Notice

Research Ventures Catalyst: successful applications

Updated 26 March 2024

Further information regarding each of the 12 successful applications that will progress to the next stage of the Research Ventures Catalyst Programme. We recommend looking at the PDF versions for an overview of each proposal.

Artemis Metrics

Executive summary

Accurately measuring, monitoring, and verifying biodiversity is an urgent challenge equally important and parallel to net zero targets. Led by Greensphere and our Gaia Sciences innovation platform (comprising of 12 leading UK applied biosciences institutes), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) and the University of York are collaborating to create the world’s first biodiversity Focused Research Organisation (FRO). Representing the research of over 4000 world-leading scientists, the FRO intends to accelerate transdisciplinary research, innovation, training and policy in biodiversity measurement, monitoring, verification, data ethics and in corporate and public awareness and policy. Artemis Metrics will bring a unique tripartite structure under the FRO – of research and innovation, training/public awareness, and policy/corporate pledges - to unblock the constraints that currently exist between research, scale up and corporate/government adoption of technology and solutions in this space.

Problem statement

Biodiversity is the bedrock of life-supporting natural systems, and a leading indicator of carbon sequestration. So far, 51% and rising of major UK and US companies have a biodiversity pledge but no metrics (only 5% have ‘targets’). The UK’s Environmental Improvement Plan, Biodiversity Net Gain laws and EU’s 2030 Biodiversity strategy aim to raise biodiversity by various targets, but none have any metrics systems to track progress. Large corporates and commercial forestry, land and agriculture asset owners are moving to Regenerative Agriculture, but none have trusted, scalable ways of proving biodiversity progress, and few evidence-led methods to do so. Globally, whole countries increasingly want to deploy technology and observation networks, but standards and technologies to enable do not exist at scale. With 72% of Eurozone companies and 75% of loans in Europe (and UK) exposed to the loss of biodiversity, the destruction of nature will lead to the destruction of the economy. Finally, the collection of data, ranging from carbon sequestration to eDNA monitoring, poses several challenges to adherence to COP15 outcomes and international laws (like the Nagoya treaty). Never has there been a more urgent need to bring a multi-disciplinary approach to solving such a critical issue from both scientifically accurate as well as ethical and standards-based viewpoints.

Value proposition

The FRO model allows Artemis to parallel-track three key interactive areas of research – the science of measuring, monitoring, and verifying biodiversity, policy governing biodiversity and potential policy improvements stemming from new science, and the data ethics around collecting information about biodiversity. These research areas in turn allow for the development of MMV tools, account for dynamic systems and recommend ‘most-right/least-wrong’ iterating courses of action on MMV, policy and data ethics in due course. The research will subsequently support and in turn be supported (financially) by three limited companies – the first incubating technology spinouts, the second providing corporate/NGO biodiversity policy training and the final one becoming a corporate pledge organisation deriving its revenue from fee memberships and audits.

Operating model

Artemis Metrics will be a not-for-profit SME company, limited by guarantee, at the intersection of biodiversity policy, academia, and industry. The not-for-profit SME umbrella company will house the research programmes and 100% own the three revenue generating entities that the initial funding will kickstart – to be self-funding and subsidising the research in the parent company in due course. Based in York, the heart of the BioYorkshire initiative, the FRO’s purpose is to inspire collaboration between business, UK research institutes and government in solving the problem statement, underpinned by the best possible research.

About Greensphere

Greensphere: Investing and commercialising UK science from the world’s largest group of globally-renowned bioscience and environmental institutes to mitigate climate change and global biodiversity loss, including RBG Kew, UKCEH, University of York and 9 others via the Gaia Sciences Innovation (GSI) Platform.

RBG Kew: Understanding and protecting plants and fungi for the well-being of people and the future of all life on Earth, including World-leading libraries - Herbarium, Fungarium, Millennium Seed Bank.

UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology: Delivering data, research and solutions to the biodiversity crisis that underpin global policies, commercial innovation and conservation action to conserve and restore biodiversity, natural resources and ecosystem functions for human well-being and livelihoods.

University of York: including the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity - interdisciplinary research into the complexities of biodiversity change and society’s response; and the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products - realising the potential of plants and microbes to provide sustainable supplies of food, fuel and chemicals.

For enquiries, please contact info@greenspherecapital.com or visit www.greenspherecapital.com.

Bind

 A new venture to exploit disordered proteins as drug targets

Overview

Many incurable diseases (cancer, neurodegeneration) involve intrinsically disordered proteins. Considered undruggabble by the mainstream pharmaceutical industry, disordered proteins continuously change their three-dimensional shapes and lack long-lived sites to which drug-molecules can attach themselves. Our mission is to make disordered proteins druggable. We will screen millions of disordered protein/drug-molecule pairs to learn the rules of drugging disordered proteins. Building on our expertise and working with academic/industrial partners, we will leverage cutting-edge biology, engineering, and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver new drugs and tools. To accomplish this in a manner for maximum societal benefit, we will establish a non profit Focused Research Organisation (FRO).

Bind: our vision

Our goal is to map drug-binding capacities for every disordered protein, thus catalysing next-generation drug discovery.

How we’ll do this

We aim to enable prediction of small-molecule binders from disordered protein sequences alone. We will first build a high-throughput, parallel platform (combining experiment, computation, and AI) to increase state-of-the-art screening efficiency to probe millions of small-molecule/disordered protein interactions. We will leverage this tool to create an enormous dataset and ultimately build an AI system that, given any disordered protein sequence, will predict promising drug candidates.

Why this can’t be done in academic labs

The funding/infrastructure required to engineer an integrated, high-throughput, interdisciplinary platform (instrumentation that does not yet exist) and create an extremely large dataset exceeds academic resources/norms. Academic salary and contract limitations also restrict top engineering talent recruitment software/hardware).

Why VC/large pharmaceutical companies won’t do this

We will create a large, publicly-available dataset for the benefit of the UK R&D ecosystem. Pharmaceutical companies and start-ups are disincentivised from sharing their tools, hits, and understanding of general binding mechanisms, even though doing so could dramatically accelerate drug discovery and improve societal health.

A focused research organisation

Our mission—make disordered proteins druggable—and the scale of our science are bold, rooted in public good, and require a strong engineering focus without academic publishing nor industrial profit pressure. To maximise impact, we will create a UK-based FRO to achieve technical milestones (creation of high-impact tools, datasets) within 7 years. We are committed to sharing our work publicly (tools, AI software, data), while also maximising translational impact by protecting IP of specific therapeutic molecules to ensure they can be accessed by medical professionals/patients. Upon completion, we will have the tools/expertise to launch new, non-profit initiatives and/or start-ups.

We are seeking £15 million from a variety of sources and 1:1 match funding from Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) should we be successful in the Research Ventures Catalyst programme, up to a final total of £30 million.

Contact us at info@bindresearch.com.

CybergenX

Vision

Engineered cells will be the factories of the future, revolutionising manufacturing across all sectors from developing new materials to producing medicine and food. This shift holds the promise of significantly reducing the reliance on fossil fuels in the creation of everyday products, thereby contributing to the achievement of the net zero goal. Engineered cells will be “living robots” that we’ll be able to program to accomplish the most challenging tasks.

Challenge

Our ability to engineer and control cells today is hampered by a fundamental gap: unlike the internal dynamics of robots, we know very little of what happens inside a cell, our picture of intracellular dynamics lacks depth and resolution. To fully realise the potential, we need bespoke AI foundational models that, like ChatGPT, achieve unprecedented predictive power on biodynamics data. The challenge is: ChatGPT was trained on a huge body of data, “internet-scale” data. Engineering Biology lacks ChatGPT-level models because it lacks rich and big data.

