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Why engage in innovation and enterprise at UCL?

By ucypcac, on 26 February 2019

Dr Celia Caulcott, Vice-Provost (Enterprise)

For me, one of the most exciting aspects of working at UCL is being surrounded by so many brilliant minds with such an abundance of original ideas – and then seeing people realise the potential of those ideas and take them out into the wider world for the benefit of society.

There are many ways to achieve this, including partnering with charities or businesses; developing short courses for professionals and organisations; providing consultancy to industry, government and policy-makers; and commercialising discoveries.

Importantly, these activities, which UCL Innovation & Enterprise facilitates, bring tremendous benefits to academics and their research and teaching work. They can enhance and expand existing research projects, facilitating access to data and helping to frame new questions in a way that would be difficult in a purely academic context. They also help build personal and professional reputation and extend networks, introducing new people who can bring fresh perspectives to research and teaching. In some cases, innovation and enterprise can generate additional personal and institutional income too.

Occasionally, I speak with colleagues who struggle to see how innovation and enterprise are relevant to their particular areas; but I firmly believe there remains a wealth of untapped potential across all areas of UCL to help drive positive change.

In this piece, I’d like to illustrate some projects that attest to the sheer diversity of impact we already have – which might challenge some existing notions around innovation and enterprise and even provide some inspiration.

Enhancing research

You may have recently seen some powerful advertisements across the tube and transport network, as part of Holland & Barrett’s ‘Me.No.Pause’ campaign – profiling a diverse group of women going through the menopause.

The campaign was in response to research led by Professor Jessica Ringrose (Institute of Education) commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA), showing less than half (48%) of Londoners feel that ads adequately reflected the capital’s diversity. The ‘Me.No.Pause’ campaign is running for 12 weeks, and is bound to start a fresh debate about diversity and advertising. For Jessica it was an exciting addition to her existing research around digital feminist activism and involved adopting some new research methodologies. She is now exploring a multitude of partnership opportunities that have resulted from the campaign.

Another example of external partnerships enhancing research comes from the lab of Professor Brad Love, who was approached about using Tesco’s loyalty card data to better understand why customers switch products. Human decision making of this kind is well understood in the lab environment. But analysis of Tesco’s real-world dataset of 280,000 anonymized individuals revealed some surprising findings, going against established thinking – for example suggesting that the very act of purchasing can make novel products more desirable. The project not only helped Tesco better understand consumer behaviour, it also led to a paper in Nature Human Behaviour and funded a PhD studentship.

Transforming practices

Innovation and enterprise can have a profound impact on practices and processes in a variety of professional sectors.

UCL’s Integrated Legal Advice Clinic (UCL iLAC) takes a holistic approach to legal problems, acknowledging that they tend to cascade into other areas of life. Since 2016, over 75 students have worked with the centre’s solicitors and advisers, providing pro bono support to over 200 clients – for example in tribunals to secure benefits or overturn pending evictions.

Another example of transforming practice comes from Dr Parama Chaudhury and her colleagues from the Department of Economics and Centre for Teaching and Learning Economics. They are delivering specialist training to diplomats around the world, who work out of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). The training covers labour markets, exchange rates, financial and macroeconomic crises and regulation, amongst other economics topics, and could ultimately have a far reaching impact on local economies around the world as well as global policymaking.

Both these examples also point to the great benefit innovation activities have in extending networks, meeting new people and gaining different perspectives. Students from the Legal Advice Clinic go on to work in various fields of law, but retain and apply that sense of social justice and perspective inspired by their often disadvantaged former clients. Meanwhile, Parama and her team are afforded an insight into the challenges of applying economic theory in a turbulent political climate.

It’s important that we see the world from other people’s vantage points.

Collaborate to innovate

I would argue that addressing Grand Challenges such as Global Health, Sustainable Cities and Cultural Understanding needs not only UCL collaboration across different academic disciplines, as already happens, but also collaboration with users – businesses and industry, governments and the public.

One prolific collaborator at UCL is Dr Kenneth Tong (Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering) – who has pioneered many new developments in the telecommunications industry. More recently, Kenneth realised that his technologies could have a transformative impact on global food production, through monitoring localised weather patterns, soil conditions and crop quality – ultimately to increase the efficiency of harvests and maximize crop yields. To bring this vision to life, Kenneth is now collaborating with colleagues across UCL as well as externally with Rothamsted Research.

