okay yes it's visible definitely it's possible okay um so Dan uh yes as Gayla was saying uh I am uh the brca manager uh so I deal with uh scouting Innovation at the trust and at the University and see where the commercialization of that Innovation it's a good route in order to bring a benefit to patients and as today so my talker will give you an overview of of my work and how we do this um at the hospital um so first of all our research is focused on the patient and that everything that we do h
as a patient in the center and our goal is really to bring a new solution to improve our patients life and this is aligned with the hospital vision of uh bringing Innovative and sustainable health care so our researchers academics or clinicians identify in a problem in the healthcare pathway and they come up with an idea um maybe it is a new diagnostic or a new therapeutic and then through different steps of the research going through basic research where you test and validate your first uh your
first assumptions and then through pre-clinical research where actually you started testing your hypothesis and maybe your new treatment on animal models or cell line models up to to a point where actually we develop something that we can test in in a clinical setting and then it's where we do clinical trials involving uh patients and where then we do collect the information uh and feedback also from patients and this is with the Ultimo goal to arrive to A solutions that can be approved and del
ivered back in the hospital and not only yes curation is not only in in edinburgh's but also if the solution can impact positively patient's life actually worldwide so how can we have that Global Outreach so we are an academic organization so our first way is of course to publish the outcomes of our studies but also we can build guidelines provide trainings for the new generation of medical practitioner and the deliver again expert advice when requested however there is another way of broadening
the Outreach again of the of our research is through commercialization of intellectual property so what is IP so intellectual property rights are legal rights that protects the creation of the Mind and if someone wants to use these rights they need to obtain permission and the IP it's a generally generated daily uh at the hospital and in Academia through the delivery of patient care education and r d programs and there are different type of intellectual property rights some arrive automatically
you do need to apply anywhere they already again exists as soon as for example you write a piece of text and the type of IP that is generated is called copyright at the hospital we generate copyright for example when we develop a new software so to diagnose some new um a disease or maybe when we write again a new manual to train a member of staff we have database rights that for example protect a curated database of information that might be required to train those diagnostic softwares nowadays
we hear a lot about artificial intelligence or machine learning and that definitely these are innovations that could help diagnose a better certain type of diseases then probably the most known uh IP right is patents so patent is a registerable write it does not arise automatically you need to go to the patent office and send an application and you cannot patent everything you need to patent you can patent only things that are new that are inventive that means that provides another obvious solu
tion and they are capable of industrial application and in our research we can develop for example new medical devices and new medicines or maybe new diagnostic methods that could be patented the interest of the patenting is that it gives a protection for a limited time 20 years and therefore it ensures the Monopoly of the use of that particular Innovation and and we will discuss a little why that is important and there are other type of IP rights one type is the design rights we enough care don
't use this rate so much because it protects only the appearance of something one probably famous a design writer is the writer that protected the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle and um and another again uh right that is quite famous is the trademarks that is protecting brands for example the Coca-Cola brand keeping um the same example so now we are an academic organization and we are a hospital and why are we talking about commercialization of IP this is because commercializing intellectual prope
rty can be a vehicle to positively influence the services and treatments in the NHS by broadening the dissemination of knowledge outside our Hospital giving a Healthcare Community new products and treatments which otherwise would remain only at the bench at at an experimental level and also you can attract industry Partners as investment to then develop the solutions that are better tailored to the patient need and the importance of intellectual property has been recognized also by the Departmen
t of Health which indeed again recognize AP as an important output of research and expect us hospitals and academic organization to effectively disseminate I.T and commercialization is one of this route so another reason why we talk about commercialization is unfortunately some Innovations have required partnering with industry in order than to to bring them back to the public uh imagine for example uh Therapeutics the field of Therapeutics yeah um here it's a rough examples of the numbers and I
nvestments that are required in order to create a new a new treatment a new drug The Other Drug Discovery you might have 10 000 candidates potentially again eligible to become the new the new drug but out of these 10 000 compounds are probably only one will will result a successful um from all again the testing that is required and so it's estimated that for a drug you require at least 12 15 years of development more than one billion dollars of investment in order to create that treatment and th
is includes for each drug all the trials fail the trials in order to screen again those other compounds um and of course these are a magnitude of activities that us as a hospital we cannot undertake another element is that of course we cannot manufacture a scale and manufacturing of medical devices and Therapeutics needs to be done in compliance with strict regulations and and also we cannot have a hospital ensure large distribution of the solutions that um again could benefit in patients worldw
ide and so that is the reason why also in in most of the cases um we needed to partner with industry so how we do this we commercialize IP by granting licenses and licenses our contracts that I grant permission to use a specific asset it can be a patented it can be a software code or other type of Rights and that right is just for a specific purpose technically it's called the field and also in a specific geographical region so you can choose it to permit to the user of your IP maybe all in the
