A new stratified medicine spin-out from the UK’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has secured £8 million funding – £4m each from Cambridge Innovation Capital and IP Group.

The funds will be used by the newly created business, Microbiotica, to commercialise ground breaking research into gut microbiome and its role in health and disease. It adds another piece to the personalised medicines jigsaw by building on to advanced genomics research and technology.

Based at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridge, Microbiotica will look to develop and commercialise new defined bacteriotherapies based on the human gut microbiome.

Microbiotica has been established to commercialise ground-breaking research, conducted in the Host-Microbiotica Interactions Laboratory (HMIL) at the Sanger Institute, into the role of the human microbiome in health and disease and its application to medicine.

The HMIL is led by Dr Trevor Lawley and collaborates with the Professor Gordon Dougan research group. The Sanger Institute teams have made significant breakthroughs in the analysis and understanding of the human microbiome, combining an extensive DNA sequencing capability with novel culturing methods, to build a first-in-class gut microbiome culture collection and reference genome library.
 
Since 2010, Dr Lawley’s group has cultured and sequenced the genome of thousands of bacterial strains from the gut of humans, representing the world’s largest culture collection of intestinal bacteria. This has given the group important new insights into the association of these bacteria with a range of diseases. Added to this, the group has developed a leading expertise in humanised models for the development of live bacterial therapeutics and exceptional bioinformatics capability.

Microbiotica has been granted unique access to these resources and capabilities and will use it to gain unparalleled insights into the microbial communities in both healthy and diseased individuals, enabling the identification of specific disease-related bacteria, patient-stratification strategies and novel therapeutics.

The startup has also been granted exclusive rights to existing potentially therapeutic bacterial mixes that have shown striking effects in novel models of disease, and which will be progressed into pre-clinical development over the coming year.

Recognition of the importance of the microbiome, the body’s trillions of resident bacteria, represents a paradigm-shift in our understanding of its impact on human health and disease. This creates major opportunities in the diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of disease including enteric infections, autoimmune disorders, metabolic disorders, cancer and neurological disease.

Microbiotica’s science will be directed by Dr Lawley, who will be chief scientific officer. The company will be led by Dr Mike Romanos who, as CEO brings a wealth of experience as a seasoned drug discoverer and entrepreneur in the biotech sector.

Dr Romanos previously held senior global roles in GSK and as CEO built Crescendo Biologics. Professor Gordon Dougan is also a co-founder. CIC and IP Group will each appoint a director to the board.

The company will use the funds to establish labs within the Wellcome Genome Campus at Hinxton to progress multiple live bacteriotherapy discovery programmes into development.

Dr Romanos said, “It has been a privilege to work with my co-founders Trevor Lawley and Gordon Dougan to create the concept of Microbiotica as a leading player in microbiome-based therapeutics.

“We are very excited to be working with CIC and IP Group to now turn the vision into reality as we start to build the company, based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, leveraging the strengths of the Sanger Institute to create new medicines.”

CIC investment director Dr Robert Tansley, added: “Research into the microbiome is a fascinating area of study with huge commercial potential. We have been working closely with Mike, Trevor, IP Group and the Sanger Institute to ensure that Microbiotica has an excellent foundation and can benefit from the tremendous body of work created by Trevor and his team.

“With our founding investment in Congenica, the genome discovery and diagnostics company, we have been privileged to be instrumental in the creation of two spin-out companies based on world class research from the Sanger Institute.”

Professor Sir Mike Stratton, director of the Sanger Institute, said there were broader implications following the creation of the new business. He said: “The Wellcome Genome Campus is home to research institutes, spin-out and start-up companies, academic-industry partnerships and Genomics England; all dedicated to driving and leading pioneering research and innovation in the sphere of genomes and biodata.

“Microbiotica grew out of Sanger Institute science and I’m delighted that Trevor and his team will continue to be immersed in the intellectual environment on campus.

“The Biodata Innovation Centre and the companies in it is the first major step in our progression of our vision for this campus as a global hub for genomics and biodata.”

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Professor Sir Mike Stratton

Cambridge University spin-out Breathing Buildings has been sold to UK ventilation specialist Volution Group for an undisclosed sum.

Volution is a market leader in Britain and northern Europe and quoted on London Stock Exchange. Breathing Buildings, which remains anchored in Cambridge, was formed in 2006 by CEO Dr Shaun Fitzgerald from a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and with support from BP. Since then it has developed its own hybrid ventilation technology niche for the UK commercial ventilation market and is now a market leading designer, manufacturer and supplier of energy efficient, intelligently controlled natural and hybrid ventilation solutions. 

Breathing Buildings generated revenue of £7.8 million in its year ended March 31, 2016. 

