From Acoustic Levitation to Biotech Automation | The Enterprise Sessions with Luke Cox

Join Professor Michele Barbour for an energising and deeply insightful conversation with Dr Luke Cox, CEO of Impulsonics, a University of Bristol spin‑out transforming how cell handling and automation are done in biotechnology. 

What begins as an exploration of Luke’s journey from engineering undergraduate to PhD researcher becomes an exhilarating story of invention, grit, and entrepreneurial drive. From early work in acoustic levitation to co‑developing a novel “impulse control” technology, Luke unpacks how a speculative research project evolved into a breakthrough method for moving millions of cells simultaneously — enabling automation where traditional tools have long failed. 

Discover how Luke navigated the risks, setbacks, and thrill of taking on the role of CEO while spinning out a deep‑tech company; how customer discovery reshaped their market focus; and why Impulsonics’ modular, ultrasound‑based approach could unlock scalable personalised medicine, reduced lab waste, and new possibilities in drug discovery. 

This is a candid discussion about ambition, risk engineering, accidental luck, and finding the “beachhead market” that biologists have needed for decades — all told with Luke’s characteristic insight, humility, and humour. 

In this episode 

• From engineering undergrad to PhD researcher: discovering acoustic levitation 
• The origins of “impulse control” and its biocompatible applications 
• Why automation in biotechnology breaks down — and how Impulsonics bridges the gap 
• Building prototypes, identifying markets and finding early‑stage grant funding 
• Becoming CEO: translating between tech, biology, and business 
• How automation could enable precision functional medicine 
• The role of AI: hype, data quality, and industry realities 
• Storytelling, improv theatre, and becoming unafraid to ask “stupid questions” 
• Advice for early‑career researchers and aspiring entrepreneurs 

🌐 About the Enterprise Sessions 
The Enterprise Sessions bring together founders and researchers to share candid insights on spin-outs, start-ups, raising capital, and translating research into real-world impact. Our goal? To inform, inspire, and challenge myths about research commercialisation. 

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Connect with our Guests: 

Dr Luke Cox – LinkedIn

Prof Michele Barbour – LinkedIn 

Chapters 

0:00 – Introductions

0:34 – From engineering student to acoustic levitation researcher 

3:20 – How ultrasound manipulates millions of cells  

5:25 – Exploring the potential of ultrasound and technology  

9:00 – How the culture of innovation in Bristol inspired Luke

13:08 – Creating a product useful for the target audience 

18:22 – Finding direction through the ICURe programme 

22:47 – How cell passaging became the perfect first market — and how Impulsonics automates it 

27:10 – Leadership, learning to translate across disciplines, and choosing not to bring in an external CEO 

32:29 – Navigating grants, investors, risk engineering, relationships, and the realities of building hardware and biology together 

42:28 – How Impulsonics’ technology could enable patient‑specific drug testing and more sustainable labs 

46:19 – The founder mindset

51:45 – Advice for early‑career researchers

Chapters

• 0:00 0:00 – Introductions
• 0:34 0:34 – From engineering student to acoustic levitation researcher
• 3:20 3:20 – How ultrasound manipulates millions of cells
• 5:25 5:25 – Exploring the potential of ultrasound and technology
• 9:00 9:00 – How the culture of innovation in Bristol inspired Luke
• 13:08 13:08 – Creating a product useful for the target audience
• 18:22 18:22 – Finding direction through the ICURe programme
• 22:47 22:47 – How cell passaging became the perfect first market — and how Impulsonics automates it
• 27:10 27:10 – Leadership, learning to translate across disciplines, and choosing not to bring in an external CEO
• 32:29 32:29 – Navigating grants, investors, risk engineering, relationships, and the realities of building hardware and biology together
• 42:28 42:28 – How Impulsonics’ technology could enable patient‑specific drug testing and more sustainable labs
• 46:19 46:19 – The founder mindset
• 51:45 51:45 – Advice for early‑career researchers

Transcript

00:00:08 Prof Michele Barbour 

Hello and welcome to the Enterprise Sessions. 

00:00:10 Prof Michele Barbour 

My name is Professor Michele Barbour and today I'm speaking with Dr. 

00:00:13 Prof Michele Barbour 

Luke Cox who is CEO of Impulsonics. 

00:00:16 Prof Michele Barbour 

Luke, first of all, thank you so much for finding the time in your international schedule to join me today. 

00:00:22 Dr Luke Cox 

Thank you for having me. 

00:00:23 Dr Luke Cox 

Travel a lot in this role, but I'm sure academics do too. 

00:00:27 Prof Michele Barbour 

Oh, to some extent, we're probably less glamour. 

00:00:29 Prof Michele Barbour 

We'll come on to that. 

00:00:30 Prof Michele Barbour 

But Luke, maybe we can start with kind of looking back. 

00:00:33 Prof Michele Barbour 

So you're CEO of the spin out company, Impulsonics, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you did prior to that? 

00:00:40 Dr Luke Cox 

I have been a University of Bristol person almost entirely throughout my adult life until I started in Pulsonics. 

00:00:47 Dr Luke Cox 

So I came here as an undergraduate in 2013, which is a worryingly long time ago now. 

00:00:52 Dr Luke Cox 

I did most of my undergrad here. 

00:00:54 Dr Luke Cox 

I did a short stint at the University of Melbourne on exchange. 

00:00:57 Dr Luke Cox 

And as part of that, I got a summer placement working on acoustic levitation in the ultrasonics and non-destructive testing lab in the engineering department. 

00:01:06 Dr Luke Cox 

And I found that to be really interesting. 

00:01:08 Dr Luke Cox 

I'd also done a little bit of work experience in a building services engineering company. 

00:01:12 Dr Luke Cox 

And I realized that while it's incredibly important, it wasn't what I wanted to do. 

00:01:17 Dr Luke Cox 

I very much felt like I was working in the realm of the possible, and that was less exciting for me. 

00:01:21 Dr Luke Cox 

So I ended up doing a PhD in acoustic levitation and manipulation. 

00:01:26 Dr Luke Cox 

in the ultrasonics group, looking at new techniques for creating new techniques for being able to control cells and small particles using ultrasounds. 

