Norwich Research Park hosted an ‘Exploring the Ecosystem’ showcase event, on Friday 19 September, as part of Cambridge Tech Week.
Attracting around 70 delegates, including representatives from early-stage companies, investors and large corporations. The showcase event featured inspiring ideas, research updates and career highlights from three of the research campus’s award-winning scientists: Prof Julea Butt and Prof Nick Le Brun of the University of East Anglia (UEA), and Prof Jonathan Jones of The Sainsbury Laboratory.
This was followed by a series of pitch presentations from emerging start-up, spin-out and spin-in companies that now call Norwich Research Park their home including HotHouse Therapeutics, PulseON, Cellexcel, BugBiome and Virilitas.
The AIP team, managing the Norwich Research Park campus, is responsible for developing new partnerships with industry, and so, in a panel Q&A session, Dr Monika Chhetry, Science Collaboration Manager, for AIP, led a panel discussion exploring a recent case study involving current occupiers the British Beet Research Organisation (BBRO),Tropic, the John Innes Centre and new industry partner British Sugar. A partnership has been formed to develop a solution to protect sugar beet from Virus Yellows by using gene editing following an AIP Explorer Forum workshop.
Norwich Research Park is home to one of the largest clusters of microbiologists in the world with over 100 groups, on site, leading innovative research work. The Centre for Microbial Interactions (CMI) was founded last year to bring together these microbiologists in order to help them to share their findings, encourage collaborations and forge closer relationships, and partnerships, with industry.
And to help facilitate the ground-breaking plant science being carried out at the John Innes Centre and The Sainsbury Laboratory, project manager Emily Purchase gave the audience an overview of the future benefits of the £317m Next Generation Infrastructure (NGI) project including some stunning CGI visualisations of what the finished buildings and facilities will look like.
Attendees also participated in behind-the-scenes tours of the three BBSRC research institutes on campus – the Earlham Institute, the John Innes Centre and the Quadram Institute.
Roz Bird, CEO of Anglia Innovation Partnership, stated, “It was a pleasure to host the first Norwich Research Park showcase event, as part of Cambridge Tech Week. We were delighted to welcome so many entrepreneurs and investors to the campus for what turned out to be a very valuable day for demonstrating the depth of knowledge and expertise we have here in agrifood, health and the environment, and for forging relationships for future collaborations. A massive thank you to the entire Anglia Innovation Partnership team for helping to make this happen!”
Matt Lawson, CEO of Downstream Innovation, said, “It was an excellent day at Norwich Research Park for the final day of Cambridge Tech Week. It was a pleasure to join the industry panel discussion, bringing to life the benefits and successful projects that were born out of the Norwich Research Park Explorer Forums. In particular, the forum that set about tackling the Virus Yellows in sugar beet using gene editing.”
To view the full gallery of images from the event, please visit our Event Gallery page.
