Acorn Computers was marooned up a murky creek struggling to locate a paddle; founders of a fledgling Arm were desperate to jump ship. The situation could have escalated into a technology Titanic – a brave new world sinking in a battered heap. 

Instead, Arm ended up a titan and sailed on to bright new horizons – and even saved the mother ship, Acorn.

Cambridge technology entrepreneur Stan Boland – then at the epicentre as the foundations rocked and rumbled – relives the rescue saga with a warts and all assessment in Business Weekly’s iconic 30th Anniversary edition out this week.

In a definitive review of Cambridge’s transition from cabbage patch in 1990 to billionaire’s row in 2020 – with science and technology driving the transformation – Boland also goes under the hood of his other tech companies, recalling the bruises as well as the brilliance. 

Sir Christopher Evans, founding father of the Cambridge biotechnology cluster, is equally frank about the fight for funding that took him and others first to the City and then to global investors to ensure brilliant life science research cultivated on Cambridge’s doorstep did not wither on the vine. Now Cambridge is one of the world’s leading life science hubs.

Relive the post 9/11 fall-out in the ‘special relationship’ as the White House bought a Cambridge smallpox vaccine to fight the perceived threat of biological warfare while Britain gave its contract to a Labour donor – and was accused of using the wrong strain in the vaccine and putting the UK population at risk.

As well as charting the major corporate events over the 30 years that Business Weekly has promoted this region to a global audience, our Anniversary edition demonstrates how much other countries and governments have come to rely on Cambridge science & technology to solve critical problems.

Read how US defence chiefs have turned to Cambridge technology to eradicate weaknesses in integrated circuit chips – a vulnerability that threatens economic and national security.

How world governments have turned to Cambridge Big Biotech and pharma players to lead the fight against coronavirus: How Cambridge cluster companies are changing the core paradigm of the international life science industry.

And as Business Weekly continues to dictate the news agenda, read about the commercialisation of the world’s first flying car; major new fundraisings and financial innovation; how former Home Secretary Amber Rudd has joined the advisory board of cyber security world leader Darktrace; and FFI’s new $1m conservation project steered from Cambridge with global funding to help counter another aspect of the COVID-19 fall-out.

Throughout our 30-year history, Business Weekly has piled exclusive upon exclusive and we lead our Anniversary edition with another great insight on a company poised to make a difference to healthcare for decades to come.

Co-steered by brilliant former CAT and MedImmuine (AstraZeneca) scientist Jane Osbourn, Alchemab flips the coin of life science research and unveils a platform that focuses not on why so many people become ill but why increasing numbers stay well for longer – increasingly past the age of 100.

The ageing well! More Cambridge innovation; and this backed by an alliance with genomic sequencing ace Illumina. 

Alchemab is yet another One2Watch for investors and business builders brought to you exclusively by Business Weekly.

• To read the latest edition of Business Weekly visit our epaper.

One of the lasting consequences of COVID-19 could be a fundamental shift in working practices across the country with many people continuing to work from home long after the lockdown eases, writes Heather Tulloch, Senior Tax Manager Ashcroft Partnership LLP.

This new breed of ‘homeworker’ might be wondering to what extent they can be reimbursed by their employer for additional household costs. The options are summarised below. 

It is important that both the employer and the employee understand the tax implications and reporting requirements.  

Fixed rate allowance
The simplest option: an employer can reimburse any employee who works from home (at least once every week) for “additional” household costs incurred, up to a cap of £6 per week. 

Provision of tools or services 
Another option is the exemption that allows employers to provide employees with tools or equipment that are needed to carry out their duties: for instance, a set of tools for a tradesman or IT equipment and office furniture for an office worker. 

For the exemption to apply, the private use of the assets should be insignificant, and the employer must purchase it directly, rather than reimburse the employee for the purchase cost.

A similar exemption exists for the provision of any services that are required for employees to work from home, provided that any personal use of the services is “not significant” and the contract for the services is between the employer and the supplier. An example would be the provision of a telephone line at home to be used solely for making business calls. 

Job-related costs
An alternative to the fixed weekly rate of £6 is the reimbursement by an employer of any additional costs incurred, such as an increase in utilities bills from additional heating and lighting. 

The exemption only applies to expenses incurred “wholly, exclusively and necessarily” by the employee in the course of doing their job, so it will not cover the employer contributing to fixed household expenses such as mortgage interest or council tax, or any contribution to costs that are not based on the actual usage, such as fixed monthly broadband or phone costs. 

All the above are exempt benefits, but any other contributions from employers to employees are likely to trigger tax charges and reporting requirements.

Home office
A director-shareholder who is running a business from home may not be happy with the £6 a week exemption, nor with the administrative and national insurance burden of preparing a P11d (required where a business is meeting some of the fixed costs of running the property). 

The solution is for the business to rent part of the house from the homeowner. In these circumstances, the rent will be a deductible expense for the business and the homeowner will have rental income that will need to be reported on their self-assessment return. The homeowner can claim a proportion of the house running costs against the rental income. 

