Cambridge-based pharma giant AstraZeneca is trialling neighbour Owlstone Medical’s disease breathalyser as a potential diagnostic for respiratory complaints.

The UK life science duo are collaborating to explore how breath can identify novel biomarkers to help differentiate between disease phenotypes relevant for asthma and COPD.

The Cambridge partners believe the technology could be a key advance in delivering precision medicine to patients. They argue that by identifying disease phenotypes and treatable traits, the underlying heterogeneity of obstructive lung diseases can be explored.
 
Owlstone believes its technology offers a rapid, non-invasive approach to identify breath-based biomarkers that could help to stratify and monitor patients so they receive the correct therapy at the optimum dosage.

Chronic respiratory disease, including asthma and COPD, is a substantial health and economic burden globally often causing reduced quality of life and premature death for sufferers. 

An estimated 334 million people worldwide have asthma and 251 million suffer from COPD.

Billy Boyle, co-founder and CEO at Owlstone Medical, said: “This agreement with AstraZeneca demonstrates our unrivalled expertise in breath biomarkers. Through our breath biopsy services we are well positioned to assist the AstraZeneca team to explore how our technology can identify novel biomarkers for asthma and COPD and to optimise their application in precision medicine.”

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Billy Boyle

Cambridge-based pharma giant AstraZeneca is trialling neighbour Owlstone Medical’s disease breathalyser as a potential diagnostic for respiratory complaints.

The UK life science duo are collaborating to explore how breath can identify novel biomarkers to help differentiate between disease phenotypes relevant for asthma and COPD.

The Cambridge partners believe the technology could be a key advance in delivering precision medicine to patients. They argue that by identifying disease phenotypes and treatable traits, the underlying heterogeneity of obstructive lung diseases can be explored.
 
Owlstone believes its technology offers a rapid, non-invasive approach to identify breath-based biomarkers that could help to stratify and monitor patients so they receive the correct therapy at the optimum dosage.

Chronic respiratory disease, including asthma and COPD, is a substantial health and economic burden globally often causing reduced quality of life and premature death for sufferers. 

An estimated 334 million people worldwide have asthma and 251 million suffer from COPD.

Billy Boyle, co-founder and CEO at Owlstone Medical, said: “This agreement with AstraZeneca demonstrates our unrivalled expertise in breath biomarkers. Through our breath biopsy services we are well positioned to assist the AstraZeneca team to explore how our technology can identify novel biomarkers for asthma and COPD and to optimise their application in precision medicine.”

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Billy Boyle

Cambridge and London based Origami Energy, a fast growing technology platform provider to the energy market, has raised a total of £18.6 million in its latest funding round.

This takes the total funds raised by the company to £36m since 2014 and includes a major investment from FTSE-listed Aggreko plc, a global leader in on-site power generation with a presence in over 100 countries. 

Current investors who participated in the latest funding round include Octopus Ventures, Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Fred. Olsen-related companies.

Over the last 12 months Origami Energy has progressed from deploying commercial projects with industrial and commercial customers to signing multi-year partnership agreements with leading energy suppliers around the world. These include SmartestEnergy – owned by Marubeni, the Japanese-headquartered global trading company – and the renewables specialist Good Energy plc.

The new funding round provides the company with additional capital to continue the delivery of its growth plans and become a strategic technology partner for some of the world’s largest energy companies. 

The funds will be used to help accelerate the growth of Origami Energy in the UK and to prepare for international deployment.

Andrew Williamson of Cambridge Innovation Capital said: “We are pleased to see that Origami Energy continues to meet key targets in commercialising its technology to provide value to energy market participants. We look forward to working with the company during the next phase of its expansion.”

Origami Energy chief executive Peter Bance added: “The continued support of our existing shareholders and Aggreko’s major investment in our company demonstrates their confidence in our business growth. 

“Furthermore, our recent partnership announcements with SmartestEnergy and Good Energy demonstrate that innovative energy market players realise the value in using our intelligent technology platform to improve their profitability by enabling new services.”

Energy flexibility – the ability for generation, storage and demand assets to turn up/down or on/off – is growing in importance globally as the industry embraces the structural changes resulting from decentralisation, decarbonisation and digitalisation. 

By harnessing energy flexibility, Origami Energy’s technology enables greater use of renewables and increases profitability for energy market participants including energy suppliers, traders and distributed energy asset owners.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Peter Bance, CEO of Origami Energy

Private equity firm Elaghmore Partners has acquired one of the UK’s leading engineering companies, Priden Engineering Limited in Wisbech, for an undisclosed multi-million pound sum. It was advised by Cambridge-based global law firm Mills & Reeve.

