Good evening. Thank you all very much for joining us tonight.
As Magdalena has very eloquently introduced, the only reason why I'm here tonight is that I've had the privilege in the last
five years whilst working for the university to start to similar and yet very,
very different companies. And before I tell you anything about the story behind those companies,
I'd like you to tell you a little bit about what these companies are so that you know where I'm coming from.
And also I'll be drawing on them as examples for many of the things which I will be attempting to illustrate.
So again, Ox is a company about automated, transportable,
normal thermic liver perfusion device in the field of organ transportation, preservation and repair prior to transplantation.
What both companies, including this one,
has in common is that they are entirely based on IP intellectual property developed within the context of the university.
And what is new about this technology is that it enables the use of organs which are commonly discarded within current donation practices.
So the big idea is to find a way to make more transplants available within current donation practices.
He was spun out in 2009 by myself and friend and colleague Professor Peter French,
who is a chair of transplantation in Oxford alongside CEO Dr. Les Russell.
And please bear in mind the three names I have put on that slide for the latter part of the presentation.
What has made this a very exciting adventure is that it is a very British style business.
It has raised a relatively modest sum of money £10 million to date,
leveraged by a further £5 million of grant funding through the Technology Strategy Board.
The European Union. And I. For I.
And with that relatively small sum of money, it has achieved what today in hindsight are quite an incredible set of milestones.
After being spun out in 2011, we completed the first fully automated prototype in 2011.
So two years after formation, we completed the production versions in 2012.
We used it in a real person for the very first time in 2013.
We have literally just applied for our CE mark, which is the regulatory approval necessary for selling a medical device in Europe this year.
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.
It's been a busy five years and just to give you a visual, what the company is about is really this device.
It is a device which consists of a retained unit and a disposable set.
And really the idea is that it follows the organ everywhere the organ goes.
So it is there at the point of retrieval, it is there at the point of transplant.
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.
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.
And my favourite quote was from a press release when we did the first transplant from a journalist who said,
This machine is so good, your liver will never know you're gone.
So this is it illustrated here. We actually take an organ which is cold and has just been retrieved from the donor.
It is connected to a set of engineering, consumables, pipes filled with blood and at the press of a button without any user intervention.
Within about 60 seconds, the organ is virtually unrecognisable from how it was within the donor.
The greatest moment and I will come back to this came in February 2013,
which was relatively widely publicised in the national press when an organ
preserved in this manner was transplanted into a patient for the very first time.
And one of the extraordinary things about working within the Oxford family is that what seemed to us
like a major but relatively narrow piece of news went around the world twice in less than 36 hours.
My personal experience, just having a long lost friend in Seattle,
whom I hadn't heard from in ten years, picking up the phone and saying, What the heck is going on?
You're just on the local channel. Where are you?
So it is an extraordinary experience to witness something which has started small and local,
actually propagate and travel around the world with such speed.
And it is one of the great motivations for doing this sort of thing.
The second company is much more recent, and as a result I'll be referring to it a lot less.
And it was it's a company called Sonics.
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.
It has raised £2.75 million of Series A funding, supplemented by a further £2.1 million of non-dilutive technology strategy board funding,
making it one of the better, if not the best funded spin out to have come out of the university in recent years.
It is developing in the first instance, a product called Sonic Trend,
and the big idea is to use ultrasound waves to enhance the delivery of unmodified cancer drugs.
In other words, to take a current cancer drug as it is and find a way to deliver it better into
tumours so that the drug itself can work at a much with a much higher efficacy.
And a unique feature of this product is that not only it enables you to improve how the drug works,
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.
And one of the great things from a business point of view is that it is what can only be described as platform technology.
Ultrasound is a mechanical effect. It's a mechanical wave.
There is nothing specific to the drug class about this technology.
You can use it with pretty much any cancer drug that is out there.
It is a different way of thinking about oncological drug delivery.
So the signs are this company was created on the back of is if you have a very common occurring target for cancer,
the liver and you're able for a combination of ultrasound and some nanotechnology to expose this liver to a particular type of ultrasound.
What you see is this the vast majority of drugs, this is a blood vessel,
don't travel more than 50 microns from the nearest blood vessel that they have been delivered through.
Under exposure to ultrasound, we are able to achieve delivery of the drug to more than 200 microns from the nearest blood vessel.
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.
So if you are actually able to breach that barrier of delivery,
you stand a genuine chance of molecules or particles of drug reaching every single cancer cell that they are targeting.
So I come before you with enthusiasm, but also come before you with humility.
Because what you will have gathered from what I've just said,
is that I'm in the process of doing it and having a blast at it, but I have not yet done it.
So a disclaimer Take everything I tell you with a pinch of salt.
This is one man's version of events. This is my story.
It's my experience. And I hope it can influence yours.
But it is by no means designed or necessarily devised to be useful.
And what I shall try and do through the story is to cover the following points.
Should I be an entrepreneur? What are the reasons for starting a venture, particularly for people working within a university environment?
How does it work out in practice? Once you've done it, what are the things that no one actually tells you?
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.
The way I've looked at this is I have tried to condense in 45 minutes everything I wish someone had told me.
12 years ago. And it's quite difficult to do that.
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.