00:01:36 Dr Luke Cox 

And from that, we created this technique called impulse control, which is where the name impulse sonics comes from. 

00:01:42 Prof Michele Barbour 

Let me get a couple of things out of the way. 

00:01:44 Prof Michele Barbour 

When I hear University of Bristol levitating things, I go straight to frogs. 

00:01:48 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's not where you're coming from. 

00:01:49 Prof Michele Barbour 

No. 

00:01:49 Prof Michele Barbour 

But that's not your field. 

00:01:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

Not interested in levitating whole frogs, maybe individual cells. 

00:01:54 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes, yeah. 

00:01:56 Dr Luke Cox 

work was done with magnets, so we use acoustics. 

00:01:59 Dr Luke Cox 

So acoustic waves are an incredibly powerful tool if you're not able to control the material of a thing that you want to move, and they're also biocompatible as well, which makes it very powerful, particularly for biotechnology. 

00:02:09 Dr Luke Cox 

Obviously, we have a lot of evidence from decades of ultrasound being used in pregnancy, but there is a regime of ultrasound which is very safe for use with cells. 

00:02:18 Dr Luke Cox 

You would not use ultrasound to build a levitating train because you can control what your train is made of, but you can't really control what your cells are made of if you want to manipulate 

00:02:26 Dr Luke Cox 

regulate them in biotechnology. 

00:02:28 Dr Luke Cox 

So that's why it's such a useful tool there. 

00:02:30 Prof Michele Barbour 

Okay, that's really helpful. 

00:02:31 Prof Michele Barbour 

There's loads there for us to unpack as well. 

00:02:33 Prof Michele Barbour 

So first of all, let me rewind a little bit. 

00:02:35 Prof Michele Barbour 

You mentioned the use of ultrasound in pregnancy and I think most people on the street, if they heard the word ultrasounds, if they've heard of it at all, that's probably the most familiar use of it. 

00:02:43 Prof Michele Barbour 

So if we sort of zoom out a little bit, that is using a harmless technology to look inside, inside of the body in this case. 

00:02:50 Prof Michele Barbour 

So that's probably what most people would know of ultrasound. 

00:02:53 Prof Michele Barbour 

What is it that you're doing with ultrasounds that's 

00:02:56 Prof Michele Barbour 

It's not about looking inside things, but actually manipulating and holding and moving things. 

00:02:59 Dr Luke Cox 

Sound is essentially a force. 

00:03:01 Dr Luke Cox 

When I speak to you, it produces a sound wave which vibrates your eardrum, which your brain then interprets as a sound. 

00:03:06 Dr Luke Cox 

Fundamentally, it's a force. 

00:03:08 Dr Luke Cox 

And what our technology is about is about really controlling how we generate that force. 

00:03:13 Dr Luke Cox 

And we use a system that I like to describe as sort of surround sound for cells. 

00:03:18 Dr Luke Cox 

So we use a lot of different speakers to be able to 

00:03:22 Dr Luke Cox 

control very carefully of the sound that we're producing, and that allows us to move the cells around in various different ways. 

00:03:28 Dr Luke Cox 

If you've ever had that sort of experience where a sound goes through your head when you're listening to headphones, you can sort of think of it as analogous to that, but imagine if it moved your head. 

00:03:36 Prof Michele Barbour 

So it's a long time since I was a physicist, so I'm dredging around in my memory. 

00:03:39 Prof Michele Barbour 

But sound is a wave, as you've already said, and it travels through air or solid materials or whatever it might be. 

00:03:45 Prof Michele Barbour 

Is this, in a sense, a form of three-dimensional standing wave? 

00:03:48 Prof Michele Barbour 

So you create like a low patch in sound where the thing sits? 

00:03:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

Is it 

00:03:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

like a sound box or am I way off the mark? 

00:03:54 Dr Luke Cox 

It's in that region. 

00:03:56 Dr Luke Cox 

So the manipulation we do is a little bit more complicated, but standing waves are a very simple way. 

00:04:01 Dr Luke Cox 

As you say, you have static regions of high pressure and low pressure. 

00:04:05 Dr Luke Cox 

And to grossly oversimplify the mathematics, things tend to move from regions of high pressure to regions of low pressure. 

00:04:11 Dr Luke Cox 

What we're able to do is dynamically move those regions and control them, which gives us a much greater degree of control. 

00:04:17 Dr Luke Cox 

So in a simple system, you can control where the cells 

00:04:22 Dr Luke Cox 

particles go in as you can not only control from where they go and sit, but also move them around dynamically. 

00:04:28 Prof Michele Barbour 

Okay, I got you. 

00:04:29 Prof Michele Barbour 

So it is a box that can move and can sort of adjust them over time. 

00:04:33 Prof Michele Barbour 

And I imagine when you're trying to do something like this, one always starts with one cell, but can you bring more than one cell into this equation? 

00:04:39 Prof Michele Barbour 

Can you sort of move them around and manipulate them in relation to each other? 

00:04:42 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:04:42 Dr Luke Cox 

So our specialism is cells by vermillions, essentially. 

00:04:48 Dr Luke Cox 

So we actually investigated trying to optimize our technology to manipulate 

00:04:52 Dr Luke Cox 

things on an individual cell level. 

00:04:54 Dr Luke Cox 

And we came to the conclusion that wasn't really a strong area for the subset of expertise and technology that we were working with. 

00:05:01 Dr Luke Cox 

So there are other technologies, particularly optical tweezers, which can do that very effectively. 

00:05:05 Dr Luke Cox 

Our technology could be optimized to do that, but those technologies already exist and are more mature, but those cannot scale up to cells by the millions. 

00:05:13 Dr Luke Cox 

To think of it in very physical terms, the gap in the market, what we identified was a physical gap between single cell and really large bulk operations, is there's actually a lot of manipulation 

00:05:22 Dr Luke Cox 

regulation there that people would like to achieve, but could not really achieve current technology. 

00:05:26 Prof Michele Barbour 

So straight away I'm seeing the confluence of the research of what you can do and the business acumen of, yes, you can do all these things, but where is there actually a market that wants to buy and pay for the thing that you can do? 

