Access to clinical expertise vital for life science firm BioClavis
Personalised diagnostics company BioClavis is based in the Teaching and Learning Centre of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Glasgow.
“We’re a spin-out of our sister company in the US which invented a new sort of industrialised, high-throughput molecular profiling technology and we’re applying it specifically to diagnostics and therapeutics development,” the company’s president Harper VanSteenhouse explained to Real Asset Insight’s Richard Betts.
BioClavis has several research and development projects in train and is engaged in a number of clinical research projects with collaborators and customers “to help them harness the same technology and gain new insights,” he added.
Links, information sharing and sharing expertise are key for biotechnology companies such as BioClavis.
“We depend strongly on integrating with clinical expertise, early academic research that’s gaining the first steps, generating ideas or direction,” he said. It is also critical for BioClavis to have access to patient samples.
Scottish base ticks lots of boxes
The company has been based in Scotland for four years. “We’ve been really happy with the entire community as well as the opportunities to grow and establish ourselves as a business. The key things that we were looking at early on are those that have really been key to our success, clinical samples, clinical expertise and collaborators that can help us build things,” VanSteenhouse said.
“We’re physically about 200 metres away from a massive bio-repository and pathology department staffed with world leading experts that can help us do our jobs better and in turn help us create innovative diagnostic tools that can get out there and help their patients,” he said.
Additionally, the firm needs a strong academic footprint. “This is both for collaborations, writing grant applications together with researchers, helping them progress their research to pull new ideas into ours.”
“We’ve found this a great place to grow a business and to hire bright students as well as people later in their careers,” he said.
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