Last year was a hugely significant one for us as we evolved from a consultancy to a fully integrated contract development and manufacturing business. We aren’t standing still this year however. Our aim for the next 12 months is to take a big step towards our goal of becoming a leading development partner for biopharmaceuticals, recognised world wide for the expertise of our scientists, the excellence of our facilities and the openness and honesty with which we do business.


The last few months has seen a succession of licensing deals and acquisitions in the UK biotech industry. High profile recent examples include AstraZeneca’s acquisition of KuDOS Pharmaceuticals in December for $210 million - just one of 4 deals the company completed that month. The spending spree has continued into 2007 with AstraZeneca purchasing Arrow Therapeutics for $150 million. AZ now estimates that 25% of its pipeline originates from in licensing with the company now particularly active in biopharmaceuticals. Current CEO David Brennan has made major changes to the strategy of his predecessor Tom McKillop who seemed to firmly believe that biotech was something to be steered well clear of.

GSK has also been busy in biopharmaceuticals, acquiring Domantis for £230 million in December and completing a licensing deal with Genmab for their antibody product Humax CD20.

The problems facing big pharma are starkly illustrated by this increased investment in licensing and acquisition being set against the backdrop of major job losses in manufacturing, supply chain, sales and marketing etc by the likes of AZ, Pfizer and others.

Added to some of the other high profile events in 2006 (for example Renovo’s IPO, the Novartis acquisition of Neutec Pharma and AZ’s purchase of CAT) it is clear that substantial capital has been returned to biotech investors in the past 12 months and it’s hoped that some of these funds will be recycled back into UK biotech, providing a much needed boost to the industry.

In other ‘big company’ news, Medimmune recently received good clinical data for its FluMist product, manufactured in Liverpool, which showed much better results than injected Flu vaccines in recent trials in young children.



The big news for this newsletter is the completion of this month’s successful inspection by the MHRA for our manufacturing license. We will be commencing GMP client projects in the next few weeks.

Eden has virtually completed phase 1 of its recruitment programme with fully operational production and development teams in place. We have now reached 52 people - some increase since the 13 or so reported in our first newsletter 12 months ago. The most recent recruit is Alison Justice, our new QA Manager, pictured left.

I’m also pleased to announce that we have begun our US operations with the appointment of Jae Sly as a consultant to lead our business development efforts in North America. Jae has a great deal of experience and expertise in biopharmaceutical development and manufacture and is an excellent fit with our business. To prove it we have included a publication of Jae’s on our website.

Business development consultant, Jae Sly, and her publication

We are however currently recruiting for a client project manager and a job description is available on our website.

In other news we are very pleased to have signed up a new client - Liverpool Biotech Company IntelliHep - to develop their novel polysaccharide biopharmaceutical.

Towards the end of last year we conducted some market research to evaluate the way we communicate with our contacts and clients and how we are perceived. We would like to thank all those who took part in the survey. A snapshot of the comments:

“Excellent company and staff”, “Enthusiastic”, “Track record of senior team in company”, “Knowledgeable about what they are doing”, “Very good, GMP incredibly sophisticated equipment”, “Excellent facilities”, “Facilities and equipment are top of the range”...

The main negative comment we received was the lack of track record in GMP manufacturing from our current facility. This is a fair point but one we have worked hard to address through hiring experienced staff and the extensive facility performance qualification programme. Our first GMP client projects should begin in the next few weeks.



Lastly, it is my sad duty to inform you that despite being shortlisted for the Sunday Times ‘Best of British’ awards for small business of the year, Eden Biodesign were not the eventual winners. Crawford, Debbie and Andrew had a great night out at the awards dinner in the Tate Modern where apparently presenter Rory McGrath was on good form. Winners on the night included Rolls Royce, JCB and Airbus so they had good company!





A Robust Strategy for Rapid Development of Clinical Manufacturing - Jae Sly
In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the number of promising new biological therapeutic candidates due both to their acknowledged effectiveness and to the accelerated discovery processes associated with proteomics research...
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