Andy Bentham, patent attorney and head of the Cambridge office of J A Kemp, offers some thoughts on current patenting issues for the biomedical sciences. 

The pace of change in biomedical research has surely never been greater. Life science innovation and intellectual property have always gone hand-in-hand but is the patent system keeping up?

In the antibody field, things have come a long way since Kohler and Milstein were advised not to patent ahead of publication of their seminal 1975 paper on monoclonal antibodies.

The last four decades have seen the patenting of innumerable developments around antibody production and diagnostics and the commercialisation of an increasing number of patented antibody drugs.

In the next couple of decades, we will also see new generations of drugs that are not ‘classical’ antibodies but rather smaller derivatives that are not only diverse and specific but also easier to deliver and manufacture. Even now, though, the field is sufficiently mature that the earliest commercially successful examples are starting to come off-patent and biosimilar ‘copies’ are becoming part of the landscape.

Litigation in this area has so far been mostly innovator-on-innovator as distinct from the innovator-generic struggles that characterise traditional pharma but this may now begin to change. 

Antibody therapeutics are revolutionary for patients with life-changing illnesses but there is reason for concern, too. In Europe at least, patenting is getting harder as the base of prior art grows, so it is not certain that every new drug will be patentable in the future, and the cost of the treatments is high so some public healthcare systems are reluctant to fund them.

If protection is harder to obtain and high-value sales harder to make, will the industry be sufficiently incentivised to develop new molecules that will in the end be dedicated to the public when patents expire? In the meantime, though, many excellent candidates are coming through both clinical trials and Patent Offices.

The patenting of research tools and discovery platforms is also of great importance. History shows it is rare to achieve true exclusivity for platform technologies, as broad patent claims are hard to obtain and new developments and design-arounds tend to erode the patentee’s position. But such technologies are nonetheless a key part of the IP ecosystem as many originate in academia and broad out-licensing enables universities to gain revenue through technology transfer.

The most important advances however tend not to have a smooth transition because of disputes over priority and/or ownership that are perhaps inevitable when blue-sky research carried out in collaborative environments suddenly acquires billion-dollar value.

In the last decade, there were battles regarding RNA interference and now there is an ever deeper dispute over CRISPR gene editing technology. For businesses seeking to access these advances, this is a problem because they may be willing to pay but it is not clear to whom to go for a licence. Perhaps in the future we will see more collaborative models and open licensing via the patent pools that are common in electronics, but perhaps not because the numbers of relevant patents will probably still be lower and the players fewer.

Lower-profile but no less important, there is also an upsurge in IP for medical devices. In 2015, more European patent applications were filed in the medical technology field than any other. There is a lot to commend patenting in this area as medical devices suffer fewer issues in patent prosecution than biological inventions and are good candidates for Patent Box tax relief.

In the developing field of digital health, little is yet clear about how the IP landscape will develop but it may be that software patent issues and the speed with which new innovations come to market and are superseded render patents less relevant than in traditional biomedical research. At a higher level, politics and IP often have an uneasy relationship and policy makers arguably listen too willingly to anti-IP lobbies. 

Diagnostics

This has led to negative developments in the USA, where recent Supreme Court case law has eroded and confused what inventions are patent-eligible there. This is particularly acute in diagnostics but may come to undermine other biomedical sectors too. 

Come 2017, we will see whether Congress, President Clinton, President Trump or the new Supreme Court Justice one of them will appoint will give priority to unlocking this. 

In Europe, basic patent-eligibility is not a major issue in biomedical science at present but a vote for the UK to leave the EU would damage and/or delay the forthcoming unitary patent system that will offer more cost-effective EU-wide coverage and enable centralised litigation. 

However, because it is not an EU instrument, the UK will remain a member of the existing European Patent Convention regardless, so much would continue as now even post-Brexit. 

Interesting times indeed: change is the only constant.

“Don’t confuse me with facts, I’ve made up my mind” would make a good slogan for either party in the Brexit bust up, now building to fever pitch as the referendum approaches.

As an adman I’ve always been rather envious of the licence granted to politicians to be economical with the truth. In our profession we have to abide by the ‘Legal, Decent, Honest and Truthful’ charter of the Advertising Standards Association. In the Commons they have no such scruples.

Of course, as any good adman could tell you, presenting the facts of the case comes somewhere down the list when it comes to the psychology of selling.

