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Edinburgh Instruments makes first sale of product using technology developed in ITI Life Sciences programme

Press Release June 2008

Dundee and Edinburgh, Scotland, ITI Life Sciences, the publicly funded innovation group, is pleased to announce that Edinburgh Instruments, one of its earliest commercial partners, has made its first sale of a new product – called NanoTaurus – containing technology developed in an ITI R&D programme. Edinburgh Instruments (EI) has combined novel fluorescence technology with state-of-the-art optics and detection in the NanoTaurus, which features the highest sensitivity and discrimination for drug discovery screening and assay development.

ITI Scotland owns rights to certain core elements of the technology and associated intellectual property used in the NanoTaurus, which were developed during a 17-month ITI programme that ended in June 2006. Edinburgh Instruments licensed this technology in February 2007 and the product sale, which was made to an undisclosed Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company, triggers a royalty payment to ITI Scotland.

Eleanor Mitchell, Managing Director of ITI Life Sciences, said: “The sale of the NanoTaurus instrument represents an important milestone for ITI Life Sciences as it demonstrates for the first time a completed cycle of the ITI model: an opportunity in cell screening was identified, from which an ITI research programme was developed and valuable intellectual assets resulted. These assets were licensed out and further developed through commercial research into a product, the sale of which generates a royalty stream back into ITI Scotland. The process makes use of research expertise and business skills resident in Scotland and indicates the future potential value that can be created by the ITI model. While these first royalties are modest they represent a significant achievement by Edinburgh Instruments and we are confident that ITI can repeat this success with technologies developed in our other programmes.”                         

Professor Des Smith, FRS, Chairman and CEO of Edinburgh Instruments, said: “We are very pleased to have made this first important sale to a major international pharmaceutical company and continue to market the capabilities of the technology widely to academia and industry. The NanoTaurus is being used in an ongoing research project with Dundee University to create protein kinase assays without the use of radioactive markers, producing advantages in speed, cost, processing steps, safety and waste disposal. We are also working with Edinburgh University to detect single base mutations in a DNA nanoswitch, which will have potential applications in immunoassay development and clinical diagnostics ultimately revealing fundamentals of gene selection.”

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