Cambridge organisations are at the heart of a global project to create a human cell atlas referencing every single cell type of the human body to transform biological research and medicine.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute has invested £7 million to help UK scientists scale work on the project.

It will be led by Dr Sarah Teichmann, head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas Organising Committee.

The University of Cambridge and the European Bioinformatics Institute, based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, are among UK partners in the work.

Creating a ‘Google map’ of our bodies has been compared to the Human Genome Project in its scale and ambition. Wellcome’s Sanger Institute in Cambridge also led the worldwide HGP collaboration.

The £7m Wellcome funding just announced is the first major financial commitment in the UK to power the collection, sequencing, and analysis of cells. It will build on the UK’s long history of excellence in genomics and biomedical research, aided by strong links between research groups, tissue biobanks, and hospitals. 

Researchers hope that insights gained from the atlas could help us to understand how diseases such as asthma and cancer develop and progress, or point to new diagnostic tools and treatments.

Research on both donated adult and developing tissues will allow scientists to compare the properties of cells and tissues present at different stages of life. 

They hope to gain a unique insight into a period of human development that has previously been a ‘black box’ for researchers. This could include new understanding about certain cancers, many of which hijack the same pathways that are involved in early development, or answer specific questions such as why adult tissue scars, but developing skin does not.

Dr Teichmann said: “The Human Cell Atlas will transform our understanding of human health and disease and we are excited to be able to embark on the next stage of this important project. 

“The new funding will bring together scientists from a huge variety of disciplines across the UK to enable the collection of data from millions of cells and drive progress towards this ambitious goal.”

The Wellcome cash will also establish important UK infrastructure in the cutting-edge single-cell sequencing techniques that have enabled the Human Cell Atlas to become a reality. 

This approach allows researchers to separate individual cells and see in detail the exact molecules and RNA messages that are produced within them. 
This type of analysis can identify new cell types, provide insights into how cells develop, reveal how cells change when they are infected and suggest how cell types may have evolved over time. 

All data generated by teams working on the Human Cell Atlas will be freely available to scientists all over the world to maximise the impact it can have on health.

The Human Cell Atlas is a global initiative, with an organising committee  jointly chaired by Dr Sarah Teichmann and Dr Aviv Regev from the Broad Institute and MIT in Massachusetts. 

It was launched at a meeting held at Wellcome in October 2016 and has since grown to encompass hundreds of researchers from over 50 countries.

• Picture courtesy: The Sanger Institute

Once upon a time, if you wanted to learn a particular skill, you had to ask another person to teach you, or you had to teach yourself, writes Laura Cox, Senior Staff Writer at D/SRUPTION. 

This might have involved going to a library, or signing up for an apprenticeship. We do still learn in these traditional ways, but in the digital age, access to information has become instant. 

People are more knowledgeable about more things than ever before. But, as argued by Tom Nichols in his book,‘The Death of Expertise’, this has reduced the need for people to actually learn. 

The internet alone has absorbed the requirement for vast amounts of expertise, and now artificially intelligent systems are adding to knowledge displacement. 

For your average person, this is a positive thing. But what does it mean for the countless numbers of highly trained, educated experts in a broad spectrum of industry sectors? 

What happens to experts when technology – in particular, AI – can eventually deliver the same breadth of knowledge?

The evolution of expertise

An expert is somebody with a high level of specialist knowledge in a specific area or areas. John Straw, D/SRUPTION co-founder, describes knowledge as an absolute. Knowledge itself is objective, he says, but the retransmission of that knowledge is subjective.

Lawyers, for example, create law on the basis of collective expertise, but these laws are questioned constantly. What AI can do is deliver an average of millions of lawyers and millions of legal cases.

“This creates a mathematical robustness, and as a result your subjective view almost translates into a fact,” says Straw.

The ability of a human to assimilate large amounts of information is extremely restricted. According to Straw, among those who will be most notably affected are healthcare professionals, lawyers, and accountants. 

