Ideas to Reality 2024

Diarmuid is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Cambridge and Chief Executive of Cambridge Enterprise. In these roles he has responsibility for all elements of innovation, enterprise partnership, research commercialisation, investment, local and national government engagement on innovation, and innovation and place.

During his time at Cambridge, Diarmuid has led the creation of a number of initiatives to unlock innovation and offer enhanced support for translational funding and company creation, including Founders at the University of Cambridge and the Technology Investment Fund. He co-founded and continues to be an active leader in Innovate Cambridge, a highly collaborative initiative defining and delivering an inclusive innovation future for the Cambridge ecosystem.

Previously Diarmuid was Chief Innovation & Enterprise Officer of Trinity College Dublin and has held senior management roles in several university-founded start-up companies, including NTera, Xoliox, and Deerac Fluidics. Diarmuid was a Research Fellow at Princeton University. He has a PhD in Physics from the University of Sheffield and a degree in Materials Science from Trinity College Dublin.

Professor Deborah Prentice became the University of Cambridge’s 347th Vice-Chancellor on 1 July 2023.

An eminent psychologist, Professor Prentice carried out her academic and administrative career at Princeton University, which she first joined in 1988. She rose through the academic ranks and took on administrative responsibilities of increasing scope, chairing the Department of Psychology for 12 years, serving as Dean of Faculty for three years, and then serving six years as Provost, with primary responsibility for all academic, budgetary, and long-term planning issues.

Her academic expertise is in the study of social norms that govern human behaviour – particularly the impact and development of unwritten rules and conventions, and how people respond to breaches of those rules. She has edited three academic volumes and published more than 50 articles and chapters, and she has specialised in the study of domestic violence, alcohol abuse and gender stereotypes.

Ajay Chowdhury assumed leadership of the Board of Cambridge Enterprise in January 2020, overseeing the strategy, which is tasked with supporting the commercialisation of the ideas that emerge from the University of Cambridge.

He has 25 years of start-up venture experience, building disruptive, new digital businesses in a wide range of industries. He has expertise in mobile, e-commerce, digital media, data analytics, digital retail and government as well as strong functional expertise in sales, strategy development, product development and fundraising. He is also the author of the Kamil Rahman series of detective novels

AetoSense is on a mission to provide a data-based solution of air quality improvements as well as meeting upcoming European regulations. Their focus is on the critical impact of airborne particles on health their innovative solutions are designed to address these challenges head-on.

Led by the founding team of particle detection experts, AetoSense’s technology provides an innovative solution for balancing indoor air quality and energy consumption in buildings. Having accelerated their business plans during the inaugural Founders at the University of Cambridge Start programme, Aetosense is addressing an immediate market in air quality monitoring in forward thinking industries, and long-term, is looking towards the regulatory space.

Presenter: Dr Molly Haugen, CEO

Molly leads the research and development of low-cost and high-accuracy sensors for monitoring and improving indoor and outdoor air quality. With a PhD in Chemistry and over five years of postdoctoral experience at the University of Cambridge, she is adept at understanding and solving complex environmental challenges.

Molly will be introduced by Mark Lazar, Programme Director, Founders at the University of Cambridge.

The ICM+ software, developed by Dr Peter Smielewski and Professor Marek Czosnyka, provides for real-time multimodality monitoring, analysis and data storage in neurological intensive care environments.

ICM+ is a pioneering clinical research software solution that offers high-resolution data collection and real time analysis from multiple bedside monitoring sources.

Encapsulating over 25 years of clinical research in intracranial dynamics and intensive care of traumatic brain injury, ICM+ has become a hub for a worldwide scientific network in brain monitoring data collection and research.

Presenter: Dr Peter Smielewski – Co-founder

Dr Peter Smielewski is the Head of the Brain Physics Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He specializes in intensive care unit monitoring, high resolution data collection, integration and analysis.

He graduated from Warsaw University of Technology, with a Master degree in Electrical Engineering, and subsequently received his PhD at the Division of Neurosurgery, University of Cambridge, where he developed computer-aided methods of non-invasive assessment of cerebral blood flow regulation.

Peter and his colleagues have been developing the ICM software for over 25 years and he continues to focus on methodologies for continuous assessment of cerebral autoregulation and their role in individualised management of traumatic brain injury patients.