Carefully calculated, the net rental income arising in the hands of the individual will be minimal and, since it is property rather than employment income, there will be no National Insurance. 

It should be noted that any rooms that are used exclusively for the business will restrict the principal private residence relief available to mitigate capital gains tax on a future sale of the property and trigger a liability to business rates. Caution is advised!

Summary
The most appropriate method will depend on the circumstances. For most employees, the fixed rate allowance and specific exemption for the provision of equipment will be sufficient, but for those incurring significant costs, such as owner-managers running a business from home, the rental agreement option should be considered.  

What is clear is that, as our working patterns change and we become more flexible and agile in our working practices, the tax considerations around working from home will become more relevant.

For further information on any of the above, please contact Heather Tulloch, Senior Tax Manager at Ashcroft, on 01763 209113. 

Three businesses with East of England operations are helping US defence chiefs eradicate weaknesses in digital integrated circuit chips.

Cambridge duo Arm and UltraSoc and Northrop Grumman in Market Deeping are in two teams hand-picked by The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the US to protect the ICs from exploitation which threatens economic and national security.

DARPA is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. 

As Internet of Things devices rapidly increase in popularity and deployment, economic attackers and nation-states alike are shifting their attention to the vulnerabilities of digital IC chips. 

Threats to IC chips are well known, and despite various measures designed to mitigate them, hardware developers have largely been slow to implement security solutions due to limited expertise, high cost and complexity, and lack of security-oriented design tools integrated with supporting semiconductor intellectual property. 

When unsecure circuits are used in critical systems, the lack of embedded countermeasures exposes them to exploitation. 

To address the growing threat this poses from an economic and national security perspective DARPA developed the Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program. AISS aims to automate the process of incorporating scalable defence mechanisms into chip designs, while allowing designers to explore chip economics versus security trade-offs based on the expected application and intent while maximising designer productivity.

DARPA has now announced two research teams to take on AISS’ technical challenges. Two teams of academic, commercial, and defence industry researchers and engineers will explore the development of a novel design tool and IP ecosystem – which includes tool vendors, chip developers, and IP licensors – allowing, eventually, defences to be incorporated efficiently into chip designs. 

The expected AISS technologies could enable hardware developers to not only integrate the appropriate level of state-of-the-art security based on the target application, but also balance security with economic considerations like power consumption, die area, and performance.

“The ultimate goal of the AISS program is to accelerate the timeline from architecture to security-hardened RTL from one year, to one week – and to do so at a substantially reduced cost,” said the DARPA program manager leading AISS, Serge Leef.

The two AISS research teams are:-

• Synopsys, Arm, Boeing, Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research at the University of Florida, Texas A&M University, UltraSoC, and University of California, San Diego
• Northrop Grumman, IBM, University of Arkansas, and University of Florida

“AISS is bringing together leading minds in security research and semiconductor design to focus on a problem of national importance,” said Leef. “AISS will drive revolutionary advances in design productivity and have a dramatic and positive impact on our electronic supply chain security.”

AISS consists of two primary research areas that address four fundamental silicon security vulnerabilities: side channel attacks, hardware Trojans, reverse engineering, and supply chain attacks, such as counterfeiting, recycling, re-marking, cloning, and over-production. 

The first research area involves the development of a security engine that combines the latest academic research and commercial technology into an upgradable platform that can be used to defend chips against attacks and provide an infrastructure to manage these hardened chips as they progress through their lifecycle.

Synopsys and Northrop Grumman will each be developing Arm®-based architectures that include security engines offering different approaches and demonstrating the modularity of the new AISS-based flows to accept other security engines, potentially including highly specialised engines developed for future Department of Defense applications.

In addition, Northrop Grumman, along with IBM, will seek to further enhance technologies first developed under the DARPA Supply Chain Hardware Integrity for Electronics Defense (SHIELD) program. 

They will use these technologies as a starting point for the development of an Asset Management Infrastructure (AMI) to protect chips throughout their lifecycle. 

The goal is to implement the AMI using distributed ledger technology, which provides for a high-availability, cloud-based system capable of managing keys, certificates, watermarks, policies, and tracking data to ensure that chips remain secure as they move through the design ecosystem.

Led by Synopsys, the second research area involves integrating the security engine technology developed in the first research area into system-on-chip (SOC) platforms in a highly automated way. 

In effect, this second research area is focused on performing system synthesis or combining the new security-aware electronic design automation (EDA) tools developed under AISS with commercial off-the-shelf IP from Synopsys, Arm, and chip instrumentation specialist, UltraSoc. 

This capability could allow chip designers to specify Power, Area, Speed, and Security (PASS) constraints on these AISS tools, which will then automatically generate optimal implementations based on the application objectives.

Flusso, a Cambridge University spin-out, has raised a $5.7 million Series A round to scale production of the world’s smallest flow sensor in an $8 billion market. 