The acquisition has been funded from the Volution Group’s existing bank facilities and is expected to be immediately earnings enhancing. It will be reported under Volution’s Ventilation Group division in the UK where it will widen the capability of the business in the attractive new-build commercial market.

Volution Group supplies ventilation products to the residential and commercial construction markets; the deal provides an exit for the company’s previous backers including MMC Ventures. CEO Ronnie George said: “I am delighted that we have completed this acquisition and look forward to welcoming Dr Fitzgerald and his team to the Volution Group.

“Breathing Buildings has developed a market leading position in the UK for natural and hybrid ventilation in commercial buildings and we are excited about their potential for continuing growth.”

Dr Fitzgerald added: “Becoming part of the Volution Group will enable us to maintain our focus on growth through new product development and the provision of a more comprehensive offer to our client base. I am excited about the opportunity to continue working with the business in the next phase of its development. Being part of the Volution Group offers significant new opportunities.”

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Dr Shaun Fitzgerald

Cambridge communications technology specialist Sepura has been sold to a subsidiary of Chinese company Hytera Corporation in a deal that values the UK business at £74 million.

The boards reached agreement on the terms of a recommended cash offer to be made by Project Shortway Limited, an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Hytera, for the entire issued and to be issued ordinary share capital of Sepura.

Each Sepura shareholder will be entitled to receive 20p per share cash. The deal price represents a premium of approximately 35.6 per cent to the closing price of 14.75 pence per Sepura share on November 3 – the last business day prior to the announcement that the companies were in talks and the start of the offer period.

Hytera said Sepura, our reigning Business of the Year, was an excellent strategic fit with Hytera’s existing operations and the acquisition will broaden the range of products and services the Chinese corporation can offer customers.

The Sepura board intends to recommend unanimously that shareholders accept the deal on the table.

Hytera is a leading provider of Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) communication solutions for clients in government, public security, utility, transportation and enterprise sectors across more than 120 countries and regions across the world.

The acquisition is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2017. Sepura chairman Alan Lovell said: “This transaction with Hytera recognises the underlying strengths of Sepura’s technology and customer base despite the difficulties of the last 12 months.

“It will provide certainty for our shareholders and secure the future of the business. There will be additional opportunities and benefits for the business and its employees as part of a larger group.”

Neither party has clarified whether Sepura will continue to expand from its new Cambridge Research Park HQ but that is expected to be the case.

Novel Cambridge technology is set to get under the skin of a key area of health & wellbeing research – literally.

Product design innovator Cambridge Consultants has developed a multispectral imaging technology demonstrator called Skintuition.

Today’s imaging and sensing technology can reveal important information about our bodies – from our bone structure to our brain activity. But what about tapping into the health and wellness information hidden within our skin?

Cambridge Consultants has harnessed this possibility with Skintuition which offers a non-invasive, non-contact way of capturing, understanding and visualising the secrets of our skin – enabling a new generation of truly personalised care products.

Equipped with off-the-shelf camera technology and integrated algorithms, Skintuition enables users to analyse and observe their skin in greater detail, providing valuable insights into its health, condition and dermatological status.

Using a low-cost, widely available camera like the ones in most smartphones – aided by a ring of LEDs – Skintuition controls the illumination around a camera to produce images of the skin’s surface with more colours than a typical camera could produce.

As a result, the system is able to expose what is under the skin’s surface, including blood, oxygen saturation and melanin. By embedding the platform into a commercial product such as a bathroom mirror, Skintuition can gather images of the user’s skin and alert them to changes in its condition through their smartphone.

The system could tell a user to apply a higher SPF sunscreen if it detects high levels of melanin, for example, or it could show them exactly where they have missed a spot on their face when applying sunscreen.

Most importantly, it has the ability to track how levels change over time – providing the user with a holistic and long-term view of their skin health. The platform technology is also capable of integration within existing personal care systems, and can recommend specific products using the data it uncovers – bringing an element of personalisation to existing skincare and cosmetics routines. 

“Imagine if your bathroom mirror could pinpoint trends in how your skin pigmentation changes, encouraging you to adjust your personal care routine to better cater to what your skin needs at any given time,” said Ruth Thomson, head of consumer product development at Cambridge Consultants.

“From monitoring for deeper changes in health to matching the perfect shade of foundation to your skin, the multispectral imaging we’ve developed provides countless ways to personalise the skincare experience.”

The low-cost cameras and imaging tools used to create Skintuition have applications that can reach far beyond the personal care sector. By manipulating the LEDs’ illumination surrounding the camera, the technology can be tailored for use in different scenarios – even within other industries, such as agriculture.

It could provide a low-cost alternative to hyperspectral imaging to allow for detection of water uptake by plants, for example, or warn of the spread of disease through changes in leaf pigmentation that are not visible to the naked eye.