00:05:37 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:05:37 Prof Michele Barbour 

So tell me a little bit more, let's maybe stick with just the research that gave rise to this just for a little bit longer. 

00:05:42 Prof Michele Barbour 

This was developed in a research context. 

00:05:45 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:05:45 Prof Michele Barbour 

Was it developed with a specific application or aim in mind in its initial genesis? 

00:05:52 Dr Luke Cox 

Ideas about how it could be applied. 

00:05:54 Dr Luke Cox 

And I think we had ideas of, oh, this could be a good idea, this could be a good idea. 

00:05:57 Dr Luke Cox 

But it was, the original technology was more speculative in terms of trying to understand what could be achieved. 

00:06:03 Prof Michele Barbour 

Okay. 

00:06:03 Dr Luke Cox 

So my original thesis title was Optimal Acoustic Radiation Force Devices. 

00:06:10 Dr Luke Cox 

Snappy, I know. 

00:06:11 Dr Luke Cox 

But the goal was always to be able to see what kind of complex manipulation we could achieve using relatively simple hardware. 

00:06:18 Dr Luke Cox 

That was the goal. 

00:06:19 Dr Luke Cox 

And along the way, we began to understand, almost through osmosis, when I was still inside in the starting regions of my PhD, what people wanted to achieve with that. 

00:06:27 Dr Luke Cox 

We had ideas about manipulating individual cells underneath a microscope, for example. 

00:06:32 Dr Luke Cox 

We did a lot of collaborations through the group on things like tissue engineering, so being able to control cells for that application. 

00:06:40 Dr Luke Cox 

But really, the focus of the original research was 

00:06:43 Dr Luke Cox 

can we do it and what can we achieve with it? 

00:06:45 Prof Michele Barbour 

What can we do and then move on to, on the basis of what we can do, what might we best apply it to? 

00:06:50 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:06:50 Prof Michele Barbour 

You're an engineer by training. 

00:06:51 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:06:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

And what I know of your collaborators as engineers, so why the very strong leaning towards the biological organisms? 

00:06:56 Prof Michele Barbour 

Was this ever something that you might have used in a more pure engineering sense or was it always the intention to apply it to cells and biological tissues? 

00:07:03 Dr Luke Cox 

When I came into the work, and I should say some of the underlying research been going on for about 5 to 10 years before I'd actually come in, we had very much narrowed down on 

00:07:13 Dr Luke Cox 

cells as an area of it was particularly interesting. 

00:07:16 Dr Luke Cox 

Some research had been done into the ability to pattern carbon fibres, for example, but it wasn't the optimal technology for that because of the size of the, again, it comes back to size versus what people wanted to achieve. 

00:07:27 Dr Luke Cox 

Interestingly, actually, the person who led on that original work now runs a company called Actuation Lab, which makes valves. 

00:07:33 Dr Luke Cox 

So they moved on to different. 

00:07:34 Prof Michele Barbour 

Lots of entrepreneurial behaviour in that environment. 

00:07:37 Prof Michele Barbour 

I love it. 

00:07:38 Prof Michele Barbour 

So you've got a fascinating PhD project, which is both applied in the sense that you were trying to create 

00:07:43 Prof Michele Barbour 

create a device that could do things and could be used for things, but also quite pure and fundamental because you haven't decided what those things are yet. 

00:07:50 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's quite an interesting niche, actually. 

00:07:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

How did you choose that PhD? 

00:07:54 Prof Michele Barbour 

Was there specific technology what interested you? 

00:07:57 Prof Michele Barbour 

Was it the potential applications? 

00:07:59 Prof Michele Barbour 

Was it the advisory team, the environment? 

00:08:00 Prof Michele Barbour 

What made you choose it? 

00:08:01 Dr Luke Cox 

Was definitely a combination between the technology potential, where I thought the technology 

00:08:08 Dr Luke Cox 

was in terms of its journey and definitely the supervisory team. 

00:08:12 Dr Luke Cox 

So in terms of a technology potential, the ability to move things without touching them, without moving parts, in my first year of my undergraduate degree, I don't know if they still do this, but they got us to build a cup dispenser in the engineering department. 

00:08:26 Dr Luke Cox 

And that mainly taught me that moving parts are terrible and you should avoid them at all costs. 

00:08:30 Dr Luke Cox 

So valuable learning there. 

00:08:32 Dr Luke Cox 

I think that was kind of what they intended to teach us. 

00:08:35 Dr Luke Cox 

But I always think of Arthur C. 

00:08:36 Dr Luke Cox 

Clark's novel, The City and the Stars, which talks about this 

00:08:38 Dr Luke Cox 

incredibly far future society, but they have this line about the perfect machine should have no moving parts. 

00:08:44 Dr Luke Cox 

And your laptop is a lot more reliable than your printer, for good reason. 

00:08:48 Dr Luke Cox 

And so there was that. 

00:08:49 Dr Luke Cox 

I think the technology potential, what was very exciting to me was I 

00:08:53 Dr Luke Cox 

Through my PhD, I worked with Professor Bruce Drinkwater and Professor Anthony Croxford. 

00:08:58 Dr Luke Cox 

But during that original project, I was also working incredibly closely with Dr. 

00:09:02 Dr Luke Cox 

Azir Marzo, who created this device called the Tiny Love, which is an incredibly low-cost acoustic levitator, sort of handheld. 

00:09:08 Dr Luke Cox 

You could build it off out of a kit for under $100. 

00:09:13 Dr Luke Cox 

And it used to be over $2,000 or pounds to build a kit, and you'd have to buy all the pieces separately. 

00:09:19 Dr Luke Cox 

So it was a massive reduction in cost, and suddenly you started to see thousands of these things being built. 

00:09:23 Dr Luke Cox 

and it was just more reliable and better than that previous approach as well. 

00:09:26 Dr Luke Cox 

And I think there was a confluence of technology, including 3D printing, including almost the ability to pipe things off places like Alibaba in huge bulk that you wouldn't have been able to get otherwise, but meant that we were at a point where suddenly acoustic levitation manipulation, which was a technology we'd been aware of for all the way back to August Kuntz tube in the 1800s, really it felt like in the last 10 years it'd been really starting to take off, but there was still so much to be done. 

