A2SP
a2sp Is a company providing Chemical Genomics Services for drug discovery that was formed in May 2006 from research carried out at the University of Warwick. The core technology upon which the company was founded is licensed as Magic Tag® and comprises a toolkit for carrying out chemical genomic studies in any organism. The key concepts developed from work carried out under a multi-centre BBSRC Exploiting Genomics grant (£350k) that was subsequently commercialised using Follow-on funding from BBSRC (£56k) and an Advantage West Midlands SPINNER grant (£50k). The four Directors of the company, Dr Andrew Clark, Dr Suzanne Dilly, Dr Andrew Marsh and Dr Paul Taylor have all been intimately involved in the science from the outset and have received business development support from Warwick Ventures in addition to on-going Business Advice and Mentoring from BBSRC. Dr Dilly has recently been awarded a prestigious BBSRC / Royal Society of Edinburgh Commercialisation Fellowship providing additional Business Training. The business aim is to establish a2sp as an indispensable provider of discovery services as we develop in-house pre-clinical activities. Together this team brings a combined 50 years of postdoctoral research and management experience to the company. Their areas of expertise cover solid phase synthesis, molecular and biological interactions, natural products, heterocyclic and photochemistry, together with chemical biology experience. With high quality laboratory space at the Warwick HRI Science Incubator and access to instrumentation in the Department of Chemistry, (RAE Grade 5, 2001) excellence is assured. With an expanding Intellectual Property portfolio and on-going academic links, a2sp is well placed to exploit the novel technology.
Notable successes for a2sp include the discovery of a new receptor for the ubiquitous plant hormone abscisic acid, together with identification of novel protein targets for an established clinically used therapeutic. In the period since incorporation we have developed a European customer base who have purchased Magic Tag ® Kits, together with several high-profile potential UK screening partners.
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