For example, in the healthcare sector, radiologists go through a number of scans to decide whether or not a tumour is malignant or benign. 
Despite their extensive training, the rate at which they can view and analyse scans is limited.

“A computer could do as much in one day as a radiologist could do in their entire career,” he says. “The computer’s ability to become more objective over time becomes larger and larger the more data it is fed. Human experts are limited by their ability to process amounts of data. AI is virtually unlimited in this.”

Another example comes from the travel and leisure industry. A human customer services rep might be able to tell you that the all inclusive hotel you want to book has a gym, but not what equipment that gym has in it. Even when combined with generally useful star reviews on sites like TripAdvisor, this is still a minute snapshot of subjective opinions. 

What AI offers is the ability to see the average ratings of all reviews, and then narrow this down to certain features or services.

Professor AI

If experts can be described as retaining, relaying and using specialist knowledge, then intelligent machines, for better or worse, are experts in their own right. 

The ability to digest and analyse huge datasets has supercharged not only the quantity but the quality of the information available to cognitive systems. 

They can work out what information is useful and suggest what it might be used for, and how it may be used – that, in essence, is exactly what human experts do.

The training of these systems is important. Currently, AI is ‘narrow’ – it fulfils a preordained purpose and, being trained by humans  means it can exhibit bias. 

With a large enough sample base of data, it’s arguably possible to exclude this bias. This is the general premise behind ‘the wisdom of crowds’, an old idea later written about in 2004 by James Surowiecki in his book of the same name. 

According to the wisdom of crowds, the many are smarter than the few. If AI can combine the collective knowledge of millions of situations and examples, then it embodies the wisdom of the crowd. That is, of course, if it is fed the right data.

AI currently aids human experts by augmenting their existing knowledge. Once AI can teach itself, this dynamic will change. Being an expert becomes less important, with the role increasingly involving management and monitoring. However, expertise is not the same as experience. 

While an AI can access cold hard facts, it can’t have or relate to an experience in the same way as a human. This suggests that the people we regard as experts will change. Instead of knowing answers themselves, experts will be those who ask the right questions. Talking of which…

What comes next?

For Straw, the next milestone is context. Current narrow AI lacks contextual awareness, and this is why humans remain an important part of the transfer and reception of knowledge. 

Straw explains this fundamental difference using a joke by the American comedian Groucho Marx – ‘This morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas, I don’t know.’

“This is a really interesting example of the way that AI works, because you and I both know that it’s highly impractical for an elephant to get into pyjamas. Because we understand the context, we understand its relevance. We know what that joke means,” says Straw. 

“But if you looked at it from an entirely objective viewpoint, you would think that an elephant could have got into the comedian’s pyjamas because you don’t have context. An AI system will really make a breakthrough when it can understand that joke.”

Ultimately, Straw believes that the death of the expert is fast approaching. He predicts that within the next two to three years, expertise as we know it will start to disappear. 

However, a lack of contextual understanding means that there is still a place for traditional, human experts. Experience levels will play a key dividing role between the experts displaced by intelligent tech and those who work alongside it. The less experience you have, the more replaceable you are. Better get learning.

• D/SRUPTION magazine is Europe’s leading publication for business leaders looking to deepen their understanding of disruption and what is takes to scale innovation in the 21st century.

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The balance sheets of businesses have seen a substantial change in the last couple of decades. Previously, for the majority of businesses, tangible assets were the primary driver of the value of a business, writes Maria Peyman, senior associate at Birketts LLP.

Now, just 20 years (or perhaps less) later, the intangible assets amount to 70 per cent of the modern day corporate balance sheets and 53 per cent of the total value of the FTSE 1001.

This is readily reflected in the rise of businesses such as Uber and Air BnB – taking a traditional business and using technology to partner those with the goods (taxis and hotels) with those needing a lift or somewhere to sleep. 

The businesses require limited initial outlay on their own tangible assets such as cars or real estate.

Despite the value attributed to intangible assets on the modern business’s balance sheet leaders of some of the most innovative global companies have issued warnings that the value of those assets is being overlooked; research has attributed some of this due to a lack of acceptance at board level of the value of intangible assets such as IP rights but rather an area of potential significant cost to the business. 

