New technology to license

In 2018 we signed an exclusive license with Cerium Visual Technologies Ltd, giving the optical manufacturer rights to our academic expertise.

The technology

The intellectual property license agreement that gives Cerium access to the university’s know-how has enabled the further development of a potentially life changing piece of technology.

The Intuitive Colorimeter ‘Curve’, developed in partnership with Professor Arnold Wilkins from our Department of Psychology can accurately and quickly prescribe tinted lenses to help some individuals with visual stress-related reading problems and associated medical conditions.

The new Intuitive Colorimeter Curve can now – for the first time - provide a fully digital, more streamlined assessment.

The solution

Having launched the ‘Curve’ in the UK in January 2018, Cerium Visual Technologies plan to expand and further build on this presence internationally.

Visual stress is thought to affect up to 20% of the general population. The 'Curve' reduces symptoms of visual stress using filters of a particular colour. The colour is individual and prescribed to patients as tinted spectacle lenses.

Researchers from the School of Biological Sciences developed the DNAzymes technology to help men with advanced (stage 4 or 3) prostate cancer that require effective treatment in circumstances where current therapies would be expected to fail succeed by providing novel method to inhibit therapy resistant disease 

The technology

DNAzymes are short single stranded pieces of DNA with catalytic activity. DNAzymes do not require cellular machinery to cleave their target RNA. Ribonucleic acid or RNA is a polymeric molecule essential in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation and expression of genes.

DNAzymes have binding arms allowing selectivity for their chosen target and a catalytic core that cleaves the RNA. DNAzymes are optimised using a number of parameters to ensure cleavage efficiency.

The problem

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer diagnosis in men and is the third leading cause of cancer-related death in the UK. Current therapeutic procedures involve surgery often coupled with radiation therapy and in advanced cancerous stages, hormone therapy and chemotherapy.

Prostate cancer is associated with alterations in Androgen Receptor functions. The Androgen Receptor signalling pathway is a fundamental process in the growth of many cancers and in particular prostate cancer. Current methods of treating this type of cancer take advantage of this androgen dependence by disrupting the signalling pathway to prevent tumour growth.

Although initially successful in the majority of patients, these therapies invariably fail and the tumours progress to an aggressive therapy resistant stage, termed castrate resistant prostate cancer. Importantly, Androgen Receptor signalling continues to drive tumour growth, due to e.g. receptor mutations or alternative splicing events, and therefore remains a therapeutic target for the disease.

The context

There were around 46,700 new cases of prostate cancer in the UK in 2014, that’s 130 cases diagnosed every day making prostate cancer the second most common cancer in the UK. There were 11,300 deaths caused by prostate cancer in the UK in 2014, 92,300 deaths in Europe and 307,000 worldwide in 2012. The global prostate cancer therapeutics market was valued between $5 billion to $9 billion in 2016 according to different reports.

The solution

DNAzymes have been designed to target the Androgen Receptor and to be active in circumstances where current therapies would be predicted to fail (e.g. Androgen Receptor splice variants or mutations). DNAzymes have been identified that successfully cleave their target mRNA with high efficiency.

(a) Schematic summarising how DNAzymes work.
(b) Cleavage reactions were performed and % cleavage of the target RNA quantified.

Our lead DNAzymes show more than 98% activity in cleaving target RNA. Cleavage of target RNA leads to down-regulation of androgen receptor protein levels, which in turn reduces prostate cancer proliferation.

The problem

Increasing food and fuel demands caused by a growing world population has led to the need to develop higher yielding crop varieties. It has been estimated that by 2050, a 50% increase in the yield of grain crops such as wheat and rice will be required if food supply is to meet increasing demands.

A determinant of crop yield is the cumulative rate of photosynthesis over the growing season which is the result of the crop’s ability to capture light, the efficiency by which this light is converted to biomass and how much biomass is converted into the usable product. However, the maximum potential yield of a crop over the growing season under optimal conditions is influenced by both genetic factors and agronomic practice.

The solution

Researchers at the University of Essex have found that over expression of a certain sub unit in the Reiske protein causes a marked increase in photosynthesis which leads to greater biomass, larger leaf area and an increase in seed yield.

This gene can be over expressed in a wide range of crop species and assessed for increases in yield and leaf area. Data has already been generated for Arabidopsis thaliana and tobacco and is also being developed for wheat and barley.

Benefits

The benefits of this technology include increased biomass per growing season/growing area allowing for higher productivity from the plants.

Patent status

• UK patent application filed February 2016
• PCT patent application filed February 2017

Find out more

Contact Dr Kirstie Cochrane at kscoch@essex.ac.uk for more information.

The problem

The extraction of oil from oil sands results in the production of vast quantities of oil sands process waters (OSPW) which are contaminated with toxic naphthenic acids. Currently this wastewater is contained in tailings ponds and left for the mature fine tailings (MFT) to settle out and the naphthenic acids to degrade, which can take years or decades.

The solution

Scientists at the University of Essex have developed a novel bioremediation method which speeds up this process by increasing the sedimentation of particulates from the water.

The technology

The technique involves the use of a consortium of microorganisms which are capable of metabolizing naphthenic acids, and growing them in a bioreactor with the oil sands process water (OSPW).

Duplicate ‘live’ bioreactors were seeded with 10 L of our microbial consortium and 180 L of OSPW. Duplicate control bioreactors without our microbial consortium and only OSPW were also set up.