Studio Wayne McGregor, dancer Catarina Carvalho. Photo by Ravi Deepres

Collaboration also flourishes at the interface between arts and sciences – two sectors that can learn much from each other. The growing UCL Dance Network partners UCL academics and students with organisations including the English National Ballet (ENB), Sadler’s Wells, Studio Wayne McGregor and The Place. Current projects include exploring the potential benefits of dance in Parkinson’s disease and new digital approaches to choreography. Dr Robert Thompson (Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering) spent three months as an Innovator-in-Residence at the ENB, and shared some insights:

“Unless you open yourself to the idea of engaging with different audiences, you’re never going to be inspired as to where your work can have further impact. All the pre-existing ideas I had for collaboration had totally changed.”

Help at hand

As Vice-Provost (Enterprise), more than anything, I want to encourage and champion a culture of innovation and enterprise across UCL. All of the areas highlighted in this piece have received some combination of guidance, support and funding from UCL Innovation & Enterprise. Of course, innovation also happens independently at the individual, research group, department and faculty level; but we are always here to provide advice to make sure that academic benefits are realised. With all the capabilities that UCL needs to support this agenda now sitting as one under UCL Innovation & Enterprise, it’s never been easier to get involved and make these activities integral to teaching and research at UCL.

Challenges and opportunities ahead

Capturing the sheer breadth of innovative activity that takes place at UCL – and other institutions in the UK – will be a key aim of the new Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF). It aims to assess, quantify, understand and ultimately improve all the many ways in which we interact with the wider world. It will sit alongside the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in assessing the three core activities in the higher education sector. Indeed, the KEF is very much at the heart of the Government’s Industrial Strategy: Building a Britain fit for the future.

These are challenging times, and the uncertainty that has marked the wider political and socio-economic landscape over the past few years shows little sign of abating. But what we do know is that the UK, along with much of Europe, will continue moving towards a knowledge-led society and economy in which universities can and should play an increasingly important role.

The radical thinking and innovative culture that is part of the very fabric and history of UCL provides us with the ideal platform to respond to the challenges ahead. There’s a tremendous opportunity here for us to re-shape our society and economy, into one that is healthier, happier, more equitable, productive and resilient. It’s never been more important for us to engage externally to achieve this.

Find out more about how your work can benefit from UCL Innovation & Enterprise and the services we offer: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/enterprise/staff

Finding new ways to improve human health

By rmhzdal, on 30 January 2019

Professor David Lomas

As a university we endeavour to be a force for public good and have a positive impact on people, lives and communities.

The growing burden of disease in an increasingly ageing population is putting intense pressure on health and care services. We must strive to use health life sciences to change the way we think about health and disease and how best to manage them. Through ‘translation’ we aim to transform scientific discoveries arising from laboratory, clinical or population studies into new clinical tools and applications that improve human health.

Increases in interdisciplinary research, NHS and industry collaboration, and the adoption of innovative treatments and technologies will all be key components of successfully applying biology and technology to health improvement and advancing the development of new approaches to disease.

Interdisciplinary Research

UCL’s strength in life and medical sciences is driven via the School of Life and Medical Sciences (SLMS). However, the scale and scope of our work in health extends to many other non-biomedical disciplines: spatial sciences, engineering, laws, mathematics, pedagogy, and physical sciences, as well as arts, humanities and social and historical sciences. These combine to address structural, environmental, and cultural determinants of health, and deliver health and healthcare innovation.

NHS and industry collaboration

We work closely with our NHS partners (University College Hospital, Royal Free Hospital, Whittington Hospital, Eastman Dental Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Moorfields Eye Hospital, the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital and Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital) to redefine what can be achieved through academic and clinical partnership.

Oriel | Proposed view from St Pancras Way (c) AECOM / Penoyre & Prasad / White Arkitekter

These partnerships have led to the development of exciting joint initiatives, success with joint research and capital bids, and leveraging of philanthropic funding (e.g. Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children, UCL Institute of Immunity and Transplantation, MRC UK Dementia Research Institute, and Oriel).

Partnership working, most explicitly articulated through our three UCL NIHR Biomedical Research Centres (BRCs), helps us to translate advances in biomedical research into real benefits for patients. The relationships with the hospitals also facilitates investigators actively involving patients and the public in their research. This public engagement in research can lead to treatments that better meet the needs of users and the public, and research outcomes that are more likely to be put into practice.

A key mission of the BRCs has been to develop a culture of enterprise and facilitate translation of discovery science at UCL into patient care. The partnership is critical to realising the value of discovery science, a value that grows exponentially following successful early phase clinical translation. The BRCs have invested in the Translational Research Office (TRO) which has been fundamental in bringing together the necessary expertise in design, and research management and governance of early phase trials, as well as technology transfer expertise in various disciplines. The biomedical portfolio supported by the TRO spans a total of 72 projects with a cumulative value at the end of the academic year 17/18 of >£114m, growing from £90m in 2016/17.