Peter will be introduced by Dr Siân Fogden, Associate Director, Cambridge Enterprise

T-Therapeutics is a next-generation T cell receptor (TCR) company spun off from the University of Cambridge. The company was created to harness the power of T cell biology, evolved over millions of years, to create safe and effective treatments for many cancers and autoimmune diseases.

The company, which is built on the foundations of research from Professor Allan Bradley in the University’s Department of Medicine, is pioneering technology which harnesses the power of T cells, offering a potential game-changer in the development of first-in-class cancer therapeutics.

T-Therapeutics’ technology works by training the body’s own T cells to identify, target and eradicate tumours. While other T cell receptor (TCR) technologies work in a similar fashion, they can lack specificity and only apply to certain cancers, which can lead to significant side effects. The company’s OpTiMus® platform can sidestep this issue by creating a near unlimited database of optimal TCRs, which can act as building blocks for new therapies.

Presenter: Professor Allan Bradley – Founder and CEO

Allan Bradley is a professor in the Department of Medicine at Cambridge University and a world-renowned researcher and entrepreneur.

He is known for his pioneering role in the development of ES cell technology as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, acknowledged by the 2007 Nobel Prize awarded to his thesis advisor Martin Evans. His laboratory has published numerous highly cited primary research articles, he has mentored many leading academics and he is an elected fellow of both the Royal Society and Academy of Medical Sciences.

Allan is also a serial entrepreneur. He has co-founded six companies, two in the US and four in the UK. These include two unicorns: Lexicon’s $1bn debut on the NASDAQ was achieved 5 years after it was founded while Kymab was sold to Sanofi for $1.45bn in 2021.

Allan will be introduced by Dr Laura Donnelly, Associate Director, Cambridge Enterprise

Demand for quantum error correction technology has grown dramatically over the past year. Driven by a series of technical breakthroughs, improvements in qubit quality and a global shift towards building error-corrected quantum systems, the quantum computing industry is now looking beyond today’s small, error-prone machines to a new generation of ‘fault-tolerant’ quantum computers with integrated QEC technology.

Today’s best quantum computers can perform only a few hundred quantum operations before failure. Riverlane’s core product, Deltaflow™, will help this increase to millions and, ultimately, trillions of error-free quantum operations. Achieving this scale will unlock transformative applications in industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, material science and transportation.

Riverlane is one of our growing portfolio of companies in the field of quantum computing. We invested in their first round in 2019 and we have participated in the early stages of their fundraising journey including writing a £1 million cheque in their 2023 Series B fundraise round.

Most recently the company announced its $75 million Series C funding round to deliver its groundbreaking quantum error correction (QEC) roadmap. The funding will enable Riverlane to expand operations to meet surging global market demand for QEC technology, with the goal of achieving one million error-free quantum computer operations by 2026.

Presenter: Dr Rebecca Simmons – Chief Operations Officer

Bek is responsible for building world-class teams and scaling company operations to enable Riverlane to reach its strategic goals. Bek enjoys supporting and empowering high-performing teams and has a supreme talent for driving work to completion.

Bek has 18 years’ experience within leading health, research and higher education organisations. She co-founded THIS Institute, a £42m healthcare research institute at the University of Cambridge, building a team of 35 people in one year. Bek also has experience in fundraising and stakeholder management across a range of sectors and countries as Chief of Staff at the University of Cambridge.

Bek holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the Open University.

Bek will be introduced by Dr Christine Martin, Head of Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise

As Head of Ecosystem Initiatives and Partnerships at Cambridge Enterprise, Caroline leads on a number of strategic activities designed to support entrepreneurship and innovation.

Delivering the company’s convening agenda, the activity is about connecting two pivotal ecosystems – the University and the wider Cambridge ecosystem – in a proactive and strategic way that drives entrepreneurship and innovation. Cambridge Enterprise sits as a bridge between these ecosystems – intrinsically linked to both – and this activity helps to shape and support emerging entrepreneurs, spin-outs and start-ups and the companies who are forging the innovation landscape of Cambridge for the future.

Caroline works closely with the Innovate Cambridge initiative helping to create an inclusive, ambitious and broad-ranging innovation vision for the Greater Cambridge area; the University Enterprise Network which helps convene all of the University’s activities for entrepreneurship and innovation; the ideaSpace community and network bringing together Cambridge founders; and International Outreach which enables us to share our experience and expertise around the globe.