Emerging Technologies Competition winners announced
The Royal Society of Chemistry has awarded four companies a share of £160,000 as part of its Emerging Technologies Competition 2020.
The competition saw 23 finalists pitch to a panel of judges at a virtual event in an attempt to win funding and support to accelerate their work.
The panel of judges included members of companies including AstraZeneca, Boots, Croda, Johnson Matthey, Pepsico, Scott Bader, Reckitt Benckiser, RSSL, and Unilever.
Each winner will receive £20,000 prize money, as well as 12 months’ one-on-one support from a specially assigned Royal Society of Chemistry mentor, and a further £20,000 available as a business acceleration grant.
The competition was held across four categories including health, enabling technologies, energy & environment, and food & drink.
The winners were:
- Health: University of Bath, developing ensilication technology that can stabilise vaccines without refrigerators, enabling an extra 2 million people every year to be saved from vaccine-preventable diseases.
- Enabling Technologies: Chromosol, allowing for the future integration of electronic and optical communications systems resulting in greater data transfer rates with reduced power usage.
- Energy & Environment: Viridi CO2, engineering porous catalysts capable of transforming CO2 into polyurethane feedstock materials that can help to reduce reliance on petrochemicals.
- Food & Drink: Hoxton Farms, using mathematical modelling and machine learning to expand and differentiate adult stem cells to make cultivated meat products.
Paul Ellis, head of Scouting and Partnerships, Research and Development at Walgreens Boots Alliance, and a competition judge in the Health category: “As a panel we were seriously impressed with the quality of all the finalists, however we were unanimous that there was only one winner. It was clear that the use of the University of Bath’s technology to make vaccines stable without refrigeration has massive potential across the world. The proposition was well thought through from both a scientific and commercial point of view and it is a very exciting technology.”
The competition is now in its eight year with winners from previous years going on to raise a combined total of £51 million in equity and grant investment.
Asel Sartbaeva, the University of Bath, winner of the Health category: “Winning this award is a huge boost for our team, and it gives us significant recognition and opportunities to present our technology to the industry with confidence and momentum.”
Jo Reynolds, director of Science & Communities at the Royal Society of Chemistry, said: “This has been a year of significant business challenges, but this competition demonstrates there is incredible resilience and resourcefulness in the chemical sciences to innovate in ways that can deliver tremendous benefit to society. This competition offers a peek into the future to see what could very soon be changing our lives.
“Our winners have succeeded in a very competitive field of finalists and for that they deserve enormous praise. Our judges had a really difficult job and that’s testament to the quality on show.
“The recovery from the economic blows delivered by Covid will be long and arduous but it is innovations like these that show how chemistry can help drive economic growth and counter threats to environmental and human health, so it’s exciting to see how our finalists this year will contribute towards those goals.”
Jo added: “We’re delighted that this spirit and connection has continued, albeit virtually this year, and very much look forward to tracking the progress of our latest winners as they join the illustrious winners who have gone before them.”