00:09:53 Dr Luke Cox 

So it felt like there was a lot of potential, but a lot to be done. 

00:09:55 Dr Luke Cox 

And that was really exciting to me as a technology field compared to some of the other places I looked at were more simulation-based, things like computational fluid dynamics, which I found quite interesting. 

00:10:07 Dr Luke Cox 

But I think it's a more mature field and more difficult to leave such a big mark. 

00:10:11 Dr Luke Cox 

And I think I always like to do things that feel like they're important and make a difference. 

00:10:15 Dr Luke Cox 

And that felt like somewhere where I could really make a difference and have an impact. 

00:10:18 Prof Michele Barbour 

If I may say so, having been a PhD student many years ago and supervised many more since, it's 

00:10:23 Prof Michele Barbour 

It's a really, really good reflection. 

00:10:24 Prof Michele Barbour 

That sounds so terribly patronizing, Luke. 

00:10:26 Prof Michele Barbour 

I'm sorry, but it's a really good reflection of not just is the project interesting, but where is the field and what role do I want to play in a field? 

00:10:31 Prof Michele Barbour 

And I absolutely applaud your decision. 

00:10:33 Prof Michele Barbour 

So can you describe your excitement about the technology itself and the development of the field and the applications of the technology? 

00:10:38 Prof Michele Barbour 

We know, because we've already had the spoiler, that this went on to form a spin out company. 

00:10:43 Prof Michele Barbour 

Was that part of your aspirations from the beginning, the commercialization of this technology, or did that come later in your journey? 

00:10:49 Dr Luke Cox 

I don't know that me specifically launching a spin out 

00:10:53 Dr Luke Cox 

company was initially on my radar as I really want to do that. 

00:10:58 Dr Luke Cox 

I think I was definitely aware of that being a thing that could be done, particularly because my PhD was part sponsored by Ultra Leap. 

00:11:06 Dr Luke Cox 

So obviously Ultra Leap being a big company that spun out of the University of Bristol, I think in 2013, so the year I started actually. 

00:11:13 Dr Luke Cox 

So just as I was building my cup dispenser, Tom would have been flying off to Vegas somewhere. 

00:11:17 Dr Luke Cox 

So that's definitely something I was aware of. 

00:11:19 Dr Luke Cox 

But one of the things that I liked about the research group that I was in was it was definitely 

00:11:23 Dr Luke Cox 

definitely commercially minded. 

00:11:24 Dr Luke Cox 

So the ultrasonics and non-destructive testing group had commercialized things in various ways in the past. 

00:11:29 Dr Luke Cox 

So obviously they've got Inductor Sense, who launched a spin-out company, Ultra Haptics, then Ultra Elite was a spin-out company, but they'd also built the Tiny Lev system, which was a low-cost kit that you could build, which incredibly increased access to that. 

00:11:42 Dr Luke Cox 

Their system Brain, which was basically the ability to focus in all positions when looking for a crack at once using a single scan, they had given it away for free. 

00:11:51 Dr Luke Cox 

And I always remember 

00:11:53 Dr Luke Cox 

was saying, I knew that we had won the battle on that when he overheard someone asking a vendor of these non-destructive testing probes whether it could support total focusing methods. 

00:12:03 Dr Luke Cox 

And they went, everyone's asking that. 

00:12:05 Prof Michele Barbour 

Brilliant, how satisfying. 

00:12:06 Prof Michele Barbour 

So you're in a very academic entrepreneurial environment already with UltraLeap and InductionSense and indeed there's other technologies. 

00:12:13 Dr Luke Cox 

But they'd also work with much larger companies as well. 

00:12:15 Dr Luke Cox 

So I think I was aware of various routes. 

00:12:18 Dr Luke Cox 

You know, they'd had PhDs sponsored by companies like Rolls-Royce, for example, as well. 

00:12:21 Dr Luke Cox 

So I don't think I saw that as 

00:12:23 Dr Luke Cox 

the only route. 

00:12:24 Dr Luke Cox 

And I felt like my motivation was, I want the things that I do here to make a difference. 

00:12:29 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's a brilliant segue into a good question for me, which is you were keen to realize the impacts of this technology that had been developed and then, but you were over commercialization or impacts. 

00:12:40 Prof Michele Barbour 

So what was it that led you and your collaborators to the decision to spin out as opposed to one of those other options? 

00:12:46 Dr Luke Cox 

So I think 

00:12:47 Dr Luke Cox 

One of the things that I came to a realization of over my PhD was that a lot of people were talking about this technology in general, the ability, acoustic manipulation, being very good for biotechnology, but nobody was really doing it. 

00:13:01 Dr Luke Cox 

And if you read papers, yeah, you could see 10, 20 years people have been saying this in papers and no one was really doing it. 

00:13:11 Prof Michele Barbour 

Having had a spin out company myself, just N equals one, I look at that now and think, is that because it's really, really, really hard? 

00:13:17 Prof Michele Barbour 

Because if they're all seeing the potential, but they're not doing it, did that make the hairs and the back of your neck prickle a little bit? 

00:13:22 Prof Michele Barbour 

Did that make you think, is this something terribly difficult? 

00:13:24 Prof Michele Barbour 

Or in your naivety, did you think this was great? 

00:13:26 Dr Luke Cox 

I think my attitude was fine, I'll do it myself. 

00:13:31 Prof Michele Barbour 

Which is a good attitude. 

00:13:32 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah. 

00:13:33 Dr Luke Cox 

And that probably segues into where we were looking at when we started on the commercialization journey. 

00:13:40 Dr Luke Cox 

So sort of six months before the end of my PhD, I started looking at that and I started thinking about how we could do it. 

00:13:48 Dr Luke Cox 

So I had an idea and I was actually primarily inspired by a lot of work with Zia Marzo and looking at creating a kit that would enable biologists to use this technology in a very flexible way. 

00:13:58 Dr Luke Cox 

So the idea would be there would be some kind of a control box that people would buy from us. 

