Magnitude Biosciences is a specialist Contract Research Organisation (CRO) founded in 2018 as a Durham university spin out by life sciences expert Dr David Weinkove and physicist Dr Christopher Saunter.
The company has pioneered the use of the tiny nematode worm C. elegans, to accelerate early pre-clinical drug development for biotech and pharma and to assess the toxicity and impact of compounds on health and longevity for other industries including consumer goods, health and nutrition products, and agri-manufacturing.
Coupled with support from Durham University, Magnitude Biosciences accessed Northern Accelerator programmes to start-up and grow the company.
The four university partnership accelerates the commercialisation of research in the North East’s universities, with their programmes bringing together academics and business leaders, with a host of funding and support, to form sustainable businesses that create more and better jobs.
Through the Northern Accelerator ‘Executives into Business’ programme, a strong management team was formed, and now a growing team of people are employed in skilled jobs in another high potential biosciences company, here in the region.
In bringing the benefits of their unique research approach to industry, Magnitude Biosciences are helping to play our part in accelerating the development of new drug therapies and other research advances to improve human and environmental health.
The name Magnitude Biosciences mirrors their ambitions and confidence that their technology will accelerate research progress by an order of magnitude.
Their C. elegans studies are highly customised and delivered by a team of expert scientists employing a unique automated imaging technology. Their novel approach is helping labs around the world answer their key research questions much faster than they could using mouse studies.
Although there are many C. elegans academic labs around the world, there are very few commercial labs that exist to apply the benefits of C. elegans research to the biotechnology and consumer goods industries.
Having recently set up their new head office at NETPark, the company are taking up more staff and are scaling up operations, further benefitting the local economy.
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