The group are particularly successful with helping PIs secure funding from the MRC Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme, Wellcome innovation schemes, NIHR i4i and LifeArc as well as providing a link through UCLB to the UCL Technology Fund and the Apollo Fund. For example, the UCL Technology Fund has recently invested £1m in a School of Pharmacy project to treat pancreatic cancer.

In December last year, Eisai renewed for a further 5 years our strategic alliance in neurodegeneration drug discovery as well as continuing to support the Leonard Wolfson studentship program. This is a great example of how working in partnership can accelerate translation, shortening the development timelines by many months, with the alliance recently moving their first drug candidate into the clinic.

Other Pharma relationships include Ono Pharmaceuticals (early translational projects with multiple PIs), CellMedica (novel T Cell receptor technology with Hans Stauss and Emma Morris), Grail Therapeutics (early detection of lung cancer with Sam Janes) and Astra Zeneca (access to their compound library three times/year through Richard Angel, TRO Drug Discovery Group).

Our commitment to partnership is exemplified by analysis performed over a 6 year period (2010-2016) which demonstrated that on average 30% of PIs across SLMS were working in partnership with industry.

Innovative treatments and technologies

We have recently established six Therapeutic Innovation Networks (TINs) to accelerate the development of novel therapeutics. The scheme was piloted in 2015, with the establishment of the Cell, Gene and Regenerative Therapies TIN.

UCL, working with UCLB to create spinouts and partnerships, is a world leader in the clinical translation of cell, gene and regenerative therapies. The strength and depth of activity has resulted in a number of high-profile Pharma collaborations and spin-out companies including: Orchard £392M, Autolus £251M, Freeline £123M, Miera £77M, and Achilies £13m.

B cell leukaemia Wikimedia Commons

UCL has a growing CAR T-cell programme based at the UCL Cancer Institute and Great Ormond Street Hospital. There are currently ten phase I/IIa clinical studies of experimental CAR T-cell approaches open at UCL affiliated hospitals which stem directly from this programme (the largest CAR T program in the UK). As an example of pull through from discovery science to clinical application for patient benefit, NHS England announced last year that children and young people in England with B cell leukaemia would be able to benefit from Europe’s first full access deal on CAR-T therapy.

A growing area of partnership with our hospitals, BRCs and industry spanning the whole of the academic base across UCL is in the area of “big data”. UCLH’s partnership with the Alan Turing Institute aims to use the power of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to support clinical decision making and make services safer, quicker and more efficient. The DRIVE – Digital Research, Informatics and Virtual Environments unit being opened at Great Ormond Street Hospital will create a unique informatics hub to harness the power of the latest technologies to revolutionise clinical practice and improve patient outcomes. Meanwhile, pioneering research from Moorfields and the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology working with DeepMind Health has given a demonstration of the potential impact AI could have for patients; an AI system that recommended the correct referral decision for over 50 eye diseases with 94% accuracy, matching world-leading eye experts.

Through this commitment to interdisciplinary research, NHS and industry collaboration, and the adoption of innovative treatments and technologies, UCL is well positioned to develop further novel approaches to all types of disease and to genuinely and fundamentally improve people’s everyday life.

A pan-UCL view of Health and Life Sciences

By rmhzdal, on 18 October 2018

The School of Life and Medical Sciences (SLMS) seeks to tackle the greatest health challenges that face society, including dementia, mental health, genetic disease, obesity, infectious disease, cancer and ageing. This is a prodigious ambition and we don’t do it alone.

Our ambition is to bring together UCL researchers, across all UCL disciplines and Schools, who work on health – and our definition of health is all encompassing! As well as human physical and mental health, this could include animal health and planetary health (‘One Health’).

In order to facilitate these important pan-UCL initiatives on health, in early 2016 we established the UCL Health Strategy Forum to address the need for a pan-UCL perspective across the breadth of our health priorities. Vice Deans (Health or Interdisciplinarity) or Health Champions have been appointed in all UCL Faculties and are members of the Forum. This pan-UCL engagement has highlighted the range of UCL Faculties involved in multi-disciplinary, health-related research and the extent of the levels at which it takes place: through institutes, centres or hubs, consortia, and projects of varying scale and scope.

The Forum plays a key role in supporting the significant advances made by the UCL Domains and UCL Grand Challenges in extending and developing interactions between SLMS and the rest of UCL. Pan-UCL health research is facilitated via the UCL Research Domains of: Personalised Medicine, Populations & Lifelong Health, Neuroscience, Cancer and more recently established Domains on Food Metabolism and Society, and Microbiology. A very successful launch event for the Microbiology research Domain was held in April 2018. Domain activities are co-ordinated via the Office of the Vice Provost (Health) Research Coordination Office, and the Office of the UCL Vice-Provost (Research).