Through this acquisition, Elaghmore will provide financial backing to grow Priden into a national business in the total vehicle solution market and develop and expand its food engineering business.

Priden is the third acquisition made by Elaghmore from its initial private equity fund, Elaghmore 1 which closed at the end of 2016, raising £60 million. The fund was oversubscribed and investors are a mix of US and European institutions.

Priden delivers bespoke engineering solutions to leading companies in a host of sectors including pneumatic vehicles, commercial bodies, truck and bus, and food industrial engineering as well as providing financial services for customers of its truck and trailer division. 
 
Founded in 1988, Priden Engineering provides, among other things, a complete range of aluminium and stainless-steel products for commercial vehicles, stainless steel systems for the food industry such as individual machines and full production lines and is the chief supplier of blowing equipment to the animal feed sector. 

The business has four factories situated on more than four acres and a 100-strong workforce. Elaghmore has bought Priden from its management who will remain with the business. 

Priden will remain an independent company but will work closely with another Elaghmore business, SB Components, which was acquired in December 2016. 

Also based in Wisbech, SB Components, has grown into the UK’s leading supplier of bespoke components for commercial vehicles. Since its acquisition, the business has delivered exceptional growth and this year will deliver a record level of sales and profitability.
 
The combined Priden and SB Components business will employ 250 people and have sales of more than £40 million per annum.

Priden director Kevin Walker said: “This is an exciting opportunity for our staff and customers. With Elaghmore, Priden now has a strong financial backer, with a track record of growing businesses, who can help us build on our successful work and take us to the next level of our development.

“By working closely with another thriving local company, SB Components, it means we can achieve our ambition of establishing Priden as a national business and open up new opportunities to bring our engineering expertise to new sectors.”

James Warren, managing director at SB Components, added: “Since our acquisition by Elaghmore in December 2016, the business has gone from strength to strength.

“Our focus is on delivering great products and customer service, and we look forward to working closely with the team at Priden to meet the needs of existing customers and develop new market areas together.”

• PHOTOGRAPH – SB Components

Plant-based restaurant chain Stem + Glory, which has two eateries in Cambridge, has rocketed past its £350k fundraising target on Crowdcube.

By this week’s stretch funding guillotine, the enterprise had raised £631,530 to launch a third location in London’s Old Street area. Some 771 investors tucked into the Crowdcube offering.

Stem + Glory is the brainchild of Cambridge yoga studio CAMYOGA’s founder Louise Palmer-Masterton – a long term vegan and a vegetarian for more than 30 years – who had contemplated the idea of a vegan establishment for quite some time.

Stem + Glory reports annual revenue growth of 84 per cent from its first site alone and is now geared up for a financially healthy roll out.

A spokesperson said: “We’re delighted to say that we reached our funding target in record time just six hours after private launch.” 

• PHOTOGRAPH (top of page) – Stem + Glory head chef, Gemma Doherty

An AI startup including original pioneers from DeepMind – the generalised artificial intelligence company acquired by Google for around $500 million – has roared out of stealth with a pledge to revolutionise the digital economy.

Fetch.ai, based at St John’s Innovation Centre in Cambridge, has been operating in stealth since foundation in 2016 and is also spearheaded by economics and cyber security professors from Cambridge and Sheffield Universities.

Its starting premise is that today’s digital economy is disconnected, with assets such as hotel rooms and cars drastically under-utilised and systems such as transport and energy networks poorly optimised.

Fetch.ai today launches its vision for a ‘decentralised digital world’ that combines Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for the first time to deliver a self-organising framework for new and emerging types of economic interactions.
  
Fetch.ai provides the tools necessary for a wide range of professional and enthusiast developers to build Autonomous Agents that inhabit the Fetch digital world, agents might act on behalf of consumers or companies and can be designed to address almost any task.

The underlying ‘smart ledger’ contains several world first innovations including built-in AI, a new Useful Proof of Work consensus mechanism and a unique data structure that combines blockchain and Directed Acyclic Graph architecture to achieve the performance and scalability necessary to support millions of agents transacting together.

CTO Toby Simpson explains: “Autonomous Economic Agents are set to revolutionise commerce. They’re digital entities that can transact independently of human intervention and can represent people, machines or themselves.

“Imagine a world that connects anything to anything and everything to everything, where data, services and information get up on their own two feet and deliver themselves with incredible precision.

