MedTechONE
MedTechONE is a College-wide Centre of Excellence, funded by the Wellcome Trust and based at Imperial College’s White City campus, with delivery sites across the wider College. It builds on Imperial’s well-established infrastructure that supports entrepreneurs across the innovation pathway—from early-stage experimental medicine and scientific discovery to engineering advances and start-up formation.
Innovation in the MedTech sector remains particularly challenging, with complex regulatory requirements, high development costs prior to investment readiness, and difficulties navigating NHS adoption pathways.
To address these barriers, Imperial has developed a comprehensive ecosystem of support. This includes world-leading, industry-agnostic entrepreneurship training, mentoring and guidance structured around the KTH Innovation Readiness Levels. Imperial also benefits from an exceptionally strong clinical innovation base—for example, the NIHR-funded Biomedical Research Centre—and established MedTech entrepreneurship programmes such as the Medical Device Design & Entrepreneurship MRes and the MedTech SuperConnector (MTSC). Together, these initiatives place strong emphasis on identifying unmet clinical needs, understanding regulatory and NHS access pathways, and accessing networks of technical, clinical, and commercial experts.
Building on these strengths, a previous Wellcome Trust Institutional Translational Partnership award enabled the implementation of an embedded Quality Management System (QMS) for medical device design and development within the university. This award also introduced dedicated project management for translational activities and established senior advisory panels—including the Surgical Advisory Panel, MedTech Innovation Panel, and Entrepreneurs-in-Residence—to guide teams through the translation process. These programmes work closely with the Imperial Enterprise Commercialisation team (Technology Transfer Office -TTO), whose domain experts in medical technologies support rapid licensing to spinouts, help secure external resources for clinical translation, and contribute to increased translational funding success across the institution.
MedTechONE is embedded at the institutional level with leadership from:
• Prof Ryan, Vice Provost, Research & Enterprise, Principal Investigator
• Prof Bull, FoE
• Prof Darzi, FoM
• Prof French, FoNS
• Prof Hanna, FoM
• Dr Hepworth, Director of Enterprise
harnessing and bringing together their complementary roles in MedTech across College.
Completing existing MedTech programmes at Imperial College, recent Wellcome Trust Funding brings together key actors and programmes around three MedTech pillars, to support MedTech Entrepreneurs across College:
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· an Accelerator to accelerate the technology readiness level of pre-clinical research & development, and support selected pre-clinical technology through the regulatory approval processes.
· a Foundation supporting early career researchers with a program of mentoring as well as better and more targeted training of next generation clinical innovators; and
· a Collaborative with connections to local and national networks of different clinical specialities. This can include coordinating national evaluations of our technologies in wider clinical trials, as well as accepting incoming devices into our medical technologies programme for support at all stages of translation, from first-in-human to early adoption.
The MedTech Executive Management Board allocates funds, appoints staff, monitors progress and is responsible for day to day-to-day management of funded activities. The Executive Board reports to the MedTechONE Board of Directors.
