Wave I: Current Clinical Trial

• Optimisation of plasmid DNA
• Aerosol delivery of gene transfer vectors
• Assay development

Wave II: The Future

• Viral vector development

Resources

• Core Facilities
• Patents

Consortium Core Facilities

The Consortium has always strived to avoid duplication of effort at it's three sites. One of the ways we have achieved this is to create a number of 'core facilities' to streamline the analysis of some highly specialised assay systems.

The Taqman Core Facility

Animation of a Taqman PCR reaction. Polymerisation from the primers forces the cleavage of the probe. The Reporter dye is freed from its quencher and fluoresces when excited by a laser.

One of the key challenges in developing gene transfer technologies is to be able to detect and quantify the levels of gene expression from our vectors in-vivo. In order to do this we rely on Taqman RT-PCR to quantify levels of vector derived mRNA. The team in Oxford run the Taqman core facility for the Consortium.

Our Biomek NX automated liquid handling 'robot' and one of our Real-time PCR machines.

Experiments are carried out all over the consortium and samples are sent to the Taqman facility for processing. This process is largely automated as we make use of an automated liquid handling workstation to purify samples and setup reactions plates. This leads to far greater accuracy, precision and a higher throughput than could be achieved manually. The vast majority of the assays we use are developed and optimised in-house. Assays that we developed for lab work are now routinely used to detect expression in clinical trial samples from the ongoing clinical programme.

To contact the Taqman team email: oxfonullrdtaqmnullan@ndcls.ox.ac.uk