00:14:03 Dr Luke Cox 

to be able to be as simple as an Arduino because of the TinyLev because you still need to create functionalities and then they could either buy something from a set of end effectors or they could build their own if they so wanted to. 

00:14:13 Dr Luke Cox 

I quickly realized that while the TinyLev was great for hobbyists or researchers where often people are used to doing physics or building their own kits, so it really met that need. 

00:14:24 Dr Luke Cox 

It was a terrible idea for trying to get biologists to adopt this technology because you tell them and now you get out your soldering iron and they've stopped listening. 

00:14:33 Prof Michele Barbour 

The number of biologists that have all the biology skills they would need to do what they want to do and the skills to build and manipulate and operate that kind of device, I imagine it's quite a niche. 

00:14:42 Prof Michele Barbour 

It's quite a small overlap in that Venn diagram. 

00:14:44 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes, I very much think so. 

00:14:45 Dr Luke Cox 

And I think there is something in there that a lot of people fall subject to this, but you consider the skills that you have to be rather basic and the skills that other people have to be vast and unknowable. 

00:14:55 Dr Luke Cox 

You go, well, of course, if they can do biology, they could write a little bit of code or plug a little thing together. 

00:15:00 Dr Luke Cox 

And sure, they probably could with the right training. 

00:15:03 Dr Luke Cox 

support and things like that. 

00:15:04 Dr Luke Cox 

But there's that understanding that they're not perhaps inclined and it will be very scary to them. 

00:15:09 Dr Luke Cox 

And actually you're building off a much higher level of base knowledge than you're thinking about. 

00:15:13 Prof Michele Barbour 

Absolutely. 

00:15:14 Prof Michele Barbour 

I've seen that time and time again. 

00:15:15 Prof Michele Barbour 

You're right, you undervalue or just don't recognise your own expertise. 

00:15:19 Prof Michele Barbour 

I think it's a very human thing to do. 

00:15:20 Prof Michele Barbour 

Your initial idea to make it like a kit, like the tiny Lev, you decided quite quickly was not necessarily going to have a sufficient market. 

00:15:27 Prof Michele Barbour 

The number of biologists that could do that, wanted to do that was quite small. 

00:15:30 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes, I think the number of people who could have benefited from it if they adopted it was reasonably large. 

00:15:36 Dr Luke Cox 

The number but would adopt it was probably maybe in the hundreds if we're being optimistic. 

00:15:42 Prof Michele Barbour 

And did you come to this realization through sitting down and thinking about it, chewing it over with a friend or on your own, or did you have to learn that the hard way by speaking to the biologist and trying to pitch 

00:15:50 Prof Michele Barbour 

almost, and then looking at you blankly. 

00:15:52 Dr Luke Cox 

I think it was a little bit of both. 

00:15:55 Dr Luke Cox 

We are quite lucky in that we had a good collaboration with Dr. 

00:15:59 Dr Luke Cox 

James Armstrong, who works down at the Dorothy Hodgkins building here at the University of Bristol. 

00:16:03 Dr Luke Cox 

He's one of the small number who will build his own device, but also does live cell biology. 

00:16:09 Dr Luke Cox 

I was perhaps skewed by my experience with him, but he had a broader perspective going, but I don't think that's going to... 

00:16:14 Prof Michele Barbour 

Great. 

00:16:15 Prof Michele Barbour 

He was he was that he was the overlap of that Venn diagram. 

00:16:17 Prof Michele Barbour 

He could say, Do you realise how rare these skills and interests? 

00:16:21 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:16:21 Dr Luke Cox 

And I think also from our collaborations with biologists, we were understanding how that sort of world works and the value that we were bringing to it. 

00:16:29 Dr Luke Cox 

was interesting actually, because this was the first time where we actually accessed any commercialization funding. 

00:16:33 Dr Luke Cox 

So we went to the technology transfer office. 

00:16:37 Dr Luke Cox 

So I basically put together a little, I wouldn't call it a pitch deck now, but perhaps I would have called it a pitch deck then, which was very helpful because obviously Bruce and Anthony had experience with this sort of world. 

00:16:47 Dr Luke Cox 

So they were happy to look at it and give me some initial commercial 

00:16:50 Dr Luke Cox 

special insights, you've got to think about these things, those things, and we put together a little bit of a proposal for the technology transfer office. 

00:16:57 Dr Luke Cox 

And to their credit, they saw what a terrible idea I was currently proposing was, but saw that there might be the seed of something much better. 

00:17:06 Prof Michele Barbour 

They're very, very good at that, seeing sometimes the nugget of gold buried in the middle. 

00:17:10 Prof Michele Barbour 

I've seen them do that with others as well. 

00:17:12 Prof Michele Barbour 

So that's great. 

00:17:13 Prof Michele Barbour 

So they saw your nuggets of gold hidden in maybe the slightly less sort of achievable aim. 

00:17:18 Prof Michele Barbour 

Were you then successful in securing that funding? 

00:17:19 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:17:20 Dr Luke Cox 

We got 15,000 pounds from the EPSRC impact acceleration account, and that allowed us to build a very early proof of concept that we could combine the electronics and we could build one of the first kinds of these little units that people could use with our best guess at what people would want. 

00:17:38 Dr Luke Cox 

And then we were able to take that to the micro task, which is a micro manipulation robotics sort of show. 

00:17:46 Dr Luke Cox 

I say take it, this was just on the back end of COVID, so I was actually sat with three 

00:17:50 Dr Luke Cox 

webcams in the university engineering labs at 2 A.m. 

00:17:54 Dr Luke Cox 

in the morning because we were working on West Coast American time, which was not the most glamorous experience I've ever had. 

00:18:02 Dr Luke Cox 

But it was very useful in terms of being able to talk to a few people, get some insights into one of the early application fields we looked into in terms of organoids, and showed that we could build something and put something together. 

00:18:22 Prof Michele Barbour 

The device that you took to the conference, or this sort of online COVID conference, this is no longer your idea to make a kit that somebody else might kind of construct with parts they've bought. 

00:18:31 Prof Michele Barbour 

This is now a module, a unit that you were at that point thinking, maybe this is my product. 

