LIHE’s 10-year vision is to build a wider MedTech Hub strategy, with offices for our successful spinouts and start-ups co-located within the St Thomas’ Hospital campus alongside headquarters for larger international medical companies to create opportunities for knowledge transfer, attracting talent and creating jobs.
Professor Sebastien Ourselin FREng FMedSci, Director of the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering.
05 June 2024
International press welcomed to London Institute for Healthcare Engineering
Press visit explores LIHE's ambition to deliver MedTech innovation at pace.
On Wednesday 5th June 2024, the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering (LIHE) hosted guests from the international press to discuss the future of medical device entrepreneurship and commercialisation.
LIHE’s director, Professor Sebastien Ourselin, welcomed journalists to the new building and explained its role as a dedicated space for MedTech entrepreneurs and King’s healthcare industry partners. LIHE is uniquely co-located on the campus of St Thomas’ Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in the UK.
Explaining LIHE’s mission, Professor Ourselin said:
“It’s all about pace. It’s about making sure that all the medical devices we support or develop ourselves at King’s get to patients as soon as possible. Medical technologies can take anything from between 10-15 years to be developed and validated, and our ambition is to try and shorten this timeframe to less than 5 years.”
LIHE’s Director of Commercial Operations, Dr Nicolas Huber, explained how LIHE is designed to “help innovations become robust medical companies.”
“The challenge for MedTech,” he said, “is that it doesn’t scale very quickly. We think one of the fundamental problems is how you start a venture as an academic. An academic researcher might spend years developing a fantastic innovation, but this doesn’t necessarily prepare them for being an entrepreneur and fighting the battle out in the marketplace. This is where LIHE comes in.”
LIHE's Venture Builder is a year-long program for innovations from across King's, our partner universities and, uniquely as far as we know, is also open to medical device companies from across the UK. This approach represents a concerted contribution from LIHE and King's to the MedTech ecosystem to support impact to patients.
Dr Nicolas Huber, Director, Commercial Operations and Partnerships, London Institute for Healthcare Engineering.
The journalists were invited to a tour of the building, including LIHE’s terrace with views across the Thames to the Houses of Parliament, and a technology demonstration from King’s MedTech spin-out, Hypervision Surgical Ltd (HVS).
Recipients of the prestigious Cutlers’ Surgical Prize in 2023, HVS has successfully raised £6.5 million in seed investments to harness AI and advanced imaging to create a technology platform for real-time tissue analysis in the operating theatre that aims to make surgeries more precise, safer and faster.
King’s College London, in partnership with Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, was awarded £16m UKRPIF funding to establish LIHE.
This opportunity was generated through major co-investment of over £32m from Wellcome and industry partners including Siemens Healthineers, Medtronic, NVIDIA and IBM, as well as £15m contribution from King’s towards the construction of the new building.
In this story
Professor of Healthcare Engineering
Director, Commercial Operations and Partnerships, London Institute for Healthcare Engineering
Research Associate