“We’ve taken existing, inexpensive hardware components and found new and exciting ways to use them,” said Thomson. “At its core, Skintuition is simply an imaging solution that is able to expose substances that are invisible to the naked eye.

“By making it low-cost, we’ve given it mass-market appeal – opening the door for this type of technology to apply its ‘intuition’ to not just skincare but nearly any other visualisation use case.”

• Cambridge Consultants will be demonstrating its Skintuition technology at the CES 2017, January 5-8, in Las Vegas.

A Cambridge University spin-out driving 3D multi-touch technologies has raised an undisclosed amount in a Series A funding round.

Cambridge Touch Technologies (CTT), is developing low cost solutions for smartphones and tablets. The funds will be used to grow the company’s technical and customer support teams,and to continue commercialisation of its novel and patent-pending 3D Multi-Touch technology for next generation smart devices.

The round was led by existing investor Cambridge Enterprise and included Hermann Hauser’s Amadeus Capital Partners and new investor Parkwalk Advisors.

CTT claims it is poised to make 3D touch technology a standard feature on smart devices of all sizes and says its technology is simpler and lower cost than existing 3D touch systems and will integrate easily into existing manufacturing lines.

Users of devices with CTT’s touch technology will be able to use one, two or more fingers for a richer user experience and enjoy a high sensitivity and consistent performance from screen edge to edge.

CEO and co-founder of the business, Corbin Church, said: “We are delighted to have the continued support of our existing investors Amadeus Capital and Cambridge Enterprise, and to welcome our new investor Parkwalk, as we execute our business strategy and enter the market in the near future.

“The early engagement by OEMs and their supply chains has been tremendous and we look forward to continue working with our customers in helping them achieve compelling and differentiated products, across a range of screen sizes and applications, using our low-cost 3D Multi-Touch technologies.” 

Dr Arokia Nathan, CTO and co-founder of CTT added: “Working with our partners and customers, we’ve demonstrated the scalability and robustness of our approach which is based on the piezoelectric principle.

“The combination of CTT’s patent-pending analogue and digital technologies makes our solution highly implementable within existing projected capacitive touch architectures, which in turn can lead to widespread and rapid adoption using existing manufacturing processes.”

Amelia Armour, EIS investment manager for Amadeus Capital Partners, said the market for 3D touch screens had been growing rapidly since its start in 2015 and will be nearly a billion devices a year by 2020. 

“With this new investment, Cambridge Touch Technologies will be set to take advantage of this huge opportunity with its unique 3D Multi-Touch technology.”

For the avoidance of doubt, I would like to make it clear from the outset that this article has been written by a genuine, bona fide human being and not by a robot. 

Whilst this comment may appear to be no more than a slightly glib opening to a piece on artificial intelligence (AI), it is actually rooted in fact – writes Kitty Rosser of Birketts LLP.
 
In October the UK’s Press Association announced that it will be following in the footsteps of US news giant, Associated Press, by recruiting robot reporters to produce news content within the next few months.

The use of natural language generation engines to produce news content neatly encapsulates many of the current controversies linked to the increasing use of AI. In particular, it highlights many of the issues that surround the potential impact of AI on traditional job roles. 

Proponents of the new technology argue that news content can now be generated with much greater efficiency and accuracy. A single bot named Xiaomingbot produced over 450 articles on the 2016 Olympics for Chinese news syndication service, Toutiao, whilst the Washington Post relied heavily on in-house automated storyteller, Heliograf, for its own coverage of the 15 day event.

Associated Press has been able to achieve a twelve-fold increase in its quarterly earnings reporting using Automated Insights’ Wordsmith program and has stated that this has freed up the equivalent of three full-time employees across the organisation.

In 2015, Automated Insights itself ‘wrote’ a total of 1.5 billion individual articles. Not bad for a company with only 50 employees. 

So, what has happened to those journalists whose time would previously have been spent in producing content that is now automated? Associated Press has stated that automation has not displaced any reporters but has instead allowed them to re-direct their focus, to think more critically about the bigger picture and produce content which examines the nuances behind the numbers.

Put bluntly, the humans can get on with producing quality, insightful journalism whilst the computers take care of the drudge work. In the short term, this looks like a win-win situation but one has to question whether this is a sustainable model in the longer term.

As the use of automated content becomes standard industry practice and more professional reporters produce an increasing volume of quality content, will we reach a saturation point beyond which there is simply no further demand or outlet for high quality human-generated content? 

This saturation point would, for most professional journalists, no doubt represent the tipping point – the moment at which AI ceases to be a positive resource to be relied on and instead becomes, at best, a career redefining hurdle and, at worst, a career destroying hindrance. And to what extent will this situation be further exacerbated by continuing technological development?

As consumers of automatically generated news coverage, we are generally entirely unaware that the article we are reading has not been written by a human.

