Imperial spins out three new companies

Funding

Imperial Innovations plc, the technology transfer arm of Imperial College London, has announced that it has completed the seed funding of three newly-formed portfolio companies.

Navion Pharma Limited, a therapeutics company focusing on cancer and metastatic disease, is based on the research of Mustafa Djamgoz, an expert in cancer biology and a specialist in biophysics and bioelectricity. Navion is led by Executive Chairman Chris Wood, who was formerly Chairman and CEO of Bioenvision, a Nasdaq-quoted biopharmaceutical company sold to Genzyme in 2006. Nigel Burns, non-executive director, was previously Senior Vice President of Preclinical Development at Cambridge Antibody Technology until its acquisition by AstraZeneca in 2006. The management of the company has invested alongside Imperial Innovations in the seed round.

The second company, Cortexica Vision Systems Limited, is a software developer based on the research of Anil Bharath and Jeffrey Ng from the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, who have been studying the way the human brain analyses visual information and have replicated this in the Cortexica technology, which imitates human visual behaviour.

Potential applications for the technology are diverse. Cortexica will focus initially on supplying services to brand management and marketing agencies, monitoring broadcast and online video sources to measure the number of times and for how long a brand appears in each video stream. Measurements can also include a “perceptual” weighting based on the focus of human visual attention.

Meanwhile Smart Surgical Appliances Limited is a medical device company developing sensor-enabled surgical instrumentation to improve the safety and clinical efficacy of minimally invasive surgery – keyhole surgery, endoscopic surgery and the newly emerging field of natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery.

A limitation with all minimally invasive procedures is that the surgeon loses dexterity and accuracy because of reduced access to the site of the operation, leading to variable success rates and intra-operative complications.  The company’s sensor-enabled instrumentation provides real-time sensing and feedback from the operation site akin to ‘touch and feel’, preventing complications, improving judgement and enabling reproducibility.   

Smart Surgical Appliances is based on research at the Department of Biosurgery and Surgical Technology, within the Faculty of Medicine.  As part of the funding round, Paul Donnelly, former executive at Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline, is investing in the business and has joined as Chairman.