The round was led by existing backer Parkwalk Advisors and new investor Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund, with participation from 24 Haymarket, Cambridge Enterprise, Martlet, and Cambridge Angels. 

With products already commercially available, the investment will also enable Flusso to widen its product and technology portfolio.

Flow meters are traditionally used in industrial, automotive, and medical products to monitor the movement of gas or liquid. The market is worth $8 billion annually, but is highly fragmented in terms of technologies and applications, and innovation has been lacking in consumer products in particular. 

Flusso’s patent-protected technology enables flow sensors to be made significantly smaller and less expensive, while adding enhanced functionality and without compromising performance. 

The result is enabling direct flow sensing in a wide range of both existing and future mass-market consumer products – including heating and ventilation systems, filtration units, and respiratory medical devices – for which flow-sensing components were previously too big, expensive, or difficult to integrate.

Flusso was spun out of the university in 2016 by co-founders Professor Florin Udrea (co-founder of CamSemi, Cambridge CMOS Sensors, Cambridge Microelectronics, and Cambridge GaN Devices), Professor Julian Gardner (co-founder of Cambridge CMOS Sensors and Sorex), Dr John Coull, and Dr Andrea De Luca, all sensor experts with extensive experience in the semiconductor industry. 

They have been joined by Robert Swann, an experienced entrepreneur specialising in early-stage semiconductor companies, as chairman, and Dr Cleopatra Cabuz, formerly VP of Technology and Partnerships in Honeywell’s Safety and Productivity Solutions division.

Flusso’s technology uses a CMOS MEMS silicon platform, and is packaged and assembled using a pure microelectronics approach. This provides both performance and scalability of manufacturing in tens of millions of parts per month.

CEO Andrea De Luca said: “The energy efficiency of many products could be greatly improved if they incorporated gas and flow sensors, but companies are unable to do so due to cost, size, or manufacturing constraints.

“Our vision is to bring flow- and gas-sensing technologies to all these products. This funding round helps us to scale up and bring our vision to reality.”

John Pearson, Investment Manager at Parkwalk, added: “Parkwalk are delighted to continue to support the team at Flusso. The company has an exciting technology with multiple large scale applications and with this financing the highly experienced team has the resources to deliver on that promise.”

Foresight’s involvement could be another gamechanger as Flusso’s expansion gathers pace. As Foresight investment manager Nick Mettyear explains: “Our unique collaboration with Williams Advanced Engineering and their expertise in fluid dynamics has already seen the Williams team supporting the company and providing valuable commercial insights.”

Local law firms were to the fore in the fundraising, Mills & Reeve advising the investors and Taylor Vinters guiding Flusso.

Microsoft Research Cambridge is spearheading stunning new technology poised to revolutionise video communications.

Virtual Robot Overlay for Online Meetings (VROOM) combines augmented and virtual reality to bring life-sized avatars into the workplace in the form of telepresence robots. 

The technology is designed to make a person working remotely in VR and someone working in the office wearing a Microsoft-designed HoloLens AR headset feel like they’re in the same place.

With more families confined to home and thousands of companies, especially in the technology field, home working during the coronavirus outbreak – and planning to continue doing so when restrictions lift – this is not only an innovation for its time but also a dynamic play for the future.

The advance was revealed in a paper by Microsoft Research Cambridge trio Brennan Jones, Priscilla Wong and Sean Rintel and their Microsoft Vancouver colleague Yaying Zhang.

As they explain, telepresence robots allow remote users to freely explore a space they are not in and provide a physical embodiment in that space. However, they lack a compelling representation of the remote user in the local space – hence the invention of VROOM which is a two-way system for exploring how to improve the social experience of robotic telepresence. 

The technology would appear to be capable of transforming face2face online dialogue domestically and across a range of business, academic and research environments.

For the local user, an augmented reality interface shows a life-size avatar of the remote user overlaid on a telepresence robot. For the remote user, a head-mounted virtual reality interface presents an immersive 360° view of the local space with mobile autonomy. 

The VR system tracks the remote user’s head pose and hand movements, which are applied to the avatar. This allows the local user to see the remote’s head direction and hand gestures and the remote user to identify with the robot as an identifiable embodiment of self.

The authors write: “Video communication has enabled global work and personal life and distributed access to education, healthcare, professional services, and more. 

“However, traditional 2D video calling is inherently asymmetrical, constraining users’ abilities to achieve common ground, maintain awareness and control and share experiences. People can certainly work around these constraints, but they will still be physically and spatiality limited.

“There are two notable ways to add physical and spatial experiences into video communication. One is to use telepresence robots – effectively video-chat-on-wheels. 

“While not yet widely adopted in domestic contexts, they are increasingly common in the workplace. Another is to use an augmented reality system in which remote and local users wear head mounted devices to see one another as avatars in their respective local spaces. 

