These start-ups are transforming the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease so everyone can live longer, healthier lives.
Enhanced Fertility, King's College London
Founded in 2020, Enhanced Fertility provides at-home fertility testing kits and a validated online assessment to speed up diagnosis for men and women who have been trying to conceive for at least six months. It uses tech innovation to provide affordable personalised fertility care for all.
Infertility affects 1 in 6 people worldwide. For these people, it takes on average seven years to have a baby.
Enhanced Fertility was founded by Andreia Trigo, a King’s alumna (MSc Advanced Practice: Leadership, Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care). She is part of the King’s20 Accelerator (now King's Start-up Accelerator) and a member of the Women Entrepreneurs Network.
Andreia Trigo, founder of Enhanced Fertility
I was diagnosed with infertility at 17 years old, which was incredibly challenging. I needed to give meaning to my own painful experience so I started looking at the experiences of others who were struggling with infertility and how I could help them.
We don’t immediately see nurses as entrepreneurs. But nurses are very well positioned to solve healthcare problems. We are close to patients; we listen to them and speak to them every day. We often liaise with other healthcare professionals, and we know how processes work within hospitals and clinics.
The tech space is still heavily male-dominated and so much needs to change. We need to see women in business to understand that we can do it too. We also need to have equal opportunities to access funding. There’s still a lot of gender and cultural biases; in 2021 all-women founding teams raised only 1.1% of capital.
Andreia Trigo
Founder, Enhanced Fertility
Broken String Biosciences, Cardiff University
Broken String Biosciences is leading the way in improving the safety and effectiveness of gene editing therapies. This advancement is crucial in making transformative treatments safe and accessible for patients.
Our technology is applicable to pretty much every stage of the gene edited therapeutic pipeline development, right from early discovery, where you are screening high numbers of nucleases and guides and different delivery technologies.
Dr Felix Dobbs
CEO and founder, Broken String Biosciences
Aquazoa, Heriot-Watt University
Aquazoa, an emerging spin-out from Heriot-Watt University, is developing an advanced, rapid-testing platform to detect harmful microbes in public water supplies.
Building on the university’s research in water monitoring technology, the company aims to provide utilities and regulators with faster, more accurate, and cost-effective methods for identifying contamination.
By enabling near real-time detection of bacteria and other pathogens, their innovation has the potential to significantly reduce waterborne illnesses and minimise disruptive service outages, ultimately improving public health and operational efficiency across the water industry.
Professor Helen Bridle, Aquazoa, Herriot-Watt University
Our system has achieved a very significant improvement in detection rates of harmful bugs in the water, so this technology will prevent illness and economic losses much more effectively in future.
Professor Helen Bridle
Founder, Aquazoa
Already, the project team has secured High Growth Spinout Funding from Scottish Enterprise (SE).
Aquazoa's founder, Professor Helen Bridle, is an award-winning researcher and academic at Heriot-Watt University. She is recognised for her pioneering work in microfluidics and pathogen detection.
As the founder of this new aspiring spin-out, she leverages her expertise in advanced sensor technologies to create rapid, highly sensitive solutions for monitoring water quality and reducing the risk of waterborne illness. Her interdisciplinary approach merges engineering and the life sciences, with the ultimate goal of making water supplies safer and more reliable.
Medherant, University of Warwick
Medherant is a clinical-stage company developing innovative treatments using its novel transdermal drug delivery technology, the TEPI Patch®.
We are working to help make the lives of all post-menopausal women better in all walks of their lives and bring high value manufacturing to the West Midlands with the world's first testosterone patch for women.
Medherant
VascVersa, Queen's University Belfast
VascVersa is an early stage regenerative medicine company developing new cell therapies that promote vascular regeneration and repair.
Building on over 10 years of academic research at Queen’s University Belfast, the company has developed a proprietary technology for the manufacture of Angicyte – a robust, highly-scalable, autologous, cell-product with a proven capacity to make new blood vessels and promote healing.
