Tatton Consulting

innovateUK

Digital Sandwich – details of Tatton’s £10m project

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Developing a modular value chain platform utilising DLT, IoT and AI to encourage a step change in manufacturing productivity, consumer safety, financing and trust within the food supply chain.

To demonstrate the benefits and value of the digitalisation of the food supply chain, the Digital Sandwich project will create an open multi-party software platform connecting organisations across the ready made food supply and value chain – from primary production to retail.  Ultimately, the demonstrator created by the project will be accessible to thousands of SMEs in the UK’s food supply chain for whom the technology would previously be out of reach.

Led by Raynor Foods, a leading UK sandwich maker, the Digital Sandwich project will exploit advanced digital technologies to revolutionise the UK’s supply chain for ready made food. This world first project is a cross-sector collaboration of manufacturers, food industry partners, industrial digital technology suppliers, universities, and trade and governmental organisations.

Some of the key priorities for the future of supply chains include:

  • Collaboration and sharing information to help reduce the negative impacts of shocks and strengthen supply chain adaptability, flexibility and resiliency in the long run.
  • Increased transparency and visibility to monitor the flow of products, money and information across the entire supply chain, delivering a virtual audit and end to end continuous assurance capabilities.
  • Supply chain optimisation, including artificial intelligence (AI) models to optimise supply chain inventory, improve services and reduce waste. Additionally this will lead to the standardisation of commercial terms, financing and settlement enabling the complete automation of data across supply chains.

As well as the benefits of reducing food waste by 10%, increasing productivity by 10% and significantly reducing the cost of capital and inventory for producers and retailers, consumers will benefit from the increased safety and traceability of ready-made food, improving public health and public trust in the food supply chain.

Innovate UK Smart Grants: October 2021 launched

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UK registered organisations can apply for a share of up to £25million for game-changing and commercially viable R&D innovation that can significantly impact the UK economy. This funding is from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation.

Your proposal must demonstrate:

  • a clear game-changing, innovative, disruptive, and ambitious idea leading to new products, processes or services
  • an idea that is significantly ahead of others in the field, set for rapid commercialisation
  • a strong and deliverable business plan that addresses (and documents) market potential and needs
  • a clear, evidence-based plan to deliver significant economic impact, return on investment (ROI) and growth through commercialisation, as soon as possible after project completion
  • a team, business arrangement or working structure with the necessary skills and experience to run and complete the project successfully and on time
  • awareness of all the main risks the project will face (including contractor or equipment failure, recruitment delays, etc) with realistic management, mitigation and impact minimisation plans for each risk
  • clear, considerable potential to significantly impact either or both, the UK economy and productivity in a positive way
  • sound, practical financial plans and timelines that represent good value for money, which will always be a consideration in Innovate UK funding decisions

Specific themes

Your project should:

  • demonstrate realistic, significant potential for global markets
  • take customer and user needs into account to deliver more desirable and useful solutions

Proposals from innovation-based businesses with significant ambition and potential for growth or scale up are welcome.

Two of Tatton’s Medtech clients featured in an industry ‘ones to watch’ list.

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Big AI projects in medicine to watch in 2020

Significant, transformational grants won for both this year – 2021 should see them rocket in growth 🚀 #grants #innovateuk #disrupt #tattonconsulting #startups #innovation #venturecapital

Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to touch medicine in many different ways, from making diagnoses to triaging patients. Many AI enterprises will make headlines in 2020:

GlobalData’s medical devices writer Chloe Kent singles out three big projects to watch this year.

Abtrace battles against antimicrobial resistance

Kent says:

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the greatest ongoing threats to global health, estimated to cause 25,000 deaths and 2.5 million extra hospital stays per year in Europe alone.

Leading the fight against antimicrobial resistance in the tech world is Abtrace, an AI platform designed to help clinicians prescribe the most appropriate antibiotic for each individual patient they see in their practice. When around 30% of antibiotic prescriptions are inappropriate, this couldn’t come at a more vital time.

The platform makes its recommendations through a process known as natural language processing (NLP), where a patient’s healthcare notes are processed through Abtrace’s augmented decision-making tool. In seconds, it presents a recommendation for whether or not an antibiotic should be prescribed, and which antibiotic would be appropriate if so.

Abtrace is a European Institute of Technology Health (EIT Health) Wild Card Project, and will receive up to €2m from the organization to help commercialize the product.”