Raw emotion is a much more reliable motivator: hence the Remain camp’s persistence with Project Fear – a hangover from the Scottish referendum, somewhat ironically coined by the No campaign and exploited by the YES.

In the commercial world, lawyers and insurance agents are masters of sending a shiver down your spine. “If you should die tomorrow, would your family be provided for? Is your house under insured?” etc.

A lot of this is quite legitimate – anyone with dependents is well advised to make a will and take out life insurance. But when it comes to ambulance chasing and selling PPIs to customers who can barely afford a loan in the first place, it’s time to draw the line.

A similar line was crossed when Brexiters were branded as Quitters and Little Englanders, and the threat of nuclear Armageddon was held over their head.  Or the doom-mongers claimed that our streets will be filled with hoards of pillaging rapists, or at least spongers, as soon as we vote to Remain! Be afraid, be very afraid!

I know all’s fair in love, war and politics, but the Brexit affair has turned particularly nasty and dirty. At least in the past it was managed with a certain wit and style. It’s time the respective agency wordsmiths got their acts together and tried to emulate the best.

I’m thinking of the elegant put down that dashed the career of Richard Nixon. Remember the slogan “Would you buy a used car from this man?” under a shifty eyed picture of Tricky Dicky?

Then there was the famous front page of The Sun prior to the General Election in 1992 which showed Neil Kinnock’s head in a lightbulb, with the caption, “If Neil Kinnock wins tomorrow, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?”

And in a similar vein, the Michael Foot poster – created by Saatchi and Saatchi – which showed him shuffling along with stick and duffle coat alongside the headline, “As a pensioner, he’d be better off under the Conservatives.”

Or the classic “Labour isn’t working” unemployment queue, which remained so embedded in the public conscience it could be used as a spoof to sell cake decades later! All brilliant, and brilliantly successful.

What slogan would you suggest to give the coup de grace to the Brexit or Remain faction on the eve of the Referendum? A bottle of fizz for the best suggestion emailed to me at richard [at] simpsonscreative.co.uk by the 22nd of June, assuming France is still exporting champagne to us by then!

Cambridge speech recognition technology startup Speechmatics is seeking up to 20 new recruits in a rapid scale-up.

It recently launched Universal Time Alignment – a language-independent forced-alignment service to match words in text files to their counterparts in audio files. The technology accurately and automatically delivers improved content discoverability, in any language, and the company is leveraging an Arabic version.

Speechmatics boasts that it provides some of the world’s fastest and most accurate speech recognition technologies, based in the cloud and leveraging the latest advances in deep learning neural networks. It already supports a number of large companies as well as SMEs.

The technology was pioneered by Dr Tony Robinson 30 years ago at the University of Cambridge and is now pushing the boundaries in speaker-independent automatic speech recognition – claiming world-beating accuracy levels.

Cambridge has become a world-leader in speech recognition technology – evidenced by Amazon’s swoop for Evi and Apple’s more recent acquisition of VocalIQ.

Dr Robinson started his first company (SoftSound) in 1995, which was acquired by Autonomy in 2000; he subsequently led the speech recognition group and was a key architect of Autonomy’s success. 

Since leaving Autonomy in 2006, he has founded or been involved in a large number of speech-based startups – most notably SpinVox, where he built a fully automated voicemail-to-text system.

Speechmatics says it can can extract audio from almost any common file format. Alongside generating a transcript, Speechmatics also provides speaker recognition (diarisation), punctuation and capitalisation.

The company has begun to employ world-leading technology developed by the Qatar Computing Research Institute to help transcribe Arabic broadcasts and audio files into text and subtitles. It can transcribe modern standard Arabic as well as four major Arabic dialects – Egyptian, Levantine, North African and Gulf Arabic.

Speechmatics recently recruited Neil MacDonald as chief revenue officer. He has enjoyed a long and successful career in the speech-tech industry having served at senior management levels within major players including Nuance, SVOX, iSpeech and HP. 

More recently he led the B2B sales team at SwiftKey, the latest UK tech-innovator to be acquired by one of the US mega-techs (Microsoft paid $250 million).

MacDonald led the sales effort on some of the most significant advances in speech-enabled product to come to market, from the likes of Google, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony – and through his work with the Android platform added the voice to over 600,000,000 Android based devices.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: The team at Speechmatics in Cambridge

It’s early 2017 and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Donald Trump are deciding how to spend their first summit meeting – playing snap, snakes & ladders or rock paper scissors: All the while trying to avoid locking hair and bringing a new sense of intimacy to the countries’ allegedly special relationship.

