Pancreatic Cancer day in the best way we feel has the most impact. Interviewing potential PhD students for our joint project to combat this devastating disease with Canterbury Christ Church University CCCU news link. There are many challenges with Pancreatic cancer stemming from the lack of understanding of the disease, often a late diagnosis which leads to a very poor prognosis. In collaboration with the excellent scientists at Canterbury Christ Church University and their new laboratory in Discovery Park we will be building knowledge and discovering potential therapies for pancreatic cancer. Here is the Venomtech team proudly displaying our purple gloves in support of Pancreatic Cancer UK

Scorpions are an ancient group of arthropods who have evolved venom to subdue other invertebrates and even as an aphrodisiac in courtship. This potent cocktail of proteins peptides and other bio-molecules represents a wealth of new chemcial matter for drug discovery. As a result two of the top ten articles published in Toxicon are devoted to scorpion venoms as novel tools for drug discovery. Top of the list from Lourival Possani's lab details molecular scaffolds for anti cancer and antimicrobial compounds Paper 1 here. The other review from Peter Strongs team at Sheffield Hallam University focuses in on the antimicrobial peptides (AMP's) from these arachnids. In a world where nearly all our current antibiotics are all from fungal origins it is about time we investigate completely novel structures and mechanisms for controlling microbes in order to battle resistance paper 2 here.

in addition to these papers there is growing news of the tumour paint from the death stalker scorpion that is making it into clinical trials and veterinary medicine to allow surgeons to see cancer cells and therefore avoid damaging too much health brain tissue.

Featured in The Drug Target Review Issue 2 2015 - Novel approaches to targeting Protein Tyrosine Kinases. 

Please follow the link to page 44-47 for more information.

http://www.drugtargetreview.com/digital/dtr-issue-2-2015/index.html