Welcome to the Abcam blog

Kim is responsible for our antibody licensing scheme, which makes her a very busy person! However, she was nice enough to let me interrupt her in the middle of some intimidating-looking Excel spreadsheets for a quick chat.

So what does she do at Abcam?

'When somebody gets in touch with me about licensing, the first thing I have to do is find out as much as possible about their antibody, which includes reading all the papers it's been referenced in. There's a big pile on my desk... after that, I make sure we get enough information for our product datasheets, and if we decide to make a business agreement, I negotiate that. But, that part's normally quite straightforward; we usually deal directly with the technology transfer department of the institution.'

Kim has been working on our licensing since November, and she has a few plans on how she wants to expand the scheme.

'Non-antibody products', she says, 'I'm really keen to establish that'. Although, for the moment, she'd be happy not to expand the staffing too much - 'Having this as a personal project does mean I can follow the antibodies all the way through the licensing process, and give them any the attention they need - I also do some marketing.'

And the thing she most enjoys about the job?

'Building up a relationship with researchers - some of them have been licensing with us for a few years now, and it's great when I hear about the new work they're doing and the exciting new antibodies they've developed. In the beginning, some of them had antibodies sitting in the freezer that they didn't know they could anything with. Oh, and I have a slight obsession with checking the sales figures to see how well our licensed antibodies are doing!'

I'll keep roaming about the Abcam office, so drop me a line if there's a particular part of our company that you'd be interested in hearing about.