Grant Support Pays Dividends for Young Entrepreneur

Following five years of development, LabGenius founder and CEO James Field, winner of BBSRC Early Career Innovator of the Year 2017, has recently secured $3.66M in investment for his company LabGenius; he was also named in American magazine Forbes’ list of the 600 most influential people in the world under age 30.

With initial research funded by a grant from BBSRC and Innovate UK, Field and a group of fellow Imperial College London PhD students created LabGenius in 2012 to commercialise their ground-breaking new technology: the ability to produce trillions of variations of gene sequences, which can be used to engineer high-value proteins. The company uses artificial intelligence to predict which gene mutations will improve a biological design, enabling scientists to produce new therapeutics or advanced materials such as adhesives, catalysts and sensors.

He believes that being awarded the ‘2017 Early Career Impact’ category played a vital role in attracting the seed funding the company needed to get off the ground: “Being able to say we had received the BBSRC Innovator of the Year award definitely added confidence to invest, because what we are working on is a really cutting-edge technology and it is difficult to explain the nuances of what we are doing to investors.”

“BBSRC support, from an investor’s perspective, de-risks the whole investment and that was particularly important as I am still at an early stage in my career.”

LabGenius now employs ten people and has three contracts with Dstl to produce new defence materials, including improved body armour and adhesives. Professor Petra Oyston, Dstl Technical Fellow, Molecular Microbiology and Synthetic Biology says: “LabGenius has been a vital part of the Dstl's protective materials programme and their technology has been successfully deployed across several projects ranging from lighter body armour to programmable adhesives.”