Autumn news from companies in our innovation centres

It has been another busy season with exciting developments for The Oxford Trust as well as companies in our innovation centres, the Wood Centre for Innovation and the Oxford Centre for Innovation.

The sale of Macclesfield House, the current site of the Oxford Centre for Innovation, in May and plans for the expansion of the Wood Centre for Innovation with a new Aspen Building to accommodate growing startups bring exciting changes and opportunities ahead.

On the move

We’re saying farewell to a few companies from the Oxford Centre for Innovation, who are moving on to other new and larger premises accommodating their growth. In August, Learning with Experts moved on to One St Aldates and Infleqtion UK, Createc and TNG Technology Consulting will leave us over the next couple of months. Infleqtion UK and Createc are among the longest standing clients of the Oxford Centre for Innovation and we have seen them achieve great successes and growth along their journey. TNG Technology Consulting joined us in 2023,  and have since grown rapidly from a team of two to 18.

While we say farewell to some companies, we were pleased to welcome a new company this summer to the Wood Centre for Innovation, biotech startup Bioarchitech (feature image). Founded by Professor Geoff Hale, Kevin Maskell, and Hannah Chen and LiLi Wang, Bioarchitech is developing immunotherapy for the treatment of common cancers. Get to know more about them in our “Five Minutes with Kevin Maskell, CSO of Bioarchitech”.

Funding

There has been much funding success to celebrate over the recent months.

Optellum in the Oxford Centre for Innovation has secured joint funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research and the Office for Life Sciences’ new £148 million cancer programme to conduct a study on the impact of its AI technology on early diagnosis of lung cancer. In partnership with Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, the study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of their AI product in relieving pressure on radiology departments and improving patient outcomes by enhancing diagnostic accuracy and supporting the early detection of cancers.

NavLive in the Oxford Centre for Innovation has been awarded a UK Innovate Grant for its BuiltRight Project, to carry out a beta trial of its prototype with commercial end users in 2024 and 2025, focusing on longitudinal monitoring of construction projects.

Oxford Drug Design, which uses AI computational methods to discover and develop novel therapeutics, has been awarded funding in the Collaborative Discovery Programme launched by the Cystic Fibrosis Antimicrobial Resistance Syndicate. The company has been awarded £466K of the £3m fund to help identify a new therapy for the treatment of bacterial infections in cystic fibrosis sufferers, building on previous work identifying new compounds to combat multi-drug-resistant bacterial infections.

Oxford Drug Design has also been awarded a joint grant, with Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute, from the UK Medical Research Council National Mouse Genetics Network Business Engagement Fund to generate proof of principle data for Oxford Drug Design’s novel small molecule anticancer compounds.

Partnerships, collaborations and networks

Accelerating innovation in quantum applications, Infleqtion is partnering with Thorlabs to commercialise their optical fibre collimation package. The fibre collimation package, developed as part of the consortium of Innovate UK-funded project QT Assemble, is robust and cost-effective, with enhanced performance. This licensing agreement with Thorlabs gives more researchers and product development teams access to advanced collimation capabilities, to boost the development of quantum technologies.

Oxford Brain Diagnostics in the Oxford Centre for Innovation has been appointed to evaluate drug efficacy in a phase 2 clinical trial for NeuroTherapia. NTRX-07. The orally-available small molecule is being developed as an innovative drug treatment to combat neuroinflammation, a key driver of Alzheimer’s disease progression.

Jack Fertility in the Wood Centre for Innovation has been featured as the health tech case study in the Barclays Eagle Labs ‘Exploring the UK’s growth infrastructure potential’ powered by Beauhurst. Co-founders Lily Elsner and Nick Shipley have been actively supporting their networks. Lily featured on the Oxford Plus podcast and Nick featured in Sifted. They’ve participated in the Sifted Summit, hosted an angel investing event at the Saïd Business School, spoke on a panel on Investing in Life Sciences at Cooley coordinated by Life Sciences People, among others.

CardMedic in the Oxford Centre for Innovation is expanding to work with more NHS Trusts. The app that reduces communication barriers with access to clinical interactions in over 45 languages will be boosting maternity care with the Nottingham University Hospitals Trust’s Nottinghamshire Local Maternity and Neonatal System. The Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust has also rolled out the app to 7500 staff and is the latest large healthcare provider to go live with CardMedic. CardMedic also announced it is part of the new Digital Consent & Health Inequalities Innovation Programme from Warwick Innovation District and University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust.

