Announcing the third cohort of Innovation Fellowships in health and care at Zinc!
We are delighted to announce our third cohort of Innovation Fellowships in Health and Care at Zinc, which we will deliver in partnership with the NIHR and The Dunhill Medical Trust.
This unique programme offers researchers and clinical academics the chance to apply their expertise in real-world commercial settings and accelerate the development of impactful health solutions while gaining new skills, networks, and career opportunities.
There are many reasons why Fellows have chosen to join this programme in the past, including being excited by the chance to accelerate the development of impactful health products, acquire new skills to bring back to their academic and/or clinical contexts, or even forge entirely new career paths.
“I was particularly drawn to the concept of bridging the gap between academia and industry and the unique opportunity to address real-world healthcare challenges through innovative solutions. The possibility of collaborating with leading entrepreneurs and practitioners in the field, combined with a focus on translating scientific advancements into practical applications, appealed to me.” – Prince Nwaubani, NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in Translational Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, currently working at Psyrin as an Innovation Fellow
Throughout the duration of the fellowship, participants are placed in exciting ventures solving some of the most difficult challenges in health, both in our portfolio and in our ecosystem. Some of our portfolio host ventures have included Mendea (non-invasive ultrasound brain stimulation technology), Unravel (diagnostech changing how we diagnose and treat women’s health conditions), Bellevie (personalised, local home care services in the UK) and many others. We’ve also partnered with Hertility, Jude, Calla Lily Clinical Care, Sava, Blueskeye AI, Psyrin, and several other ventures in our network to deliver these fellowships, who have benefited from the expert input and skills of the Fellows who joined them.
Fellows have worked on diverse projects within these ventures including defining value propositions to key commercial stakeholders, planning and executing clinical trials, engaging in patient, carer and public involvement, investigating and contributing to strategy around regulatory pathways across multiple geographies, or developing Machine Learning models generating medical reports.
“Our Zinc Innovation Fellows have been an absolute pleasure to work with! They are super smart, motivated by purpose, easy to get on with, pro-active and organised. They are making a real difference to our social impact startup.” — Trudie Fell, Founder & CEO of Bellevie
“Prorizon’s participation in the Innovation Fellows programme has been instrumental in advancing our company’s mission. The Fellows from the programme bring fresh perspectives and vital skills that significantly contribute to our projects and critically, also to our team dynamics. Their involvement not only furthers our progress but also enriches our corporate culture. We are so grateful to the Fellows for all of the valuable support they Provide”— Claire Stewart Co-founder and CSO of Prorizon
“Gaining firsthand experience with founders and startups gave me insight into the excitement and passion in the start-up ecosystem. I also learned the challenges of building something new and working with various stakeholders including investors, clients and collaborators.” – Kengo Shibata PhD in Clinical Neuroscience, Dunhill Medical Trust Innovation Fellow with Eargym and Bellevie
Beyond working in ventures, fellows receive workshops and talks which aim to help them develop the skills and knowledge needed to navigate and succeed in commercial environments. Fellows also receive one-to-one coaching to support them in their professional development. Some of the skills and knowledge Fellows have developed throughout their fellowships include knowledge about medical device regulation, grant writing, agile working methods, market research, design thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and more.
“I have learned that there are some ways of working that are commonly used in start-ups that could actually be really helpful both in the NHS and clinical research. I am also learning how industry works, which might sound obvious, but understanding the processes that companies go through (e.g. obtaining investment) has helped me understand how collaborations could work in future.” – Sam Malins, Clinical Psychologist at Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, Innovation Fellow at BlueskeyeAI
The NIHR and Dunhill Medical Trust partner with us to deliver this programme as they both prioritise the career development and mobility of health and care researchers. The NIHR have been supporting this programme as they are committed to increasing the number of researchers and clinical academics who can work across academia, NHS, and industry and translate new ideas into solutions benefitting patients. The Dunhill Medical Trust supports the career development of early career researchers in healthy ageing with the goal of building and maintaining capacity in the field. The Trust wants to help post-doctoral researchers to find the ageing-related career path that allows them to have the greatest impact in this space. Overall, our partner organisations have funded a combined 19 Fellows throughout the two previous cohorts.
“We are excited by the opportunities Zinc Innovation Fellowships present for NIHR Academy Members. We are keen to see our future research leaders develop skills and understanding around how to turn their research outputs into marketable products and interventions so that the full benefits of research can be realised for patients and the public. These opportunities with Zinc will help our future research leaders to gain these skills” – Dr Peter Thompson, Director of NIHR Academy Programmes
Join the Third Cohort!
We are now recruiting for our third cohort. If you’re a health researcher eager to make a difference in an early-stage startup, check your eligibility and apply here.
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Featured Resources
Zinc Impact Report 2024
Zinc’s mission is to make the UK the best place to successfully start a venture which can have a massive impact on the health of people and the planet.
Increasingly, we are building deeper science ventures that serve global, industrial customers in environment and health, giving access to impact at a global scale.
Our 2024 Impact Report explores the challenges that need to be tackled to empower and enable talented founders from around the world to solve critical health and environmental challenges at scale, from here in the UK.
This report showcases success stories from the Zinc portfolio, and highlights how Zinc – and our growing community of hundreds of Founders, Fellows, Coaches, Partners and Funders – are working together to build a world-leading “Science-for-Impact” ecosystem for inception stage ventures in health and environment.
Impact Report 2023
We started Zinc with the hypothesis that missions are an effective way to attract highly ambitious, talented and experienced groups of innovators, who might not recognise themselves as “classic entrepreneurs” but are ready and able to start a new commercial and successful venture to tackle some of our most pressing societal issues.
The world has overcome the sorts of challenges we face today when it has adopted a mission-based approach to the biggest problems and brought together world-class talent to invent and innovate, e.g: NASA and landing a man on the moon, the LSE blueprinting the British welfare state, or the Gates Foundation aiming to eradicate diseases.
On this basis and assumption, we designed Zinc as a new mission-based Venture Builder — a place where global talent, ‘impact makers’, can join to experiment and develop new solutions to our most pressing societal issues.
