TURNING IDEAS AND RESEARCH INTO LIFE-SAVING REALITY

“The Patient Status Engine offers remote monitoring and real time data analysis as we have added intelligence and decision support to the system. This frees up time –particularly useful when the NHS has a deficit of around 50,000 nurses (and the lack of nurses is a worldwide trend).”

The PSE has been approved for use in the UK, United States and Europe. Last October, Isansys announced a major contract with the second largest hospital group in India.

Michalis Papadakis, Brainomix

Ingelheim in European hospitals, collecting evidence of the value of our system. Since then we have been very successful in creating adoption in the NHS and were fortunate to win an NHSX AI award.

“We are in 50 per cent of the country’s stroke units. More importantly we continue to collect evidence of the impact we are delivering. In the Royal Berkshire Hospital, following the introduction of our technology, physicians can save an hour from the time a patient arrives at the hospital to the decision to transfer them to the Oxford hospital for a life-saving thrombectomy.”

Keith Errey, Isansys

“We began looking at patient safety on hospital wards more than a decade ago. It generally wasn’t recognised that one in 10 patients come out harmed in some way by their treatment and around 12,000 patients a year died unnecessarily in NHS hospitals. There are still around 10,000 avoidable deaths each year in UK hospitals as well as more than one million adverse events. We needed better surveillance for patients. Our solution is new wearable tech alongside equipment which is functionally equivalent to current bedside monitors which use cables and wires to connect to the patient. In our system, patients are connected wirelessly to equipment which automates patient observations and delivers it to a centralised point.

“Millions of patients miss out on life-saving treatments because a hospital’s front-line physicians don’t always have the expertise to interpret the brain scan, which is a key driver on how to diagnose a stroke and select patients for treatment.

Brainomix has developed an AI imaging platform to increase the uptake of existing treatment and improve the success of new treatments in stroke, cancer and fibrosis. We offer the most comprehensive stroke AI imaging solution globally and have operations in 30 countries and more than 300 hospitals. Our solution has so far helped with treatment decisions for more than one million patients.”

The company launched its stroke AI system in 2016. “We initially focused on the NHS and then realised it’s not the easiest healthcare system to crack and get adoption,” said Michalis. “We decided to partner with the global pharmaceutical company Boehringer

Simon Jones, SpyBiotech

The world still lacks effective vaccines for many viral, bacterial and parasitic infectious diseases, as well as therapeutic vaccines to advance the treatment of cancer.

SpyBiotech has developed a pioneering technology, the proprietary protein superglue SpyTag/SpyCatcher, which enables the development of safe and effective vaccines with greater ease and speed.

The pre-clinical company is initially focusing on a disease called Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV) disease, carried by between 50-90 per cent of the population. The HCMV virus is related to the herpes virus and for the vast majority it’s harmless, but can cause significant problems if newborns have been infected from their mother, or in the elderly or immunocompromised, causing birth defects and organ failure. There is no vaccine for it and a significant medical need. Overall, it affects more live births in the US than Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or Down’s and is estimated to generate more than $2 billion in healthcare costs annually.

SpyBiotech has reached the pre-clinical process development stage in under two years. A final vaccine candidate has been selected and both the virus-like particle and the HCMV antigen are currently being manufactured to Good Manufacturing Practice standards ahead of initiating clinical trials in 2023. (Good Manufacturing Practice represents the minimum standard a medicines manufacturer must meet in their production processes),

Adam Stoten, Evotec

“We work with a huge number of different partners, from nascent biotechs to big pharma companies to improve the efficiency, speed and ultimately probability of success in the development of new medicines.”

“Our activities in Milton Park have grown enormously from our UK origins as a University of Oxford spin-out (Oxford Asymmetry), which Evotec acquired in 2000. A major recent development has been the opening of Building 95, which provides a central hub for our campus and adds significant in vitro biology capability to our existing structural biology, discovery chemistry and development chemistry operations.”

Graham Griffiths, Vaccitech

“Vaccitech is most widely known as the biopharmaceutical company that coinvented the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, Vaxzevria. We licensed our rights to the product and ChAdOx Platform to Oxford University Innovation and AstraZeneca, who then took on further development and commercialisation. However, pre-dating the Covid-19 pandemic was the emergence of the MERS coronavirus, for which we still have a vaccine in development. MERS is a much nastier virus which thankfully doesn’t transfer as easily but does unfortunately kill about a third of the people it infects.

“We are also focused on infectious diseases for which there is currently no cure. For instance, chronic Hepatitis B (HBV), affects 250 million people worldwide. Most of the affected are in Asia and only about 10 per cent are getting treatment. We are in clinical stages of trying to find a cure for those people. It’s a hugely competitive field. We have introduced a new mechanism, using the ChAdOx platform which potently primes T cells against cells that are infected with HBV. A second immunisation with Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) boosts and expands the T cell response against the same target HBV antigens.”

Ben Thomas, Oxford BioTherapeutics

“We are a well-established cancer drug development company using large molecule antibody-based therapeutics to treat cancers. Our focus is on high unmet clinical need. The company is not interested in incremental improvements on what everyone else is doing. We are focusing on novel, first-in-class therapies.

“We have an asset in clinical trials in Europe and the USA where we are using our core technology platform, Antibody Drug

Conjugates, aimed at delivering a toxin to just cancer cells. Recently we signed another collaboration partnership with a wellestablished US company to develop another range of ADCs. We are also beginning to work in immune oncology and looking to treat a range of solid tumour cancers in the next few years.”

Miguel Silva, OMass Therapeutics

“Our mission is to utilise our drug discovery platform to develop small molecule therapeutics against targets that can meaningfully improve the lives of patients with immunological or rare diseases. Many proteins that have been linked to disease are still not able to be targeted with current drug discovery approaches and we believe that our drug discovery platform, OdyssIONTM, can improve our probability of success against these hard to drug targets. Beyond that, although small molecules have fallen slightly out of favour in recent years versus some newer approaches, for example cell and gene therapy, we believe this class of drugs is hugely important for patients. Small molecules tend to be orally dosed; they do not have strenuous storage requirements and have lower costs of production, all of which can improve access for patients.

“One of the key criteria we use when selecting projects to work on is unmet need and the potential benefit our drugs could bring to these patients. As an example, in Rett syndrome and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, two of the therapies areas we are currently working on, there has been a dearth of new therapies since these diseases were identified.”