VascVersa is developing therapies to treat major unmet clinical needs caused by ischemic conditions including ischemic retinopathies and diabetic foot ulcers. During 2025 the company is seeking Series A funding for a first-in-human clinical study scheduled for 2026.
CEO and co-founder Dr Christina O’Neill as worked on the development of the Angicyte technology for over 10 years, at Queen's and now at VascVersa. Christina also led the formation of the company and is responsible for the wider commercialisation of the technology.
Elcella, Queen Mary University of London
Elcella creates a unique nutrient-based natural alternative to weight-loss drugs.
Backed by a decade of scientific research at Queen Mary University of London, the nutrient-based appetite suppressant releases the body’s natural ability to control eating. Elcella is conveniently available as twice-daily pills, unlike weight loss drugs that often require injections.
Unlike common weight-loss injectables that use artificial approaches to enhance the gut-brain connection, Elcella unlocks the power of the gut to support its own processes, resulting in more balanced eating.
Founded by Dr Madusha Peiris and Dr Rubina Aktar, the pair collaborated on appetite regulation research, before joining to create Elcella. Dr Peiris is a leading gut health researcher who made a surprising discovery that a specific combination of nutrients that will trigger the hormones that makes us feel full. Dr Peiris describes herself as ‘an entrepreneur by accident'.
Obesity is a global public health issue requiring safe, effective, accessible and complimentary treatments to reduce how much people eat. The tragedy of obesity is that you lose much of your ability to tell when you're full. We found a combination of nutrients triggers hormones that control appetite, so you eat less and lose weight. Our discovery means we have a new way to help people get healthy again.
Dr Madusha Peiris
Founder, Elcella
EarthSense, University of Leicester
EarthSense delivers products that enable the world to visualise and manage its air quality issues. Their award-winning air quality monitors and advanced pollution modelling and API, they create critical components in smart systems, inform major investments, assess historic exposure and future risk to make a real difference to people’s lives.
EnsiliTech, University of Bath
EnsiliTech is working on making room-temperature stable vaccines for easier transport and storage, so that everyone will have access to vaccines across the globe.
This ground-breaking solution to the problem of vaccines 'spoiling' means more people around the world can be saved from vaccine-preventable diseases.
Using the Bath team’s award-winning, patented technology – named ensilication – a vaccine can now be warmed to boiling-point temperatures and jiggled about in extreme humidity without falling apart.
Delivering vaccines that need to be kept cold to communities riven by poverty or conflict – or both – is a logistical nightmare. Dr Asel Sartbaeva is a Reader in Chemistry (Associate Professor) at the University of Bath. She is a CEO and co-founder of EnsiliTech Ltd, an Ambassador for the Girls in Science Program for UNICEF, and a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellow.
Dr Sartbaeva is confident that ‘ensilicated’ vaccines will be available for use in animals within just two years and in humans, possibly, within five.
TauRx, University of Aberdeen
TauRx are dedicated to studying neurodegenerative diseases and are at the forefront of Alzheimer’s research. Their product, HMTM, is a drug with the potential to slow disease progression in Alzheimer’s and behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia.
Mesenbio, University of York
Mesenbio is a biotech startup pioneering the use of extracellular vesicles (EVs) derived from clonally selected, immortalised mesenchymal stem cell lines for the treatment of arthritic diseases.
By leveraging cutting-edge regenerative medicine approaches, Mesenbio aims to develop scalable, consistent, and clinically effective therapies to address the growing need for disease-modifying treatments in osteoarthritis and related conditions.
Neurotherapeutics, University of Nottingham
Neurotherapeutics Ltd is a University of Nottingham spin-out launched to bring to market a wearable neuromodulation device, worn like a wristwatch, for use in Tourette Syndrome (TS) and associated co-occurring brain health conditions.
Neurotherapeutics uses research from scientists from the University’s School of Psychology and School of Medicine that used repetitive trains of stimulation to the median nerve (MNS) at the wrist to entrain rhythmic electrical brain. They found that rhythmic MNS is sufficient to substantially reduce tic frequency and tic intensity, and the urge-to-tic, in individuals with TS.
