Supporting healthcare innovators to develop their ideas and scale their business Dr Louise Jopling, Commercial Director at Eastern AHSN, explains how we have helped healthcare innovators navigate the innovation landscape and realise the potential of their ideas. We know that health is improved by great ideas, but great ideas only make an impact when they are put into practice. As an innovator, the struggle to find the right support to turn a great idea into reality, grow your business and make a difference to health and care services can be overwhelming at times. At Eastern AHSN, we support innovators from insight to implementation helping them to design and engineer new technologies and products, navigate complex systems and generate value propositions that make a positive and lasting health impact. Creating the conditions to help innovators thrive We run numerous programmes that help start-ups and small businesses to plan their next steps along the innovation pathway. In October, we partnered with Cambridge Judge Business School Entrepreneurship Centre and Idea Space to deliver a Venture Creation Weekend for clinicians and innovators from the allied health professions. Delegates were matched with potential founding team members in a supportive, safe, but challenging space, to explore and validate their ideas. Through workshops and mentoring sessions, teams were guided through the process of capturing an ideas potential and value, developing and experimenting with innovative business models and preparing their first pitch. Despite being at such an early stage in their development, three delegates went on to be accepted to Cambridge Judge Business Schools Accelerate Cambridge programme in spring 2023, and at least one participant has since been accepted onto the National Clinical Entrepreneurs Programme as a result of the Venture Creation Weekend. Read more about the Venture Creation Weekend here. Those working in healthcare settings are well placed to see where innovation can support their colleagues and improve services. This year, we ran three Clinical Innovators Forum events in partnership with Health Tech Enterprise. Each supports a community of entrepreneurs working within healthcare settings to learn from their peers and expert speakers from industry, academia and the venture-funding world. The Scale-Up Academy is an annual programme developed by Eastern AHSN, in partnership with the Triple Chasm Company, to tackle the healthcare scale-up challenge. The programme brings together start-up leadership teams with specialist advisers and experts who coach them to develop high-impact commercialisation plans. Over the course of six weeks, successful applicants meet twice a week for half-day workshops to develop their plans. They are given practical support and access to tools to find solutions to common problems faced when scaling a business. Areas covered include fundraising, marketing and proposition framing, intellectual The ScaleUp Academy is probably the single most impactful learning programme Ive worked through, leaving all the business books Ive read in shadows property management, product development, manufacturing, and team development. Read more about the Scale-Up Academy here. John Fitzpatrick, CFO at Cardisio Innovator spotlight: Charco Neurotech Lucy Jung, Co-founder of Charco Neurotech CUE1 is a wearable device, developed by our support our route-to-market journey. It has trust, to understand how best to use the CUE1 team of engineers, doctors and delivered two business development device in people with Parkinsons who are neuroscientists, to help people with workshops with the Charco team and NHS admitted to hospital. Parkinsons. The device provides focused clinicians and commissioners, to understand vibrotactile stimulation and cueing to reduce and validate CUE1s funding streams and develop our budget-impact model, to the symptoms of slowness and stiffness. We alignment to NHS key policy levers, as well as understand the potential cost-effectiveness of have been working with Eastern AHSN since how the device fits into care pathways. CUE1 to the NHS, which we can continue to 2020 and it has previously helped fund and Dr Alistair Mackett is a Consultant Geriatrician refine as we gather more evaluation and commission an evaluation of CUE1, which has at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS clinical outcome data. The model has been so really helped us with early conversations with Foundation Trust, who specialises in valuable in grant and funding applications, commissioners and providers. Parkinsons. He attended the workshop and and in conversations with investors and has since facilitated a pilot of the device at the healthcare providers. This year, the team has continued to We have also worked with the AHSN to Unlocking funding Dr Debora Lucarelli, CEO at Enhanc3D Genomics We know how important it is for innovators to access capital to develop their ideas and scale their business, but with so Inside every human cell, we store a full copy of the human many options out there, where do you start and who should genome, which is made up of a complete set of our DNA. you trust? Stretched out, the genome would measure two metres in length, so to fit inside the cell it is folded in a manner that Eastern AHSN helps innovators unlock funding to make change happen, helping find the best sources for them. differs from cell type to cell type. It is through this 3D folding of the genome that enhancers come into proximity with the specific genes they control. Our GenLink3D platform integrates molecular biology Brokering innovation funding through the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) SBRI Healthcare is an initiative delivered in partnership technologies with machine learning to map the 3D between the AHSNs and the Accelerated Access Collaborative structure of a genome in high resolution. A 3D that supports a programme of competitions inviting companies understanding enables us to decipher previously unseen to come forward with ideas and new technologies that have genetic variations that may help us identify actionable the potential to address known NHS challenges. Here are four disease biomarkers and treatment targets. of the successful bids we supported this year: Cardisio GmbHs, Cardisiography enables 3D analysis of the We are Cambridge-based, having initially been spun out of the Babraham Institute by Start Codon in 