Brunel University London has today been announced by Research England as one of the first adopters of new best practice for how universities commercialise their research.
University research that has commercial application can be spun out as a private company to make the most of the intellectual property – the idea behind a product or service. And with spin-outs widely seen as an important driver of economic growth, the government commissioned an independent review to identify best practice that the UK’s universities should follow to make their spin-outs generate greater investment and grow faster.
The review’s final report, including recommendations which called for innovation-friendly university policies, was published in November last year, with Research England – which provides funding for and advises universities on research activity – tasked with playing a key role in the roll-out of the recommendations.
Brunel is a research-intensive university that has produced spin-out companies, including:
- HecoAnalytics, an easy-to-use health analytics platform that supports MedTech companies to gain the capability needed to robustly assess and sell their products to a global digital health economy
- TestAVec, which has developed the world’s first patented human-stem-cell-based in vitro testing service to reduce the genotoxic risk of gene therapy products
- Vidiia, a game-changing team of medical, technology and operational experts brought together to pursue a new breed of low-cost disease diagnostics deployable anywhere in the field, by anyone
- Phyona, which is commercialising extraction and synthesis processes that recover metals from contaminated soil, converting them into high-value nanoparticles for use in manufacturing.
By publishing a statement of adoption of the best practices recommended in the spin-out review, Brunel is among the list of 39 research-intensive universities published by Research England in response to the review’s principle of transparency. The list will periodically be updated with other universities who become adoptees.
Reflecting on the independent review in a progress update published today, Jessica Corner, Research England’s Executive Chair, said: “It will help us solve current economic growth challenges, including helping us to develop next-generation entrepreneurs, unlocking private sector value from the research base, raising investment for the UK and delivering for societal good.
“The review also recommended that we explore whether sharing of tech transfer functions could help make these more effective, particularly for universities that only spin out companies infrequently.
“We received an exciting range of proposals to our Connecting Capability Fund programme call for pilots of diverse, innovative models of sharing. I can announce today that we are allocating over £4,700,000 among 13 successful collaborations.”
One of these funded collaborations involves Brunel: VirtualTTO, an end-to-end solution for scalable and effective spin-out support using artificial intelligence and technology transfer office best practice. The University of West London will be the lead higher education partner in a project involving Brunel and the commercial partners MDRx LLP, Mishcon de Reya and Sega Europe Ltd, fuelled by more than £420,000 of funding from Research England.
“Adopting the independent review’s best practices aligns perfectly with how we take our academics’ research ideas to market,” said Prof Geoff Rodgers, Brunel’s Pro Vice-Chancellor of Enterprise and Employment. “We have kept updating how we do this in response to what works well. Following the review’s recommendations as one of the early adopters, together with being part of the VirtualTTO project, will help us do this even better.”
Reported by:
Joe Buchanunn,
Media Relations
+44 (0)1895 268821
joe.buchanunn@brunel.ac.uk