00:18:36 Prof Michele Barbour 

So it's the unit that has the controller, but also things like the software and the platform built in? 

00:18:41 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yes. 

00:18:42 Prof Michele Barbour 

Okay, you've presented this at the conference. 

00:18:44 Prof Michele Barbour 

You started to talk to people about potential uses, maybe in organoid handling and so on. 

00:18:48 Prof Michele Barbour 

Where did you go next? 

00:18:50 Dr Luke Cox 

We got onto one of the small IQR programs, the part-time one that ran for about 3 months, where they get you to try and have 30 meaningful conversations with people. 

00:18:58 Dr Luke Cox 

So it's the smaller one, and we managed to get onto it on the back of that. 

00:19:01 Dr Luke Cox 

We came in with a few ideas on that one, and we obviously got some training there on things like business canvases, but really the most useful thing was those 30 conversations. 

00:19:13 Prof Michele Barbour 

I've had my own IQ journey as I often mention these interviews. 

00:19:16 Prof Michele Barbour 

One of the things I found really interesting is the people I thought were my customers turned out to not be my customer. 

00:19:20 Prof Michele Barbour 

So who did you approach for those conversations? 

00:19:22 Prof Michele Barbour 

Who did you think your customers would be? 

00:19:24 Prof Michele Barbour 

And were you right? 

00:19:25 Prof Michele Barbour 

Because I've already declared that I wasn't. 

00:19:27 Dr Luke Cox 

I was wrong at the start of that journey, and I will be less wrong at the end of that first journey, but moving in the right direction. 

00:19:37 Prof Michele Barbour 

Excellent. 

00:19:37 Dr Luke Cox 

So we spoke to a lot of different people. 

00:19:40 Dr Luke Cox 

I think we were very interested in organoids in particular at that point, and we got a lot of interest in that. 

00:19:46 Dr Luke Cox 

Organoids is still an area that we are interested in as a company, but I still don't think that it's mature enough and scalable enough to be our immediate priority. 

00:19:54 Dr Luke Cox 

So we were both right and wrong. 

00:19:56 Dr Luke Cox 

But some of the critical 

00:19:57 Dr Luke Cox 

things that came out, actually probably one of the biggest insights that I think now make a lot more sense of the last 10 to 20 years of people saying it was useful in biotechnology, but not being very useful, was the fact that everybody told us it needs to work in a standard well plates. 

00:20:13 Prof Michele Barbour 

So this is maybe one of the things that held people back all those years, is that practicality, which is actually quite a tricky practicality, isn't it? 

00:20:19 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah, from a technology perspective, a lot of work that people have been doing was easy to achieve acoustically, but not easy to translate into a standard well plate. 

00:20:27 Dr Luke Cox 

And one of the advantages of our technology was that it did translate into standard well plates. 

00:20:32 Dr Luke Cox 

So if you looked at what other people were doing, they were doing very cool science, and it could be applied in very specific areas, perhaps. 

00:20:39 Dr Luke Cox 

But if you wanted to apply it on a large scale, you could make stage 8 in a 10-stage process way easier. 

00:20:47 Dr Luke Cox 

But in doing so, one had to redesign stages 1 through 7 and 9 and 10. 

00:20:51 Dr Luke Cox 

Of course, nobody's going to adopt that. 

00:20:53 Dr Luke Cox 

You're causing so much more work. 

00:20:55 Dr Luke Cox 

The other thing that came out of that, interestingly, was an emphasis on trying to do single cell manipulation for the isolation of cells for medicine production. 

00:21:04 Dr Luke Cox 

Essentially, if you want to produce a monoclonal antibody, which is a type of antibody which is produced by cells, you engineer the cell to pump out loads of this drug. 

00:21:14 Prof Michele Barbour 

The cell becomes a factory, effectively. 

00:21:15 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes, essentially. 

00:21:16 Dr Luke Cox 

And that is 8 out of 10 best-selling drugs in 2021 were produced by monoclonal antibodies. 

00:21:21 Dr Luke Cox 

Right at the start, you need to guarantee all of those cells have been cloned from a single original. 

00:21:25 Dr Luke Cox 

cell. 

00:21:26 Dr Luke Cox 

So it's a hugely valuable part of a process. 

00:21:28 Dr Luke Cox 

So we were quite interested in that. 

00:21:29 Dr Luke Cox 

One of the things that I would later go on to learn was other people had also identified this gap and there was a lot of other technologies that could have meet that need. 

00:21:36 Prof Michele Barbour 

So it's crowded and you're maybe coming at it probably later than a few of these other people trying to achieve this. 

00:21:40 Dr Luke Cox 

Exactly. 

00:21:41 Dr Luke Cox 

So you could walk around some conferences and find 10 different people all trying to flog you a different method for their single cell isolation and some of them were already products that you could buy. 

00:21:50 Prof Michele Barbour 

So while you almost certainly could do it, then it becomes, yes, but commercially is it our priority? 

00:21:55 Prof Michele Barbour 

The organoid market quite small and underdeveloped, the monoclonal antibody production market already quite crowded. 

00:22:01 Prof Michele Barbour 

This is a bit of a sort of Goldilocks, porridge is too hot, porridge is too cold, you know. 

00:22:05 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yes. 

00:22:06 Prof Michele Barbour 

Which was the right porridge? 

00:22:07 Dr Luke Cox 

Interestingly, both in terms of sort of like the scale and the size of things, we landed on cell passaging as a beachhead market. 

00:22:17 Dr Luke Cox 

So this is the process from a non-biologist when you're growing cells in a dish every couple of days, depending on the cell type, they're going to fill that dish and you're going 

00:22:25 Dr Luke Cox 

going to have to put them into a new dish. 

00:22:27 Dr Luke Cox 

If you don't do that, they're going to overpopulate, become very unhappy and eventually die. 

00:22:32 Dr Luke Cox 

It's a very common process. 

00:22:33 Dr Luke Cox 

Everyone's doing it all the time, but it's actually a huge faff to automate. 

00:22:38 Dr Luke Cox 

So almost everybody is doing it manually. 

00:22:41 Prof Michele Barbour 

And has been for 100 years or more. 