“The Fetch digital world acts as the ultimate value exchange dating agency: each AI agent sees a space optimised in real-time just for them, where the important things are right there.

“Autonomous agents can work together or alone to build solutions to life’s complex problems by joining a disparate array of potentially useful data and services into one, seamless experience.”

According to CEO Humayun Sheikh such an approach is increasingly necessary to address the inefficiency inherent to today’s economy: “Today’s centralised systems and marketplaces result in silos and there isn’t a means to enable complex economic activity.

“We’ve built a decentralised and open system to solve this: for AI to interface with AI on both sides of an economic transaction. For the first time Fetch delivers a self-organising digital world that enables the discoverability of data for decision making, the trading of excess capacity, energy, computation, or the storage, transfer and transportation of digital or physical assets.

“When you have  a decentralised collective intelligence and AI operating in the right environment, which our open network provides, an autonomous system like Fetch can solve problems before they even arise.”

Enabled by a range of significant innovations and underpinned by the world’s first ‘smart ledger’, the Fetch decentralised digital world includes:-

• A smart ledger that borrows elements from blockchain and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to scale to millions of transactions per second at near zero cost.
• A new consensus mechanism called Useful Proof of Work, which means that unlike traditional blockchains the Proof of Work computing needed to secure the network isn’t abstract. Instead it is redeployed to perform the machine learning tasks that give the ledger its intelligence.
• An Open Economic Framework that enables autonomous agents to thrive in a decentralised system, which is an example of Agent based Computational Economics in practice.
• Collective Super Intelligence that increases in line with usage of the Fetch network to deliver information AEAs can use to more efficiently seek out relevant economic exchange opportunities.

Jamie Burke, CEO of VC firm Outlier Ventures explains why he has been backing Fetch since 2016: “For the first time we can genuinely say we have not smart contracts but instead a smart ledger. To date, blockchains haven’t been capable of even rudimentary intelligence and anyone wanting to use today’s dumb ledgers for anything complex, dynamic or predictive has been left severely wanting.

“Fetch’s unique blend of ledger technology borrows from blockchains and innovations in Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to deliver high performance, at near zero cost, transactions but with a brand new consensus mechanism called Useful Proof-of-Work. Its applications are vast.”

The Fetch.ai decentralised digital world is already up and running today in an early form with a number of Autonomous Economic Agents already busily navigating this new environment.

The truly autonomous system enables AI to buy and sell a variety of digital assets, from or to another AI, with contracts, payments and execution all handled automatically.

Fetch.ai plans to provide code on Github and announce a range of corporate partnerships over the coming months.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: CTO Toby Simpson

“It’s summer. You’re thirsty. We’ve got sales targets”. So ran an honest – and rather amusing – ad for Oasis, the soft drinks manufacturer. I have to say it did for me what more ambitious, worthy or blatantly sentimental ads did not.  It connected with me in a way that made me feel good about the advertiser and the product.

Contrast that with, say, Heineken, who want to ‘Brew a Better World’ or Starbucks, who according to their latest mission statement want ‘to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time’.

This is what, in the trade, is called ‘brand purpose’ marketing, and it is very much the flavour of the month. But, as highlighted by Mark Ritson in his talk for Marketing Week Live when he described it as a “total joke” (amongst other more robust descriptions), they seem to have lost all sense of brand positioning in doing so.

I suppose I can see where they’re coming from. They want to generate that feel good factor.  To convince us that they have a social conscience and that they care about you as a human being.

Do you buy that?  It doesn’t take a genius to see that their main interest in us as human beings is to separate us from our loose change, and that if they really wanted to make the world a better place they could plough some of their profits back into social or community projects. Or, as Mr Ritson so clearly pointed out, they could pay their fu**ing taxes! Well, maybe some of them do – let’s take the generous view.

But whether they do or not isn’t really the point. You don’t sell product by signalling your virtue. You do it by selling your products on their merits.  And unless your product is penicillin or a cure for cancer, you don’t make preposterous claims for it – just that it will make life easier and maybe a bit more pleasurable, while being better at doing so than the next guys product.

Yes, you should identify with your customers and win their approval in any way you can. They may be impressed by the fact that your products are biodegradable or that you are an equal opportunities employer, but don’t pretend you’re Greenpeace and the United Nations rolled into one. Just lighten up a bit.