“These avatars can be cartoon-like or more photorealistic, providing something approaching a parametric representation of the user. Both methods are a step ahead of traditional video communication in terms of physical and spatial mobility, autonomy, and bodily identification. However, they both still have limitations. 

“Telepresence robots still lock users into 2D screens showing constrained fields of view (FOVs) from a remote camera, so while they allow for more autonomous mobility, they suffer from the same limitations on conveying remote users’ body language and expressions as traditional video communication. 

“In addition, low FOVs can result in reduced task performance. While current technologies limit the fidelity of parametric avatars, AR systems enable free use of arm and hand gestures and spatial bodily arrangements. However, mobile autonomy in a remote location is limited to a current shared meeting instance with another person – an AR avatar cannot roam around a remote location.

“The question, then, is how to combine robotic telepresence with mixed-reality avatars to provide the best of both worlds to each endpoint of a video-call experience.’ Hence the arrival of VROOM and move over ZOOM!”

The authors say that, given the evolution of video communication and improvements in allied technologies such as wireless communications infrastructure, more opportunities to collaborate with people not sharing a physical space are arising. 

This is enabling a greater number of remote and distributed work meetings and activities. As a result, such technologies are empowering, providing inclusion and new opportunities to those who would otherwise not have them; e.g., people with disabilities who cannot leave the home, people who live far away and cannot afford to travel, or need to be far away to take care of family members, etc.

A telepresence robot is a remotely-controlled movable robot with a screen, speakers, a microphone, and a camera. Such a robot provides an experience that is akin to ‘video-chat on wheels,’ allowing a user to drive around and interact with people in another space. 

Usage of telepresence robots has been studied by researchers in collaborative and social contexts such as museum visits, remotely attending academic conferences, outdoor activities and long distance relationships. 

The authors provide an inspirational example of usage. In their own words: “Amy is a design director in a motorcycle manufacturing company. She is located in Seattle but has teammates in Shanghai. With VROOM, she can be autonomously present in the Shanghai studio. She has a virtual ‘key to the door’ of the Shanghai office, engaging with the office on her own timetable and without the need to organise meetings with a particular Shanghai colleague. 

“Her colleagues, each wearing a HoloLens, can see her avatar present in any room, moving around the building and if they call to her they can see her look back over her shoulder. 

“Amy can ‘walk’ around the studio to check project progress from team to team, hold 1:1s in her manager’s office and engage in ad hoc ‘water cooler’ conversations with people she comes across. 

“In a specific design session, one team shows five life size clay maquettes of new motorcycle designs. Amy and her colleagues are all able to move around the room discussing the designs, huddling around each model and pointing at various design elements. 

“As people move, Amy is always able to know whether others are looking at her, where others are looking, and can also direct her attention to anything in the room’s context. 

“At the end of the session, as everyone exits the room and goes back to their open office space, Amy is able to continue conversations with a couple of colleagues on the move.

“At the end of that days’ visit, Amy docks the robot ready for another user. An hour later Red, who works in the Brisbane office, calls into the robot and can move around like Amy. 

“Although the robot itself is identical, all of Robert’s Shanghai colleagues are able to know he is there at a glance because they can see that his life-size avatar is different to Amy’s.”

To expand on VROOM further, the inventors are interested in providing the local and remote users with a shared mixed-reality workspace. That is, both remote and local users would be able to spawn virtual objects (such as 3D models, documents, etc.) that they could pin to locations in the real environment and both users would be able to see and interact with the objects. 

The local user would see the objects overlaid on the real environment through the AR headset, while the remote user would see the same objects but in VR. This could be applied in areas like home planning (e.g., discussing furniture choices in an apartment) or remote education/training (e.g., trainer and trainee adding virtual arrows, notes, tags in the training space).

VROOM can also be used in scenarios with multiple local and remote users. 

More explorations can be done looking at how multiple users interact with each other, how to have multiple remote users see each other’s avatars, and how to reduce cost (e.g. with cheap remotely-controlled robots, instead of telepresence robots).

Cambridge life science business Inivata, which was staring down the barrel in a fight for urgent funding, has clinched lifeline capital through a $25 million investment from the US.

A global leader in liquid biopsy technology, Inivata has formed a strategic collaboration with Nasdaq-quoted NeoGenomics, Inc for the commercialisation of its InVisionFirst®-Lung liquid biopsy test in the States.

NeoGenomics is a leading US-based cancer diagnostics and services company. As an established player in the field with significant commercial reach and scale it is a highly complementary partner to advance the commercialisation of InVisionFirst-Lung.

As part of the collaboration, NeoGenomics will make a $25 million equity investment in Inivata to take a minority shareholding with an option to buy the UK/US business outright. 

It will also take a seat on the Inivata board. The new funding received by Inivata will be used to enable the acceleration of the company’s innovative liquid biopsy products, including further development work on RaDaR.

Auditor PwC had warned recently that Inivata had until August to find the cash it needed to survive and thrive. This is some response! 