After only 28 days of treatment, it was visibly obvious that the‘live’ bioreactors (Figs 1A and 1B) containing our microbial consortium had significantly less suspended solids compared to the controls (Figs1C and 1D). There was also a marked decrease in toxicity (by > 50 %)in the bioreactors by day 28, as measured by Microtox®.

The benefits

• Greatly increases sedimentation rates of solids in OSPW (approx. one month, rather than decades)
• Greatly reduces OSPW toxicity
• Works at room temperature and pressure
• Can be used to treat existing tailings pond water, or newly produced OSPW
• Low capital and running costs
• Can be readily mobilized on site

Patent

Patent application submitted in 2015. Further information is available under confidentiality.

Status

The technique has already been demonstrated successfully to treat 300 L of OSPW from a single site in Canada. The next stage is to validate the general applicability of the technique with a variety of different OSPW inputs, and to understand how it could be best integrated with current practice.

The University is seeking commercial partners which would be willing to collaborate through the provision of funding and/or access to OSPW waste streams.

Find out more

Contact Dr Kirstie Cochrane at kscoch@essex.ac.uk for more information.

Information sheet: Bioremediation of oil sands process water

The technology

This technology is based on a high resolution MS/MS technique where the phosphorylation pattern of certain residues within the C-terminal part of the tumour suppressor protein Scribble will enable a clinician to determine the best treatment option within triple negative breast cancer patients. The phosphorylation pattern on a cluster of sites in the C-terminal region of scribble dramatically changes when cancer cells become more invasive.

The problem

The use of chemotherapy as treatment options for breast cancer is utilised within the population of breast cancer sufferers with tumours that are negative for receptors to oestrogen, progesterone and HER2. Upon biopsy the cancer's receptors are identified to identify the best course of treatment. Within the triple negative population of breast cancer patients, chemotherapy is offered as the treatment. Triple negative breast cancer is seen as a more invasive cancer with poor prognosis.

The climate/arena

Breast cancer will affect nearly 232,000 women in the USA over the next year and 15-20%of cases will be triple negative tumours. The figures for the UK are 50,000 cases per year and the rest of Europe including Belgium, Denmark and France have higher incidence rates than the UK.

The solution

The technology described here is able to distinguish between highly invasive and less invasive metastatic state of cells. Loss of phosphorylation appears to be an early marker for invasion, metastatic propensity and ultimately poor prognosis. Whereas phosphorylation of the sites indicates a less invasive and less metastatic state of the cells. The current technology is mass spectrometry based and there is potential for an ELISA based method to be developed.

Patent status

Patent issued in the USA in April 2016

Find out more

Contact Dr Kirstie Cochrane at kscoch@essex.ac.uk for more information.

The technology

Heat-shock transcription factors (HSFs) are known to be key regulators of expression of heat shock proteins in eukaryotes. Individual HSFs have unique functions in response to environmental stress. They are known for many plant species including corn, rice, soybean,wheat, barley, potato, tomato and Arabidopsis. Prof Phil Mullineaux and Dr Ulrike Bechtold have now demonstrated that HSF3 acts beyond its previously associated functions, and have found that transgenic plants over-expressing HSF3 show benefits to water productivity and pathogen resistance.

The solution

Expression of HSF3 in transgenic Arabidopsis has shown significantly enhanced plant performance under drying conditions – leading to increased seed yield, improved water use and better recovery from severe drought stress. Moreover, plant productivity is not only improved under drying conditions but also under normal growing conditions – plants over-expressing HSF3 produced 2.5x the seed weight of normal plants even under well watered conditions. This effect was confirmed in three different Arabidopsis accessions,whereas hsf1/3 double null mutant plants showed reduced water productivity. The overall biomass was not affected, but redistribution from vegetative biomass in favour of seed biomass was observed in the HSF3-over expressing plants.

Patent status

• USA - 8445747 B2 - granted.
• Brazil - filed.

Find out more

Contact Dr Kirstie Cochrane at kscoch@essex.ac.uk for more information.

Information sheet: HSF3-gene

The problem

In recent years, there has been an abundance of vision sensors in various applications such as security surveillance, healthcare, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), etc. However, the massive data sizes related with video analysis applications and the high level of uncertainties associated with the real world unstructured environments occupied by various users make it very challenging to automatically detect important events and human behaviours and summarise them from vision sensors in real time.

The solution

The technology operates on videos to extract summaries that could be customised according to the needs of the user and through this summary the video can be searched in natural language similar to searching through a Word document.

The technology

We have developed a robust behaviour recognition system for video linguistic summarisation using the latest model of the 3D Kinect camera based on Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Systems optimised by Big Bang Big Crunch (BB BC) algorithm to obtain the parameters of the membership functions and rule base. The proposed system outperforms the Type-1 FLSs counterpart as well as other conventional non-fuzzy methods, and the difference in performance rises when the number of subjects increases. The recognised output activity together with relevant event descriptions (such as video data, timestamp, location and user identification) detailed events can be efficiently summarised and stored in our back-end SQL event database.

The benefits

• Applicable to detecting multiple behaviours.
• Better performance in higher uncertainty situations such as multiple people in a video frame or occlusion than Type 1 FUZZY Logic system or non-fuzzy systems.
• Non-intrusive unlike wearable device solutions (especially in healthcare applications e.g. fall detection).
• System can be used for generating automatic alerts or for searching occurrences at a later time.

Patent status

• Patent application filed in the UK.