Solution

Enter CybergenX, a pioneering Focused Research Organisation dedicated to addressing this challenge by developing a technology that will transform the way we understand and interact with biological systems. In doing so CybergenX will usher in the era of Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPT) in Engineering Biology.

CybergenX technology will increase by 1000 times the number of intracellular signals measured and the frequency at which they are sampled. We will then use this data to train a new type of AI foundational model that takes inspiration from the transformers used in ChatGPT and specialise them to biological dynamics.

Benefits

Open access to data, models and protocols for industrially relevant cells

• The highest resolution dynamic data
• Most predictive biological models

Transform Engineering Biology through the power of AI

• Unlocks the full potential of a predicted trillion-dollar emerging sector (McKinsey report, 2020)
• Provides cost-effective, risk-reduced, high-rewarding solutions

Follow-on commercial opportunities

Contact details

Filippo Menolascina
Professor of Engineering Biology
University of Edinburgh

Email: CybergenX@ed.ac.uk

Find out more at: eil.ac/CybergenX

EVA

Engineering the 21st century.

From AI-on-chip technologies to bio-interfaces.

Imagine a world where you have the power of a data centre in the palm of your hand without impacting the environment or your own security.

Scale	Speed	Sustainability	Social Responsibility	Smart-everything
Land and resource usage for data centres and Telecomms is unsustainable	Large and slow AI models mean more servers serving fewer customers	Datacentre energy demands are expected to reach up to 20% of global consumption if unchecked	Cloud computing is vulnerable to cybersecurity, privacy and trust breaches	Miniaturising electronics is increasingly unsustainable

our technological targets

Scale	Speed	Sustainability	Social Responsibility	Smart-everything
Support up to 500x more computations per second	Reach up to 100x faster access to data	Use up to 1000x less energy for computing	Deliver training capabilities at the edge making it 100x cheaper to access AI capabilities	Deploy AI at 100x smaller form-factors

We are creating a novel entrepreneurial engine to generate semiconductor technologies that drive optimal AI processing exploiting IP across a diverse range of applications and markets.

The Edinburgh Venture builder for AI-hardware, EVA, will co-locate researchers, innovators and investors creating critical mass in a thematically cohesive business. This will translate academic research that has clear market fit, adopting an agile approach to commercialisation that capitalises on successes and failures, and upskills a dedicated resource to deliver viable technologies underpinned by world-leading research.

Find out more at: eil.ac/EVA

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, in collaboration with Oxford Nanopore

New organisation to develop and clinically evaluate a prototype metagenomic sequencing-based test

Clinical metagenomics is the genomic sequencing of all microorganisms in a patient sample to uncover complete pathogen and other microbial information, ideally in a single test within a few hours. This means not only providing the species or names of pathogenic bacteria, fungi, or viruses, but also whether they carry antimicrobial resistance or virulence factors, and whether they are common, rare, unexpected, or completely novel. This information can inform the best antimicrobial treatment with immediate patient benefit. It can also be shared with infection control and public health teams for surveillance of emerging variants, resistant organisms, or novel organisms including those with pandemic potential, to inform public health strategies including rapid interventions and vaccine campaigns.

Our vision is for metagenomic testing to be equitably embedded in healthcare systems around the world at the first points of contact of patients presenting with an infectious disease. Although this will be a journey, there is an urgent need to shorten the implementation timeline as much as possible. There are concerning increases in antimicrobial resistance, predicted to be the biggest killer globally by 2050, multiple examples of emerging infections and predictions of further pandemics either naturally occurring or artificially constructed.

To deliver on this vision, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust will develop a new partnership for the public benefit to design and clinically evaluate a prototype metagenomic sequencing device, with the dual purpose of providing immediate clinical results for patient care and pathogen sequence data for real-time national and international surveillance. The partnership will collaborate with Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) who have developed ground-breaking portable rapid sequencing devices and potentially with additional organisations with expertise in processing samples for clinical application.

