Peak Proteins Welcomes Emma Cains
Peak Proteins welcomes Emma Cains who joins us as a Cell Culture Specialist. Emma is an experienced graduate bioscientist with almost 20 years’ experience in a variety of areas, from production and purification of antibodies and recombinant proteins to antibody validation, cell culture and cell line development.
Emma studied for a BSc in Biology at the University of Manchester UK including a student placement at Eli Lilly in Speke, Liverpool.
Emma went on to work as a Scientific Officer in the Paterson Institute at the Christie Hospital working as part of a small team carrying out the breast tumour steroid receptor assay service. She then joined the Antibody Generation Group at AstraZeneca, working on antibody production, from production of peptide-carrier protein conjugates to multi-column affinity purification. She also used phage display technology for selection of monoclonal antibody fragments from phage libraries and validated antibodies in a variety of assay types.
Within AstraZeneca, Emma also worked as an in vitro translational research bioscientist in the cell cycle area, providing discovery support. This included developing the methods for the isolation, growth and freezing of human PBMCs to support early clinical trials. She also carried out mammalian cell culture of a variety of tumour cell lines and HUVECs for compound dosing experiments. Emma also worked as a Protein Scientist in the Reagents and Assay Development Group carrying out small scale E. coli multi-parallel protein supply and producing recombinant proteins via E.coli and Baculovirus systems on a larger scale, which she also purified via a variety of purification methodologies.
Emma moved to Allergan Biologics in Speke, Liverpool as a Cell Line Development Scientist developing mammalian cell lines for production of biologic molecules from DNA preparation through to transfection, single cell cloning, screening, and assessment. She also enjoyed transferring many of the more time-consuming activities into an automation system, a robot she became quite attached to.
Emma has enjoyed a little time away from the lab, teaching herself DIY to complete various home and garden improvements, followed by Covid-19 lockdown home schooling.
Emma commented, “I am delighted to have re-joined many of my previous colleagues to work at Peak Proteins”.
Mark Abbott, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Peak Proteins added, “Emma is currently enjoying carrying out purifications again, and will be able to continue working with cell expression systems. We are looking forward to making full use of the variety of skills Emma has obtained during her career”.