Some is also attributable simply to a lack of understanding of what an intangible asset is and what it means to the value of the business.

As a quick reminder examples of intangible assets are, trade marks, domain names, customer lists, literary works, musical works, pictures, licensing agreements, service contracts, franchise agreements, rights of use, computer software, trade secrets and patented technology. 

A brief look at the list by any business owner should cause them to stop and think about what exactly their business owns which might be of value beyond traditional bricks and mortar. 

However, by their very nature it can often be difficult for a business to identify its intangible assets of value and to ensure that they are protected. Compare that to real estate which simply requires a visual check to ensure it is standing and keeping insurance in place. 

These are relatively easy steps in comparison to creating an inventory of all intangible assets. In respect of intangible assets a business needs to work out whether the assets are protected by automatic rights, (such as copyright in the business’s images or manuals), or, whether it needs to have a registered right such as the patent for the new drug or a trade mark for your brand name and logo.

If, considering the examples cited of AirBnB and Uber, they are not owners of something tangible the business can, arguably, be replicated by the development of software, then what is it that helps those businesses rise above the others? 

Of course, it can be luck, the first into the market place, the one with a good sponsor, the one with an early lucrative contract. However, it is often also the development of other intangible assets, for example, the ‘brand’. Development of a brand starts with securing a name and protecting it by registration. The brand can then be developed further by enforcing rights and ensuring a consistency in those allowed to use / be associated with the brand.

As set out above, intangible assets have real value and worth for a business which means they can be offered as security in a developing business looking for investment or sold. 

There is no doubt that a well-structured business with a balance sheet based on intangible assets can obtain significant investment and/or be sold for a significant value.

However, to make the intangible assets give the greatest return they need to be properly identified, ensure that where necessary/possible any rights are registered and that steps are taken to enforce those rights against third parties who may seek to ride on a business’s success.

• Call Maria Peyman on 01223 326596 or email her at: maria-peyman [at] birketts.co.uk

Cambridge technology thought leader Arm has further strengthened its proposition in the fast-developing IoT arena with the $600 million acquisition of enterprise data management business Treasure Data in Silicon Valley.

The UK superchip architect says the purchase of a global leader and the simultaneous launch of the new Pelion IoT platform in enterprise data management will create a world-first end-to-end IoT connectivity, device and data management platform for hybrid environments.

Dipesh Patel, president of Arm’s IoT Services Group, says the device to data move will enable businesses worldwide to aggregate and derive meaningful insights from disparate data sources, CRM, IoT devices, e-commerce and more.

The launch of the Pelion IoT Platform combines technologies from Treasure Data, the acquisition of Stream and Arm Mbed Cloud.

“The Pelion IoT Platform will enable companies to seamlessly and securely connect and manage IoT devices and data at any scale,” says Patel.

He added: “The Internet of Things will give businesses superpowers. Whether it’s an energy provider drawing data from its infrastructure to sense failures; a sensor-equipped building anticipating and then proactively dealing with occupants’ needs; or a retailer using data streams from its stores and warehouses to streamline operations – IoT systems can be transformational.

“But unlike fictional superheroes who are often born with their abilities, any business wanting to develop IoT superpowers requires help. That must come from the technology sector and three specific elements – investment, solutions and ecosystems.

“IoT investment is evident, with the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund being a prime example of major support in advanced technologies.

“For solutions, we need to make it easy for organisations to provision, update, connect and manage devices, as well as make sense of the incredible amount of diverse data that the IoT is generating.

“Lastly, IoT requires a strong ecosystem of companies working together to deliver value – one company cannot solve everything alone. Dealing with data is hard. An Information Age article summed up the massive data explosion, when it cited IDC predictions that 163 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created or copied by 2025.

“That’s ten times the 16.1ZB of data generated as of 2016. However, according to a 2018 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Arm, 67 per cent of organisations face challenges with data silos and more than half struggle with data preparation.

