Dr Ekaterina McKenna An academic from the University is taking the opportunity to bridge the gap between the worlds of scientific research and commercial marketing courtesy of a prestigious Enterprise Fellowship.

In April, Dr Ekaterina McKenna, a Research Associate in the Institute of Molecular Cell and Systems Biology (IMSCB), will begin a one year Enterprise Fellowship, jointly funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE).

The fellowship programme aims to enable researchers to take a more active role in commercialising scientific research undertaken at universities, by learning business and marketing skills along the way. Schemes such as this give academics greater insight into the commercial world, equipping them with the skills to start their own business ventures.

Over the coming year Dr McKenna will be promoting an innovative product concept developed as a result of her work on the interdisciplinary research programme ‘Radical Solutions for Researching the Proteome’ (RASOR)*. RASOR was originally set up in 2005 by Dr Andrew Pitt and Professor Walter Kolch from the University with funding from BBSRC, EPSRC and SFC, in collaboration with researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh, Dundee and Strathclyde. This project, involving researchers from engineering, chemistry, physics and biology created a fertile environment for innovation.

Dr McKenna teamed up with the colleagues at the Scottish Microelectronics Centre (SMC), the University of Edinburgh, Dr Yifan Li and Dr William Parkes in the group of Professor Anthony Walton and came up with some interesting solutions for biological microarray analysis. The technology developed capitalises on the methods of microfabrication used in microelectronics in materials, such as silicon, to create structured surfaces for manipulation of biological molecules.   

Speaking about her new project, Dr McKenna said: “Microarray technology represents a substantial market share in biochemical analysis and diagnostics.  Reliable and affordable tools for the detection of proteins, DNA, lipids and other biologically relevant molecules in small and complex samples are critical to improvements in biological discovery and healthcare.”

“This is an exciting opportunity for me because I plan to use the business training that I get through the Enterprise Fellowship to find the best ways of marketing  the outcomes of my research as a commercial product.”

 

* www.gla.ac.uk/rasor

First published: 14 February 2011

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