This new organisation will benefit from over 5 years of intensive translational research developing metagenomic workflows that have gone through successful multi-year proof-of-concept pilot service evaluation on the intensive care unit. These largely manual laboratory process will be developed into an automated solution that can handle capacity requirements of a routine hospital service. The metagenomic device will focus on respiratory infection, the biggest infectious killer globally and most common cause of sepsis, but the intention is that it can be configured to process other patient or animal fluid samples or air and water samples, to have relevance across the One Health agenda.

The new organisation will bring together specialists from a range of professional backgrounds and will be designed to shorten the traditional delivery time for innovation into healthcare from estimates of 15+ years to about 5 years. This will be facilitated by co-locating staff on campus to provide a shared understanding of clinical needs alongside the practicalities of developing and taking a new regulated technology into routine laboratory service. This will help break-down familiar barriers between academia, industry and healthcare which can hinder timely progress towards an end-goal. This is particularly important when developing a technological solution at the intersection of the major societal challenges of respiratory infection and sepsis, antimicrobial resistance, future pandemics and greater protection against threats to Biosecurity.

For further information please contact Tom Langford, Project Manager via Tom.Langford@gstt.nhs.uk.

Materials MedTech Centre

Overview of project proposal

The Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials/Tata Steel Materials MedTech Centre, will be a first of a kind £30 million public-private partnership with a new approach to applying materials innovations to support the nation’s health and position the UK as global leader. The Centre will connect a diverse ecosystem of healthcare providers, research leaders, industry players and investors centred in the NorthWest and North of England. It will link the whole supply chain through clear regulatory, de-risking and investment pathways. By combining specialist clinical and technical knowledge with commercialisation knowhow, it will unlock new opportunities for sustainable healthcare and accelerate commercialisation in rapidly expanding global markets.

The proposed model is structured to make a paradigm shift to the medical materials innovation ecosystem and bring a step-change in delivering vital new solutions to clear unmet healthcare needs. The strong partnership with Tata Steel’s New Materials and Graphene division will help address scale-up capability and economic viability. The precise aim is to accelerate the discovery and application of new biomedical materials in specific areas of high impact i.e. bioelectronics, wound care and bone replacement.

The centre will enable early access to major advances in materials science from UK universities and research institutes, and help achieve greater positive societal impact from the research, through major healthcare companies, start-ups and healthcare providers. By combining clear ‘top-down’ demands with ‘bottom-up’ understanding of materials opportunities the centre will bring together the complete supply chain to bridge the readiness gaps between lab-based materials research and proven, de-risked technologies that can be integrated and adopted at scale. The proposed model has been proven in pharma by Apollo Therapeutics (which has now raised $400 million) bringing together university drug discovery expertise with drug development knowhow of three major pharma companies. This would be the first use of that model outside pharma.

The centre will bring an understanding of the needs of commercial readiness to de-risk health innovations and create more attractive opportunities for both industry and the wider investment community. Although initially funded through government and Tata Steel (via the agreed investment in Royce) the aim is that the centre will become sustainable through additional industry funding because of the new and highly effective commercialisation pathways created.

Advanced Materials and Manufacturing, Health Innovations and Digital have been recognised as three of Northern England’s four prime capabilities with major sectoral strengths and R&D assets (NorthWest life-science industry sector >£6 billion turnover) and also priority areas of the GM industrial strategy. The Royce/Tata Steel Materials Medtech Centre will work at the intersection of these prime capabilities aligning with the regional industrial strategy to improve productivity of the region. The devolved health and care budget to GM means that working closely with GMCA, additional support will likely be provided. The development of the £1.7 billion Innovation District by UoM and Bruntwood Sci-Tech (ID Manchester) and the Mayoral Development Zone Atom Valley with a focus on materials innovation and manufacturing provides additional opportunities for further investment and an ideal place to house the centre.