Pexxi genetic testing aims to decode contraception

Kent says:

Many women who choose to use hormonal contraceptives, such as the pill, implant or ring, have to navigate several different options through trial-and-error until they are able to find a medication that works for them.

The side effects associated with hormonal contraceptives, such as acne, weight gain, anxiety and depression, can have a huge effect on a person’s life, and it can take months or even years before a woman is able to settle on one with no or only minimal adverse effects.

Healthtech start-up Pexxi is aiming to end the contraceptive roulette wheel through AI-powered genetic testing. Users give Pexxi a spit sample, which contains enough information about where their progesterone and estrogen levels naturally sit, as well as whether they have any genetic predispositions to the potential side-effects of one type of pill over another. Pexxi then provides a list of the contraceptive pills the person is most likely to tolerate, with plans to eventually expand to include the implant and ring as well. Pexxi is currently in beta-testing stages, with a plan to eventually reach customers through a 23andMe-style model where they’ll pay a fee to use its services.”

Source:

GlobalData

Tatton appointed the official Grants Partner of KQ Labs @ The Francis Crick Institute

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Run once a year by the Crick and supported by LifeArc, ten start-ups with the potential to make an impact on global health outcomes have access to unrivalled support and resources.

KQ Labs helps early-stage data-driven health startup founders to validate their ideas and put their startups on a path to receive investment from business angel investors, venture capital and other sources including non-dilutive funding in the form of grants.

The accelerator is called KQ Labs to represent the ‘Knowledge Quarter’ area around the King’s Cross, Euston and Bloomsbury regions of the city. The KQ Labs accelerator represents a unique opportunity to foster a vibrant ecosystem for data-driven health.

The 16-week programme includes funding (£40k) in the form of a convertible loan, weekly workshops with experts tailored to digital health, training in transferable skills, mentoring by a hand-picked network of experts, and discussions with investors and corporates. In addition, the KQ Labs network facilitates access to data (eg from Health Data Research UK or Genomics England) for start-ups that need to validate their technology further. The programme culminates in a Demo Day, when the startups pitch their propositions to potential investors and partners. All selected startup teams have access to a powerful network of global experts in entrepreneurship, health sector expertise, data science and investment strategies.                                                                           

KQ Labs logo

The KQ Labs accelerator programme

  • Specialised investor introductions
  • Introductions to major corporates, especially pharma
  • Mentoring opportunities with a hand-picked network of experts
  • Tailored and customised weekly workshops covering:
    • Data accessibility and ethics
    • Finance and fundraising
    • Customer and market focus
    • Leadership and team building
    • Communications and pitching practice
    • Regulatory requirements
    • Protecting Intellectual Property
    • Corporate legal aspects
    • Market access (UK and international)
    • Scaling
    • Grant funding and writing

Alumni

Find out more about the previous cohorts of KQ Labs start-ups on our alumni page.

£350k grant for Byotrol and Liverpool University to explore the anti-viral properties of seaweed

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Researchers at Byotrol plc and the University of Liverpool are set to investigate the anti-viral properties of seaweed.

The new project is a collaboration with industrial partner Byotrol plc and will focus on the potential use of anti-viral seaweed compounds in sanitising products, such as hand gels and household cleaners.

The team has been awarded £350K of funding by Innovate UK to carry out the work over the next 16 months.

Easily spread and immune to antibiotics, viruses are very difficult to eradicate and even more expensive to treat, with a limited number of anti-viral solutions. Despite rapid advances in medical and cleaning technology, viruses such as norovirus, influenza and coronavirus continue to pose a major threat to human health and cost the UK billions each year.

AIM-listed hygiene group Byotrol has, for some time, been investigating sustainably sourced anti-virals and has found certain forms of seaweed to have particularly good potential.

The University’s Molecular Virology Research Group will use their expertise to characterise the anti-viral component of the seaweed, evaluate the efficacy of a much broader range of seaweed species and determine its anti-viral mode of action.

Professor James Stewart, who is leading the project at the University of Liverpool, said: “The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to develop new anti-viral countermeasures, especially ones that are environmentally sustainable. We are excited to be working with Byotrol on the development of these compounds.”

Dr Trevor Francis, Chief Technology Officer of Byotrol plc, said: “We are delighted that Innovate UK is supporting our research into the anti-viral properties of seaweeds and we are very pleased to be working on this project with Professor James Stewart’s excellent team at the University of Liverpool. It is a very exciting area of development for Byotrol.”/Public Release. The material in this public release comes from the originating organization and may be of a point-in-time nature, edited for clarity, style and length. View in full here.