Website mrctechnology.org Founded 2000 | Headquarters London Number of employees 140 | |
Industry Life science medical research charity Number of locations London, Stevenage, Edinburgh Key people CEO: Dave Tapolczay, Director of Business Development: Mike Dalrymple, Director of Corporate Partnerships: Mike Johnson, Director of Technology Transfer: Andrew Farquharson, Director of Drug Discovery: Justin Bryans, Director of Finance: Andrew Mercieca, General Counsel & Company Secretary: Edward Bliss Services IP management, drug discovery, antibody engineering | ||
Medical Research Council Technology (MRC Technology, MRCT) is a British life science medical research charity. It was established in 2000 to translate the work of UK Medical Research Council research scientists.
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Today MRC Technology provides intellectual property identification, protection and commercialisation, technology development, early stage drug discovery and antibody humanization services for the MRC, academia, biotechnology and pharmaceutical organisations and charities, aiming to move promising medical research forward into viable and accessible patient treatments. Profits from MRC Technology's activities are reinvested into further research.
History
MRC Technology started as the Medical Research Council Liaison Office in 1984, and in 1986 the MRC Collaborative Centre, a laboratory-based technology transfer function, was founded. In 1993, the Liaison Office became MRC's Technology Transfer Group, responsible for office based patenting and licensing.
MRC Technology was set up as a charity and a company limited by guarantee in 2000 to incorporate patenting, licensing and research functions.
Activities
MRC Technology has humanised a number of antibodies on behalf of other organisations. Four of these, Tysabri (Biogen Idec/Elan), Actemra (Hoffmann-La Roche/Chugai), Entyvio (Millenium Pharma/Takeda) and Keytruda (Merck/MSD), are now on the market.
In 2010, MRC Technology signed a deal with the drug company AstraZeneca to share chemical compounds to help identify potential treatments for serious diseases.
MRC Technology is a member of a Global Drug Discovery Alliance along with the Centre for Drug Research and Development, the Scripps Research Institute, Cancer Research Technology, the Lead Discovery Centre and the Centre for Drug Design and Discovery, dedicated to translating health research into new medicines and working together to improve the conversion of global early-stage research into much-needed new therapies.
Dementia Consortium was launched in December 2013 - a unique £3m drug discovery collaboration between Alzheimer's Research UK, MRC Technology and pharmaceutical companies Eisai and Lilly.
Neurodegeneration Medicines Acceleration Programme was established in November 2014 to revive promising drugs for brain diseases, which have stalled for non-scientific reasons.