Contact details

Dr. Ania Jolly
Head of Research and Business Development, Henry Royce Institute
ania.jolly@royce.ac.uk

www.royce.ac.uk
07825 207620

PA: Oliver Drakeford
oliver.drakeford@manchester.ac.uk

MEMetic

Empower the future with MEMetic: catalysing a global water revolution

By synergising nature’s biological processes with cutting-edge synthetic, sustainable polymer chemistry, MEMetic crafts exquisitely selective membranes for the removal and recovery of critical waste products in water.

Aston University’s MEMetic technology heralds a global shift, introducing a pivotal solution at the intersection of waste and water. This transformative technology is poised to revolutionize water management across the globe, facilitating clean water access, advancing biopharmaceutical and bioproduct processes, enabling lithium recovery in battery recycling, and tackling a myriad of environmental challenges including silica, heavy metal, and phosphate management.

A sustainable vision: seven years to change the world

Our vision spans a seven-year development cycle, aiming to refine and scale MEMetic technology for these global applications. This ambitious journey builds upon several million pounds in awards from peer-reviewed research grants, underscoring the project’s solid scientific foundation and potential for transformative impact.

Fundamentally we intend to take this sustainable technology forward, at pace, through a focussed research organisation hosted by Aston University, collaborating with industry to address genuine real-world challenges.

We envisage that at the end of this funding cycle we will have the capabilities to build an entire industrial base for the UK aligned with anyone who has challenges in wastewater management, as long as microbes have got their first (and they almost always have!). In the future, guided by computational biology and AI, we will design transporters to move any molecule we wish.

Invest in a future where innovation meets sustainability

We are seeking £12 million in match funding to unlock a further £12 million in UK government investment. We are actively seeking philanthropists, co-investors, industry, and anyone who wants to contribute to development of a sustainable future for our planet and society. Join us in advancing a technology that promises not only to impact every manufacturing sector in the world, but fundamentally aims to foster a cleaner, more sustainable world.

Contact

Dr Alan Goddard
a.goddard@aston.ac.uk

Dr Matthew Derry
m.derry@aston.ac.uk

Mr Luke Southan
l.southan@aston.ac.uk

Mr Paul Knobbs
p.r.knobbs@aston.ac.uk

Newton’s Cradle

Newton’s Tree proposes to establish Newton’s Cradle, a medical AI venture builder delivered by a consortium of healthcare providers, academia and a multi-vendor network. The Cradle will develop a validated methodology for building medical AI products, in collaboration with the health system, to improve patient outcomes and operational efficiency. Contact the team directly at info@newtonstree.com for more information on this proposal.

PharosAI

Mission: navigating the path to AI-assisted healthcare

We are facing a UK and global challenge in healthcare

• £282 billion UK healthcare cost = 11.3%of UK GDP
• 160,000 NHS vacancies
• 10% increase in disgnostics tests per annum (p.a.)
  
  
• Increased burden on healthcare systems
• Increasing complexity of tests and treatments
• Declining workforce 20% reduction in histopathologists

Opportunity: Healthcare is going digital

Digitisation of imaging, the genomic medicine service and the 2024 roll-out of digital pathology present unique opportunities for multimodal AI-driven precision medicine:

• Early detection

• Disease diagnosis

• Treatment precision

• Discovery science

Problem: UK is slow in adopting AI-assisted healthcare

• High quality multimodal datasets to train AI models do not exist.

• Current R&D models do not support efficient deployment of AI solutions into the NHS or healthcare providers.

• Lack of clarity around clinical evaluation and regulatory approval pathways.

Solution: PharosAI

A new operational model to provide highly curated and refined multi-modal datasets combined with digital solutions for swift development, robust clinical evaluation and efficient deployment of AI into the NHS.

• A “data refinery” creating clinically valuable and structured multimodal datasets primed for AI.

• A rich data repository with >50,000 patient samples from two London biobanks at its core.

• A “plug and play” app store for developing, evaluating, and deploying AI solutions in healthcare.

• Lend-me-an-expert programmes to upskill the workforce for future sustainability.

• Novel navigator function to support researchers, inventors and innovators.