00:22:43 Prof Michele Barbour 

I mean, it's one of those things. 

00:22:44 Prof Michele Barbour 

I've spent loads of time in biology labs, but I've done a little bit of massaging in my time and it's incredibly repetitive and hasn't changed. 

00:22:50 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah, about 100 years. 

00:22:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yeah, exactly. 

00:22:52 Dr Luke Cox 

It's probably gone from using mouth pipettes to. 

00:22:55 Dr Luke Cox 

formal pipettes, but a lot of stuff. 

00:22:58 Dr Luke Cox 

It's interesting actually, because we realized, we found our people within biology, or at least the first people that were most useful to us in automation engineers within biology. 

00:23:07 Dr Luke Cox 

And as soon as you tell them you're making it easy to automate cell passaging, they are very excited because they understand the pain. 

00:23:13 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yes, they see the need. 

00:23:14 Prof Michele Barbour 

You found that pain point. 

00:23:15 Prof Michele Barbour 

So what did you then need to do? 

00:23:17 Prof Michele Barbour 

Because manipulating individual cells, manipulating organoids, which at least are quite kind of, I don't know, contained, aren't they? 

00:23:23 Prof Michele Barbour 

They've got boundaries. 

00:23:24 Prof Michele Barbour 

Whereas cell passaging. 

00:23:25 Prof Michele Barbour 

you've got a big old washy old petri dish full of cells. 

00:23:28 Prof Michele Barbour 

So what changes did you need to make to your tech to make it suitable for that use? 

00:23:33 Dr Luke Cox 

It was actually relatively simple for us in terms of our core technology. 

00:23:38 Dr Luke Cox 

It was actually one of the easier things that we could do was moving things. 

00:23:41 Dr Luke Cox 

So the way that we approach it is we use ultrasounds to help unstick the cells and then we essentially push them to one side, we hold them with the sound and then we use a pipette to remove the other liquid and then you can add new liquids and then put it into a new plate. 

00:23:55 Prof Michele Barbour 

So you're effectively holding them out of the way and then other types of automation move the plate and the liquid from beneath. 

00:24:00 Dr Luke Cox 

We come in from the bottom. 

00:24:01 Dr Luke Cox 

So the device that we're building at the moment is essentially a box that you put your plate on top of. 

00:24:06 Dr Luke Cox 

And then the sound comes in from the bottom. 

00:24:09 Dr Luke Cox 

We move the cells to one, we unstick the cells, we move them to one side. 

00:24:12 Dr Luke Cox 

You remove your liquid, you add your new liquid, you're good to go. 

00:24:15 Dr Luke Cox 

Removing the liquid is something that's a relatively well-established technology. 

00:24:18 Dr Luke Cox 

The first product we're looking at is a box which sits inside a pipetting robot. 

00:24:22 Dr Luke Cox 

Pipetting robots are reasonably well-established technology, so we're 

00:24:25 Dr Luke Cox 

building that ourselves as a starting point. 

00:24:28 Dr Luke Cox 

Our technology allows you to help unstick the cells much faster than current techniques and then essentially pushes the cells to one side. 

00:24:35 Dr Luke Cox 

You can then remove the liquid, put the new liquid in, so now you've got your cells in suspension record floating around inside the liquid, which you can then just put into new plates and they are ready to go. 

00:24:48 Dr Luke Cox 

And the current process involves often putting things into an incubator. 

00:24:52 Dr Luke Cox 

It involves them having to agitate them depending on the cell 

00:24:55 Dr Luke Cox 

You then have to centrifuge them, and then you have to have a large pipetting robot that can handle all of those interactions, which suddenly means that you've got a machine the size of a small room that requires a lot of optimization just to do this simple process, and... 

00:25:07 Dr Luke Cox 

People like their automation modular where possible, because it means you can reconfigure things easily. 

00:25:13 Dr Luke Cox 

A walk-up device is a lot easier to use and a lot easier to drive adoption within a lab, essentially. 

00:25:18 Dr Luke Cox 

So the advantage of our technology is it's very scalable. 

00:25:21 Dr Luke Cox 

You can do a lot of things in parallel, but also it can be made very modular, so it can scale from very small labs, which would never currently adopt the automation technology, up to huge labs which want to do massive throughputs and also allow you to do lots of different cell types in parallel as well. 

00:25:38 Prof Michele Barbour 

So hugely powerful and also addressing a real gap in the market where other people have tried and failed rather than markets where people are trying and succeeding or the market was too small. 

00:25:47 Prof Michele Barbour 

So fantastic. 

00:25:48 Prof Michele Barbour 

You've got your beachhead market. 

00:25:50 Prof Michele Barbour 

At this point, are you still within the university? 

00:25:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

Have you formed the company? 

00:25:53 Prof Michele Barbour 

When did the company kind of come to be in this journey? 

00:25:56 Dr Luke Cox 

We had proved some of the technology points using the larger Impact Acceleration Account grant and then we had gone on to the larger IQR programme. 

00:26:04 Dr Luke Cox 

So that was where we identified cell passaging 

00:26:07 Dr Luke Cox 

as a key beachhead market. 

00:26:09 Dr Luke Cox 

And I knew I was on to something when I kept being introduced to people's boss. 

00:26:14 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's always good. 

00:26:15 Dr Luke Cox 

So we sort of went with one of the big automation companies. 

00:26:18 Dr Luke Cox 

We went from someone on the floor of Medica right up to the person who reports to the CEO about four layers in the space of about a month or something of people introducing going, oh, you need to meet and talk to this person. 

00:26:30 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's very encouraging. 

00:26:31 Prof Michele Barbour 

Fantastic. 

00:26:32 Prof Michele Barbour 

You formed your company. 

00:26:33 Prof Michele Barbour 

You took the role of CEO. 

00:26:35 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:26:35 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's a bold and may I say. 

00:26:37 Prof Michele Barbour 

I would say very step by very much applause because a lot of people like you exiting your PhD moving into a company would take maybe the chief science officer, chief engineering officer, chief operating officer, chief tech officer, one of the many, and may or may not move on to CEO later, but you went straight to CEO. 

