Oxford: Innovation fund makes first investment

A fund designed to bridge the "innovation gap", supporting Oxford University inventors in proof of concept and prototyping work, has made its first investment: funding work into a new class of antibiotics discovered at Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry.

The Oxford Invention Fund has received donations totalling £500,000 since it opened last June from four individuals including Sir Douglas Hague and Dr Tim Cook.

The fund is managed by the University’s technology transfer company Isis Innovation. "These generous donations will allow us to make up to ten investments in well-validated and promising Oxford technologies," said Isis Innovation MD Tom Hockaday. "The aim is to make them attractive for the next phase of investment or a licensing deal with an established company."

Professor Mark Moloney of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, whose group mined natural product libraries to identify the next generation antibiotics, said the early stage funding provided by the Oxford Invention Fund would be used to determine which of the compounds are most likely to be clinically effective drugs: "The discovery of new antibiotics has become critically important because of the emergence of bacteria resistant to current drugs. The urgency of the task is underlined by the recent E. coli outbreak in Germany in June 2011."

"This project will test the antibacterial activity of new chemicals we have designed and synthesised, to build up enough data to gain interest from a commercial partner such as a biotech or pharmaceutical company to take the work further."

The Oxford Invention Fund is modelled after the highly successful Oxford University Challenge Seed Fund (UCSF) – also managed by Isis – which has awarded £6 million, financing 115 projects and prompting the formation of 33 spinout companies and the completion of 51 commercial deals.

The next meeting of the Oxford Invention Fund will be held in September. All students, researchers and professors from the University of Oxford are eligible to apply to the fund, through Isis Innovation.