Frightening prospect isn’t it? But that could easily be the outcome if Leave wins the Brexit referendum and enough American rednecks and halfwits believe hurling gratuitous insults at every opponent beats coming up with coherent political strategy.

If there is a group of people Donald Trump has failed to insult then I am sure he would like to apologise for missing them out. Give him time. Race, creed, colour, looks. They are all fair game to a man who has already stooped so low he could become world limbo dancing champion and whose thought processes appear to change shape at a rate that would put an amoeba to shame.

Hillary Clinton may have all the charisma of a house-brick and enough baggage to collect record surcharges flying through JFK Airport but at least she manages the levels of diplomacy and decency one has a right to expect from a President of the United States.

As for Boris, propped up by a national newspaper showing as much balance as a tightrope walker with the DTs, his position as poster boy for Leave appears nothing more than opportunist – trying to make No.10 not so much by sneaking through the back door as by tunnelling up through the foundations in heavy disguise.

He may well find enough support from the alarmingly large racist element of Leave supporters who mistakenly believe that quitting the EU will end the influx of any migrants to the hallowed shores of Little England but his position lacks class and his arguments gravitas. Flip the coin and the price of failure for Boris could be the end of his political career as we know it.

At least Boris hasn’t sunk – indeed he would not be capable of doing so without a lobotomy – to the level of trash-talker Trump.

It has taken so long for the ‘civil’ to be put into civilisation – to create a world that was societally agnostic with no figurative frontiers; where gender, race and religion were neutralised; it would be heartbreaking to see Britain and America slide back towards political agendas that militate against sensible integration.

If humanitarian arguments don’t move you then consider this. Cambridge companies and their counterparts the length and breadth of Britain are crying out for fresh talent from around the world.

Much of that talent – skilled, intelligent and enterprising – is sitting in refugee camps on the other side of the Channel or Middle East war zones. A strategic approach to immigration with sensible checking and policing is required – not a scattergun ‘don’t let anyone in lest they’re a terrorist’ mantra bred from irrational fear and ignorance.

And for an America showing economic frailty on several fronts they need to remember the ethos on which the nation was built. From 1892 to 1954, over 12 million immigrants entered the United States through the portal of Ellis Island, a whole mass of them with no English!

Someone should tie Donald Trump down and read him this.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost (sic) to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
By alienating Mexicans, American Indians, women, the military, people too fat or too goofy – his words not ours – Donald Trump threatens to extinguish the light of liberty itself.

A rare mix of transport and technology transactions drove healthy activity in the Cambridge cluster in May with deal value topping $3.1 billion.

It took the value of transactions to $105.063bn in the 38 months of Business Weekly’s Cambridge Deals Digest – a monthly average of just over $2.76bn.

Low fares airline Ryanair, anchored at Stansted Airport, winged in with $1.4bn of investment in a new European Training Centre at the Essex hub plus associated scale-up across its UK network.

The investment was announced at Stansted by CEO Michael O’Leary as Chancellor George Osborne performed the official opening ceremony.

Marshall Motor Holdings in Cambridge was also in seventh heaven. It acquired Ridgeway Garages (Newbury) Ltd for just under £107 million cash acquisition that significantly extends its UK franchise empire.
CEO Daksh Gupta described it as a transformational deal which sees the company expand its geographic footprint from 19 to 25 counties, add 30 franchises and increase its product range and freehold property assets.

It also makes Marshall Motors the seventh largest motor group in the UK. The headline deal in hi-tech was ARM’s $350 million cash swoop for imaging technology innovator Apical.

CEO Simon Segars said the deal supported ARM’s long term growth strategy by enabling new imaging products for next generation vehicles, security systems, robotics, mobile and any consumer, smart building, industrial or retail application where intelligent image processing was needed.

Driverless cars is just one of the vertical markets being targeted by the imaging power play. Mobile payments technology business Bango added millions of dollars of new revenue to its bottom line through an acquisition on the other side of the Pond.

Bango acquired BilltoMobile, the US-based carrier billing services of Danal Inc, for an initial consideration of $3.5m. BilltoMobile services processed approximately $80m of end user spend last year, making it the largest carrier billed payments processor in the US by volume.