The PharosAI Team

• PharosAI founded by King’s College London, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Barts Cancer Institute and Barts Health NHS Trust.

• Centred around the King’s Health Partners Cancer Biobank and Breast Cancer Now Tissue Bank our unique consortium consists of academia, healthcare providers and industry.

• In discussions with partners such as NHS England, UK Biobank, Royal College of Pathologists, Genomics England, GSK, Paige and Google.

Anita Grigoriadis

Professor of Molecular and Digital Pathology and Head of Comprehensive Cancer Centre at King’s College London, Breast Cancer Now Unit London, Exec-commitee member CRUK, City of London Cancer Centre.

Majid Kazmi

Consultant Haematologist, Deputy Medical Director at Guy’s and St Thomas’ , Director of Innovation Cancer and Surgery at Guy’s and St Thomas’, Clinical Advisor at Advent Life Sciences.

J Louise Jones

Lead Pathologist at North Thames Genomic Laboratory Hub, Pathology Advisor Genomics England, PI Breast Cancer Now Tissue Bank Queen Mary University London.

Gregory Verghese

Early Career Researcher at King’s College London, Machine Learning Scientist Breast Cancer Now Unit London.

Danny Ruta

AI Clinical Lead at Guy’s and St Thomas’, Honorary Senior Lecturer at King’s College London.

Total Addressable Market

• £805 million digital pathology

• £5 billion UK healthcare data p.a.

• £190 billion pharma R&D spend p.a.

The current funding seeks to raise £20 million

• £10 million from Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) should we be successful in the Research Ventures Catalyst programme.

• £10 million private investment.

• £5.5 million secured (from external sources).

Business model assumes net positive cash flow within 2 years.

Estimated £125 million value of biobank assets based on anticipated value of refined multimodal data for 1000 patients with Triple Negative Breast Cancer.

For more information please contact: anita.grigoriadis@pharosai.co.uk or gregory.verghese@pharosai.co.uk.

Plant Cell Research Centre

The Plant Cell Research Centre (PCRC) will unlock the economic potential of gene editing in plants by developing universal tools for plant cell regeneration. PCRC is a public-private co-investment opportunity, hosted by two world-leading plant science research organisations, the John Innes Centre and The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich.

Vision

An open-access, species and genotype independent plant cell regeneration technology to accelerate the application of gene editing for crop improvement, biotechnology and conservation.

Unprecedented need

Population growth is increasing the demand for food, fuel, and fibre. A rapidly changing climate requires more resilient crops to secure harvests and protect nature. Human activity is accelerating the loss of plant species, and the need to grow more crops using less resources has never been greater. We need crops that need less fertilizers and pesticides, and that can thrive in future climate scenarios. To achieve this, we need a new generation of crops.

Opportunity

Recent advances in gene editing technology and changes in the UK’s regulation of precision bred organisms creates an unprecedented opportunity. For the UK to become the world leader in the application of plant biotechnology and to support the development of climate-resilient crops, that require less inputs without losing yield, and to preserve biodiversity.

However, there are bottlenecks that hold us back. The current gene editing technology can only be applied to a fraction of plant species, and we need to be able to reliably generate full plants from gene edited plant cells. The plant cell regeneration technologies developed by the PCRC will be used to preserve, maintain and optimise plants for agriculture, conservation and in new systems to produce natural plant-based products medicines.

From discovery research through to translational outputs the PCRC will develop mechanisms by which a single plant cell can become a full plant, a process called plant cell totipotency. This universal plant cell regeneration technology will allow crop-independent gene editing to ensure that research discoveries reach their full potential.

Commercialisation will establish a UK-based service or Clinical Research Organisation (CRO) that can deploy these technologies to support the use of gene editing to the crop improvement, pharmaceutical or conservation needs of industry and society.

The PCRC will span fundamental discovery through to full commercial application - Technology Readiness Levels 1-7, and will:

• Accelerate the development of nutrient dense, low-input and climate resilient crops for UK agriculture.
• Support global food security and global sustainability goals as defined by the UN.
• Reduce the barriers to the adoption of plant production systems to bring plant natural product medicines to market.

