2018 was a landmark year for the Divisional Business Development and Partnering Team. In addition to strengthening our research alliances with UCB, Novo Nordisk, Celgene, Pfizer and Bayer, we also saw some important strategic developments. We were delighted to welcome Novo Nordisk to Oxford in the summer, with the opening of the Novo Nordisk Oxford Research Centre based on the Old Road Campus which will strengthen our research partnership. The summer also saw the opening of the BioEscalator, a hub for new and developing life science innovations.
We were thrilled to learn that Innovate UK and industry are to invest more than £17.5 million in the University of Oxford to develop artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare applications. Funding will be provided through the Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund by as part of a £50 million investment to establish a network of digital pathology, imaging and AI centres, to drive innovation in the use of AI for improved diagnosis and delivery of precision treatments.
We have continued to deliver a range of events to engage our research community with industry, including the 2018 AIMday in Biomedical Imaging which was a huge success and we hope to repeat this in 2019 with a new AIMday in Advanced Therapies and Regenerative Medicine.
More recently, the Oxford MIT Healthcare Technologies of the Future Conference saw the University of Oxford and MIT come together to strengthen and share our industry networks and highlight some of our spin outs.
We are delighted to have developed, delivered and supported so many alliances, collaborations, opportunities and events in 2018 and look forward to a successful and fruitful 2019.