As Business Weekly pointed out at the time, the technology and team have always been world beaters but cash remains king even in the jaws of a pandemic.

Inivata’s liquid biopsy test offers competitive sensitivity with results being delivered within seven calendar days from blood draw and has already received reimbursement for US Medicare patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), paving the way for the test to be used in routine clinical care.

Inivata and NeoGenomics will also seek opportunities for collaboration with biopharmaceutical companies around Inivata’s liquid biopsy platform, drawing on both companies’ technology and expertise.

These collaborations could further accelerate the roll-out across Inivata’s range of leading liquid biopsy products including RaDaR™, the newly launched highly sensitive personalised assay for the detection of residual disease and recurrence. 

This product complements the use of other tests, including InVisionFirst-Lung, and is initially being utilised in clinical trial settings where it has the potential to increase the speed of patient recruitment through more accurate selection.       

Clive Morris, CEO of Inivata, said: “This strategic collaboration and equity investment provides the platform to significantly accelerate the commercialisation of InVisionFirst-Lung in the US, and bring its benefits more rapidly to patients and clinicians. 

“It will also drive the development and roll-out of RaDaR, our highly sensitive, personalised test to detect residual disease in multiple disease states.

“We look forward to working with NeoGenomics, an established and well-respected company in this field, and utilising its expertise to deliver further on the potential of our pioneering liquid biopsy technology to improve outcomes for cancer patients.”

Cambridge startup Decorte Future Industries has won £50k from Innovate UK to fund final R & D trials of advanced technology intelligent clothing in care homes to help combat coronavirus.

It is the maximum Innovate UK was mandated to award in the ‘Business-led innovation in response to global disruption’ competition.

As Business Weekly revealed in February, DFI (then in stealth) has developed intelligent, always-fitting clothing with embedded AI controls, which is machine washable and can be tumble dried – stealing a march on rival products from US and Korean tech giants.

The business, spearheaded by coding ace Dr Roeland Decorte, has now put its foot on the gas to secure venture investment having applied the brake temporarily following the March 23 UK lockdown.

Dr Decorte said he was thrilled beyond belief at the Innovate UK grant which further validated the groundbreaking technology.

“It is fabulous to know that our core technology could help to continuously monitor and empower the elderly and vulnerable in care homes.

“Innovate UK let us know they were astounded to receive over 8600 applications, their highest number ever; in fact, they say, this is more than all competitions in the 2019/20 financial year put together. This was possibly the most competitive grant in Innovate UK’ history.”

Decorte Future Industries, officially launched in August 2019, builds body-adaptive (always-fitting) intelligent clothing that allows single-platform remote monitoring of multimodal biometrics (vitals, including body-temperature, coughing) of the wearer. 

It further enhances the mobility of the user by allowing them to employ the same embedded hardware to remotely control devices through voice, gesture and touch commands, e.g. through touching their sleeve, using existing third-party AI. 

The business consists of Cambridge PhDs and engineers, advised by the Director of Engineering at Raspberry Pi; Cambridge University research, amongst other sources, has demonstrated that wearables can detect, and at times even predict and prevent, health issues.

While the product was initially conceived in the context of the defence sector, a retired care home CEO and adviser recognised the need for such single-platform remote monitoring and mobility-enhancing technology in the care sector, investing £5k+ – prompting FFI to start exploring that market in early 2020. 

Dr Decorte says that just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK, the company and its EEN-awarded adviser – also the incoming head of innovation for a UK care home chain – investigated deploying the technology to render care more efficient and effective. 

In response to COVID-19, the company is now seeking to supercharge existing R & D to build and deploy as swiftly as possible the most basic, cheapest version of its technology, to allow remote monitoring of the elderly and vulnerable during the crisis.

Dr Decorte says: “Lives are being actively lost due to the lack of technologies enabling comprehensive 24/7 monitoring of vulnerable people in care. 

“Our proposed project is a six-month trial and final R & D process to take place in a single care home, to test efficiency, effectiveness of, as well as response of residents to such biometric monitoring and enhanced mobility through intelligent clothing. 

“In a recent SEHTA survey investigating the lack of technology in care, care home administrators and authorities responsible for over two million individuals ‘all seemed to agree that the ideal solution is a single platform into which all stakeholders, sensors and individual devices can feed and access data, and which records and manages everything in a single environment.’

“Intelligent clothing, covering the whole body, renders such a centralised gathering, sending an AI-automated analysis of resident data possible for the first time.

“Our solution would directly address industries and people that have been severely impacted by COVID-19 and hopefully save lives. 

“This will be achieved by making the process of monitoring the elderly and vulnerable in care (and elsewhere) much more efficient and effective, moving away from physical interactions that take place only occasionally at specified time intervals.

“The prevailing process often fails to provide the swift response needed in emergencies such as caused by COVID-19, leading to lost lives. Our solution transforms this lottery to the certainty of tech-enabled 24/7 remote care.