Co-investment

We are seeking £10 million from DSIT through the Research Ventures Catalyst programme to support the fundamental / academic research within the PCRC. This will be for staff, consumables, facility access costs and for commissioning subcontracts.

We are seeking Private and 3rd sector co-investment to support infrastructure development, facilities, equipment and staff for BRACT the CRO and Service Company.

Contact

Dr Jonathan Clarke
jonathan.clarke@jic.ac.uk
07771 868406.

Psychiatry Consortium

Accelerating medicines discovery for mental health

There is an urgent need for improved mental health therapeutics, underscored by the staggering economic impact, estimated at £117.9 billion annually in the UK. In spite of the recognised unmet need, there are a lack of clinical assets in late-stage pipelines for mental health conditions. This is because there are significant barriers to innovation, (e.g., accurate models of the blood-brain-barrier, lack of understanding of distinct patient populations) leading to high failure rates once therapeutic assets reach the clinic. Our national R&D platform, called the ‘Psychiatry Consortium’ will provide a collaborative platform, bringing together partners from pharma, SMEs, charities, and academia to co-develop drug discovery technologies that will address ‘innovation barriers’ within mental health drug discovery - dismantling bottlenecks and enabling the development of new therapeutics. These innovation barriers will be identified during the seed corn funding stage and transformed into what we call ‘Grand Challenges’ – which will be a collection of innovation streams bringing together diverse partners to co-develop enabling drug discovery technologies.

The outcome of the Grand Challenges will be a collection of drug discovery assets which address the major barriers to innovation within the Mental Health conditions. Assets could include, novel drug discovery platforms, multi-omics models (including spatial assays), predictive in vitro and in vivo assays. While collaborative in nature, we are building IP frameworks to ensure that the Psychiatry consortium retains access to the assets for its continued financial growth and sustainability. Longer-term we expect the utilisation of these assets to lead to future partnerships for the development of novel therapeutic interventions, which the Psychiatry Consortium will be a central part of, bringing additional revenue streams. The Psychiatry Consortium will work on a subscription-based model, which pays for the operational and management aspects of the platform and allows members to take part in the R&D activities of the consortium.

The Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) is uniquely positioned to lead this initiative, thanks to its extensive network across academia, patient-focused charities, global pharma, and the UK’s SME community. In addition, MDC has a range of cutting-edge technologies, capabilities and existing infrastructure that will support the Grand Challenges. We are committed to moving beyond traditional R&D silos, advocating for an integrated and innovative approach to mental health medicine discovery.

The Psychiatry Consortium is championing a collective effort to transform mental health therapeutics, through the development of transformative drug discovery assets using an ecosystem-wide collaborative model. We strive for a future with accessible, effective mental health therapies, advancing the UK as a leader in life sciences.

If interested, please contact Sara Imarisio at sara.imarisio@md.catapult.org.uk or visit Psychiatry Consortium website.

UKCEPTI

To accelerate and scale the process for organ repair and support healthy ageing.

UK Centre of Excellence for Precision Therapeutic Implants (UKCEPTI) is an R&D centric venture of National and Global significance built around a core team with significant scientific, financial, and operational success in turning science into businesses. UKCEPTI provides a compelling opportunity to accelerate and scale R&D towards clinical and commercial use of 3D Engineered Tissues targeting a wide variety of applications, including organ repair and drug development. UKCEPTI’s patented and proven technology platform is the brainchild of Professor Hagan Bayley – founder of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, one of the UK’s most successful spinout companies, which floated on the London Stock Exchange for $4 billion 2021.

Why now?

