Award will support exciting future for transformative x-ray technology company

X-ray technology has changed very little since the first tube-based x-ray machines were designed back in the Victorian-era. However, that’s all starting to change now as Adaptix Ltd – winners of The Oxford Trust Innovation Award 2016 – work to transform medical imaging for the benefit of everyone. Mark Evans, CEO of Adaptix, explains:

“We were delighted to win the Trust’s Innovation Award 2016. Receiving an award from Lady Audrey Wood was particularly special for us given the huge role that the Woods’ have played in medical imaging advances.

Adaptix aims to touch the lives of almost everyone by transforming diagnostic X-ray in medical and dental domains, and is aiming to double from eleven permanent staff over the next year.  Go to your local hospital or the dentist and you’ll experience the basic ‘planar’ X-ray diagnostic. Adaptix is aiming to transform this process through developing a ‘solid state’ X-ray emitting panel that will enable highly-portable low-dose 3D imaging at low cost. The analogy that we use is of TV – something that emits light rather than X-ray – where the transformation from a single large vacuum tube to flat panel LCD is effectively complete.

I see the market for the Adaptix Flat Panel Source being worth about $2.5bn annually, based on the precedent of X-ray detectors that followed a similar transition from old film technology to new digital panels.

With the award prize money we will be extending Adaptix’s existing internship program. As well as working with scientists at Liverpool University’s Physics Department and Oxford University’s Mathematics Department, and experts at Manchester and Warwick universities, Adaptix also currently host two undergraduate interns from a specialist medical imaging programme at Strasbourg University. We get fantastic value from our relationship with Strasbourg, building on the experience of hosting an engineering student that interned with us last year.  Personally I was privileged to participate in a European exchange at Stockholm University, so I see the value of international exchanges being on many levels to the students, the participating institutions, the host companies and the countries – this is particularly so in science where Europe must work together to compete with the US and China.  We are very much aligned with the Oxford Trust’s mission in relation to investment and science and education driving economic and social progress.”

Arnaud Abreu, one of our Strasbourg interns said “It has been great to come to Oxford and work with one of the many great tech companies that are being grown here. Adaptix is already collaborating with several European companies and institutions, and it is really interesting to see how important early international collaborations are when a company is developing new technology focussed on a global market.”

In many markets and technologies, the UK lacks critical mass, so working with European companies, universities and clinical institutions is of vital importance in building a business that will create long-term employment in secure well-paid jobs for the UK.

Read more about Adaptix.