“Our technology would provide a much more responsive and holistic companion to physical monitoring and triage by nurses, carers, NHS staff, or individuals themselves (self-monitoring), allowing algorithms to track body temperature patterns and coughing, using the same criteria as the NHS call centres to flag worrying patterns and to suggest when medical help may need to be sought, or is critical. This would furthermore seriously alleviate pressure on nurses, care workers and other staff. 

“Introducing intelligent clothing that monitors the wearer’s biometrics is clearly an innovative and ambitious project – only possible because of our existing patent-pending, lightweight, low-cost exoskeleton allowing such clothing to fit any body-shape or size. 

“Our clothing would not be a medical device and thus able to be deployed much more quickly, as it does not diagnose or treat, instead being a typical wearable, offering a 24/7 overview and additional protection alongside physical third-party or self-monitoring, especially during those intervals when no monitoring is normally taking place.”

Dr Decorte says third party devices can be integrated into the company’s smart-clothing architecture: these devices simply need to be combined into a single care-focused product in the final R & D process. 

“This grant allows us to immediately start this process and begin engagement with the care industry. The nature of the tech also means that our work can, by definition, be done remotely, with clothing sent to care homes and data processed by the company at home. 

“This Innovate UK success represents the potential birth of a new intelligent clothing industry dramatically enhancing care.”

At present care homes do not have the resources to continuously monitor residents’ health and vitals. Checkups are infrequent, with long intervals, and often rely on simple visual recognition by staff of residents in distress. 

Care home staff – particularly in homes without nursing – are not routinely required to take observations on residents (British Geriatrics Society). In case of sudden-onset or rapidly worsening conditions like COVID19, critical rapid response often comes much too late.

Dr Decorte reasons that the lack of continuous monitoring also means that patterns are hard to establish for staff and the wrong action may be taken: care residents are ‘some of the most complex patients in primary care, with a high rate of unplanned hospital transfer, over half of which may be avoidable’ (Barker et al. 2020, in Age and Ageing 49, 142). 

“This puts unnecessary additional strain on staff and homes – and the NHS. The £16.5 billion-sector, with around 426k residents, is unprepared for the ageing population; demand will outstrip supply by 2022. Unavoidable shifts to home/remote-care  means demand for telehealth will explode, way beyond COVID19- distancing.”

AstraZeneca is scaling manufacturing capability of a new Oxford University COVID-19 vaccine to one billion doses to supply countries worldwide at no profit during the pandemic.

The Cambridge business wants to ensure a vaccine is available across the planet – not just the UK – and its altruism has today been rewarded with a $1 billion windfall from a US power player.

The investment has come from the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) for the development, production and delivery of the vaccine, starting in September.

That development programme includes a Phase III clinical trial with 30,000 participants plus a paediatric trial.

AstraZeneca recognises that the vaccine may not work but is committed to progressing the clinical program with speed and scaling up manufacturing at risk.

Only a week ago the company was targeting 100 million doses of the vaccine but the landscape has changed dramatically and ambitions have been ramped accordingly.

The first agreements are now to supply at least 400 million doses and the company reveals it has total capacity sourced for one billion doses through 2020 and into 2021 and continues to seek opportunities to further scale capacity.

AstraZeneca says it is advancing its ongoing response to address the unprecedented challenges of COVID-19 and collaborating with a number of countries and multilateral organisations to make the Oxford vaccine widely accessible around the world in an equitable manner.

It has secured total manufacturing capacity for one billion doses so far and will begin first deliveries in September. AstraZeneca aims to conclude further agreements supported by several parallel supply chains, which will expand capacity further over the next months to ensure the delivery of a globally accessible vaccine.  

The company is also engaging with international organisations such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Gavi the Vaccine Alliance and the World Health Organisation (WHO), for the fair allocation and distribution of the vaccine across borders. 

AstraZeneca is also in discussions with governments around the world to increase access and talking to the Serum Institute of India and other potential partners to increase production and distribution.

CEO Pascal Soriot said: “This pandemic is a global tragedy and it is a challenge for all of humanity. We need to defeat the virus together or it will continue to inflict huge personal suffering and leave long-lasting economic and social scars in every country around the world. 

“We are so proud to be collaborating with Oxford University to turn their ground-breaking work into a medicine that can be produced on a global scale. 

“We would like to thank the US and UK governments for their substantial support to accelerate the development and production of the vaccine. We will do everything in our power to make this vaccine quickly and widely available.”

AstraZeneca has now finalised its licence agreement with Oxford University for the recombinant adenovirus vaccine. The licensing follows the recent global development and distribution agreement with the university’s Jenner Institute and the Oxford Vaccine Group. AstraZeneca has also agreed to support the establishment of a joint research centre at Oxford University for pandemic preparedness research.

A Phase I/II clinical trial of the vaccine began last month to assess safety, immunogenicity and efficacy in over 1,000 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 55 years across several trial centres in southern England. 