Better still, leaven things with a little humour or hyperbole.  Costa has the slogan ‘Saving the World from Mediocre Coffee’ and that’s fine by me.  The absurd grandiosity of the line shows they don’t take themselves too seriously, which oddly enough has the effect of winning them my good will, trust and respect. They’re proud of their product and say so.

All of which reminds me of David Ogilvy’s famous line: “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife”. Perhaps its not entirely PC these days, but it enshrines a universal truth. Don’t insult your customers’ intelligence. If you’re selling coffee, don’t pretend it’s the holy grail, just damn fine coffee. You’re in business and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.  

Appeal to your customers’ common sense – and sense of humour – and your marketing will be more believable – and hence more effective.

https://simpsonscreative.co.uk/

“It’s summer. You’re thirsty. We’ve got sales targets”. So ran an honest – and rather amusing – ad for Oasis, the soft drinks manufacturer. I have to say it did for me what more ambitious, worthy or blatantly sentimental ads did not.  It connected with me in a way that made me feel good about the advertiser and the product.

Contrast that with, say, Heineken, who want to ‘Brew a Better World’ or Starbucks, who according to their latest mission statement want ‘to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time’.

This is what, in the trade, is called ‘brand purpose’ marketing, and it is very much the flavour of the month. But, as highlighted by Mark Ritson in his talk for Marketing Week Live when he described it as a “total joke” (amongst other more robust descriptions), they seem to have lost all sense of brand positioning in doing so.

I suppose I can see where they’re coming from. They want to generate that feel good factor.  To convince us that they have a social conscience and that they care about you as a human being.

Do you buy that?  It doesn’t take a genius to see that their main interest in us as human beings is to separate us from our loose change, and that if they really wanted to make the world a better place they could plough some of their profits back into social or community projects. Or, as Mr Ritson so clearly pointed out, they could pay their fu**ing taxes! Well, maybe some of them do – let’s take the generous view.

But whether they do or not isn’t really the point. You don’t sell product by signalling your virtue. You do it by selling your products on their merits.  And unless your product is penicillin or a cure for cancer, you don’t make preposterous claims for it – just that it will make life easier and maybe a bit more pleasurable, while being better at doing so than the next guys product.

Yes, you should identify with your customers and win their approval in any way you can. They may be impressed by the fact that your products are biodegradable or that you are an equal opportunities employer, but don’t pretend you’re Greenpeace and the United Nations rolled into one. Just lighten up a bit.

Better still, leaven things with a little humour or hyperbole.  Costa has the slogan ‘Saving the World from Mediocre Coffee’ and that’s fine by me.  The absurd grandiosity of the line shows they don’t take themselves too seriously, which oddly enough has the effect of winning them my good will, trust and respect. They’re proud of their product and say so.

All of which reminds me of David Ogilvy’s famous line: “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife”. Perhaps its not entirely PC these days, but it enshrines a universal truth. Don’t insult your customers’ intelligence. If you’re selling coffee, don’t pretend it’s the holy grail, just damn fine coffee. You’re in business and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.  

Appeal to your customers’ common sense – and sense of humour – and your marketing will be more believable – and hence more effective.

https://simpsonscreative.co.uk/

Cambridge University and the Nanjing Municipal Government are launching a smart cities hothouse in China to research technologies that support a modern 21st century city with integrated IT, healthcare and building management.

Innovations emerging from the IoT-focused centre will enable the development of fully integrated urban environments in which sensors – applied at the individual level and all the way through to the level of large infrastructure – will enable sustainable lifestyles.

Professor Stephen Toope, the university’s vice-chancellor, visited Beijing to formalise the agreement to create the Cambridge University-Nanjing Centre of Technology and Innovation. 

It will entail the establishment of a joint research nexus and the sharing of revenue derived from the commercialisation of intellectual property. It is the university’s first overseas enterprise at this scale.

Funded by Nanjing Municipality for five years in the first instance, the project will have its own dedicated building in Nanjing’s Jiangbei New Area – a pilot urban development based on high levels of technological innovation.

As well as supporting health and wellbeing in new cities, the new centre will help deliver efficient energy use through its academic and entrepreneurial activities.

The agreement will fund positions in Nanjing, both academic and management, and will allow Cambridge-based academics to engage with specific, long-term projects in Nanjing. It will also support the establishment of a professorship, based in Cambridge, with responsibility as the centre’s academic director.

The project has been driven by Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, although it is hoped that there will be opportunities to widen participation to other departments and schools. 

IP generated by research funded through the centre will be licensed for commercialisation by the university’s innovation branch, Cambridge Enterprise.