“To deal with data volumes and complexity, businesses need to be able to seamlessly connect and manage their IoT devices, as well as manage their data flows.

“Arm has focused on supporting companies with this for several years, but a full solution taking care of all of a company’s data needs, from device-to-data, has only become possible after we acquired Treasure Data.

“Treasure Data is a global leader in enterprise data management providing the ability to aggregate and translate massive volumes of scattered and siloed data.

“The company’s technology deals with data from any source – CRM, ecommerce systems, edge, IoT devices, and any third-party data. The result for customers is an ability to derive meaningful and actionable insights from any disparate data mix.

“Treasure Data is the final piece of our IoT enablement puzzle. Its technology, along with that of another recent acquisition (Stream) for connectivity management, combined with Arm Mbed Cloud and our knowledge of the IoT hardware foundation creates something entirely new. We call it the Arm Pelion IoT Platform.

“The Pelion IoT Platform will enable companies to seamlessly and securely connect and manage IoT devices and data at any scale. It’s designed to work on public and private clouds, on-premises and in hybrid environments, delivering ultimate flexibility in IoT system architectures.

“This will allow companies to quickly turn IoT and enterprise data into insights capable of unlocking new opportunities for them and their customers. The Pelion IoT Platform will also provide unified billing that lowers infrastructure costs, increases operational efficiency, and eliminates integration headaches.”

Patel said the Pelion IoT Platform delivers a strong combined partner ecosystem of 140+ partners spanning silicon, mobile, network operators (MNOs), channel, technology providers and more.

He added: “There are many vertical IoT Platforms focusing on specific device classes. Some also focus on specific kinds of data insights they’ll support. There are vendor-specific platforms that seek to tie customers into specific clouds. The linking word here is ‘specific’.

“The Pelion IoT Platform is different because it is a truly horizontal platform capable of managing any number or type of devices and connectivity, dealing with any type of data (internal and external) and linking to any cloud. In short, it offers the ability to tie into ‘Any device, Any data, Any cloud’ – we think of it as a triple A IoT experience.”

Arm, which is owned by Japan’s SoftBank, is growing from a newly upgraded UK headquarters in Cambridge.

Its advanced, energy-efficient processor designs have enabled the intelligent computing in more than 125 billion chips. Over 70 per cent of the world’s population are using Arm technology, which is securely powering products from the sensor to the smartphone to the supercomputer.

The NHS in the UK has widened its adoption of cyber defence technology from Cambridge specialist Darktrace to safeguard more systems and patient in formation.

Several hospitals and NHS foundations have taken Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System. – enhanced as Antigena – which detects and repels cyber attacks in real time.

CEO Nicole Eagan is presiding over a record worldwide rollout of the technology across sectors as diverse as healthcare, government and education.

The roots of the new NHS for Darktrace go back to last year’s WannaCry ransomware attack which spread globally and compromised 61 NHS organisations.

Darktrace Antigena successfully interrupted the attack across the NHS, driving the adoption of autonomous response technology that can fight back against in-progress attacks in seconds.
Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, Luton and Dunstable Hospital, and West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust are just four NHS organisations enhancing their cyber security strategy with the Enterprise Immune System.

Craig York, associate dDirector of IT at Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Autonomous response is the future for defending against fast-moving and unpredictable threats before they do damage. I am confident that we will be in a much better place to fend off another serious cyber-attack on the NHS with Darktrace at work.”
Dave Palmer, director of technology at Darktrace, spelled out the threat organisations are facing from cyber attackers.

“Today, cyber defenders have to react with the speed and accuracy of machines to keep our healthcare services and patients safe. “As our hospitals and clinics become increasingly digitised and hyper-connected, it is reassuring to see more and more NHS organisations deploying Darktrace’s AI to catch sophisticated attacks before they have the chance to cause a crisis.”

Darktrace became Cambridge’s 16th billion dollar company at the end of May – in fact it is valued at over $1.25bn – just five years after launch. It was named this newspaper’s Business of the Year in March 2017. It is the UK science & technology cluster’s youngest surviving unicorn.

