EnCor Biotechnology Inc. was founded by Dr. Gerry Shaw, who was born in Nottingham, England sometime in the last millennium. After school and working for a a year in a warehouse, he obtained a B. Sc. degree in University College London. He then went on to obtain a Ph.D. degree in the laboratory of Dr. Dennis Bray in King's College London. He started making antibodies in the laboratory of Prof. Klaus Weber and Dr. Mary Osborn, in Goettingen, in what was then West Germany. This was in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (also known as the Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer Institute). Then as now, one of the most useful tools available in biological research was a collection of good antibodies, and as part of his research projects Dr. Shaw learnt how to make both polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies. Many of these antibodies became widely used by collaborators, and some also became commercially available. In 1986 Dr. Shaw moved to the University of Florida to set up his own research laboratory. In this lab he continued to make a variety of antibodies to aid in his research interests, and also learned the molecular biological techniques necessary to express proteins in bacteria in bulk. This turned out to be a very useful thing to know, since antibodies can be generated against recombinant proteins quite easily, and this approach does not require tedious protein purification procedures. Using this approach he generated many antibodies to proteins that would have been difficult to purify from biological tissues, but which were easily obtained in recombinant form from bacteria. Once again many of these newer antibodies became popular with collaborators around the world and several found their way to commercial vendors, such as Chemicon, Novus Biologicals, Novocastra, Sigma-Aldrich and Zymed. In fact some of these antibodies became so successful commercially that shipping them out to companies and particularly making new batches became a major drain on Dr. Shaw's time. It was at this stage that he decided that the most appropriate way forward was to found a small company dedicated to the manufacture and marketing of these and other high quality antibodies. The company was founded in December 1999 and first occupied lab space in the Sid Martin Biotechnology Development Incubator under the name of EnCor Biotechnology Inc. in December 2002. EnCor continues to supply Dr. Shaw's antibodies to a growing list of other companies and also is beginning to sell directly to researchers. The company also is making novel high quality antibodies against proteins of particular interest. Finally the company has some research projects underway aimed at commercializing some of Dr. Shaw's recent scientific discoveries.