  • The Cancer Domain aims to ensure that the breadth and depth of cancer research is visible to external audiences, and brings together investigators around four themes: Understanding Cancer; Treating Cancer; Technology; and Cancer in Society. It links UCL computer scientists, ethicists, statisticians, clinicians, engineers, physicists, and life scientists as well as NHS Trusts, funders, and industry partners. Their recent ‘Artificial Intelligence in Cancer’ event brought together over 120 researchers.
  • The UCL Personalised Medicine Domain aims to harness the personalised medicine research activity across the university and its partner hospitals, to deliver innovative patient-targeted medicines and therapies. The Domain has established a Precision Medicine accelerator focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Healthcare. The SLMS Translational Research Office (TRO) worked together with venture capitalists, companies and the UCL community notably, BEAMS investigators to develop the AI in Health accelerator.
  • The Populations & Lifelong Health domain co-ordinated UCL’s successful £7m application for membership of Health Data Research UK, as a pan-London collaboration with Imperial, Kings, QMUL, and The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The focus is on health informatics and actionable analytics, precision medicine, public health, and clinical trials.
  • The Neuroscience Domain has supported the UCL Mental Health strategy working group which consulted widely across UCL to develop recommendations for our future mental health research direction. It has also helped to facilitate productive connections between the Institute of Education and the Divisions of Psychology and Language Sciences and Psychiatry.

Education also benefits from a pan-UCL approach and UCL offers 28 health-related Masters’ programmes external to SLMS, including a new Master’s degree in Bio-social Anthropology. In addition to the 15 MSc, 7 MA and 5 MRes programmes across BEAMS, SLASH and the IoE, Engineering hosts an EPSRC Doctoral Training Programme in Medical Imaging, MAPS offers a health-related post-graduate certificate, and Laws offer two health-related modules.

We aim to extend our impact by close working with UCL’s NHS partners and other Academic Health Science Centres within London and the Southeast cluster. We are involved in a range of exciting major projects with our national and international partners. These are some of our research initiatives:

  • The Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS) accommodates researchers from the Faculty of Engineering, the Division of Surgery & Interventional Science, the Centre for Medical Imaging and the Institute for Healthcare Engineering in state-of-the-art interdisciplinary facilities at Charles Bell House, enabling research at the intersection of engineering and health.
  • Led by UCL Biochemical Engineering, the EPSRC Future Vaccine Manufacturing Research Hub (Vax-Hub) will drive vaccine discovery, development and manufacturing, bringing together 25 partners with industry and policy makers to address key challenges in vaccine manufacturing.
  • The EPSRC IRC in Early-Warning Sensing Systems for Infectious Diseases (i-sense) is a multidisciplinary research consortium which aims to engineer a new generation of disruptive sensing systems to diagnose, monitor and prevent the spread of infectious diseases such as major flu epidemics, MRSA and HIV.
  • The contribution of health economics to decisions concerning the production, distribution and evaluation of health and healthcare is recognised by health services worldwide. The Faculty of Population Health Sciences has brought together and strengthened the health economics community across UCL, including Economics, Statistical Science, IoE Social Science and Engineering.
  • The Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH), a four-year Wellcome Trust funded collaboration between Bartlett School of Architecture and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, will deliver key global research on the systems that connect urban development and health.

UCL has one of the largest and most prestigious groupings of academics in biomedical, life and population health sciences in the world. While we are all familiar with the need to interpret league tables with care, they nonetheless provide a helpful indication that our performance over the last academic year supports this claim. In the QS World University Rankings, UCL ‘Life Sciences and Medicine’ ranked 8th in the world (up from 11th in 2017), moving ahead of Yale, UCSF and UCLA, and 3rd in the UK, sustaining our position ahead of our London peers, Imperial and King’s.

I am convinced that this success is due to our pursuit of UCL 2034’s third principal theme: to address global challenges using our ‘distinctive cross-disciplinary approach’. We have made cross-disciplinarity a priority and we can only get better by working more closely with one another. I am keen that we continue to extend and grow the interactions in health and life sciences across UCL.

Professor David Lomas

Vice Provost (Health)

For further information on how to get involved, please contact the Domain leads, or:

Dr Sinéad Kennedy (Director of Research Co-ordination & Planning, OVPH) for research opportunities in health: sinead.kennedy@ucl.ac.uk;

Dr Jane Kinghorn (Director of the Translational Research Office, OVPH) for translational research: j.kinghorn@ucl.ac.uk;

Dr Nandi Simpson (Acting Head of Partnerships and Projects, OVPH) for the Health Strategy Forum: i.simpson@ucl.ac.uk.