2020. We electrical activities of the heart in just four minutes. Eastern were introduced to the commercial team at Eastern AHSN AHSN supported them in securing 342,484, as part of SBRIs via its partnership with Start Codon and they have been a cardiovascular disease competition, to explore the impact of fantastic partner in helping us grow our organisation and using Cardisiography for community-based heart testing, to articulate our value proposition to secure funding. detect early signs of cardiovascular disease. Through the respiratory diseases competition, Aseptika Ltd Dr Louise Jopling, commercial director at Eastern AHSN, has been a strategic advisor and supported us in was awarded 499,342 to support the real-world validation, in a successful bid to secure 10 million in Series A funding both community and hospital-based settings, for Active+me from private investors in October 2022. The funding will REMOTE, its technology-enabled hybrid service-delivery help accelerate the development of GenLink3D, with an model for pulmonary rehabilitation that blends in-person initial focus on identifying novel biomarkers and treatment classes with at-home support. Onkohealth received 97,810 to pilot the use of digital targets for cancer, ageing and autoimmune conditions. prehabilitation in personalised cancer care pathways, as part of To find out more about this project, contact: louise.jopling@eahsn.org. SBRIs sustainability and a greener NHS competition. The programme of clinically-based behaviour change and coaching is tailored to people who are undergoing treatment for cancer and other conditions, to give them the best chance of a positive outcome. The project supports the delivery of a net zero NHS through a digital-first approach, reducing the services carbon footprint. Facilitating industry collaboration Arunava Dhar, Consultant Paediatrician with a special interest in Neonatology, Cambridge University Hospitals, and founder of LocANTS Citizens, academia, health services and industry will achieve more working together than they will in isolation. Our focus on helping organisations provide better services for patients means we can be an impartial critical friend, brokering deals that can benefit all parties. We supported 52 North Health in its successful application When babies are seriously ill, they may need to be for 1.2 million in SBRI funding to accelerate the development transferred from their local hospital to the nearest of its Neutrocheck device. Neutrocheck is designed to aid specialist intensive care unit by a neonatal transport patients on chemotherapy who are at risk of neutropenic service. It is vital for the babys care that the local clinical sepsis, a whole-body reaction to infection that kills three team is able to get the right support from the neonatal people each day across England and Wales1. Find out more intensive care specialist clinicians as soon as possible about our work with 52 North Health here. during this transfer. Thats why we created LocANTS, the cloud-based software platform with the ability to better Training the healthcare workforce on lysosomal storage disorder share critical information in real time between hospitals In March, Eastern AHSN helped launch a new RCN-accredited University Hospitals to virtually connect its consultants training programme to help healthcare professionals better into other hospitals, giving access to a dashboard that identify lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs), a group of more brings together all relevant information required for than 70 rare inherited metabolic disorders that result from rapid decision-making and a live high-definition video defects in lysosomal function. The new eLearning programme feed of the baby, to enable them to support medics was designed by nurses and health care professionals from across the region care for seriously ill babies. several lysosomal disorders centres across the UK, with input Importantly, LocANTS may also help reduce the need to from the British Inherited Metabolic Disease Group (BIMDG), to transfer some babies, as the ongoing detailed virtual help aid faster diagnosis and access to treatment for patients. advice that it can facilitate between clinical teams may and acute care transfer teams. It allows Cambridge Eastern AHSN supported the development of the training allow care and recovery at the local hospital, which also programme by seeking educational grant funding from four helps keep the baby and their parents together. pharmaceutical companies and coordinating the process for We engaged Eastern AHSN through their Innovation the nurse steering committee to select the medical Review Panel and with its support were delighted to be communications agency to be appointed to develop content. awarded 124,315 by the MedTech Accelerator. We also Liz Morris, lead specialist nurse at Cambridge University learned a lot from attending Eastern AHSNs Clinical Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, was part of the steering Innovators Forum and were delighted to be invited to group that helped create the course content. take part in an industry roundtable event coordinated by Speaking at the launch, she said: As a clinician, it can be the Association of British HealthTech Industries (ABHI) difficult finding reliable training to help deliver better care for and Eastern AHSN as part of ABHIs Health Technology patients with rare diseases. We want to help educate nurses Regulatory and Innovation Programme (May 2022). and other health professionals by providing accessible, Weve received invaluable advice from Jag Ahluwalia, digestible and accredited resources so they can chief clinical officer at Eastern AHSN, on how to develop understand more about these conditions and our ideas and have benefitted hugely from the AHSN their patients experiences. The team at teams expertise in writing bids and securing funding. Eastern AHSN has been pivotal in Find out more about this LSD training programme, and how to access it, on our website We are delighted to be shortlisted for MedTech and helping us get to this point, making Healthcare StartUp of the Year at the East of England introductions and helping us find the StartUp Awards, and would like to thank Eastern AHSN right partners to give healthcare for its support in helping us get this far. professionals the tools to help their patients. Brokering collaboration with the third sector: 52 North