Like the launch of technology trailblazer Autonomy and the discovery of the Double Helix, here is another classic Cambridge ‘pint to payback’ business story.

In a warehouse in Madingley in Cambridge UK are shelves upon shelves of trays teeming with maggots chomping through a tasty repast of rotting fruit and veg.

It may sound vaguely stomach-churning but these maggots and other insects could provide the sustainable food of the future – at least for fish and animals – helping to reduce the reliance on resource intensive proteins such as fishmeal and soy while also mitigating the use of antibiotics in the food chain (one of the causes of the increase in drug-resistant bacteria).

Entomics Biosystems, set up in 2015 by a group of students from the University of Cambridge, with support from the Cambridge Judge Entrepreneurship Centre’s ‘Accelerate Cambridge’ programme, is the brains behind the enterprise. Its vision is to end the scandal of 1.3 billion tonnes of food wasted globally every year.

“It’s one of those stories where we came together in a pub over a pint, talking about weird ideas,” says CEO and co-founder Matt McLaren. “The team has members from the Department of Biochemistry, from Engineering, from the Cambridge Judge Business School, so it really is a diverse skill set.”

According to the company, each year over 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted globally – equating to around $1 trillion of lost value. With an increasing population and modern lifestyles, the burden of food waste on society and the environment is set to increase in the future.

Entomics focuses on ‘insect biomass conversion’. Larvae of the black soldier fly chew their way through several tonnes of food waste collected from local supermarkets and food processing plants.

The insects are fed different ‘recipes’ under controlled conditions to see how these affect growth rates and nutritional profiles. They metabolise the food waste into fats and proteins, growing to around 5,000 times their body weight within just a couple of weeks.

As McLaren, explains, these fats and proteins “are great sources of nutrition for salmon and poultry – in fact, insects are part of their natural diet.” Entomics is currently working with partners including the University of Stirling, who are world-leading salmon aquaculture experts, to validate and test their products in the field.

“Farmed salmon in Scotland are currently fed on fishmeal which comes from wild-caught anchovies from as far away as Chile and Peru, which are then shipped across the world to Scotland,” he says. “Insects provide a nice, sustainable solution.”

With support including from Innovate UK and the European Institute of Technology (via EIT FoodKIC), Entomics is using a novel bioprocessing technique to boost the nutritional and functional benefits of these insect-derived feeds, using a microbial fermentation technology they have termed ‘Metamorphosis’.

Essentially, these specialised feeds represent a sustainable, holistic approach to improving overall fish health and welfare. “There are several benefits to this process,” explains Miha Pipan, chief scientific officer and fellow co-founder, “from affecting the gut’s microbiome and trying to preserve a healthier bacterial community there, to training immune systems to make livestock more resistant to disease challenges and at the same time reduce the need for veterinary medicines, antibiotics and vaccines.”

“The world’s looking for more sustainable sources of feed and I think increasingly there’s a recognition that it’s not just about basic nutrition, but it’s about overall health,” says McLaren. “We’re trying to take a promising, sustainable ingredient of the future – these insect-derived feeds – and trying to add a bit of biotechnology or science focus to it, to really enhance what the effect is in the end application and reduce reliance on traditional antibiotics and veterinary medicines.”

There is endless potential for innovation in the emerging insect industry in general and the Entomics team is also working on an engineering project to build a smart, modular system for insect production in the future.

This includes developing computer vision algorithms to understand and monitor insect behaviour during the production process – for example, the insects’ growth and health. McLaren is grateful for the support the company received from Cambridge Judge Business School to get off the ground. “The mentorship and coaching provided by the Accelerate Cambridge programme in particular has been vital to getting our business to its current stage, and the credibility of the Cambridge brand has allowed us to engage with some great academic and commercial partners,” he said.
 

Healx, the Cambridge AI technology company developing breakthrough treatments for rare diseases, has unveiled a $10 million Series A funding round led by European-leading early stage venture backer Balderton Capital.

Existing investors Jonathan Milner and  Hermann Hauser’s Amadeus Capital also participated in the round.

