Technology
Life Sciences
The Burgundy Gold Team ate active throughout the Life sciences sector and have wide experience of the Pharmaceutical Industry (including Drug Discovery and Drug Delivery Technologies), the Healthcare sector (including Medical Devices and Diagnostics) as well as more generally in the Fermentation, Enzyme, Food and Beverage sectors.
Drug Discovery
Pharmaceutical companies spend at least 20% of their revenue - 25.1 billion by 2006, an increase of 29% from 2002 (Drug Researcher, 2005).
With generic competition eroding profits from traditional blockbuster drugs, pharma operations must optimise their R&D programmes and outsourcing activities. In order to meet the increasing costs of drug development, utilizing the latest technological advancements in drug discovery is essential to develop the next potential breakthrough in the global healthcare markets.
Focus on quality not quantitiy: The disappointing results of the High Throughput Screening (HTS) approach have led developers to focus on quality rather than quantity. A more rational approach, obtaining more information about fewer, more promising compounds is the way forward.
Drug Delivery
Microencapsulation
Microencapsulation refers to a process by which minute particles of liquid or solid material are coated with a uniform and continuous film. A range of materials are suited for use as the capsule material: lipids, wax, crystal starch, modified starch, cellulose, phospholipids and other polymers.
Microencapsulation has a variety of purposes, such as the controlled release of active ingredients, coating
liquid substances, masking or protecting core material as well as reducing volatility.
Medical Devices
The healthcare services remain under considerable pressure to identify and commercialise simple medical devices quickly to lower costs, reduce hospital stay, control infections, reduce liability and eliminate preventable errors. The trend toward more user-friendly home health care products will also spur the demand for innovative medical devices. With the convergence of scientific, electronic and digital technologies; new breakthroughs in medical devices will play a critical role in solving the problems in healthcare and enhancing the human condition.
The global market for medical products and hospital supplies is over $220 billions. Innovation is the life-blood of the industry. The medical supply industry has had a consistent growth rate of over 10% for the last several years. The leading companies struggle to maintain 30% of their revenues from new products introduced in the last 3 years.
Medical Diagnostics
In the last few years there has been something a revolution in the medical diagnostics industry. Clinical laboratories in hospitals have been improving their efficiency with the installation of large automated instruments. Alonside these developments technological advances in solid-phase chemistry, electronics and miniaturisation of instrumentation have led to a new breed of diagnostic tests that can move diagnostics out of the traditional laboratory and closer to the patient. This type of near patient testing, or point of care testing as it has become known, is set to expand dramatically. In the United States it now accounts for around one fifth of all tests and European countries are quickly following suit
As part of this development non-invasive techniques are being developed which allow more and more diagnosis to be carried out by the non-specialist in non-specialist faccilites such as outpatient clinics and GP surgeries. These techniques greatly reduce the cost of diagnosis to the healthservice and usually reduce discomfort and pain for the patient.
Biotechnology / Fermentation
There are 5 major groups of commercially important fermentation:
- Microbial cells or biomass as the product, e.g. bakers yeast, lactobacillus, etc.
- Microbial enzymes: catalase, amylase, protease, pectinase, glucose isomerase, cellulase, hemicellulase, lipase, lactase, streptokinase, etc.
- Microbial metabolites :
Primary metabolites – ethanol, citric acid, glutamic acid, lysine, vitamins, polysaccharides etc.
Secondary metabolites: all antibiotic fermentation Recombinant products: insulin, HBV, interferon, GCSF, streptokinase - Biotransformations: phenyl acetyl carbinol, steroid biotransformation, etc.
Materials
The Burgundy Gold Team have a broad range of expertise within the materials sector including polymers and coatings, adhesives, textiles and nonwovens and polymer recycling technologies.