Health When Macmillan Cancer Support approached us in 2020 to help identify promising cancer innovations that could make a big difference for patients, we were thrilled to help. The If you want to find out more about our support of resulting oncology innovation exchange event introduced LocANTS, contact jag.ahluwalia@eahsn.org. funders, innovators and commissioners to create connections and build partnerships. We knew about Cambridge MedTech start-up 52 North Health and its pioneering Neutrocheck product because it had previously received 125,000 in grant funding through the MedTech Accelerator programme, in which Eastern AHSN is a partner. We also designed a bespoke business development workshop with key NHS stakeholders to support 52 North Health to develop its business case and better understand how to navigate procurement and commissioning frameworks. While it is still in the early stages, Neutrocheck is designed to enable chemotherapy patients with symptoms to test for neutropenic sepsis, a potentially life-threatening complication of chemotherapy, at home using a finger-prick test. Accurately detecting the early signs of neutropenic sepsis at home would enable people to get to hospital as quickly as possible and get the treatment they need, as well as avoid unnecessary hospital visits for those who test negative. Following an introduction at the innovation exchange event, we have been involved in the collaboration between 52 North Health and Macmillan Cancer Support, which eventually led to Macmillan investing 100,000 as part of its new Innovation Impact Investment Portfolio. The funding will support a clinical validation study, to be conducted in NHS hospitals, and it is hoped this will lead to the device being used widely throughout NHS providers in 2024. Eastern ASHN has also supported 52 North Health in its successful application for 1.2 million in funding from SBRI Healthcare, which is an NHS England and Improvement programme supported by the AHSN Network. We are planning another cancer innovation exchange in autumn 2023 following the success of the last event, which leveraged more than 3.5 million in funding. Making 2+2=5: Creating an innovation package for patients with multimorbidities The number of people with multiple conditions CareMonitR, an innovation that had come capacity. We also extended the pilot into some is rising. More than one in four of the adult through our Innovation Review Panel. Created GP practices in Essex. population in England lives with two or more by CareDoctR, CareMonitR enables GP conditions. Facing this growing challenge, practices to automate their recall included in the pilot shows that CareMonitR Suffolk Primary Care, a partnership of and monitoring activity for patients with provided a cost-saving for primary care GP practices from across Suffolk, long-term conditions and standardise care appointment costs through improved approached Eastern AHSN to explore how it for multimorbidity management. administrative efficiencies and better use of could better support patients with long-term To support this project, Eastern AHSN Analysis of data from 25,206 patients the diverse healthcare workforce. It also conditions while reducing their need for entered a Joint Working agreement with improved treatment adherence by patients and multiple appointments. AstraZeneca, whose real-world evidence team increased appropriate testing and diagnosis supported the pilot in a non-promotional through automation. We brokered a partnership to trial Supporting growth in the UK economy through healthcare innovation The East of England boasts the largest technology cluster in Europe, and Eastern AHSN has a key role in helping companies join this thriving ecosystem. This year, we partnered with the Quadram Institute to develop Supporting Economic Growth: International Innovator Masterclass, a two-day virtual programme for international HealthTech innovators and SMEs wishing to establish themselves in our region and navigate the NHS for UK commercialisation. The first cohort saw attendees invited from Switzerland, Israel, Belgium, France, Denmark, Australia and Sweden sign up to learn about how the NHS is structured, how it commissions services and adopts innovation and key regulations and frameworks for consideration in the UK. It also introduced participants to some of the incubators, accelerators and innovation hubs available in the East of England, as well as to colleagues from Growth Works and Anglia Innovation Partnership to give an outline of the support available for businesses looking to grow their presence in the region. Spanish-owned life sciences firm Quibim invests in Cambridge with help from Eastern AHSN Quibim, a leading Spanish-owned life sciences company, chose Cambridge for its first expansion to the UK, following support from the Combined Authority and Business Boards dedicated business growth service, Growth Works. The move will see the company create more than 10 jobs over the coming years. Quibim presented to an international market-access programme run by Growth Works, under its international inward investment brand, Locate Cambridge, and our Launching products that could have a huge impact within the UK market is complex, so this programme was so valuable in understanding the innovation landscape and our options in setting up UK operations Erik Belfrage, Health Tech Nordic commercial director was a panel member on this programme. The company then came through Eastern AHSNs Innovation Review Panel in 2021 and went on to take part in our third annual Scale-Up Academy later that year. We have brokered independent engagement meetings with NHS trusts that are keen to trial Quibims QP-Prostate product. Dr Angel Alberich, CEO of Quibim, said: We are excited about starting our operations in the UK and have been really motivated by the support received from Eastern AHSN. [Taken from an article in the Cambridge Independent.] Share this article Return to About Us If you want to learn more about how we can support you to turn your great idea into a positive health impact, visit our website. Up next: Read how we make sense of complex health data. References 1 Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. (2022). Cancer patients to help life saving home testing kit. cuh.nhs.uk. Last Updated: 22 November 2022. Available at: www.cuh.nhs.uk/news/cancer-patients-to-help-trial-life-saving-home-testing-kit/ Accessed 22 May 2023.