Healx is planning to cut medicine development time for rare diseases by 80 per cent through its repurposing model. The fundraising exercise was exclusively flagged by Business Weekly in March.

The company was founded in 2014 by Dr Tim Guilliams, a bio-chemical engineer and founder of the Cambridge Rare Disease Network, Dr David Brown, the inventor of Viagra and ex-global head of drug discovery at Roche and Dr Andreas Bender, a lecturer and researcher at Cambridge University’s Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics.

There are 7,000 known rare diseases that affect 350 million people worldwide. One in 20 people on the planet suffer from a rare disease – in aggregate, rare diseases are not rare. Yet 95 per cent of rare diseases still do not have an approved treatment.

Rare disease patients and families have been let down by a broken traditional pharma model that is dependent on and focuses on blockbuster drugs.

Healx’s mission is to reverse this by using Artificial Intelligence, deep pharmacological expertise and extensive patient engagement to give sufferers of rare disease a better quality of life.

Healx’s massively parallel approach combines cutting edge technology with one of the largest collections of insights from rare disease patient groups.Dr Guilliams said: “Healx has a simple but profound goal: To transform the lives of rare disease patients. Our technology helps us find treatments where none currently exist.

“Our proven approach is to start from existing drugs and apply artificial intelligence to niche disease populations, working with patient groups to accelerate treatment development.

“Our success comes from our world-class multi-disciplinary team of experts, leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques to cut the discovery-to-treatment time from years to months.” Healx’s technology has already been used successfully, including most recently in collaboration with FRAXA, the patient group for the Fragile-X Syndrome.

A drug for Fragile-X that was discovered by Healx’s platform was ready for the clinic in less than 15 months, cutting typical drug development timelines by 80% and doing so at a substantially reduced cost. At the heart of Healx, is HealNet, one of the world’s most comprehensive knowledge-bases for rare disease, mapping over one billion unique disease, patient and drug interactions.

HealNet was built and is maintained using a variety of machine learning methods applied to a wide range of data types from both publicly available and exclusive sources including scientific literature, patents, clinical trials, disease symptoms, drug targets, multi-omic data and underlying chemical structures.

HealNet facilitates highly parallelised, automated, large scale drug discovery that drastically reduces time and cost to discovery compared to traditional processes. Key to Healx’s success to date has been its treatment strategy. While the technology could be used for the development of new therapies, the company has so far focused on finding new uses for existing drugs and their application in potential combination therapies.

Applying this strategy within the context of rare disease has allowed Healx to further improve speed to market – existing drugs require fewer and less complex trials and the Orphan Drug Act was designed to encourage research and development of therapies for rare disease.

The $10m investment will be used to more than double Healx’s diverse and multi-disciplinary team of software engineers, data scientists, pharmacologists and drug development experts from the rich cross-disciplinary Cambridge ecosystem and to expand its world class artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

Balderton’s Suranga Chandratillake will be joining the board alongside Shaun Grady of AstraZeneca  – an involvement flagged exclusively by Business Weekly in March when we reported on the launch of the fundraising – and Dr Jonathan Milner (founder and ex-CEO of Abcam); serial tech entrepreneur Hermann Hauser, who also founded Arm, will act as an observer.

David Brown said: “The traditional drug discovery process takes 10 to 15 years at a cost of $2 billion per new drug and with a failure rate of 95 per cent – it’s broken, it’s slow, it’s high failure, and it’s not economic for rare diseases.

“However, today’s technology can change that and help 350 million under-served rare disease patients. Healx is showing that we can massively transform the rate of discovery of new medicines, reducing timelines and costs.”

Suranga Chandratillake of Balderton Capital, added: “Historically, the pharmaceutical industry has focused on what is the same about everyone, building blockbuster drugs that affect large groups of people.

“The future of medicine will focus on what is different about everyone, personalising treatment and taking the individual into context.

“The first frontier of this exciting new direction for medicine is rare disease and the only way it can be solved is by using automation to deliver a step-change in the volume of discovery that is possible.