Data from the trial is expected shortly which, if positive, would lead to late-stage trials in a number of countries. 

AstraZeneca’s comprehensive pandemic response also includes rapid mobilisation of its global research efforts to discover novel coronavirus-neutralising antibodies to prevent and treat progression of the COVID-19 disease, with the aim of reaching clinical trials in the next three to five months. 

The company has also quickly moved into testing of new and existing medicines to treat the infection, including CALAVI and ACCORD trials underway for Calquence (acalabrutinib) and DARE-19 trial for Farxiga (dapagliflozin) in COVID-19 patients.

AstraZeneca said the scale-up to a billion doses was not anticipated to have any significant impact on its financial guidance for 2020; expenses to progress the vaccine are anticipated to be offset by funding from governments.

Technology hothouse Cambridge Consultants is fielding enquiries to use a new ventilator that it designed for the UK’s fight against COVID-19 from overseas territories where ventilator capacity is limited. 

The international interest in Veloci-Vent makes up for the Government’s decision not to continue funding the device as it deemed that UK demand for such apparatus had already been met.

Business Weekly recently flagged that the sophisticated technology looked set to find global markets as world governments sat up and paid attention to the innovation.

Now, for the first time, Cambridge Consultants has revealed the enormous effort and professionalism that its team poured into developing Veloci-Vent for the national effort.

The device was designed and built at the request of the UK Government for use in the treatment of COVID-19 under the Ventilator Challenge in which several Cambridge innovation teams were involved. 

Created as a new design in a little over six weeks and praised by a panel including ministers, clinicians and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Veloci-Vent is an achievement to rank alongside any in Cambridge Consultants’ 60-year history, the company said today.

Cambridge Consultants initially received the Government’s call on March 13. Faced with the biggest crisis in decades and the risk that the UK’s ventilator capacity would be overwhelmed, the company said it was proud to assist in the rapid development and manufacture of ventilators to meet the unprecedented challenge faced by NHS hospitals dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. 

This ‘Ventilator Challenge’ involved multiple concurrent streams, with leading technology and engineering firms engaged to build existing, modified or newly designed ventilators at speed.

Despite the company’s long track record in pioneering medical device development, the team knew they’d taken on the challenge of their professional lives: to design and build a completely new ventilator, from a blank sheet of paper to manufactured units – and in just six weeks. 

The team also needed to base their design around components available at scale in the UK, due to supply chain disruption. As a safety-critical medical device it would normally take five or six years to develop a system to the levels of safety and clinical utility necessary for patient deployment. 

High volume supply and extremely rapid manufacture were key objectives, while remaining subject to testing and approval from the MHRA and without compromising the integrity and focus on patient safety that sits at the core of the company’s quality system. 

A team was convened within hours, bringing together a range of disciplines including mechanical engineers, electronic engineers, software engineers, regulatory affairs specialists, physicists, mathematicians, human factors, design and more.

This team, that quickly grew to 185 people, began a programme of work that would run day and night without pause, despite the working constraints of a national lockdown, for a further 46 days.

In the early days of the Ventilator Challenge, when the clinical understanding of COVID-19 was less developed, and urgency superseded all else, the team was guided to design and build an ultra-minimalist device. 

But with an improved clinical understanding of the disease, so the need and direction from government was refined. 

Working with an advisory team that included front line clinicians, the guidance was to develop a robust device fit for as many patients as possible – COVID-19 has no one specific phenotype – aiming for maximum versatility. 

Veloci-Vent was designed from the outset as a fully-featured ventilator, capable of a range of sophisticated and technically challenging functions tailored to the reality of the COVID-19 patient journey. 

While this evolution caused fundamental difficulties to some ‘minimum viable product’ type approaches within the broader programme, a highly flexible underlying architecture and massively parallel work streams meant that the Cambridge Consultants team could respond to changing needs and timescales while never stepping outside of the normal regulatory framework.

Veloci-Vent is based on the design of established ICU pressure-controlled ventilators. It is suitable for long term use, has a familiar user interface and allows standard clinical workflows. 

The device enables the ‘basic’ mandatory ventilation originally envisioned and expands well beyond that, providing a system that responds to patients as they begin to recover and breathe for themselves. 

Patient-triggered ventilation is capable of assisting through various spontaneous breathing modes, supports aspiration (suction) and, ultimately, weaning. 
These more advanced modes provide a system suitable for the longer period of intubation described by both the UK Government’s specification and the team’s discussions with clinicians.

To the relief of the whole country, social distancing measures put in place during March flattened the peak COVID-19 infection rate. The result is that the NHS retained spare critical bed and ventilator capacity and the  Government now expects to meet demand using existing ventilator designs. 

Honouring the huge achievement of the Cambridge Consultants team, Michael Gove MP, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, said: “Thank you for the extraordinary efforts that Cambridge Consultants made to address the increased need for ventilators as a result of COVID-19. 