UK or only in France or maybe you you want it to be used worldwide so in a license there are always a license or the owner of the asset and a licensee and the licenses can be granted uh with different levels you know of Freedom abuse exclusive license allows the licensee to be the sole user of the asset and the and the Other Extreme we have a non-exclusive licenses where the AP owner can use analysis to more than one licensee so at each stage we do decide what is the appropriate route for the co
mmercialization of the AP and the goal for us is to be able to ensure that that particular innovation has the broadest Outreach possible so of course we cannot license everything before any IP license we go through a very thorough due diligence because we can like sap only if we have permission from patient consent research article approvals research funders and and also we ensure that that IP has been generated uh in accordance with gdpr so the general data protection regulation and data govern
ance and our again Master is that we of course never include identifiable patient data so once we ensure that we have all this permission then we we enter into our license hopefully we do receive a certain point some uh Revenue out of of this licensing and the revenue is shared among all contributors of the AP and this is because we want to support again better care foster innovation so uh we share back with the funders of the researcher so this can be Charities like uh act and rechargeable trus
t the British Heart Foundation CR UK is on it can be governmental bodies like the nihr and that funds a lot of our research programs and and this is again is really to support uh further the founders work Michelle back with the hospital and the collaborators that have participated in that piece of research those can be other NHS trusts in the UK but also worldwide hospitals and and universities and this is to support the healthcare services and research we do also share back with the uh the IP c
reators and this to encourage more innovative ideas and this is because if you imagine again all the duties that clinicians and researchers have um developing something new requires a lot of time a lot of efforts sometimes even outside of their working hours and then we want really to encourage them to continue sharing with us their ideas because they might have again the solution of uh something that again the solution that could could help many patients so um how we help them at the at the hos
pital at the University of that we researchers are supported by Professionals in the technology transfer field um I'm based in the r d department at the trust and I deal with anything that is related to intellectual property and I'm responsible of uh finding those ideas at the hospital and at the University but I also work with other two offices um one in the University that is called Cambridge Enterprise and one that supports activities of the trust that is called the health Tech Enterprise and
both organization again are special um have a you know a group of Professionals in the um in the in the field of IEP commercialization so in order to commercialize IPM to develop actually something from an idea stage to something that it's um it's concrete you know it's it's a it's a it's either a medical device or a new treatment you need to constantly ask uh yourself um these questions and it's really an iterative process uh really uh being aware of the problem that your inventions wants to s
olve uh and the advantages that you think your invention could bring compared to the current uh treatment or current care and and also to try to generate through research the evidence that provides again that proves that your inventions brings an advantage and as I was saying it's an iterative process that we don't do in isolation we ask for many advice and and definitely patient focused groups and the patient feedback it's a very important one because we again we want to develop the things that
are tailored to the need of our patients um so um usually the the journey well it's never linear but here it's represented as a linear path but to somebody coming up with with an idea and really try to um work at the uh and gather the evidence required again to uh to prove its value and then a certain point usually prior public disclosure we ask ourselves is it worth protecting the AP maybe through a patent and this is because we are an academic organization protecting IP and commercializing IE
P does not mean impeding publication we believe that knowledge needs to be disseminated and and therefore there are mechanism where you can achieve both and um and we continued and um uh performing trials and the studies in order Ghana to acquire more and more um evidence in order to prove ourselves ahead to the solutions that we have created that uh is indeed uh bringing a benefit at to the point that we can also convince others uh to then uh join us in the Journey of uh of development and this
can be other existing company or companies that we spin out from the University or the hospital so there are new Ventures that we create from scratch in order then to continue developing that that product or that solution so I finished with the two examples that you might have heard two successful stories so one is has been developed by a professor again and is the result of the collaboration between the university and cuh and it is a device that can perform uh prostate cancer diagnosis in a be
tter way than uh current transfactal biopsy methods and this is because I can probe how it is designed allows again the recovery of the biopsy with the reduced risk of infection reduce also a patient discomfort and also reduce the cost of the healthcare system and currently the the device has been licensed to the company job that is currently Distributing products in hospitals and we hope soon to see can probe used by again the many um many many hospitals so and the second success story is the s
ize of sponge you might have heard the appeal on string uh this has been created by uh Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald and it's a device that allows early detection always overgr cancer um and it can be used instead of endoscopic procedure that usually requires a sedation whereas and of course are performed at the hospital whereas the cyto sponge is just appeal that you can swallow and then it can be retrieved through a string and any you can again have the samples from the esophagus through again
a procedure that it's less demanding for the patient it can be administered at HP and um and again it's a solution that can reduce costs for the healthcare system and the cytosponder has been origin to be very useful during the covid-19 outbreak where endoscopic procedure could not be used because of the fear of various Associated infection sorry various virus Association oh Virus Infection Associated to aerosol generated during the endoscopic procedure and and then we hope you decide to sponsor
to be um used in order Dana to screen them a large amount of uh you know of people in order to reach that early detection of the esophagia cancer that it's required in the field that's it so thank you very much for for
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