About the conference:
On the 31st October 2019, the Transforming UK Translation conference was held, bringing together Universities and Research Institutes to exchange ideas on bridging industry with academia. Hosted by the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Wellcome Trust, this one-off event was designed to address eight commitments in the Transforming UK Translation 10-year plan. Commitments from the hosts include opening training and development opportunities, fostering a system that rewards translation as part of research excellence, and that all work produced will have wider societal benefits.
There were over 200 people in attendance, including our Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence, David Tew, and BBI Director Prof Dek Woolfson. Meetings throughout the day consisted of talks, workshops and round table discussions with key stakeholders to address industry-academia engagements, their mutually beneficial partnerships and how to attract and train the right talent to drive these engagements.
A well-oiled machine: Lessons from Cambridge
An instance of successful translation is The Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology. In 20 years, they have founded over 270 companies. More than half of these are still active in 2020 with combined revenues of $1 billion and upwards. Their translational strategy is successful for several reasons:
- Staff are encouraged by the department to be both entrepreneurs and academics simultaneously, which creates spin-outs and attracts business-minded researchers to the University in a continuous loop.
- All negotiations regarding Intellectual Property are dealt with outside of the University to maintain positive relationships between entrepreneurs and businesses.
- Entrepreneurial staff are encouraged and willing to mentor other industry hopefuls to create a supportive working environment. Friendly competition is welcomed with annual prizes given out.
- Academics have space to develop companies more and publish a little less.
- The department launches as many prospective businesses as possible rather than being selective. They aim to reduce negotiation time between all parties to help drive the quantity of start-ups.
- The ‘golden share’ method is utilised when negotiating start-up contracts, where the University owns 2-3% of a company, but has control of at least 51% of the voting rights. This model is far easy to negotiate, is quicker to sort contracts and doesn’t dilute the University’s stake in the business.
For companies relatively new to the start-up businesses, like Bristol, there are a lot of lessons we can learn from this model. Having only started our first BrisSynBio spin-out in 2017, Bristol University is in its early stages of transforming translation.
BrisSynBio: The new kids on the block
At the conference, BrisSynBio at the University of Bristol was used as a successful example of thriving industry-academia collaboration. BrisSynBio is one of only six Synthetic Biology Research Centres in the UK, funded by BBSRC and EPSRC. BrisSynBio’s research focuses on aspects of biomolecular design and engineering and applying these in the field of synthetic biology. An Innovation Manager post was created to translate novel areas of synthetic biology research into real-life application. There are four UoB spin-out companies; Cytoseek, Imophoron Ltd, Rosa biotech and Zentraxa, specialising in synthetic biology research, including cell therapies, new vaccine candidates, biosensing technology and bioengineering pharmaceuticals respectively. Their combined successes have led to millions of pounds of translational funding from angel investors and venture capitalists, overseen by Dr David Tew.
Lessons from Transforming UK Translation:
How to attract, train and retain the right talent was an important take-away message from the conference. Currently, collaborations rely heavily on personal networking to enable industry-academia interactions. There is a need to hire full-time ‘connectors’ to create an obvious digital ‘gateway’ that either party can contact. Also, encouraging the mobility of people between academia, start-up companies, industry and incubators will benefit the innovative ecosystem function with less conflict and more healthy competition. To incentivise academics to innovate, Universities need to recognise knowledge share and transfer of technology as a positive output.
As well as negotiating intellectual property of academics, cultivating long-term, trusting relationships is of equal importance. The amount of student industrial placements, sponsored PhDs and apprenticeships should be increased to build healthy business partnerships. A thriving knowledge economy should be the goal of businesses and academics, and all parties should encourage the sharing and application of ideas beyond the academic setting wherever possible.
Finally, it’s important not to consider translation as commercialisation alone. Translation does not revolve only around the spinout of companies through innovative ideas- long-term professional partnerships are just as significant. We should propel the collaborations between technology-driven companies and academic institutions, using the innovative ability of the former and the research of the latter in a way that both sides may sustainably benefit.
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