Collaborating with industry, innovation and commercialisation

Collaborative R&D
One-way BBSRC catalyses, promotes and invests in innovation is through support for collaborative R&D (CR&D). This enables businesses to collaborate and invest in different ways with bioscience research partners across the UK, delivering economic and societal benefit.

BBSRC support for CR&D is provided through business partnering programmes, such as LINK, IPA and Prosperity Partnerships which are responsive to challenges set by businesses, as well as national strategic innovation programmes which bring businesses and other partners together pre-competitively to invest and work with the bioscience research base.  

Between 2011 and 2021 BBSRC invested £611 million to support innovation through CR&D, alongside investments of more than £150 million from industry partners. This investment supported over 1,800 awards involving more than 1,200 business partners and delivered a net impact of £7 for every £1 BBSRC invested. 

Commercialisation and translation
BBSRC collaborative CR&D work is complemented further by support for the onward commercialisation of bioscience research, such as investment provided through its translational funding programmes, namely the Follow-on Fund and Impact Acceleration Accounts. BBSRC has recently published an evaluation of its translational funding programmes. The evaluation highlights the effectiveness of these programmes in supporting bioscience innovation, enabling BBSRC researchers to translate their fundamental research ideas into practice. BBSRC translational funding projects have contributed to an estimated net additional Gross Value Added (GVA) of £192 million with a projected impact of £652 million over a 10-year period.

The Follow-on Fund (FoF) is central to BBSRC’s vision for a vibrant bioscience ecosystem. Over 20 years, the Follow-on Fund has invested in more than 500 projects. Researchers can advance previous BBSRC investments to deliver outcomes such as products, services, spin-outs, and licensable IP that benefit the UK and international markets. Awards are designed to develop intellectual assets with the potential to unlock a commercial opportunity. Nearly half of the FoF research teams surveyed in the translation evaluation reported a commercial outcome from their work, such as a spin-out or a licensing deal, with a further 30% indicating progress towards commercialisation in the future. 

Spin-outs play a crucial role in delivering impact, driving economic growth and creating jobs. BBSRC published an independent report, an “Economic impact assessment of BBSRC attributable spin-outs”. The report demonstrates the significant impact of BBSRC funding in driving economic value through the UK spin-out community. The BBSRC attributable cohort, spanning a wide range of market sectors, contributes an estimated real net GVA of over £5 billion, which is predicted to grow to an estimated £7 billion on a 20-year projection. Since its inception, BBSRC has supported the creation of over 450 spin-outs employing over 8,000 people.

Changing international poultry policy

Poultry is critical to global food security and human health. In low- and middle-income countries, chickens and eggs provide affordable protein and bioavailable micronutrients, and poultry farming supports livelihoods and economic development.

Demand is driving the rapid intensification of poultry production, which brings public health risks. These include food poisoning from bacterial contamination, the spread of avian influenza (bird flu) viruses (with potential emergence of dangerous new variants), and increased antimicrobial resistance (AMR) due to overuse of antimicrobials.

The One Health Poultry Hub was established in 2019 to tackle these challenges. Funded by BBSRC through the Global Challenges Research Fund, this international network of experts from many disciplines has worked collaboratively in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.

The Hub team has achieved many impacts, including:

• identifying factors influencing the evolution of avian influenza viruses through poultry networks, developing effective risk mitigation measures adapted to local contexts and contributing evidence to the FAO-WOAH global control strategy
• identifying gaps in AMR on-farm management and overarching policy frameworks in Vietnam and supporting multisector collaboration through high-level convening and resource mobilisation
• playing a key role in the development of Sri Lanka’s first-ever national poultry policy, which supports a more sustainable poultry industry
• developing new open-source research tools, including models and an app to help policymakers better understand disease spread and an app to track real-time movements of animals and people
• supporting thousands of poultry farmers, traders and retailers to better understand disease risks and to improve biosecurity practices and antibiotic use

Understanding cell membranes underpins biotech

BBSRC encourages UK researchers to collaborate with bioscience experts from across the world and provides funding opportunities jointly with international counterparts to facilitate this. One such partner is the US National Science Foundation Directorate of Biological Sciences (NSF/BIO).

Professor Dominic Campopiano, Chair of Industrial Biocatalysis at the University of Edinburgh, used the funding to collaborate with Dr Eric Klein (Rutgers University) and Professor Ziqiang Guan (Duke University) in the USA.

Professor Campopiano has been working on sphingolipids, the building blocks of cell membranes, for over a decade. Professor Campopiano says: “This newly funded collaboration came about when I read Eric's exciting paper published in MBio in 2019. I immediately contacted him to offer our expertise in sphingolipid research and was glad that he agreed to collaborate. From there, we identified the BBSRC/NSF call as a suitable source of funding and are delighted that with this support we have driven this exciting research forward.”

One aim of this work is to build up a fundamental understanding of sphingolipids to eventually produce vesicles, which are tiny transport bubbles some bacterial cells make. Vesicles are naturally made with sphingolipids and have great potential for healthcare, such as for drug delivery and industrial applications.

Together, the team investigated the biosynthesis and functions of sphingolipids, identifying the independent evolution of sphingolipid production in bacterial and eukaryotic cells. In their 2022 Nature Chemical Biology paper, they report the discovery that many more bacteria have the potential to make sphingolipids than previously thought.

Campopiano is now using E. coli to understand the unique elements of bacterial sphingolipid synthesis, as well as exploring what roles they play in the mammalian microbiome. He also aims to unlock the potential to engineer new sphingolipids for the biotechnology industry.