Polymer Industry
The Polymer Sector comprises four discrete processing areas: Plastics Processing, Rubber Processing, Polymer Composite Processing and Composites. Just under 14,000 companies operate within the UK sector employing some 286,000 employees. This figure rises to approximately 400,000 employees when companies who process polymers as a secondary operation to their main business, are taken into consideration. The industry is extremely dynamic being subject to many changes and opportunities arising from technological change, development of new materials and processing technology and not least, the development of new products and changes in consumer requirements.
Paint and Coatings Industry
Worldwide, the paint and coatings industry is an important part of everyday living. Paint industry statistics confirm that no domestic or commercial arena remains unaffected, with applications ranging from household and decorative paints, to coatings used in the automotive industry; from the anti-contamination coatings in the canned foods sector, to the paints used to advertise corporate logos on airliners.
Textiles
The textiles and clothing industry is the UK's 9th largest manufacturing sector, and has a turnover of over £17.7 billion per year. In 1999 the industry exported £5.1 billion of goods. Since then the British textile industry has been hit by one of the deepest slumps in its history over the last 8 years. Total output has declined each year due to the severe competitive from low cost textile suppliers in other countries. However, in fashion design and innovation and in particular in medical textiles, performanace (sport and industrial) textiles and non-wovens a number of UKs companies continue to hold their own. Much of this development is in syntheric polymeric fibres and materials particularly for the consumer in the management comfort in the wide variety of pass times and working environments faced today. Another interesting development has been in the initial developments of SMART materials, for monitoring medical outputs and for example novel in-bult communication systems.
Polymer Recycling
The awareness of polymer recycling to consumers and industry alike has increased greatly over the last few years particularly relating to the volumes of packaging waste genrated each year. The public have been affected directly because of the changes being made to their door-step-collection systems and industry is looking closely as the waste created and the cost of disposal is clearly affecting their bottom line. In addition to waste resulting from packaging applications, other areas of high polymeric waste include: construction, automotive, agriculture and electrical components.
Chemistry
The Burgundy Gold Team have considerable experience in product development, research and development and marketing within the chemicals sector.
The Chemicals Sector
The Chemical Sector within the UK has changed substantially over the last few years particularly as the global industry has gone through a major consolidation process resulting in many UK household names being swallowed up by International Groups. For the industry that remains generatiion of novel innovative ideas is crucial to the sustainability of the chemical industry. Improvements in process and ability to find and take-up and develop new products is key to this survuval and ongoing success.
Fuel Cells
Fuel cells are clean and efficient technology for generating electricity which is poised to become the leading energy source of the 21st century, in applications such as transport, stationary power and even laptop computers. Fuel cell operates like a battery. Unlike a battery, a fuel cell does not run down or require recharging. It will produce energy in the form of electricity and heat as long as fuel is supplied. A fuel cell consists of two electrodes sandwiched around an electrolyte. Oxygen passes over one electrode and hydrogen over the other, generating electricity, water and heat. A fuel cell produces electricity. The fuel cell is similar to a battery. It produces electricity using chemicals. The chemicals are usually very simple, often just hydrogen and oxygen. In this case the hydrogen is the "fuel" that the fuel cell uses to make electricity. Another very important difference is that fuel cells do not run down like batteries. As long as the fuel and oxygen is supplied to the cell it will keep producing electricty for ever. The oxygen needed by a fuel cell is usually simply obtained from air. Although the majority of fuel cells use hydrogen as the fuel, some fuel cells work off methane, and a few use liquid fuels such as methanol. Fuel cells that use hydrogen can be thought of as devices that do the reverse of the well known experiment where passing an electric current through water splits it up into hydrogen and oxygen. In the fuel cell hydrogen and oxygen are joined together to produce water and electricty. Fuel cells can be made in a huge range of sizes. They can be used to produce quite small amounts of electric power, for devices such as portable computers or radio transmitters, right up to very high powers for electric power stations.
- Life Sciences (14/1/2008)
- Materials (14/1/2008)
- Chemistry (14/1/2008)