Industry Insights Seminar Series

• 12.00 -1.00 pm
• In person and online
• In person at Institute of Developmental & Regenerative Medicine (IDRM), Old Road Campus, Headington, OX3 7TY
• Networking & 1:1 meeting opportunities

The Industry Insight Seminars provide the opportunity for Oxford scientists to attend a scientific seminar of interest and to network with industry scientists. Selected industry speakers provide seminars that are scientific in nature, across a range of medical or health topics.  Speakers are encouraged to bring along colleagues to facilitate networking; one to one meetings can be facilitated upon request.  Seminars are suitable for all scientists with some knowledge or interest in each topic area, from PhD students to PIs.  Although mostly aimed at an academic audience, those located in the BioEscalator and Wood Centre, as well as local spinouts, are welcome to attend. 

Please contact Sheena Lee if you have any questions or have an industry partner you would like to invite to speak

15th May 2025: Maridebart Cafraglutide (Maritide) -an investigational drug for the treatment of obesity - from bench to clinic’

Presenter: Dr Murielle Veniant

Company: Amgen

Description:  MariTide (maridebart cafraglutide) is an investigational antibody peptide conjugate, subcutaneously administered monthly or less frequently. In people living with obesity or overweight without Type 2 diabetes, MariTide demonstrated up to ~20% average weight loss at week 52 without a weight loss plateau, indicating the potential for further weight loss beyond 52 weeks. The study also showed people living with obesity or overweight and Type 2 diabetes, who typically lose less weight on GLP-1 therapies, achieved up to ~17% average weight loss, also without a weight loss plateau, and lowered their average hemoglobin A1C (HbA1c) by up to 2.2 percentage points at week 52.1 In summary, in both study populations, a weight loss plateau was not observed, again indicating the potential for further weight loss beyond 52 weeks.

MariTide also demonstrated robust and clinically meaningful improvements in cardiometabolic parameters, including blood pressure, triglycerides and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) across doses. There were no significant increases in free fatty acids.

Registration:https://forms.office.com/e/vFwBfRznW4

12th June 2025: Targeting the WRN helicase in MSI cancers

Presenter: Dr Marta Cortes-Cros

Company: Novartis

Description: The RecQ DNA helicase WRN was identified as a synthetic lethal target in MSIhigh tumors by several genetic screens. Despite recent advances in the treatment of MSIhigh tumors by immune checkpoint inhibitors, a significant proportion of patients still fails to respond to or relapses after single agent anti-PD1 or combination of anti-PD1 plus anti-CTLA4 treatments. We will present the biochemical, cellular and pharmacological characterization of the first potent and selective WRN helicase inhibitor, HRO761. We will show that HRO761 is an allosteric WRN inhibitor that binds at the interface of the D1 and D2 helicase domains, thus locking WRN in an inactive conformation. We will further show that pharmacological inhibition of WRN by HRO761 recapitulates the phenotype observed by WRN genetic suppression, leading to activation of the DNA damage response and inhibition of tumor cell growth selectively in MSIhigh but not in MSS cells. In addition, we will show that WRN inhibition leads to WRN protein degradation only in MSIhigh tumor cells and give insights into the mechanism of WRN degradation upon DNA damage response induction. A phase 1 clinical trial with HRO761 is currently ongoing to assess the safety, tolerability and preliminary anti-tumor activity in patients with MSIhigh colorectal cancer and other MSIhigh solid tumors

Registration: https://forms.office.com/e/h3vKk0s5Yb

Past events

2025

Oliver Harrison - Royal Society EIR in Oxford- CEO of Koa Health - Opportunities in healthcare AI at Oxford

Mohammed Ismael - Olink- Working alongside UK Biobank

Dr Robert Wilkinson - Immunocore - Progress Towards Targeted Immunotherapy for Cancer

2024

Kuldeep Singh, Mradul Kanugo - Softude,  Dr. Joseph Davids - Imperial College London- From Paperwork to Patients: AI in Helathcare

Dr Thomas Freeman - Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine - The impacts of omics data on translational science

Professor Nadeem Sarwar  - Novo Nordisk - Prevention is better than cure – realising a sustainable new paradigm to predict and pre-empt obesity and its consequences

Nicholas Zoulias - Azenta - Harnessing the power of multiomics from a single sample to explore tumor heterogeneity and advancing immuno-oncology

Dr Shea Hamilton - Somalogic - The transformative role of Somascan for protein biomarker discovery, validation and translation

Dr Sarantis Chlamydas – Olink - Precision proteomics broadens MultiOmics repertoire and enables biomarker discovery

Christel Iffland, Chris Birchall - OmniAb-Opening the Barn Door to Antibody Discovery with OmniAb

Jayne Wallace - Oxford Nanopore - Democratising sequencing: Latest from Oxford Nanopore Technologies

Luke Devey – Quell - Restoring the balance with Regulatory T Cell Therapies/ Opportunities and Challenges in Biotech, 2024

2023

Balaji Modhagala, Subhagata Chattopadhyay – SquareML - AI-ML in Healthcare: Predicting 30-day Post-discharge Unplanned Readmission Risks in the Elderly - a Use Case

Casper Wilstrup – Abzu - Augmenting Drug Discovery with AI

Quin Wills - Ochre Bio - Maintaining Human Livers Outside of the Body

Jo Howson - Novo Nordisk - Genetics and Drug Discovery

Jonathan Kwok – Infinitopes - UK positioning as a cancer vaccine superpower- hyperbole or reality? Infinitopes as a CRUK-led cancer vaccine spinout from the Oxford ecosystem

Lisa Caproni - Touchlight - The Making of DNA:  The role of enzymatic doggybone DNA in enabling future genetic medicines

Daniel Tomé, Mariana Fontes – Olink - Understanding human disease in the post-genomics era

Hussein - Al-Mossawi – AstraZeneca - Targeting type 1 IFN in immune-mediated inflammatory disease

2022

Iris-Valerie Stracke – Psious - Virtual reality and mental health

William Drewe, Martin Main - Medicines Discovery Catapult - Advancing UK Medicines Discovery through Innovative Partnerships

Jack Pearson - Natural Cycles - Natural Cycles: Revolutionising research in Women's Health

Jason Crain – IBM - Physical modelling and machine intelligence for accelerated discovery

Yatish Lad - Oxford BioMedica - Gene therapy – coming of age

Martin-Immanuel Bittner – Arctoris - Combining robotics and AI: the emergence of data-driven drug discovery

Anna Hakes – BridgeBio - Bridgebio Pharma: turning translational academic research into medicines for patients with genetic diseases

2021

Ramneek Gupta - Novo Nordisk Research Centre Oxford - Target Discovery Opportunities using Machine Learning on Longitudinal Patient Journeys

Anjan Thakurta – BMS- Translational Fellowships: Perspectives from a BMS mentor and 5 Oxford fellows 

David Price -Vertex - Humanising drugs

Katharina Duerr - OMass - Development of Novel Medicines using high resolution native mass spectrometry of intact protein assemblies

Dr Manuela Zonca – PsiOxus - Tumour re-engineering

Joanna Gould – VisusNano - Novel drug-delivery in ophthalmology

Jane Osbourn, Paul Kellam – BIA - Accelerating Covid-19 Antibody Discovery Through Industry-Academia Consortium

Joe Fitchett - Mologic     - Transforming the path for equitable access to rapid diagnostics for epidemics

Ilona Gutcher – Bayer - Targeting the Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor (AHR) as a novel immunotherapy for the treatment of cancer

David Lowe – Evox - Exosome-Based Therapies for the Treatment of Rare Genetic Diseases