France, Switzerland and UK dominate the finalists’ list for Academic Enterprise Awards

Academic entrepreneurs leading spin-outs from universities in Denmark, France, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom have made it through to the final round of the fifth annual Academic Enterprise Awards, the only pan-European awards for enterprise in university and public research institutes. Four winners from the shortlist of eight finalists will be decided by the Science|Business Innovation Board during a conference on innovation at the European Parliament in Brussels on 4 June.

For the first time there are two shortlisted entries from France, both from the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Ideas produced here led Christophe Robillard to form Qualisteo, which helps electricity consumers take an active role in managing their own power consumption patterns, and Suat Topsu to create Oledcomm, a “green wireless” company that uses LED lighting networks to send data wirelessly.

Switzerland has also produced two shortlisted finalists, both based on research at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Élodie Dahan’s company OsmoBlue uses patented technology to recycle low-temperature waste heat. And Amin Shokrollhai has been nominated for his company Kandou Bus, which produces fast and power-efficient chip-to-chip serial links.

Discoveries at Imperial College London led Jörg Feist to set up Sensor Coating Systems, which uses luminescence to measure temperature, corrosion and erosion in stressful environments such as gas turbines. And two Cambridge University professors, Wilhelm Huck and Chris Abell, combined to found Sphere Fluidics, which promises to accelerate drug discovery with a technique for using tiny “picodroplets” to analyse and characterise single cells.

From Scandinavia, Richard Godfrey from BerGenBio AS has taken his company from research at the University of Bergen, Norway, to produce an integrated suite of tools that support drug target discovery and is now poised to take first in class cancer drugs in to clinical trials for aggressive drug resistant cancers. Danish company ABEO, under its founder Alexander Wulff, is using ideas developed at the Technical University of Denmark and Copenhagen Business School to offer the construction industry pre-formed concrete that reduce the amount of concrete used by up to 50 per cent.

The shortlist of eight finalists was agreed by a selection committee with members from industry, academia and venture capital, meeting in Brussels on 24 April. The panel was chaired by Science|Business.