Six years ago, the technology transfer offices of Imperial, Cambridge and UCL, together with three major pharmaceutical companies, founded biopharmaceutical company Apollo Therapeutics to accelerate the translation of biomedical research into new drugs and treatments. Since then, we have worked in partnership with Apollo to pursue an innovative model of technology transfer that applies industry expertise to translational research early-on and helps to close a funding gap that can hamper the early-stage development of therapeutics.
Apollo has enabled several Imperial research projects to flourish, and we are very excited by recent news that the company has raised over £100 million in new funding to expand its work with universities. The funding from predominantly US-based investors is a vote of confidence in research by Imperial and other leading universities, and shows what our institutions can achieve by collaborating with industry and each other to turn research into life-changing treatments.
Imperial’s strength in translational medicine also led this month to a new deal with Australia-based SUDA Pharmaceuticals to further the development of a potentially transformative cell therapy platform based on natural killer T (NKT) cells that holds promise in the first instance as an effective treatment for certain blood cancers. This important work is proceeding thanks to the world-leading expertise in NKT cells of Professor Tassos Karadimitris, his commercial acumen, and the intensive support provided by our commercialisation specialists. I look forward to sharing further news about this development in coming weeks.
As these examples show, we are a truly global university, though rooted in Europe and the UK and supported by a variety of place-based ecosystems, particularly the one in London’s White City, where we have our expanding research and innovation campus. The White City Incubator, our hub for deep science startups, has recently welcomed two new diagnostics companies – one an Imperial startup from Dr Pantelis Georgiou and another all the way from Chicago – that will benefit from access to the community. Welcome to the Incubator, ProtonDx and Essya Labs!
Best wishes,
Dr Simon Hepworth,
Director of Enterprise,
Imperial College London
