ITI innovation hub in call for synthetic biology

But put Energy, Life Sciences, Techmedia into either search engine, and hey presto, mostly ITI Scotland links!  Moral, how you describe yourself is important and the roots of ITI Scotland are clearly scoring well.  For the some 200 technology-involved corporate Scottish companies paying their graduated membership, there's no need to use a search engine to look for Scotland's innovation. ITI Scotland is their market research and global foresight service, concerned with enabling IP, and tapping into the major player expertise in the three key sectors that intend to keep Scotland in play among the global greats.                                                  
                                                                                                                                                      CEO David Creed            
                                                                                                                                       
CEO David Creed points out that now with three years of work under its
belt,ITI Scotland is really global scoping, including liaison and work with
Japanese, Swedish and German companies.  ITI Scotland is also aiming to become a beacon for smaller, but bright Scottish players, who can relate to any angle of the three specific sectors. First lure to this has been to "drop our membership fees for SMEs to a more affordable £250," he says.

This month on its website are five new Foresight reports. Three are on energy:  "Advance blades for offshore wind,"  "Sustainable transport (bio-) fuels" and "Electric and hybrid electric vehicles."  There's a new Drug delivery report covering transdermal, microcapsules, nanoparticles and ocular delivery. The fifth report amazingly, is on Robotics.

Defined as "devices that act largely, or partly, autonomously that interact physically with people or their environment and that are capable of modifying their behaviour based upon sensor data," an overview of the advanced robotics market, gives key trends, drivers and inhibitors, reviews the outlook for market development and describes nine market opportunities, along with specific needs identified for each opportunity.

From a media viewpoint of course, the reports existence is frustrating being unrevealed beyond a title and keeping ITI Scotland's light under the radar   as it were. Looking at how the International market research organisations  work, it might be useful to give out four or five incontrovertible facts about the report sectors, and a couple of figures or a chart that indicates growth. It's hardly robbing the members of their data, might lure in more members and would certainly encourage media to keep the ITI Scotland name up in the headlights.

Still think ITI Scotland wouldn’t grab a game player?
Wrong, it should appeal to the games sector and it has. Slam Games in Glasgow for one offered a vision of how new technology could revolutionise the game development process. No website exactly explains this revolution, but it became a catalyst for the ITI Online Games Development Programme. Slam Games itself has moved to set up Metaforic negotiating to license some new technology.  On a less frivolous note, games based learning, attracted a commercial agreement for the technology allowing Dundee based TPLD to use IP to simplify the process of developing games based learning content for training and education purposes.

MRSA. Courtesy:trouble.philadelphiaweekly.com
TPLD has subsequently developed an MRSA game concept, part of an initial exercise to stimulate discussion regarding the potential use of game-based learning in the health sector. TPLD partnered with a health supplies organisation which helped with pilot studies and requirements gathering to actually create a useful training tool for healthcare staff.  SIMBIOS, Abertay's specialist research centre for bioinformatics and complex systems, under the direction of Professor John Crawford, is currently building a mathematical simulation and computer simulation showing the spread of MRSA in hospitals. There seemed an obvious fit between the simulation's scientific fidelity and the game as a training delivery platform in order to raise awareness of potential issues and instil best practice amongst hospital staff." The game is in beta trials.

To date Creed points out that ITI Techmedia (in Glasgow) initiated seven R&D programmes, invested £37.46m and involved 37 organisations (the critical sectors have involved machine readable security tagging, ultra wideband R&D, homeland security and ubiquitous computing reports). Over the same period ITI Energy (Aberdeen-based) has committed £27.8m in eight active R&D programmes, involved with over 20 organisations. Among the keywords here, composite pipeline structures, resonance enhanced drilling, and microgeneration, with three foresight Energy reports launched at end March. ITI Life Sciences (Dundee) has invested £51.6m into 5 R&D programmes involving 12 Scottish and International organisations.

Synthetic biology to bloom this year
The most intriguing April development of course is that ITI Life Sciences has issued a Call for Expressions of Interest from organisations or individuals with expertise in Synthetic Biology techniques that could be applied to Gene & Genome Synthesis and Assembly. It is also looking to commission a new R&D programme to develop the new technologies to create high-value commercial products. Typically, R&D programmes will receive in the range of £2-5m (US$ 4-10m) over an anticipated term of 18–36 months, and these are expected to lead to creation of centres of research excellence in Scotland.

One of the most prestigious of these to date, the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Centre (SynBERC) lead partner University of California at Berkeley, was opened in 2006 The most recent, set up this year, is at the Netherlands University of Groningen, where the centre is dedicated to the growing discipline of synthetic biology and its application to the production of biologic medicines will receive €2m funding over the next five years, as an umbrella organisation that coordinating relevant research activities from the university's institutes of chemistry, biomolecular sciences and biotechnology. ITI Scotland looks to have a new approach in the possible creation of more than one Centre, with strong contenders from Scottish Universities.

Synthetic Biology that merges biology with engineering to create new micro organisms programmed to perform complex biological processes for specific industrial applications is a significant jump ahead of current genetic engineering technologies, owing to the level of engineering involved and the ability to control processes. Foresighting has concluded these applications are expected to address market needs in a variety of sectors of high commercial and societal value, ranging from bioenergy, chemical synthesis, drug & vaccine development, biosensor development and tissue engineering.  Synthetic Biology is attracting considerable interest from academia, industry and the financial community, and major opportunities exist in the development of enabling technologies to drive this forward.                                                                                       

ITI Life Sciences is keen to identify R&D ‘packages’ to form
the basis of a commercially viable research programme,
the goal of which is to develop innovative tools, strategies and methods that enable Gene & Genome Synthesis and Assembly and can be developed to create commercial products. According responsesare invited from companies, agencies, institutes, academia and individuals. Worth noting is
that no geographical restrictions apply. ITI Life Sciences welcomes responses to this call from non-UK organisations.

One area that Creed sees of consummate importance is “to ensure our commercial activities are protected by Intellectual property.  Of the 122 patents that are held, technology has around 60 and life sciences about 49. ITI Scotland has the expertise to articulate the market and discover the patent landscape, and able to undertake IP scoping and we are very careful to protect this,” he says.

ITI certainly has innovation in its sectors, and spreads the base between Dundee, Aberdeen and Glasgow.  But perhaps if its Google descriptor read "Scotland Innovation Hub for Energy, Life Science and Techmedia plans" it would be the have the trump card of attraction.

Web: http://www.itiscotland.com
Members: :http://www.itiscotland.com/defaultpage
121c0.aspx?pageID=23&letter=M

Web: http://www.tpld.net/main.php?page=1007
Web: http://www.slam-games.com/
Web:http://www.joyboost.com/
Web:http://indoctrimat.typepad.com/scottishgames/
iti_techmedia/index.html
Also http://computescotland.com/911.php
Call  for Synthetic Biology expressions of Interest
(Closes May 1) http://www.itilifesciences.co.uk/syb                      Exoskeleton robotics Tsukuba University                                                                                                                    professor Yoshiyuki Sankai's HAL robot suit
                                                                                                                 Courtesy:dvice.com/pics/halsuit.jpg