Ready for launch?
This year’s Green Templeton Lectures concluded on Wednesday 3 June, ending a series focused on the lifecycle of medical and health entrepreneurship. The lectures were convened by the Oxford Health Innovation Forum, a recently-formed group at Green Templeton led by Associate Fellow Christiaan de Koning, Governing Body Fellow Sheila Lumley and Senior Research Fellow Michael Smets to provide an Oxford venue for exchange between researchers, clinicians, start-up representatives, investors, and industry professionals. They were sponsored by leading law firm Mills & Reeve.
Subtitled ‘Find, Fail, Fly’, the series took a collaborative, conversational approach to explore the challenges and opportunities at each stage in the process of taking research discoveries to commercial launch to adoption and global systems-level impact.
It had an inspiring start with a talk by Lennard Lee (Research Fellow at Green Templeton and Associate Professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine; Chief Medical Officer of the Clinic at the Ellison Institute of Technology), and Anthony Hsieh (Chief Science Lead of the UK Cancer Vaccine AI Scientist and Supercomputing project) on their use of AI supercomputers and closed-loop design to accelerate cancer vaccine development.
Second, Benny Axt (Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Oxford Science Enterprises), Matthew Frohn (co-founder of Longwall Venture Partners) and Susanna Kislenko (director of the Founder Leadership Research Lab) tackled failure, founder’s syndrome, and the roles of individuals, teams, institutions and ecosystems in supporting innovation.
Finally, in the last lecture of the series, Zoe McDougall and Mark Bruce (Oxford Nanopore Technologies) talked to Senior Research Fellow Thomas Hellmann (Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Saïd Business School) about the story of genomics leader Oxford Nanopore Technologies, including their own roles and experiences in the company’s development of low-cost, fast, portable, direct sequencing technology, and its place in Oxford’s unique entrepreneurial environment. Oxford Nanopore’s story is one of going against the grain and defying accepted routes to medical entrepreneurship, repeatedly achieving things that people told them were impossible. This was a fitting conclusion to a lecture series encouraging students and junior researchers in the audience to aim high, overcome challenges, and find, fail and fly in healthcare innovation.
Full lecture reports:
