Comment from David Grimm and Simon Goldman, investment directors of UCL Technology Fund.

Universities are large complex organisations with vast amounts of research, teaching, industrial collaboration and intellectual property (IP) commercialisation going on at any one time. As Covid-19 hit the UK and businesses scrambled to re-engineer their processes and communication to work in the new environment, we wondered how universities, would cope. Highly effectively, it turns out. University College London (UCL), an institution of magnitude and complexity, delivered a swift and focused response to the pandemic that was impressive. This rapid response was highlighted by the UCL Ventura Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) project: departments quickly collaborated and brought in industrial partners to make a real, life-saving difference. The university’s hospitals – already at the forefront of reorganising to tackle the pandemic – coordinated alongside to help test the prototypes and make design improvements. Tech transfer office UCL Business, our partners in the UCL Technology Fund (UCLTF), swung into action too, ensuring the designs were made available globally on their specialised licensing platform, E-lucid. The designs were downloaded everywhere, from Australia to Zambia – a massively important contribution in the fight to save lives. Elsewhere, academics across the university have accelerated and repurposed research to tackle all aspects of the crisis. For example, a world-leading team of cancer scientists and antibody engineers at the UCL Cancer Institute are applying their expertise in targeting cancer cells and activating the immune system to kill tumours to instead develop therapeutics that target the SARS-CoV-2 virus and elicit an appropriate and controlled immune response to clear the virus and potentially provide long-term protection. UCL is a university with a long history of applied research that has global impact, but now more than ever the focus on application is at the forefront as these examples demonstrate. That mindset is contagious, and opportunities are appearing at an even more rapid pace. Many of the portfolio companies within the UCL Technology Fund have also been working at top speed to respond as they re-engineer their businesses to survive and thrive. As a university fund, many of the portfolio businesses are early stage deep tech and biotech opportunities. To some extent that shields the companies within the portfolio from immediate impact as they are generally capitalised to grow without much near-term revenue and designed to support long term change rather than exploit current trends. Anecdotally, we are seeing more interest from the wider tech investment community in earlier stage and deeper tech, which is positive and a trend we are…

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