To start, what is UCLB?
Well that’s an easy one to start with. So we’re a wholly owned subsidiary of UCL. We are effectively the intellectual property commercialisation vehicle for the university. Every university in the UK does this slightly differently, some will have a department within the university that does this, some will have a consultancy outside that does this. It might be a hybrid arrangement, but we are a wholly owned subsidiary that focuses on the commercialisation of intellectual property developed by the academic faculty.
But that wasn’t the case when I first started. I’ve been at UCL on and off a long time, doing my PhD and my postdoc in the early nineties, then I lived in North America and came back in 2000.
The reasoning behind having a subsidiary is because UCL is a charity, so there are certain risks it cannot take with its assets. We are the buffer between UCL and its priorities and then doing commercial business, which is very different.
And in a university as big as UCL, which by its nature is bureaucratic, because it has to be, we can’t afford to be like that. So we’re all employed by the UCLB company, we’re employed on company pay scales, not the university pay scales. And we’re rewarded differently. We cover the whole research base, everything from fine art to AI to engineering. We return money to the university from ventures according to the university’s revenue sharing policy. So we don’t set that revenue sharing policy, we just administer it for them.
We’re not just there for financial impact, we are there to make impact in all sorts of ways.
That could be social enterprise, economic impact. And we are profitable. We spent quite a few years as a loss making entity because we’d been investing in some of the companies like Autolus or Orchard, which are now publicly listed gene therapy companies. But those years of investment have paid off and now we are heading towards being not just profitable this year, but hopefully sustainably profitable in the future.
Could you outline who is in the UCLB team?
I like to describe the UCLB team as a fully integrated tech transfer or commercialisation operation, because we’ve got our business managers who are our core capability, if you like. So they are the people with technical backgrounds who liaise with the academic base at UCL but also with business. They are the ones who’ve got the relationships with specific departments or institutes and they build relationships with those groups. They will help identify any new inventions that come out of those departments and then decide how to commercialise it with the academics.
And that can either be through a spinout route or a licensing route, those are the two main ways to commercialise intellectual property.
Supporting those teams are 17 business managers in total now covering biomedical, physical sciences, and engineering. We have a legal team, consisting of corporate lawyers, patent lawyers, and intellectual property lawyers. We have got a project management team that helps with projects that we fund and our investment fund supports as well. We have got a HR, IT, and operations team and we’ve got a finance team. So they deal with our own finances, but they can also help support spinouts with payroll and accounts.
And we have our own marketing team. So we have the whole company set up to support everything we do.
The Commercialisation Process
What does it mean to “commercialise the exceptional ideas of UCL researchers?”
Effectively what it is doing is identifying something that has technical merit in the first place. We ask about confidentiality: has it been disclosed, has it been published, has someone given a talk about it? That will determine how you protect the IP. The academic will often know a lot about the commercial route because they are usually aware of the markets anyway.
We will also talk to them about who funded it, who we will need to revenue share with, who we might need to get permission from to commercialise the IP, and how they want to take it forward.
Then we look at the best way of protecting the intellectual property. They’ll need to work with patent attorneys to help get the patent filed. They’ll need to work with our team to support the commercialisation and work with investors. They have to be able to give a robust defence of their technology to investors. Some are well aware of it if they’ve done it before, some are not.
So what is the IP, can we protect it, and how do we take it to the market.
The other route is via a social enterprise, if it’s something that might be better developed that way. For instance, from the Slade School of Fine Art we’ve got a range of paints that have been developed from coal mining waste products, which is a great story and that is going down the social enterprise route as a company and also down the licensing route to Windsor and Newton, who are the artist paints company.
It the route to commercialisation a long process?
It can be quite short sometimes, it depends what the underlying technology is. Something like Senceive, which was an engineering and remote monitoring company, we sold that last year. That’s been going for 15 years, and we’ve been supporting it all the way through with small amounts of money.
A company like Autolous listed four years ago, but that was set up in 2015. So it really varies.
What can be done to simplify the process of bringing new ideas to market?
I think one of the things that we found is having proof of concept funds within the university. If you go out for series A or B funding, there is usually plenty of money around, especially in the biomedical space. There is a defined regulatory pathway for therapeutics which is well understood. Everyone knows what is involved in funding. And I think that was really helped by the MRC and the Wellcome Trust at the time having particular translational grants that at the time could go up to £4M, which was huge then for one grant to get therapeutics into the clinic.
When you have different disciplines, like AI, where you’re not sure what the market application is going to be, the process, from achieving significant investment to putting a company structure around the technology, is harder.
So we’ve set up a proof of concept fund and a seed fund for that. We’ve now got a £7.5M fund over the next three years, created from returns we’ve made from exits from our companies. That helps because it means we can take more risks. It means we can build relationships with parts of the universities that we didn’t have before. University awareness and sharing best practices is the other area that could simplify it,
One of the things that 6U is doing, with the backup of 10U, is trying to get template guidelines for how you would negotiate a spinout company, how you negotiate the terms, and a template term sheet so that if it’s something you’ve never done before, then you’ve got a starting point.
I think that also helps the investors because they don’t always know how universities work. Universities are complicated places and trying to navigate your way through them can be really difficult. So raising investor awareness is really useful. And we’ve had a series of roundtables where we’ve had some of the key investors in the UK with some of the UK’s leading commercialising universities to talk about what the problems are and what can be done to simplify the process.
That can make a huge difference. Apollo is a good example for how universities and industries can work together.
During the pandemic, UCL worked with Mercedes-Benz on the UCL Ventura CPAP device, and that agreement was put in place in a month. And then we used one of our licensing platforms to make sure that device was available globally free of charge.