Our Challenge led programme offers postdocs and PhD candidates from our consortium higher education institutions a salary replacement to take six-months (full-time) away from the lab to develop a medical technology into a business venture. The programme offers entrepreneurship masterclasses, specialist advice, access to co-working space and an allowance for travel and consumables (up to £45,000). Apply now.

The Challenge

Pain can be acute, chronic or intermittent but most importantly it is one of the most common health conditions that people seek medical treatment for. Yet the causes of and treatment for pain is not well understood, difficult to measure and a deeply personal experience. They are looking for technologies that innovate in this space; offering novel solutions, experimental and alternative ways of addressing how science, medicine and society understands, diagnoses and measures pain. How technologies may innovate or address the challenge;

• Understanding– New and novel ways to understand and objectively measure pain
• Pre-emption and prevention–Early interventions and preventative tools to reduce risk factors associated with pain
• Visualisation and interpretation-Tools and approaches to support clinicians and individuals with the interpretation of data and alternative explanatory methods
• Management and treatment-New and novel ways to improve quality of life suffered by pain patients

Challenge Accelerator alumni: Precision psychiatry for depression management

Formed at an MTSC run weekend hackathon event last February, Affect.AI, venture development was supported via collaboration with the Royal College of Art during our 2019 six-month Challenge led Accelerator programme. Now supported by Imperial’s Venture Mentoring Service and Imperial Enterprise Lab’s Venture Catalyst Challenge. The video below provides an inside look into this unique collaboration.

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Affect.AI believe monitoring is the first step to better treatment. Through developing a state of the art deep learning solution that provides personalised monitoring of mood from a vocal responses to simple questions like ‘What is your plan for the day?’ With a frequent and reliable assessment of severity, they want to empower measurement based care of mood disorders and shorten the cycle of trial and error in medication.

About MedTech SuperConnector

An open experiment in acceleration, bringing together talented early career researchers, academic discoveries and pooled know-how from eight academic institutions led by Imperial College London to determine the most effective methods for translation of medtech discoveries into clinical practice and consumer use. Funded by Research England Connecting Capability Fund its mission is to support entrepreneurial early career academic researchers to commercialise early-stage medtech innovations. In doing so, its vision is to become, a world leading organisation for supporting and accelerating the commercialisation of early-stage medtech innovations.