Professor Toope said: “This is only the most recent example of our collaboration with Chinese partners – but it is by far the most ambitious to date. And it is very exciting.

“We see it as an essential part of Cambridge’s contribution to society to tackle some of the great world problems. But we cannot do this on our own. There is a proverb: ‘You cannot clap with just one hand’. To me this means that we can only accomplish great things by working together – which is what we will be doing with Nanjing.”

The launch of the Cambridge University-Nanjing Centre of Technology and Innovation came only a few days after the vice-chancellor addressed the annual China Development Forum, in Beijing.

Prof Toope said: “Of all the intangible assets that underpin our knowledge capital, the most precious is people. It is people who generate the new ideas; it is people who ask the searching questions, and collect the relevant data to answer them; it is people who make the discoveries; it is people who bring those discoveries to the market, and create the intellectual property. 

“The conclusion I draw from this is that, for countries and institutions wishing to expand their knowledge capital, the single most important investment is in their human capital.”

He singled out equality and diversity as essential to the sustainability of knowledge-based capital, before concluding: “’Knowledge itself is power’ is a famous line attributed to one of Cambridge’s most famous graduates – 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon.

“The question before us – particularly those of us in universities – is how we build and deploy and share all that knowledge for the greater good.”

Cambridge and Peterborough Combined Authority will discuss plans to invest up to £5.5 million to ensure the county has outstanding digital connectivity – including tackling poor mobile phone coverage – at a board meeting at the end of March.

Ambitious plans for improving mobile, broadband and public Wi-Fi coverage for everyone – whether at home or work, on the move, in market towns or rural villages – form part of agenda papers published in advance of the  authority board summit on March 28.

The plans to be discussed are part of a bold vision shared by all combined authority members to ensure that as a leading digital county of the UK, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough has the fixed and mobile connectivity needed to underpin the region’s growth and prosperity – now and in the future.

The business and technology sectors of the county are still complaining about poor connectivity in too many areas of a supposedly world-leading cluster.

Internet access is now seen at the ‘4th utility’ which underpins almost all aspects of modern life. Superfast broadband is now available to over 96 per cent of homes and businesses in the county with more to come, but poor mobile coverage is below the England average in all areas except the main cities.

If agreed by the Combined Authority Board, the funding will be used to extend the successful Connecting Cambridgeshire digital programme, which has been led by Cambridgeshire County Council and with Peterborough City Council, supported through a combination of public funding and private sector investment.

Connecting Cambridgeshire has recently been allocated up to £4 million additional Government funding to help to bring full fibre broadband connectivity – capable of gigabit speeds of over 1000Mbps – to Cambridgeshire and Peterborough over the next four years.

In addition to current plans to bring Superfast Broadband access to over 99 per cent of homes by 2020, the programme aims to target improvements in Mobile (2G & 4G), Full Fibre coverage, 5G (next generation mobile) and Wi-Fi coverage in market towns over the next four years.

The delivery programme would work with telecoms providers and mobile operators to:-

• Improve mobile network coverage so that people can make reliable mobile phone calls and use 4G across the whole geography of the county, including A and B roads, and rail services by 2022.
• Expand public access Wi-Fi services to market towns, so more people can get online in public buildings and open spaces, as is already in place in Cambridge and Peterborough.
• To prepare for the next generation of mobile services and full fibre networks, the programme could also:-
• Target a threefold expansion of full fibre networks bringing ‘fibre to the premise’ (FTTP) services offering broadband speeds of up to 300Mbps.
• Be among the first in the country to trial future facing 5G services, working with businesses to maximise the impact and generate long term benefits for the area.

The four-year plan supports CA’s devolution deal commitments to double the size of the economy, deliver outstanding and much needed connectivity, make public services more responsive to local need and improve people’s quality of life.

Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough James Palmer said: “Digital connectivity is a vital part of our area’s infrastructure. The Combined Authority is committed to ‘outstanding’ digital connectivity that will support the growth of our local economy and improve the day to day lives of our residents. 

“A strong mobile and broadband network is key to enable us to remain competitive in the national and international marketplace through the use of smart technology.

“We also want to see greater equity of free public access to Wi-Fi, which is why we are keen to extend free public access across our market towns to follow the very successful projects that are already in place in Cambridge and Peterborough. 

“This scheme would allow local people and visitors to get online in public buildings and open spaces across our area, so that they can be connected wherever they are.”

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: James Palmer, Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and Cllr Steve Count, leader of Cambridgeshire County Council