For the second time in a couple of months a technology business with a Cambridge base was lined up for acquisition by the Chinese. Following ongoing negotiations to sell online games publisher Jagex to Shangdong Hongda, the German-owned AIXTRON SE – based locally at Buckingway Business Park – is being sold to Chinese investor Fujian Grand Chip Investment Fund LP (FGC).

It launched a voluntary public takeover offer through its indirect German subsidiary Grand Chip Investment GmbH (GCI) – a deal which values AIXTRON at around €670 million. AIXTRON SE owes much to Cambridge IP and specialises in manufacturing metalorganic chemical vapour deposition equipment for clients in the semiconductor industry.

American VC firm TTV Capital led a $9m round for Cambridge technology business Featurespace that will fund global expansion. It is the specialist FinTech investor’s first foray into mainland UK.

Featurespace is a global leader in machine learning fraud prevention using adaptive behavioural analytics spun out of Cambridge University.

Imperial Innovations, Nesta, Cambridge Angels and Cambridge Capital Group  also participated in the round. City investment heavyweight Unicorn AIM VCT injected £1m into a heftily over-subscribed £3.1m funding round for equity crowdfunding platform SyndicateRoom.

The cash is being used to allow the young Cambridge UK business to pursue growth in equity capital markets via an aggressive strategy over the next six months. It believes it has the springboard to become Cambridge’s next billion dollar business.

The initial target of £2.3m was reached in just 10 hours after going live on SyndicateRoom’s platform. DevicePilot, whose technology is tipped to accelerate progress in unleashing the full power of IoT, raised over £600k from an impressive list of entrepreneurs and angels to scale the business.

Formerly 1248, the company is based in Cambridge and London.Its software continuously monitors and manages thousands or millions of connected products over their complete life-cycle as IoT projects move from pilot stage to deployment at scale.

CEO Pilgrim Beart and chairman Rob Dobson have each previously achieved $100 million exits from new technology businesses, Beart with AlertMe which was sold to British Gas. Other hi-tech, CleanTech, life science and property deals locally totalled $39.73m in the month and there were 19 significant transactions where the parties declined to disclose financial details. At the time of writing Sanofi, which owns Genzyme locally, continued to chase US company Medivation with a $9.3bn bid that has turned hostile.
 

Cambridge UK innovator ARM Holdings has produced arguably the most significant new technology in its 25-year history with a double play set to revolutionise the look and power of next generation smartphones and other devices.

A suite of new technologies available from 2017 will improve graphics and power on smartphones while using less energy consumption – and will also redefine virtual reality and augmented reality experiences on mobiles and boost the performance of virtual reality headsets.

ARM’s innovation has been hailed as a gamechanger for the future by global ICT giants such as Huawei and Samsung among many other international heavyweights that queued today to pay homage.

ARM said its transformative Cortex-A73 processor and Mali-G71 graphics processor offer sustained performance and efficiency gains that will lead to new products with enhanced contextual and visual capabilities.

The move will allow devices to run high resolution content for longer periods while staying within strict mobile power budgets.

Pete Hutton, executive vice-president and president of ARM’s product groups, said: “The smartphone is the world’s most ubiquitous compute device, offering experiences that improve with each new product generation.

“In 2017, we will see devices with the Cortex-A73 and Mali-G71 processors that stand out thanks to their impressive and sustained performance, and even more stunning visuals. “This technology can make engaging with 4K video, virtual reality and augmented reality an everyday experience on a mobile device.”

The Mali-G71 GPU increases the momentum for ARM Mali products – officially the industry’s number one shipping graphics processor technology. The new core enables a 50 per cent increase in graphics performance, a 20 per cent increase in power-efficiency and 40 per cent more performance per mm2. The Mali-G71 scales efficiently up to 32 shader cores, twice as many as the previous generation premium IP GPU – the Mali-T880.

The uplift means the Mali-G71 surpasses the performance of many discrete GPUs found in today’s mid-range laptops. The product is also fully coherent, helping to simplify software development and efficiency.

ARM says it is ideally suited to power immersive VR and AR experiences on mobile devices and leading silicon providers including HiSilicon, MediaTek and Samsung Electronics have already taken licences.

Bifrost, the third-generation ARM GPU architecture, is the foundation of the Mali-G71. The architecture is optimized for Vulkan and other industry-standard APIs, building on innovations from the previous Utgard and Midgard architectures.

