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Good evening. Thank you all very much for joining us tonight.

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As Magdalena has very eloquently introduced, the only reason why I'm here tonight is that I've had the privilege in the last

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five years whilst working for the university to start to similar and yet very,

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very different companies. And before I tell you anything about the story behind those companies,

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I'd like you to tell you a little bit about what these companies are so that you know where I'm coming from.

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And also I'll be drawing on them as examples for many of the things which I will be attempting to illustrate.

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So again, Ox is a company about automated, transportable,

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normal thermic liver perfusion device in the field of organ transportation, preservation and repair prior to transplantation.

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What both companies, including this one,

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has in common is that they are entirely based on IP intellectual property developed within the context of the university.

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And what is new about this technology is that it enables the use of organs which are commonly discarded within current donation practices.

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So the big idea is to find a way to make more transplants available within current donation practices.

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He was spun out in 2009 by myself and friend and colleague Professor Peter French,

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who is a chair of transplantation in Oxford alongside CEO Dr. Les Russell.

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And please bear in mind the three names I have put on that slide for the latter part of the presentation.

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What has made this a very exciting adventure is that it is a very British style business.

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It has raised a relatively modest sum of money £10 million to date,

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leveraged by a further £5 million of grant funding through the Technology Strategy Board.

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The European Union. And I. For I.

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And with that relatively small sum of money, it has achieved what today in hindsight are quite an incredible set of milestones.

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After being spun out in 2011, we completed the first fully automated prototype in 2011.

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So two years after formation, we completed the production versions in 2012.

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We used it in a real person for the very first time in 2013.

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We have literally just applied for our CE mark, which is the regulatory approval necessary for selling a medical device in Europe this year.

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And we have also at the same time initiated large scale what I call randomised phase three clinical trials both in Europe and in the US.

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It's been a busy five years and just to give you a visual, what the company is about is really this device.

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It is a device which consists of a retained unit and a disposable set.

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And really the idea is that it follows the organ everywhere the organ goes.

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So it is there at the point of retrieval, it is there at the point of transplant.

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In essence, it is a feat of engineering because it performs every single function that the human body is expected to perform around an organ.

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So it flows it with whole blood, it heats it, it feeds it, it enables it to function in the same way as it would in inside the body.

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And my favourite quote was from a press release when we did the first transplant from a journalist who said,

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This machine is so good, your liver will never know you're gone.

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So this is it illustrated here. We actually take an organ which is cold and has just been retrieved from the donor.

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It is connected to a set of engineering, consumables, pipes filled with blood and at the press of a button without any user intervention.

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Within about 60 seconds, the organ is virtually unrecognisable from how it was within the donor.

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The greatest moment and I will come back to this came in February 2013,

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which was relatively widely publicised in the national press when an organ

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preserved in this manner was transplanted into a patient for the very first time.

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And one of the extraordinary things about working within the Oxford family is that what seemed to us

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like a major but relatively narrow piece of news went around the world twice in less than 36 hours.

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My personal experience, just having a long lost friend in Seattle,

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whom I hadn't heard from in ten years, picking up the phone and saying, What the heck is going on?

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You're just on the local channel. Where are you?

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So it is an extraordinary experience to witness something which has started small and local,

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actually propagate and travel around the world with such speed.

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And it is one of the great motivations for doing this sort of thing.

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The second company is much more recent, and as a result I'll be referring to it a lot less.

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And it was it's a company called Sonics.

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It was created by myself and fellow academics, Bob Carlyle and Kristian Cavallo, as well as CEO Colin Storey, formerly of Ices Innovation in 2004.

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It has raised £2.75 million of Series A funding, supplemented by a further £2.1 million of non-dilutive technology strategy board funding,

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making it one of the better, if not the best funded spin out to have come out of the university in recent years.

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It is developing in the first instance, a product called Sonic Trend,

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and the big idea is to use ultrasound waves to enhance the delivery of unmodified cancer drugs.

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In other words, to take a current cancer drug as it is and find a way to deliver it better into

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tumours so that the drug itself can work at a much with a much higher efficacy.

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And a unique feature of this product is that not only it enables you to improve how the drug works,

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but it enables for what is possibly the first time for the clinician to know where and when the drug has been successfully delivered within the body.

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And one of the great things from a business point of view is that it is what can only be described as platform technology.

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Ultrasound is a mechanical effect. It's a mechanical wave.

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There is nothing specific to the drug class about this technology.

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You can use it with pretty much any cancer drug that is out there.

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It is a different way of thinking about oncological drug delivery.

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So the signs are this company was created on the back of is if you have a very common occurring target for cancer,

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the liver and you're able for a combination of ultrasound and some nanotechnology to expose this liver to a particular type of ultrasound.

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What you see is this the vast majority of drugs, this is a blood vessel,

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don't travel more than 50 microns from the nearest blood vessel that they have been delivered through.

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Under exposure to ultrasound, we are able to achieve delivery of the drug to more than 200 microns from the nearest blood vessel.

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Why is that significant? Because the farthest a cancer cell can lie from a blood vessel in the body is on the order of 150 microns.

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So if you are actually able to breach that barrier of delivery,

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you stand a genuine chance of molecules or particles of drug reaching every single cancer cell that they are targeting.

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So I come before you with enthusiasm, but also come before you with humility.

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Because what you will have gathered from what I've just said,

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is that I'm in the process of doing it and having a blast at it, but I have not yet done it.

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So a disclaimer Take everything I tell you with a pinch of salt.

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This is one man's version of events. This is my story.

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It's my experience. And I hope it can influence yours.

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But it is by no means designed or necessarily devised to be useful.

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And what I shall try and do through the story is to cover the following points.

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Should I be an entrepreneur? What are the reasons for starting a venture, particularly for people working within a university environment?

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How does it work out in practice? Once you've done it, what are the things that no one actually tells you?

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An introduction to basic terms and concepts. And finally, some administrative steps on how you start a business in the UK and out of Oxford.

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The way I've looked at this is I have tried to condense in 45 minutes everything I wish someone had told me.

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12 years ago. And it's quite difficult to do that.

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And I'm sure I have forgotten things. I would look to you for questions and for emphasising those things that perhaps have been omitted.