By 2050, the ageing population is expected to be more than 2 billion. Ageing is a complex phenomenon; significant changes occur in our cells and tissues, resulting in diseased and damaged organs, often resulting in organ failure. Organ transplantation is a convoluted process; many people die waiting for an organ due to the lack of suitable donors. UKCEPTI’s vision is to build a future where through early intervention we can repair soft organs such as the Heart, Brain, Eye, Liver, Pancreas, etc., and avoid the need for an organ transplant. By using our engineered tissues incorporating cells derived from human stem cells we will increase healthy lifespans in a novel and affordable way.

Market opportunity

UKCEPTI aims to disrupt the tissue engineering applications market, which is expected to be worth more than $150 billion by 2030 and is growing at 20% annually. The rapid growth is propelled by the demand to restore, maintain, or improve damaged organs, and the application of advanced 3D tissue models to enable new drug discovery paradigms. Tissue engineering has gathered significant interest globally, but commercialisation is still in its infancy. Conventional 3D-engineered tissue structures have significant issues with uniformity, reproducibility, scalability, affordability, and yield.

UKCEPTI: our approach

UKCEPTI benefits from Professor Bayley’s precision 3D-engineered tissues, which offer unparalleled uniformity and quality while maintaining affordability. The high-resolution printing of living cells (using our propriety technology) yields 3D tissues that have high cell viability. The cells can be pre-patterned; they are functional and can differentiate and migrate, allowing Ox3DBio to produce complex structures replicating native human tissues.

Mending broken hearts

Our platform technology is organ-agnostic and will initially be applied to repair the damaged heart with printed living tissues derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). Current bovine patches have issues with durability, absorption, and contractility.

Dr Vivek Srivastava (consultant cardiac surgeon John Radcliffe

Hospital, Oxford, United Kingdom) says:

The concept of using Cardiac Patches for heart muscle repair holds significant promise with such patches showing good performance in pre-clinical studies. At current tissue sizes, the therapeutic implants developed by OXFORD 3D BIO seem to have properties that align for various heart repair applications and appear to be an excellent candidate warranting further investigation.

DR Srivastava has over 20 years of experience in adult cardiac surgery including  coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) and aortic valve replacement (AVR), which are the most common heart operations.

Key achievements

A beating human heart tissue has been demonstrated. The functional structures (synchronous beating) with retention of morphology have survived for more than 3 months. Notable achievements have been published in leading journals, including Nature, include (a) the loading of synthetic tissues with small molecules for patterned drug release; and (b) the integration of 3D-printed cerebral cortical tissue into a lesioned brain slice.

Passionate Founders - The team provides 65 years of combined professional experience in developing integrated technologies and growing multidisciplinary ventures:

• Professor Hagan Bayley FRS (CSO) - Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford. Has developed scalable techniques for the fabrication of 3D tissues, both living and synthetic.

• Dr Rakesh Roshan (CEO) - an entrepreneur with more than 20 years of Senior Management and Board experience in building tech start-ups from inception through exit.

• Dr Adrian Howd (CFO) - Life Science professional and experienced board member (Immunocore, Kymab, Poseida Therapeutics) - has led equity capital and debt raises totalling $500 million alongside multiple $ billion exits.

Fundraising and use of proceeds

UKCEPTI provides a unique opportunity for co-investors to participate in the development of its best-in-class therapeutic implants, and build a strong ecosystem through judicious collaborations with professionals, experts, and companies in the domain. The funds will be used to secure key value inflection points including maturing the technology platform and generating viable pre-clinical data confirming our approach to alleviating organ damage in a well-validated model before First-in-Human usage. With a world-class multidisciplinary team, global partnerships, and growing IP and product portfolios, supported by cutting-edge R&D, UKCEPTI is on a pathway to advance the readiness level of our technology and increase the healthy life span of the aging population.

Dr Rakesh Roshan
Email – rakeshroshan@oxford3dbio.com
https://www.bayleygroup.co.uk/team/professor-hagan-bayley.

Contact us

Proposals will need to secure matched funding from non-public sources to deliver their venture. Investors who are interested in any of the proposals above may contact applicants directly via the details provided on this page, or contact the RVC team at researchventures@dsit.gov.uk.