The new Cortex-A73 is the smallest and most efficient ‘big’ ARMv8-A core, according to the company. Its advanced mobile microarchitecture enables a 30 per cent uplift in sustained performance and power efficiency over the Cortex-A72.

Improvements create further opportunities for designers to scale big cores along with the GPU and other IP in a single SoC. Ten partners have licensed the Cortex-A73 so far, including HiSilicon, Marvell and Mediatek.

Kevin Ho, president of the handset business in the Huawei consumer business group, was among the first to throw a bouquet. He said: “In order to deliver more quality and excellent smartphone experiences to consumers, Huawei will continue enhancing the integrated performance of our premium smartphones. “The system-level approach that ARM takes in developing its IP is a vital element in ensuring our design teams are able to maximise efficiency and performance across the entire device.”

In addition to smartphones, ARM’s latest premium IP suite offers the increased performance density and throughput required for other consumer electronics applications such as large-screen compute devices, industrial gateways, in vehicle infotainment and smart TVs. Jae Cheol Son, senior vice-president in the processor development team at Samsung Electronics, added: “Next-generation premium experiences will be defined by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with mobile VR and AR.

“A scalable GPU like the Mali-G71 will help Samsung design teams address increasingly complex mobile VR and AR use cases.”
 

Cambridge is at tipping point as a competitive hub for global science & technology companies and needs to sort out its infrastructure fast to secure continued growth, new market intel from Savills warns.

A key indicator of the potential danger to Cambridge’s international cachet is the disconnect between salaries and house prices compared to a city such as Boston in the US – another global science and research hotspot.

Boston scientists simply have more bang for their buck, the Savills research shows. A comparison of the salaries of scientists employed by three global bioscience companies in Cambridge UK and Boston US shows that UK-based employees are paid 40 per cent less than their US counterparts but the cost of housing is broadly similar in both cities.

Therefore, the attraction of Cambridge to global companies could potentially recede if housing costs continue to grow, Savills counsels. While Cambridge is a global success story, not embracing further growth is likely to impact on its competitiveness, according to Savills. The city continues to face significant pressure on housing, workplaces and infrastructure.

Bold decisions need to be made soon in order to enable one of the UK’s fastest growing economies to continue to compete with other innovative cities both internationally and within Britain. Traditionally characterised by the technology and bioscience sectors and currently home to more than 4,300 knowledge intensive firms employing over 58,000 people, this influx of workers has meant a strong and continual demand for commercial space, which is not being matched by supply.

Savills analysis shows that availability of office and R & D space is likely to bottom out next year, having fallen by 90 per cent in the five years to 2017. Strong employment growth has underpinned the population of the city and its surrounds, which rose by 11.8 per cent in the 10 years to 2015, compared with the UK average of just under eight per cent.

As a result, Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire has seen employment grow by more than 31 per cent in the same time frame. This has had a major impact on both commercial space and residential values. Employment growth has pushed up the cost of housing, which is now 49 per cent above the 2007/08 peak (on a par with London levels), as it deals with a shortfall of more than a 1,000 homes a year.

Susan Emmett, director of research at Savills, said: “Competing on a global stage, Cambridge could lose out to competitors such as Boston in the US or even UK tech clusters such as Reading due to the acute lack of commercial space and the rising affordability pressures surrounding local housing.”

To keep its competitive edge and meet demand for workplaces and homes, Cambridge needs to make significant changes, says Savills. The options for further growth include increasing densities in existing locations and using space more efficiently, expanding the urban area of the city by altering the inside edge of the Green Belt boundary and utilising existing satellite towns and villages along with creating new ones.

The proposed infrastructure changes, such as the guided busway, improvements to the A14, a new Cambridge North station and the planned reconstruction of rail links to Bedford are all steps in the right direction for increasing capacity and opening up new sites for development. Rob Sadler, head of office for Savills Cambridge, said: “There is no doubt that Cambridge needs to evolve in order for it to continue to grow.

There is a risk that failure to tackle these pressures could constrain growth of existing companies, impacting on the city’s attractiveness to future employers, ultimately resulting in a skills shortage as jobs and talent go elsewhere.

“Solving the problem requires a joined up approach between Cambridge and the local authorities, setting out the challenges and exploring ways in which we can work together to future-proof our city.”