King's Innovation Catalyst's award-winning IP & Licensing team engages with potential licensors to market our pipeline of life-changing innovations developed in King’s world-class facilities across five campuses in central London.

King’s College London are co-founders of the Francis Crick Institute, Europe’s leading biomedical research institute. Alongside King’s Health Partners, we are also the largest healthcare training partner in Europe, with three teaching hospitals totalling 4.8 million patient contacts per year and 600 clinical trials at any one time.

We champion a diverse portfolio of breakthrough technologies and innovations in healthcare (including diagnostics, therapeutics and medical devices), physical sciences (IT, telecommunications and robotics) and across the social sciences, humanities and the arts.

In 2019, we won the PLG ‘Licensing Deal of the Year’ award for a licence to Merck, described by the Financial Times as ‘the most valuable [deal] achieved by a British university for a specific drug development programme’.

Enabling CAR-T Cells to Access Alternative Carbon Sources to Glucose

In the environment around solid cancer tumours, T-cells that fight infections and cancer have to compete with cancer cells for glucose to fuel their activities.

King’s researchers have proved in in vitro and in vivo models that Alternative Carbon Source genes can be engineered into Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-T cells to reduce their need for glucose using ribosomal skipping peptides.

This avoids additional manipulation of CAR-T cells before adoptive transfer, reducing complications and manufacturing costs.

King’s is seeking a commercial partner to develop the technology within a research programme, with a licence for the technology and know-how.

Scribble: Optimised Segmentation of Medical Images through AI

Scribble is a segmentation tool that uses machine learning to create a first segmentation of medical image to identify anatomical structures for diagnosis, anatomical modelling or surgical planning.

Unlike similar tools, this technology uses the user’s ‘scribbles’ drawn on the first segmentation to refine mis-segmented areas.

The technology is protected by a US patent and a European patent, and is available for licensing.

We are seeking suitable commercial partners to bring the algorithm to the market.

MRI Compatible Virtual Reality System

Patients often experience anxiety and distress during MRI scans and struggle to keep still for the scan to finish successfully.

Researchers at King’s have developed an MRI-compatible VR system that uses eye-tracking gaze control, so that patients can remain still but occupied by an immersive virtual experience.

A working prototype has been developed that does not induce artefacts in MRI images, and this opportunity is open to license the patents, associated know-how, and develop it to market.