When it comes to nurturing scientific entrepreneurs, Oxfordshire is a hothouse. Last year, spinouts from Oxford University last year raised £391m across 39 deals[1] and between 15-20 companies consistently emerge from the ecosystem every year.
The culture of innovation is deep-rooted, as can be seen by the Oxford Trust’s recent celebration of its 40th anniversary. For four decades it has provided affordable, flexible office space, technical workspace and R&D laboratories, and it is continuing to grow. At its Wood Centre for Innovation in the heart of the Headington Science Cluster, it is embarking on a £7m expansion of its Aspen Centre for growing science and tech companies, with lab and office spaces as well as a dedicated STEM resources room. Meanwhile in the city centre, it has opened the Oxford Centre for Innovation, a new space for science and tech start-ups in central Oxford. Last year it helped 28 businesses and 350 employees to grow, in sectors from biotech to deep tech, quantum, and therapeutics. With a planned investment exceeding £20m, the Trust is now the largest non-academic third sector investor in Oxfordshire.
Meanwhile, precision cancer medicine company Dark Blue Therapeutics, spun out of Oxford University in 2020, is another success story of a start-up nurtured here. It has recently been acquired by global biotechnology company Amgen in a deal worth up to US$840 million. The company, which focuses on potentially life-changing therapy for acute myeloid leukaemia – one of the most difficult cancers to treat – benefited from an accelerator designed to speed up the transition of academic research into real-world medicines, known as LAB282, which is a joint initiative between OSE, Oxford University Innovation, and pharma partners.
Close working between academia and international companies is a feature of the Oxfordshire innovation landscape and this was further evidenced by the launch of the Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre (MiMeC), founded by the biopharma company GSK with the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. This will provide a new UK hub for research in the rapidly growing field of data-driven mechanistic modelling. The new £11m research centre will build open-source digital twins of organs for in-silico research to advance disease understanding and speed up development of new drugs.
Image provided by Oxford Trust
[1] Beauhurst and Penningtons Manches Cooper, the Investment into Spinouts 2026