The trial showed the positive impact the device could have on people with Tourette’s. Providing them with control over their tics could be life-changing.
Professor Stephen Jackson
Founder, Neurotherapeutics
Singer Lewis Capaldi testing the wearable neuromodulation device
HaemAnalytica, University of Reading
HaemAnalytica are revolutionising drug development by eliminating fundamental causes of clinical trial failure, stratifying patients and enabling research.
Personalised medicine will transform the prevention and treatment of heart attacks, strokes, and bleeding disorders such as ITP. HaemAnalytica provides next-generation platelet analysis, improving clinical trials and diagnostics, for more effective patient care, reduced costs and better health.
Astratus, University of Reading
Astratus aims to address the global challenge of increasing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) through a rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing platform.
The testing platform addresses the significant need for rapid antibiotic resistance detection for better AMR surveillance and antibiotic prescribing, targeting patients with urinary tract infection within the veterinary and human clinical microbiology pathways.
The company’s mission is to make sure patients get the right antibiotic, first time. This is done by the Astratus One Health platform significantly shortening the time of test results. The current average test result time provided by existing methods ranges between 28-72 hours. Astratus’s platform yields results within six hours.
The founders of Astratus are scientists and industry representatives with a passion for healthcare innovation. Dr Alexander Edwards is an interdisciplinary researcher focussed on solving current and future healthcare challenges. Julie Hart is a medical affairs specialist with over 30 years of commercial experience. Dr Oliver Hancox is a biochemist by training with seven years’ experience in both commercial and academic method development and research and development and Dr Sarah Needs is a biologist with over five years’ experience in developing and evaluating new tests.
Together, the founders are aiming for the Astratus rapid platform to answer the over-£4-billion-challenge to revolutionise outdated urine microbiology laboratory testing methods applied across human and veterinary clinical medicine as well as therapeutic research.
I-Diagnose, The University of Bradford
At present, clinical evaluations known as Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE) are often costly and difficult to organise.
I-Diagnose uses machine learning and AI, drawing data from thousands of real cases, to simulate different scenarios, making it quicker and cheaper to organise, while also providing students with immediate feedback.
Corryn Biotechnologies, Swansea University
The Advanced Tissue Repair (ATR) platform by Corryn Biotechnologies is set to revolutionize wound management by integrating a contactless, pain-free application process with bioresorbable, micro-structured synthetic materials.
These materials have been clinically validated to enhance wound healing. The ATR system provides a new method to fabricate and deliver these materials to reduce pain and maximise the benefit of their three-dimensional microstructure.
To date, Corryn Biotechnologies has demonstrated the ATR technology’s safety and usability in preclinical animal models and established a distinguished clinical advisory board to guide the platform’s transition to human trials in Q3 2025.
Benefits include:
- Pain-free contactless application with no specialist training required through in situ electrospinning.
- Fully resorbable dressing with breakdown products known to accelerate wound healing of complex and recalcitrant wounds.
- Microstructure that mimics the natural ECM to drive migration and infiltration of beneficial cells.
- Free from biologically derived materials to ensure biocompatibility.
- Platform technology which allows the delivery of various materials for different wound scenarios.
Founder Dr Luke Burke completed his PhD at Swansea University in 2015, and went on to work for some of the most successful medical device multinational corporations as well as start-ups around Europe.
Luke's background in tissue engineering brought him to create the Advanced Tissue Repair platform to address the issue of chronic and complex wounds for patients and healthcare systems around the world with a breakthrough technology.
Microplate Dx, University of Strathclyde
Microplate Dx is a multi-award-winning diagnostics company dedicated to developing novel solutions to tackle the global health threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Their mission is to accelerate treatment decisions and improve patient quality of life through pioneering diagnostics that enable effective antimicrobial stewardship.
By ensuring patients receive the correct antibiotic treatment promptly, Microplate Dx aims to prevent and control the spread of AMR worldwide, positioning itself at the forefront of efforts to combat this critical global health challenge.
Antibiotic resistance is a major global health risk and the company’s innovative testing technology has the potential to be both life-saving and world-changing.
Microplate Dx