If you want an example of how the EpiFund Growth Accelerator can help your businesses, look no further than one of our sister Innovation Centres.
To find out more about Office Space | The EpiCentre | Haverhill, Cambridge (epicentrehaverhill.co.uk)
To find out more about Lab Space | The EpiCentre | Haverhill, Cambridge (epicentrehaverhill.co.uk)
To find out more about Our Members | The EpiCentre | Haverhill, Cambridge (epicentrehaverhill.co.uk)
To find out more about Business Support | EpiCentre | Cambridge, Haverhill (epicentrehaverhill.co.uk)
To say Oxford Innovation-based company Active Needle Technology Ltd. is ultra-sound is an understatement. The young business has the potential to be a global game-changer in a number of science & technology arenas from cancer to aquaculture.
As co-founder Ian Quirk explains, Active Needle – based in the Culham Innovation Centre – is exploiting the effects one gets when you add ultrasonic waves to a needle to make it vibrate.
While its core market is medical technology, the company is demonstrating its potential across multiple industries. Quirk says: “The truly extraordinary properties of an ultrasonic needle are applicable across a wide range of areas.
“We’re working with the aquaculture industry and have signed a commercial deal with a prominent tattoo manufacturer, which for us is completely left-field. Basically we are looking for those opportunities where, potentially, there’s a very large impact for our technology, virtually no competition and a genuinely unsolved clinical or other need – all opportunities around the ultrasonic needle.”
The core technology was developed at The University of Dundee as a joint project between ultrasound engineers and medics. Quirk and co-founder Dr Muhammad Sadiq CEng MIMechE, who is the ultrasound guru, formed the business in 2016 initially exploring the medical aspects using that single University of Dundee patent and has successfully expanded its patent portfolio from there.
Having spoon-fed the business on angel financing for the large part, including some help from Oxford Innovation Finance in the formative years, Active Needle has responded to a changing financial climate by pivoting to collaborative projects with companies – either where there is a good overlap or where Active Needle has a technology which meets another company’s major need.
The measure of progress in recent times is that most of Active Needle’s customers are B2B collaborative projects and about 80 per cent of these are outside the UK – principally in Germany, Norway and the US.
Full article – https://lnkd.in/esmmfCrj
Article written by Tony Quested.