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Tapolczay heads MRC tech transfer drive

Written by Ben Fountain
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
The Medical Research Council has handed one of the region’s leading Life Sciences executives the task of exploiting its nationwide groundbreaking discoveries so it can pump the profits back into cutting edge science. Dr Dave Tapolczay is taking over as head of the Medical Research Council’s affiliated technology transfer company, MRC Technology (MRCT), which generated over £200m between 2005 and 2007. With over 22 years experience of R & D management including joint worldwide head of chemistry for Zeneca Agrochemicals and senior manager of chemical development for Glaxo, MRC believes Dr Tapolczay is ideally suited to take technology through to treatment at a key time in the council’s evolution. “A greater focus on technology transfer and speeding up the discovery development pipeline has really placed a spotlight on the work of MRCT,” said Dr Tapolczay. “The task of identifying, nurturing and aiding the commercialisation of the work of thousands of scientists spread across the UK is a daunting one, but one I am looking forward to.” MRCT is the exclusive commercialisation catalyst for the Medical Research Council (MRC), working to translate cutting edge scientific discoveries by MRC scientists into commercial products. Over the past nine years, income from MRCT has surpassed £298.9 million. A major chunk of this was from a royalty buy-out of $265m – one of the biggest ever deals to arise out of breakthroughs by British scientists – for the UK blockbuster, Humira®, created using patented technology derived from research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and developed by Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT). MRC has participated in the creation of 17 start-ups, including two of the UK’s largest and most successful biotech companies, both from the region: UCB-Celltech and CAT, who started out as companies based on MRC IP. Dr Tapolczay has been involved with the start up of five companies all of which are still trading. Set as favorite Bookmark Email This Hits: 369 Trackback(0) TrackBack URI for this entry Comments (0) Subscribe to this comment's feed Show/Hide comments Write comment Show/Hide comment form This content has been locked. You can no longer post any comment.