Imperial Innovations wins spinouts R&D grants

Imperial Innovations, the technology commercialisation company based at Imperial College London, has seen six of its portfolio companies awarded prestigious Research and Development Grants worth nearly £700,000 in total from the London Development Agency.

The Grant for R&D was introduced by the DTI in 2003 to help address the challenge of funding small to medium-sized enterprises in the London region. The 2005 competition attracted 88 applications with 29 winners successfully securing funding after a competitive application process, six of which are from the Imperial Innovations’ portfolio. The six Imperial Innovations companies that have been awarded the Grant are: Thiakis Limited, which is developing analogues of the peptide hormone oxyntomodulin for the treatment of obesity; IXICO Ltd, which is enhancing its current image analysis technology platform to deliver a system that can provide high throughput image analysis capability for large scale clinical trials in three distinct clinical areas, dementia, rheumatoid arthritis and MR mammography; Lontra Ltd, an environmental technology developer that has as its principal technology the Lindsey Engine, which is up to 37% more efficient than a traditional engine and has significant advantages with alternative fuels such as hydrogen; Membrane Extraction Technology Ltd, which is investigating the technical and commercial feasibility of a new approach for manufacturing chiral molecules, Complexation Nano Filtration (CNF); ParOS plc, which is applying its core parametric optimization algorithms for a model-based controller for AVT engines, in collaboration with Lotus; and Process Systems Enterprise Limited, which is a leading provider of Advanced Process Modelling software and Model-Based Innovation services, it is aiming to initiate a much wider adoption of the software across the process industries.

Imperial Innovations is one of the UK’s leading technology commercialisation companies with a strong value creation record having already generated revenues in excess of £30m from spinouts and licenses since 1997. The company, together with Imperial’s academic inventors, has established equity holdings in more than 54 spinout companies and completed over 100 commercial agreements. Over 1,000 jobs have been created through the spinout companies. Imperial Innovations commercialises technology emanating from Imperial College and external sources. Technologies range across software, micro and nano devices, power electronics, renewable energy, mechanical tools, medical imaging and devices, therapeutics and drug discovery tools.