Page 174 - CW E-Magazine (16-4-2024)

News from Abroad

INDUSTRY-ACADEMIA COLLABORATION
Agilent and UC San Diego launch Centre of Excellence

in cellular intelligence

Agilent Technologies, the US-
based analytical technologies major,
and the University of California San
Diego (UC San Diego), one of the top-
ranked public research universities in
the world, have announced a scientific
collaboration to establish the Agilent
Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Cellular
Intelligence.

Located at UC San Diego’s School
of Medicine, it will foster collaboration
and innovation among researchers from
Agilent and UC San Diego, and other
institutions and industry partners. The
CoE will serve as a hub for academic
and pharma/biopharma researchers in The CoE will leverage Agilent CoE will advance the understanding of
the region, enabling access to vital instrumentation, including cell analysis fundamental principles of life and the
analytical instrumentation and providing and mass spectroscopy solutions, to origin of biological complexity.
education, training, and application support an ambitious transdisciplinary
development opportunities. initiative: Decode Eukaryotic Cellular The programme is based on the
Intelligence, a research programme hypothesis that eukaryotic cells function
“This important initiative will that aims to understand how eukaryotic as deep reinforcement learning (RL)
improve our understanding of disease cells sense, decide, and act in complex agents that use interlinked switch cir-
mechanisms at the cellular level – and and uncertain environments, with cuits of biological intelligence to adapt
drive the development of better methods implications for health and disease. and survive. It combines experimen-
for editing and engineering cells to tal, computational, and theoretical
treat diseases, enhance immunity, Dr. Pradipta Ghosh, Professor of approaches to decode the molecular and
and create novel bioproducts,” said Medicine and Cellular and Molecular cellular mechanisms of these switch
Mr. Mike McMullen, Agilent President, Medicine at UC San Diego and Found- circuits and explore their implications
and CEO. ing Director of the programme, said the for health and disease.
CONTRACT MANUFACTURING
Wacker partnering Pantherna to move mRNA active

ingredient from lab to production

German chemicals firm, Wacker, has The ‘PAN004’ active ingredient duction lines that Wacker Biotech GmbH,
said that its soon-to-be-opened mRNA supplied by Pantherna Therapeutics, a a fully-owned subsidiary of Wacker
competence centre in Halle (Germany) is German biotech company, will be manu- Chemie, will use to contract manufacture
to produce an active ingredient based on factured based on a large-scale production mRNA vaccines, among other things. Part
messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) and process developed by Wacker for mRNA of the new capacity will be available to the
lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for combat- formulated in LNPs. German Government as and when required
ing acute respiratory distress syndrome as part of its pandemic preparedness con-
(ARDS). The Halle site features four new pro- tracts. Pantherna will become Wacker’s

174 Chemical Weekly April 16, 2024

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