Ten years ago, I slipped in through a side door to the office block that rings Times Square in Newcastle, next to the Life Science Centre near the city’s central station, and spoke to Jonathan O’Halloran, the co-founder and chief scientific officer of QuantuMDx, a Newcastle-based biotech startup.
I was there to write a story on QuantuMDx’s killer product, a Star Trek-like tricorder that would take blood or saliva samples and provide instantaneous results to diagnostic tests. The Q-POC, as it was called, was a revolutionary technology.
I think about that reporting trip a lot a decade on, having come through a pandemic where I regularly dropped saliva onto a PCR test for Covid-19, and having seen the North East biotech scene go from strength to strength. (QuantuMDx is still going; it raised £15m in funding in 2021, and in 2023 developed a diagnostic device to detect tuberculosis.)
What O’Halloran told me on that relatively grey afternoon in 2014 still holds. Newcastle – and the wider North East – punches above its weight in the biotech startup space. Data from Nepic, a processing sector trade body in the region, suggests there are close to 200 life science companies operating across the North East.
In large part, that’s thanks to our pedigree in science and medicine at local universities. Spinouts from Newcastle University alone raised £40m from investors last year, according to the university’s own data.
Newcastle is home to the Great North Children’s Hospital, only one of 14 in the UK. We have both the UK’s National Innovation Centres for Data and Ageing. Newcastle Helix is a locus for activity. And outside Newcastle, the £8m National Healthcare Photonics Centre in County Durham helps support startups to commercialise medical technology products.
The region is known for its scientific strength, and as a result sees plenty of university spinouts focused on areas that boggle the minds of most. And it supports plenty of jobs, too: 7,000 people are currently employed in the life sciences, according to Invest North East England, and a further 116,000 in the manufacturing sector.
Many of those are in the titans of the industry, such as GSK (formerly Glaxo SmithKline) and Accord Healthcare. But beneath those big beasts, there’s a vibrant group of startups and scaleups in similar positions to where QuantuMDx was a decade ago.
Take Newcells Biotech, which has developed 3D models of human body parts that mimic processes in the body in order to replace drug testing on animals. The company, spun out from Newcastle University in 2015, boasts more than 100 customers worldwide, has a near-50 strong team, and has raised £12m in funding since its founding, most recently a £2.35m follow-on investment in February.
Or look at Orla Protein Technologies, based in the same wing of the bioscience centre surrounding Times Square that I toured with QuantuMDx a decade back. It too was a spinout from Newcastle University. InvenireX, a 2021 spinout from Newcastle University, just raised half a million pounds operating in a similar field to QuantuMDx. TREAT-NMD launched an £18m programme last month.
Nor is it just the Russell Group university in the city powering the biotech revolution: PulmoBioMed was born in neighbouring Northumbria University, developing a handheld device that collects lung fluid samples non-invasively to detect conditions like asthma. It raised £1.4m in funding in February.
Others are branching out beyond the more health-focused branch of biosciences to strike it rich: just the other week Kromek, founded in 2013 and which develops radiation detection solutions, booked a $2.1m order to provide security screening tech for a company in the US homeland security space.
Looking at the list of scientific spinout successes, it all feels like it did 10 years ago as I walked around the office building near the Life Science Centre: the North East does science well – and as long as the universities keep churning out spinouts, will continue to do so.
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