Two UCL research projects receive crucial ‘Proof-of-Concept' Awards from UKRI

UKRI today announced a total of 48 PoC Awards across England totalling £9m. The scheme aims to support the commercialisation of research across various disciplines. This is the first of five annual tranches of PoC awards – totalling £40m over five years – which was announced by the government in 2024.

The two UCL entries awarded were:

• Smart Chromatography: an AI-Powered, self-driven acceleration of sustainable drug analysis and purification. Academic: Max Besenhard, UCL Chemical Engineering
• AI Mapper+: a Vision-Language models (VLMs)-powered Accessible Journey Planner for disabled people. Academic: Youngjun Cho, UCL Computer Science

The AI Mapper+ project was highlighted by UKRI in its public announcement of the PoC awards.

PoC: unlocking transformative potential

Proof of Concept (PoC) funding has been a vital part of the commercialisation landscape at UCL for nearly 20 years. It has helped to support the early stages of development of highly successful spinouts in areas ranging from therapeutics through to engineering, together with technologies such as an innovative gene therapy for treatment of severe haemophilia A that was licensed to a listed US biotechnology company.

Examples include:

Autolus Therapeutics

Breakthrough immunotherapy cancer treatments from Autolus Therapeutics offer hope to cancer patients who previously had few or no treatment options. Spun out from UCL in 2014, the business develops re-programmed T-cell immunotherapies (known as CAR T), also called ‘living medicines’; they rearm a patient’s T cells to recognise and kill their cancer cells, particularly leukaemias and lymphomas.

Dr Martin Pule, one of the leaders of the ‘CAR T’ programmes at UCL’s Cancer Institute, established Autolus following several rounds of proof-of-concept funding totalling £183,000 from UCL Ventures between 2010 and 2014, which successfully demonstrated the therapeutic applications and commercial potential of this nascent technology.

Since its inception in 2014, the company has undergone rapid growth. The company has raised $921.6m, including $150m (£125m) from investors such as UK life science investment firm Syncona and up to $250m from Blackstone Life Sciences in one of the largest ever private financings of a UK biotech company.

Autolus has invested heavily in growth, development and commercialisation of its therapeutics; now employing 450 people, its UK-based manufacturing and infrastructure includes a new 70,000 square foot production facility in Stevenage with plans for further expansion.

Satalia

Satalia is a global leader in enterprise AI and one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech companies, whose clients have included Tesco, DFS, DS Smith, BT, PwC, Gigaclear and Unilever.

Combining machine learning and optimisation, it builds technologies that helps clients transform their business strategies and radically improve operational efficiency – for example by instantly identifying optimal delivery routes from trillions of possibilities, saving time, money and resources, improving customer service and reducing energy.

Satalia developed from research by founder Daniel Hulme at UCL’s Department of Computer Science, along with co-founders Professor Anthony Finkelstein and Dr Alastair Moore. UCL Ventures awarded a £32k proof-of-concept funding in 2008 to enable Daniel to build a prototype and in parallel conduct market research with companies that could benefit from the proposed optimisation technology. Satalia was founded a year later and the company grew rapidly and was acquired by WPP in 2021, currently employing 140 people worldwide to deliver products and customised AI solutions solving some of the toughest problems for the enterprise sector.

Senceive Ltd

PoC funding was a critical enabler in 2005 in the development of Senceive Ltd, a UCL spinout which became the international leader of wireless enabled remote condition monitoring solutions for use in rail and construction applications.

Researchers had developed an innovative wireless mesh-enabled sensor network technology which had the potential to enable highly efficient monitoring of the stability of infrastructure assets such as railway embankments.

PoC funding of £37,500 from one of the UK’s first PoC programmes, a consortia comprising UCL, Imperial, Cambridge and Oxford and funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund, supported prototype development and market scoping work to quantify the unmet market need.

The outcomes provided the UCL academic team and UCL’s TTO with confidence in the commercial opportunity and led to the establishment of the spinout company in late 2005.

Over a 15+ year journey, the company developed a robust monitoring product that met the demanding needs of rail and construction clients in over 40 countries, generating strong revenues (£15m+) and employed a team of 60+ staff from offices in the UK, Australia and the USA.

In 2021, Senceive was acquired by Previan, a Canadian industrial technology group generating strong returns for the company’s management team, UCL Ventures and academic founders.