Reg Chua, executive editor at Thompson Reuters (another proponent of the technology) reports that in blind testing automated content actually came out as more readable than human-generated content.

Whilst this is testament to the high standard of the existing technology there is no dispute that, at present, the scope of that technology is limited.

The current generation of robot reporters are, in fact, simply software programs that can process specific data sets to generate a fairly narrow range of essentially standardised reports on topics such as sports and finance.

Those at the forefront of the technology are confident that in time AI will be able to produce increasingly complex ‘human’ content. Kris Hammond of Narrative Science predicts that “a machine will win a Pulitzer one day”. However, it is likely that there will be significant technological hurdles to overcome before we see a wholesale replacement of human journalists by cyber-hacks.

Concerned journalists may take some comfort from the recent experience of Microsoft’s chatbot, Tay. Tay, launched on Twitter earlier this year, was taken offline within 24 hours after posting a variety of tweets containing racist and sexist content, promoting drug taking and denying the Holocaust. It subsequently made a brief return only to melt down and start tweeting out of control, spamming its 210,000 followers with messages reading, somewhat ironically, “you are too fast, please take a rest…”

According to recent research by Oxford University and Deloitte, about 35 per cent of current jobs in the UK are at risk of computerisation over the next 20 years.

Interestingly, journalism scored a relatively low eight per cent likelihood of automation, placing 285th on a list of 366 professions considered. The clergy came in at position 341.

The job deemed most likely to be automated is that of telephone sales person. Those looking to guarantee long term job security are advised to start looking for management opportunities in the hospitality sector.

My own job, solicitor, came with a reassuringly low 3.5 per cent likelihood of automation. For now, at least, I can feel some degree of job security as I return to considering who I might sue when my client is defamed by a robo-scribe whilst my lawbot gets busy dealing with my contract drafting.

Kitty Rosser can be contacted on 01603 756559 or via email: kitty-rosser [at] birketts.co.uk 

The Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, as with the Budget, is always eagerly anticipated by the property industry, particularly among our residential colleagues.

In recent years respective governments have exerted further pressure on residential landlords as well as homeowners and this year’s Autumn Statement was no exception. 

Amongst these headline grabbing and consumer focused announcements some of the finer points can be overlooked. For those of us working in commercial property, whilst the impact and content of such statements might be less direct, it is no less integral.

The commercial team at Carter Jonas used the Autumn Statement as a chance to take stock and ask what we would like to see from Philip Hammond. How could Mr Hammond confirm his commitment and support to the commercial property market? Of course, the market is only as strong as the wider business environment in which we work and are dependant; we concluded that we needed to see signals that the Government is taking steps to safeguard companies committed to the UK.

Addressing the House, the Chancellor reconfirmed the Prime Minister’s announcement of significant investment into research and development. This is a welcome move – particularly in Cambridge where we are famed for our top-end science and technology occupiers and, increasingly, for attracting small startups – as it is vital for the UK’s economy and the wider property market.

However, what the Government gives with one hand! The Government has reiterated that it will not discuss plans for Brexit until it is ready. 
The problem is that companies – from startups to multinationals – have been looking for and need specific reassurances that the UK can retain its position as a global business hub.

Some organisations have been deferring their decisions on expansions and new openings, due to this lack of clarity. The migration of people – of a business’s ‘talent’ – is particularly important as the retention and attraction of people is often the number one priority for any business.

Access to talent is also one of the single biggest drivers of commercial real estate decision making. It is a simple fact that uncertainty is rarely good for business and the Government’s continuing reluctance to share their Brexit proposals are certainly not helping.

Closer to home, a controversial levy being considered by councillors on workplace car parking has been greeted with little enthusiasm from some in our business community.

The scheme, an attempt to cut road congestion in Cambridge, would be similar to a levy in Nottingham which charges firms a fee per employee car parking space. 

Whilst some argue for the benefits of such schemes, many have suggested that rather than supporting business it would effectively be a tax in disguise and simply another cost for firms that will already be paying for their parking spaces because they are subject to business rates.

Of course, it is not all doom and gloom. Office rents in the city are currently at £36.50 per sq ft – as of Q3 2016. This is up from £28 per sq ft in 2010, an increase in part driven by occupier demand.

But the Government and our councillors must realise what we have in Cambridge. Our reputation as a leading business hub, one which supports innovation and business growth and development, has not been easily won. Other locations in the UK as well as Europe are desperate to attract the calibre of occupier that we boast and are looking for any opportunity to do so.

Cambridge city centre is already suffering from long-term supply issues with many of the new developments already pre-let. This, combined with a planning system which is still not working in an optimal way to enable sites to be brought forward, leaves me struggling to see how this shortfall will be addressed.

As such we need to look at every policy announcement with additional scrutiny and ask: is this truly supportive of the business that our city relies upon?