News from the John Innes Centre

The John Innes Centre announced today that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Professor George Lomonossoff will pursue an innovative global health and development research project, titled “Plant Immunisation – a technology for crop virus control” “We’re looking for a new way of ‘Immunizing’ [...]

Academic research and large scientific businesses are sometimes seen as opposites, but together they are key to ensuring the economy gets maximum benefit from Government-funded research. On 18th-19th April the first UK PlantSci conference, held at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, helped to cross the gulf between pure research and the commercial world. The [...]

Professor George Lomonossoff has won “Most Promising Innovator” and the overall “Innovator of the Year” prize at this year’s national BBSRC Innovator of the Year Awards, for his work with Dr Frank Sainsbury on the development of a system for the rapid production of vaccines and pharmaceutical proteins in plants. The technology allows plants to [...]

[Medicago Press Release] Innovations developed at the John Innes Centre are part of a Canadian company’s strategy for developing new ways of rapidly producing large quantities of vaccines. Medicago USA Inc recently announced it has received the third milestone payment of US$5.6 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”). This is part of the potential US$21M DARPA milestone awards to [...]

Three research students from the University of Pretoria are currently undertaking five-month internships at the John Innes Centre, studying biotechnology and learning the skills needed to work in this field. These visits are sponsored by an award from the British Council through its Education Partnerships in Africa (EPA) programme. The objective has been to develop [...]

A PhD student from the John Innes Centre recently got the chance to showcase their work to an audience of MPs and leading scientists at the House of Commons.  Alaa Aljabali from the Department of Biological Chemistry was selected for the SET for Britain poster exhibition, organised by The Parliamentary and Scientific Committee.  The aim [...]

Science from the John Innes Centre recently featured on the front cover of the journal Integrative Biology, in a special edition focussing on Synthetic Biology. Prof Dave Evans’ group, in collaboration with Prof George Lomonossoff, have been able to chemically modify the Cowpea Mosaic Virus (CPMV) particle with peptides that cause a specific mineralization process.  [...]

[Medicago Press Release] Medicago Inc, a Canadian Biotechnology company, is clinically trialling a vaccine to the H5N1 avian influenza virus, produced in part using innovations developed at the John Innes Centre.  Medicago is using virus-like particles (VLPs) in plants to produce the vaccine.  A protein expression system developed by Professor George Lomonossoff and Dr Frank [...]