Lentitek was founded to address a significant problem facing the commercialisation of next generation therapies such as CAR-T, namely the low yields of lentiviral vector used to reprogram cells. We are developing a technology to improve the yield of lentivirus by 10 fold which can be easily integrated existing manufacturing workflows.Lentitek has already secured Scottish Enterprise funding for a proof of concept study and are now looking to prove the technology in practice by generating a CAR.

Agilent Technologies aquired Lab901 at the end of February 2011.

A wide ranging role in a young dynamic company. My responsibilities include organising and leading training for distributors and corporate sales force, delivering marketing materials, supervising collaborations with potential and existing customers as well as obtaining and developing leads. The main source of leads for my product area has been conferences which I have both organised and attended. Although not technically a sales role, latterly I have visited many potential clients in both Europe and the US for sales demonstrations and taken several leads to the fund application stage. A significant proportion of my time is devoted to supporting customers and distributors use and sell the product by drawing on my extensive expertise of both the product (that I was scientific lead on), and the wider scientific context.

I was fortunate to join a project early in its development cycle. My role was to finalise development and then transfer the manufacturing process to production, successfully delivering a stable product ahead of schedule, that still stands as an example to other products. As well as supervising the shelf life validation studies, I had sole responsibility for establishing the documentation system associated with this project. The role also stretched my knowledge into establishing cold chain logistics to our clients, something that had not been done before at Lab901.

Senior Scientist in charge of virus production lab for avian transgenics project. Generation, purification and titration of lentiviral vectors for transgene delivery to embryonic chickens. Category II Cell culture, transfection, virus handling, RNA purification, PCR and cloning. Also responsible for transfer of laboratory practices from research GLP to GMP with QC, H&S and SOP documentation implementation, plus involvement with patent application and defence.

Technology Transfer Chemist. Responsible for establishing high throughput QC lab. Establishing and networking lab IT and instrumentation. Programming lab robotic systems. Assessing and analysing large quantities of data using Excel. Evaluating and updating spreadsheets using Excel. Training staff on the daily operation of instrumentation and spreadsheets. Experience with preparatory reverse phase HPLC systems.

Research Biologist on an Osteoarthritis project providing additional molecular biology, protein chemistry including HPLC protein purification, cell culture and assay development support for project team. Time also spent in the protein crystallography group using Silicon Graphics (Unix based) computers for 3-D derivation of protein structure as well as protein crystallisation and quality assessment of proteins for crystallisation