In January 2020, Zhanfeng Cui, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Oxford, was travelling through Heathrow Airport on his way home from China. When he arrived in London, Cui was surprised to find that there were no temperature checks or tests taking place at the terminal at a time when China was on high alert following the emergence of a new, highly-transmissible respiratory disease. “We [Cui and his colleagues] knew we had to contribute and help stop the spread of the disease in some way,” Cui says.
So when Cui returned to Oxford he approached Wei Huang, a professor of synthetic biology, and together they began working on a rapid coronavirus test that could be implemented at airport borders when passengers are making their way through airport terminals.
By March, the scientists from Oxford’s department of engineering science and the Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research had successfully developed a viral RNA test to rapidly diagnose Covid-19. “We needed regulatory approval to administer the test and because of that, we had to set up a company,” Cui says. Three months later, with the help of the university’s commercialisation arm, the team from Oxford managed to set up a social venture spinout company called Oxsed which would allow them to distribute the test at speed.
Oxsed is just one of many UK university spinouts created on the back of the coronavirus pandemic, joining startups discovering drugs, developing vaccines and designing personal protective equipment.