£2 million awarded to University of Warwick to support critical early-stage translation of research
£118m to accelerate UK bright ideas into global opportunities
Ideas emerging from UK research organisations will benefit from £118 million funding to jumpstart knowledge exchange, translation and commercialisation. The University of Warwick has been awarded £2,271,976.08 to help brilliant ideas become realities that make a real difference.
The Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) supports critical early-stage translation of UK research to real impacts, which:
- transforms public services
- creates new jobs
- attracts private investment
- forges new partnerships with business and charities.
Funding allows UK teams to unlock the value of their work, including early-stage commercialisation of new technologies and advancing changes to public policy and services such as NHS clinical practice.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a government body responsible for delivering £8 billion research and innovation funding each year.
64 universities and research organisations
UKRI is investing £118 million in the latest round of IAAs to translate research across 64 universities and research organisations.
The programme, now in its 10th year, provided early-stage support to projects that are now established global businesses.
Previous IAA success stories include autonomous vehicle software leader Oxbotica that spun out of University of Oxford research in 2014 and the leading haptics and hand-tracking firm Ultraleap.
Ultraleap founder and CEO Dr Tom Carter used IAA support to commercialise his PhD research at the University of Bristol.
University of Warwick spinout Erebagen gain funding and have filed their initial patent, and attracted significant venture capital investment.
New approaches to drug discovery
An IAA project at the University of Warwick supported the development of a new natural product discovery company, Erebagen.
Erebagen’s platform combines bioinformatics and synthetic biology to discover new medicines and agrochemicals much more efficiently.
The initial IAA project, which helped establish Erebagan’s business plan, was followed by a broad range of other support from the innovation ecosystem.
Erebagen has gone on to access further funding to continue to develop the company and skills needed, from:
- Innovate UK’s ICURe
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Pathfinder and follow-on funding
- Royal Society of Edinburgh-BBSRC Enterprise Fellowship
- local and institutional support.
They have now filed their initial patent and attracted significant venture capital investment.
To read the full article, and to find out more about the Impact Acceleration Account click here
More about the ICURe Programme here: https://warwickinnovationdistrict.com/icure/
