“I research the use of bacteriophages to control disease-causing microbes, such as Salmonella, in the food chain.

Bacteriophages are bacterial viruses, which only infect and replicate within bacteria. They offer the potential to improve food safety and benefit our health because we can use them to target the bacteria that can make us ill.

The goal of my research is to enhance food safety and reduce contamination within food and food production environments.

My current project working alongside Professor Rob Kingsley and Dr Evelien Adriaenssens, involves taking my research out of the lab and testing it within a commercial environment.

Our project is building on work carried out during my PhD which involved using cutting edge genomic approaches, such as TraDIS, to formulate mixes of bacteriophages, known as “bacteriophage cocktails”. These “cocktails” can be used to treat and prevent bacterial infections, such as Salmonella.

Working with our Business Development team

When we first had intentions of “spinning-out” our bacteriophage research we had discussions with our Business Development team. We decided that we needed to establish whether there is a need for our kind of technology and whether this would be well received by food producers, farmers, regulators and agri-pharma companies.

They suggested getting involved with the UKRI Innovate UK ICURe Explore (ICURe). It is a pre-accelerator programme designed to take research out of a lab and validate its commercial potential by exploring different markets. This involves making contacts and having conversations with different businesses to test assumptions of our technology.

Building a business through a pre-acclerator programme

The whole experience of ICURe has been extremely positive. Every day is very different.

My day-to-day work varies from helping design digital content, having conversations with key stakeholders such as businesses and regulatory bodies as well as travelling to different trade shows across the world. It has been great to attend trade events in Kansas City, USA and Nuremberg, Germany and talk to many different people about our research and the work going on at the Quadram Institute.

In a way, the market exploration phase has been similar to carrying out experiments in the laboratory.

You come up with a set of different hypotheses and then decide what kind of tests you could do to attempt to disprove these statements. The only real difference is that market exploration doesn’t involve experiments in the lab. In market exploration, you analyse the data and responses to adapt the hypothesis or carry out a different test. In essence, this testing process is the aim of the ICURe programme.

Introducing Quadlytics

We’ve named our spinout Quadlytics. The name combines the “Quad” from the Quadram Institute, as well as the term “lytic” which refers to our phages.

Our aim is to be a key player in the successful development and deployment of bacteriophage-based antimicrobials in many different market sectors.

Our plans are to complete the Icure Explore phase successfully and pitch our ICURe journey and spin-out business to a group of industry experts including investors.

We hope to show how we’ve explored the market and present the key findings which will demonstrate that our business idea has potential.

We’re interested in speaking to anyone who has an interest in our bacteriophage technology. If you work in food production, animal feed, agri-pharma and regulatory bodies and would like to know more about us please get in touch.”