“Healx’s HealNet platform, at the forefront of this shift, is already delivering value and Balderton is excited to have the opportunity to be part of the company’s journey.”

Cambridge University is launching a DeepMind Chair of Machine Learning, thanks to a benefaction from the world-leading British AI company – Google’s DeepMind – whose IP was born within the globally acclaimed seat of learning.

The new chair, to be based at Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, will build on the university’s strengths in computer science and engineering and will be a focal point for the wide range of AI-related research taking place across the university.

Cambridge researchers are designing systems that are cybersecure, model human reasoning, interact in affective ways with us, uniquely identify us by our face and give insights into our biological makeup.

The first DeepMind chair is expected to take up their position in October 2019, following an international search by the department. The chair will have full academic freedom to pursue research in the field of machine learning.

Cambridge has a long tradition of excellence in computer science and is home to the largest technology cluster in Europe. The DeepMind Chair will build on this tradition by enhancing Cambridge’s capacity in AI-related research, and will contribute to the UK’s standing as a global hub in this rapidly-growing area.

The gift is part of a wider DeepMind programme to encourage uptake of machine learning, to support the wider academic ecosystem. As part of these efforts, DeepMind will give a donation to support four Master’s students from underrepresented groups wishing to study machine learning and computer science at Cambridge.

More information will be made available this autumn about scholarships beginning in the 2019 academic year. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO, completed his undergraduate degree in computer science at Queens’ College, Cambridge and received his PhD from UCL, while numerous other employees continue to give back to Cambridge through teaching and mentorship.

Hassabis said: “I have many happy memories from my time as an undergraduate at Cambridge, so it’s now a real honour for DeepMind to be able to contribute back to the Department of Computer Science and Technology and support others through their studies.

“My hope is that the DeepMind Chair in Machine Learning will help extend Cambridge’s already world-leading teaching and research capacities, and support further scientific breakthroughs towards the development of safe and ethical AI.”

University vice-chancellor Professor Stephen Toope added: “This gift will not only enhance Cambridge’s strengths in the field of AI research but also will benefit the UK more broadly as AI has such transformative potential in so many aspects of our lives.

“Our researchers are not only developing these new technologies but also are working to ensure that they benefit humanity. This new professorship is an important piece of that puzzle.”

Google paid over $600 million for DeepMind in 2014. Since that time Cambridge has spawned a UK leading number of AI, Machine Learning and broader DeepTech startups – the best of whom are ramping headcount at a rate of knots and starting to raise big money from global investors.

Cambridge leaders in the field include PROWLER.io, Fetch.AI and SWIM.AI, which has just received $10m from Cambridge Innovation Capital and Arm, the Cambridge-based world leading architect of superchips.

A new power player in the market of in-car infotainment and telematics applications has hit the road in Cambridge.

RealVNC has agreed a management buy-out that allows its VNC Automotive division to launch as an independent business. VNC Automotive Limited will be spearheaded by experienced executive Tom Blackie as CEO. 

And it may not be the last spin-off from the prolific RealVNC stable as the company broadens its geographical and technological reach in an aggressive new business model spearheaded from its Cambridge UK headquarters.

RealVNC has shot past 100 headcount under new CEO Adam Greenwood-Byrne who has overseen the overhaul of the technology offering to corporate technology greats and global OEMs. 

He says the company is faster and more flexible than ever, more bold in its sales and engagement strategies and has identified a number of new, high-growth vertical markets such as Set top Boxes.

It is exploiting the clear synergies of its technology with a number of key market plays driven by the increasingly influential Android mobile operating system powered by Google.

The automotive VNC spin-off was a logical first step in Real VNC’s flexible innovation roadmap. Over the last decade, the VNC Automotive division developed a global reputation for delivering car connectivity solutions across the automotive industry with 15 OEMs and software installed in more than 20 million cars. 

To facilitate the on-going growth of the successful division, the RealVNC executive team negotiated a private MBO and will help the new business through a six-month operational transition to ensure a smooth migration to full independence.  