“The ingenuity and commitment that your team and suppliers have demonstrated is incredible. You brought pace, collaboration and innovation to this challenge, and that is recognised and appreciated across Government. The commitment that you have shown has been truly inspirational.”

Eric Wilkinson, Cambridge Consultants’ CEO, added: “When the country necessarily went into lockdown, our team went to work and I, and all our staff, feel an immense sense of pride in their achievement. 

“I thank the project team and the wider group of colleagues that supported their work, enabling them to focus solely on project delivery. Right from the start, the team used their considerable medical technology skills to fill in gaps in the evolving specification, meaning that many of the later, high-performance requirements were already designed in. 

“As well as producing a fully-working, production-ready ventilator in just 46 days, the team followed all of the necessary quality management systems and microbiological standards required for a safety critical device. 

“Veloci-Vent is not just a working ventilator, but a robust system, built without compromise to safety and all achieved in an almost unbelievable timeframe.”

Joint administrators at BDO are confident of rescuing some money for the two main creditors hit hardest by the collapse of Cambridge Broadband Networks Ltd. But the payout is likely to be a drop in the ocean compared to the £14.5 million the duo are owed. 

Five years of falling sales sent CBNL into a tailspin in 2019, its 20th anniversary year, and BDO was unable to find a buyer after being appointed to attempt a rescue.

The two main preferential creditors – TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp and BMS Finance (UK) Ltd were owed £7.288m and £7.23m, respectively, when CBNL entered administration.

In a report to all creditors, joint administrators Antony Nygate and Colin Haig – appointed on February 6 – expected that there would be sufficient funds to enable a distribution to both the secured and preferential creditors but they  could not say how much or when. They say the company will be dissolved once the administration process is complete.

Global broadband technology specialist CBNL was incorporated in November 1999 and established by 10 Cambridge University engineers who secured private equity funding to develop innovative mobile communications. It based the venture at Cambridge Business Park and had African subsidiaries.

BDO’s report says that CBNL experienced a decline in sales revenue over the past five years. Due to the need to invest in infrastructure and the level of overheads combined with a decline in revenue the company was loss making. Revenue decreased from $37.2m in 2017 to $23.7m in 2018 with an operating loss of $8m. 

During 2019 cash flow pressure continued to mount owing to a trend of continued declining sales in the period. Sales revenue declined to $14m during the nine-month period to September 30 and the business incurred a loss of $7.7m.

In December 2019 management implemented certain measures to restructure operations including a reduction in office space, with the landlord agreeing to reduce rental costs going forward.

In January 2020 revised cashflow forecasts indicated that significant funding would be required in the short term to keep the business afloat. During this period cashflow pressure intensified as key suppliers refused to release stock without payment. 

The shareholders were unable to provide additional investment so the directors sought independent legal advice as to the options available.

BDO had originally been introduced to the company on October 31, 2019 and on November 7 was engaged to conduct an accelerated mergers and acquisitions process and to review the short term cashflow forecast.

A campaign was launched in early November offering the company and/or the business and assets for sale but no offers capable of completing were received for the shares of the company or the business and assets, says BDO.

BDO was further engaged by CBNL on January 22 to undertake contingency planning work and another review of short term cashflow forecast. Due to intensified creditor pressure, a deteriorating cash position and no offers received for the business the directors decided to file a notice of intention  to Appointment. On Jan 30 an application for the appointment of joint administrators was made by the directors.

The joint administrators say it has not been possible to sell CBNL as a going concern “due to the high levels of secured and unsecured debt and lack of funding to allow the company to trade in the longer term.”

The next objective – achieving a better result for creditors as a whole than would be likely if the business was wound up without first being in administration – is said to be “not achievable as we do not anticipate that there will be distribution to unsecured creditors other than via the prescribed part.”

That left the final option which is being pursued – realising property to make a distribution to one or more secured or preferential creditors.

Staff were made redundant immediately after BDO was appointed for the administration process – save six employees retained to help with the wind down of operations and realise the company’s assets.

Cambridge Broadband Networks Group Ltd offered to acquire certain assets and on March 19 a deal was agreed for an initial consideration of £195k – including £60k for Intellectual Property and business rights, and 12k for certain plant, machinery and office equipment.

BDO hopes to sell remaining customer contracts and the share capital of the company’s subsidiary CBNL Nigeria and an offer has been accepted subject to contract. The identity of the buyer and amount agreed is not being disclosed until the sale is completed.

Other book debts of $459,432 and €7,470 will be collected by the administrators with the help of a former employee. The recovery of the residual book debts is at this stage uncertain.

BDO is in the  process of realising £1.265m from the company’s main bank account and around $2k from Silicon Valley Bank accounts.

The value of the company’s net property after allowing for payment of preferential claims will be $3.948m, the administrators say.

CBNL’s website remained operational at the time of writing with no mention of the administration process as far as Business Weekly could determine.