Dr. Xianxin Guo, Head of Research at Lumai and expert in the field of optical computing has been selected by the Royal Academy of Engineering to join its prestigious Shott Accelerator programme. Lumai, based in the Wood Centre for Innovation, is working with industry partners to enable AI deployment at scale using its unique 3D optical technology for fast, energy-efficient, and more cost-effective AI acceleration performance.

Quantum Dice in the Oxford Centre for Innovation has joined the IoT Security Foundation as a member.  The IoT Security Foundation is a global, not-for-profit organization addressing critical cybersecurity challenges facing the rapidly expanding Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem.

Quantum Dice also announced a partnership with SCI Semiconductor to bring quantum-backed cryptography to advance security systems for sectors with high-integrity requirements, including smart energy, critical infrastructure, aerospace and defense, telecommunications, automotive, Industry 4.0, and medical domains.

Learning with Experts has a new customer, independent community healthcare provider Connect Health, which serves over 375000 NHS patients across 29 NHS Integrate Care Boards, and have developed an online learning strategy for better health outcomes for their patients. Learning with Experts has also expanded to become the largest online provider of horticulture training courses in the UK

QuantrolOx announced its collaboration with Anyon Technologies to expand its QPU architecture. They will work together on integrating Anyon’s custom electronics into QuantrolOx’s software solution, QuantumEDGE.

In more news from QuantrolOx, the FERROMON project, of which QuantrolOx is part of the consortium, has been selected and supported by the EU as one of the Pathfinder projects in the field of quantum computation. QuantrolOx has also joined the ARCTIC consortium. The ARCTIC (Advanced Research on Cryogenic Technologies for Innovative Computing) project, which aims to establish a comprehensive European supply chain for cryogenic photonics, microelectronics, and, in general, cryo-microsystems around the emerging quantum computing industry and different cryo-enabled ICT applications.

At the beginning of October, The Oxford Trust, Oxford Innovation Space and Barclays Eagle Labs hosted a successful Exit Right event, providing local businesses with valuable insights on how to best secure investment through Oxfordshire’s funding matrix. The event featured a distinguished panel of funding and investment experts. With a full lecture hall, attendees were provided with knowledge and resources on funding to help their ventures grow and thrive. If you missed it, look out for the recording available soon.

Research and product developments

In July, Infleqtion announced the installation of a cutting-edge neutral atom quantum computer at the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) to become the first company to deploy hardware at the NQCC under their quantum computing testbed programme. Together with colleagues at the NQCC, Infleqtion is establishing essential infrastructure components, such as network infrastructure, safety protocols, and security measures, as part of the project to understand different hardware approaches, establish appropriate metrics and explore the types of applications that benefit most from each technological approach.

Infleqtion announced the successful completion of the first phase of its Quantum Enhanced Inertial Navigation Systems (Q-NAV) project awarded by Innovate UK, culminating in its Quantum Navigation Industry Day in June. The Q-NAV  project builds on from their previous world-first flight demonstration of its ultra-cold matter platform for quantum Positioning, Navigation, and Timing, to develop a Quantum-Enhanced Inertial Navigation System.

In June, Infleqtion announced another milestone, the first UK commercial delivery of its groundbreaking optical atomic clock, Tiqker™, to the University of Strathclyde and the research group of Professor Riis.

Optellum launched its multimodal therapy AI guidance platform for life science research, which it showcased for the first time at the 2024 American Society for Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago in June. The multi-modal AI software shows potential to optimise lung cancer treatment and guide precision lung cancer care across the patient journey, from early identification to predicting response and monitoring.

Oxford Drug Design announced it has successfully completing the first in vivo validation in their potential first-in-class approach against multiple tumours. The results of a 28-day mouse trial showed clear efficacy as well as dose response and the new data demonstrates the potential of the company’s innovative proprietary molecules to modulate the function of tRNA synthetases as a novel approach to cancer.

CardMedic featured in a PhD study that showed how the app transformed patient satisfaction and healthcare equity.

Awards

Lumai has won the The Open Compute Project Foundation ‘Best Overall Technology’ award at the Future Technologies Symposium 2024.

Createc in the Oxford Centre for Innovation was awarded a prestigious King’s Award for Enterrpise for innovation in May, following a Queen’s Award in 2019. More recently, their CEO Will Newsom and CTO & Founder Matt Mellor have been recognised as Ones to Watch in The LDC Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders 2024.

As we near the end of 2024, we are pleased to reflect on and celebrate the many successes of companies in our centres. We look forward to the next season and the many more exciting developments to come.

 

Feature image: Bioarchitech joined the Wood Centre for Innovation this summer