Adam Greenwood-Byrne, CEO at RealVNC said: “The entire RealVNC team is very excited to support the VNC Automotive division on its own autonomous business trajectory with this management buyout.

“The VNC Automotive team have clearly demonstrated the quality and value of their car connectivity software to the automotive industry and this move is the next logical step for the evolution of their business. This gives them the independence to define the technology roadmap and strategic objectives for their future.”

Greenwood-Byrne added: “While we will be sad to see our VNC Automotive colleagues leave the company, this is a fantastic opportunity and we will do everything we can to ensure their future success.”

Tom Blackie said: “Driven by the interests of our customers, partners and employees, we have worked hard over the last few months to make this management buyout a reality.

“We thank RealVNC for their support over the last few years and for enabling this exciting opportunity. Everyone in the team is incredibly enthusiastic about the opportunities that are created by the formation of VNC Automotive Limited and it’s great news for all the stakeholders. 

“We now have full control of our technology strategy so can develop even more innovative solutions for the automotive industry. It’s tremendous to be working in such an exciting market and we are confident that the new VNC Automotive Limited is very well positioned to be a major player in this dynamic ecosystem.”

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Tom Blackie

Venture Capital investment into Cambridge and the East of England region gained strength in the second quarter of 2018 as more than £291 million was invested, according to KPMG research.

A total of 22 VC investments were closed in the region between April and June, with Cambridge taking the lion’s share with 16 deals worth more than £192m; so Cambridge  attracted around 66 per cent of the region’s haul.

Half the region’s deals came in the healthcare segment and this region accounted for almost 19 per cent of the Q1 UK deals total funded by VC. Science & technology – notably cancer tech, robotics and AI-related deals were prolific.

Investments for Cambridge-based businesses included the £74m Series B venture funding for CMR Surgical which will use proceeds to prepare its Versius system for planned commercialisation.

There was also a £53m funding for Crescendo Biologics to advance the development of the company’s lead program, CB307, which stimulates local activation of tumour-specific T-cells, and further expand its internal pipeline of products.

Earlier stage fundings included the £11.3m funding round for Fetch.AI from investors in Europe and Asia and an £11m of Series A venture funding for PhoreMost.

Elsewhere across the region there was a £7.5 million fundraise for Norwich-based Tropic Biosciences which will be used to commercialise the company’s non-GMO coffee and banana varieties and globally expand into additional crop segments; whilst Ipswich-based Chainvine raised £2.5m of Series A venture funding led by Deepbridge Capital.

In Essex, £89m was invested across three deals in Q1. The deals included a £28m Series A venture funding by Little Chesterford-based NodThera; a £15m fund raise by Brentwood-based EMoov to further enhance the company’s technology platform; and £44m for Clacton on Sea-based healthcare business M&A Pharmachem.

Across the UK, a total of £1.55 billion of VC money was invested in businesses across 244 deals in Q2, with late-stage financings responsible for the majority of the capital invested – propelling it back to the top of the VC market in Europe.

This compares to just over £1.1 million ($1.5 billion) invested in Q1 of 2018.The UK accounted for six of the top 10 European deals done in the last three months, including Revolut (£188m), Freeline Therapeutics (£90m), CMR Surgical (£74m), Liberis (£61m), Culture Trip (£60m), and Crescendo Biologics (£53m).

Chris Wilson, corporate finance director for KPMG in the East of England, said: “Hot on the heels of a blockbuster 2017, we continue to see very healthy sums of VC invested in robust East of England businesses.

“Whilst Cambridge continues to draw widespread attention from international investors, it’s great to see large sums of money is being invested all over the East of England with deals in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex contributing to the strength of the region’s startup ecosystem.

“The uncertainty in the macropolitical and macroeconomic environment does not appear to be substantially hampering appetite for investment in startups. Healthtech businesses accounted for nearly half of the investments received over the last three months, although we are seeing new groups of companies emerging, in particular in AI and blockchain.

“Already AI businesses are raising solid early and mid-stage funding rounds. Subject to successful R & D and commercialisation, they will surely attract even more funding going forward.”