UCLTF Showcase 2022 Highlights

The UCL Technology Fund (UCLTF), which Albion manages and administers in partnership with UCL Business, had its Showcase this year at the British Museum. The event, sponsored by Google, brought together UCL academics, spinouts, investors, and the broader technology ecosystem, to hear from the fund’s portfolio companies and projects.

Dr Anne Lane (CEO, UCL Business and UCLTF) and Dr Andrew Elder (Partner, Albion Capital and UCLTF) welcomed guests, who then proceeded into the life science and the physical science auditoriums to hear from some of UCLTF’s portfolio companies; each company spoke about their achievements so far, and plans to continue their success in the future.

Life sciences stage

On the life science stage, we heard from Luke Henry (Quell Therapeutics), Peter Adamson (Tenpoint Therapeutics) and Philippa Mills, who outlined her current research with Haiyan Zhou on the treatment of disorders affecting lysine metabolism. This was followed by Matteo Rizzi whose work with Kate Oversby-Powell looks at horizontal cell gene therapies.

The panel discussion was chaired by UCLTF’s Leigh Brody and covered what ‘exit’ actually means in biotech venture capital and how this is changing. Leigh was joined by Cassie Doherty (Parkwalk Advisors), Clare Terlouw (LifeArc) and Mary Canning (Epidarex Capital).
 

Physical sciences stage

On the physical science stage, Daniel Summerbell (Carbon Re) spoke about their mission to help the world achieve net zero by optimising manufacturing processes; Alhamza Alnaimi and Ben Steer (Pometry) outlined how they describe the past to predict for the future, simplifying data transformation through temporal graph analytics in real-time.

The panel chaired by Marina Santilli (UCL Business) featured John Cassidy (Kindred Capital VC), John Taysom (Angel Investor) and Manjari Chandran-Ramesh (Amadeus Capital Partners), who discussed the funding landscape for deep tech businesses.

The final two presentations came from Hazy’s Harry Keen, who use synthetic data to conduct sophisticated data analysis, and Odin Vision’s Peter Mountney who discussed their work using AI to improve detection and diagnosis of cancer.