00:26:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

Talk me through your decision making. 

00:26:54 Dr Luke Cox 

I think I was the only candidate, but I'm not sure I want to say that. 

00:26:58 Prof Michele Barbour 

Well, no, I totally get that, but... 

00:27:01 Prof Michele Barbour 

I suppose what I'm getting at is lots of people would just find that too scary. 

00:27:04 Prof Michele Barbour 

I have sat in this room with people, dare I say double your age, who went, oh no, I couldn't do that. 

00:27:10 Prof Michele Barbour 

Oh my goodness, I'm putting words in them. 

00:27:11 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's certainly how I felt. 

00:27:12 Prof Michele Barbour 

I had a great deal more experience than you when I went through my equivalent journey. 

00:27:16 Prof Michele Barbour 

You laugh and say you were the only candidate, but actually there are people out there that make a career of being a dropping CEO of a spin outcome, which in some ways can be more comfortable for the entrepreneur. 

00:27:26 Prof Michele Barbour 

They feel like, well, they've got the business. 

00:27:27 Prof Michele Barbour 

You could have, I'm sure, found someone who was willing to be that CEO. 

00:27:31 Prof Michele Barbour 

but you took it on yourself. 

00:27:33 Prof Michele Barbour 

First of all, good for you. 

00:27:35 Prof Michele Barbour 

But what I suppose, were you reluctant to give that degree of control away to somebody else? 

00:27:41 Prof Michele Barbour 

Was it your tech and you felt it had to be you that brought it forward? 

00:27:44 Dr Luke Cox 

I think the honest answer is I was probably the best candidate around at the time. 

00:27:48 Dr Luke Cox 

So we did consider looking for external CEOs. 

00:27:52 Dr Luke Cox 

I think we felt for the early stage of the company and what it needed, we needed someone who could see the technology and what it could do and marry that with seeing the customers and what they wanted and how they were operating. 

00:28:05 Dr Luke Cox 

I think one of the things that I found during the IKEA journey was that I was quite good at that talking to people bit. 

00:28:13 Dr Luke Cox 

I hope that's coming across here. 

00:28:15 Prof Michele Barbour 

I was going to say, I can believe that because I'm seeing it right here. 

00:28:17 Prof Michele Barbour 

But that link up between the tech, which is often where the newfound 

00:28:22 Prof Michele Barbour 

kind of feels more comfortable because that's often where they've come from, is the tech or the science or whatever it is for them. 

00:28:27 Prof Michele Barbour 

That talking to people and talking to people in a non-technical language or indeed in their own technical language, which might be just technical language different from the technical language that you grew up with, that's something that doesn't always come naturally, but it sounds like for you it's something you sort of slotted into you quite naturally, which is amazing. 

00:28:42 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah, I think there was definitely something in that I had been learning the language. 

00:28:46 Dr Luke Cox 

and science of biotechnology for two years, jumping in a long way at the deep end from going from my GCSE of biology. 

00:28:56 Dr Luke Cox 

all the way up to conferences where PhD and post-PhD people are presenting their work. 

00:29:02 Dr Luke Cox 

So I spoke and understood biology on a certain level. 

00:29:05 Dr Luke Cox 

I wouldn't claim to have a deep understanding, but I had an understanding on the right levels. 

00:29:11 Dr Luke Cox 

And I understood our technology and what it could do. 

00:29:14 Dr Luke Cox 

So I was in a very advantageous position there. 

00:29:17 Dr Luke Cox 

And I don't think that there were any particular candidates who could see both aspects of that clearly. 

00:29:24 Dr Luke Cox 

So I would say there are definitely, as you say, a lot of 

00:29:26 Dr Luke Cox 

of jobbing CEOs. 

00:29:28 Dr Luke Cox 

I think we were a slightly unusual company. 

00:29:31 Dr Luke Cox 

For example, there were a lot of companies in biotechnology working on new therapeutics. 

00:29:37 Dr Luke Cox 

And that is, while not an easy path, a reasonably well-defined path. 

00:29:42 Dr Luke Cox 

There's a reasonable expectation of you're going to need to take it towards clinical trial de-risking the science at each stage. 

00:29:47 Dr Luke Cox 

Exactly, yeah. 

00:29:48 Dr Luke Cox 

And I think you could probably find a very competent CEO for that. 

00:29:51 Dr Luke Cox 

If I had been running that kind of a company, I think I would have been a bad choice for CEO. 

00:29:56 Prof Michele Barbour 

Because there's a template and ideally you want someone that's been through that process before with previous companies so they kind of can use that experience and there's contacts and networks. 

00:30:05 Prof Michele Barbour 

but in this instance it's more of a one-off or at least something more novel, more a less clearly defined path. 

00:30:10 Dr Luke Cox 

Exactly. 

00:30:11 Dr Luke Cox 

So I had a good site on the technical aspects, I had a good site on the market aspects and I had a good site on the application and I could speak all of the languages necessary to a sufficient degree that I could act as a translator between them and treat things as black boxes where necessary and trust people to tell me when that was now a problem. 

00:30:30 Dr Luke Cox 

I think it was also in part a fact that we got a very good engineer. 

00:30:35 Dr Luke Cox 

I felt 

00:30:35 Dr Luke Cox 

I could trust to really focus on the technology. 

00:30:37 Prof Michele Barbour 

That freed you up to not be doing, you could understand the technology, but you weren't actually doing it. 

00:30:42 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes, exactly. 

00:30:43 Dr Luke Cox 

And I was still very interested in it and still contributing to it. 

00:30:45 Dr Luke Cox 

And still, the other day we were talking about mechanisms for a new technique we were trying to develop, and that was still something that I'm able to contribute scientifically to. 

00:30:54 Dr Luke Cox 

I hope. 

00:30:54 Dr Luke Cox 

No one's told me I'm wrong yet. 

00:30:57 Dr Luke Cox 

No, people tell me I'm wrong all the time. 

00:30:59 Dr Luke Cox 

No one's told me I'm useless yet. 

00:31:01 Prof Michele Barbour 

Okay, let's hope and believe that day will not come. 

00:31:03 Prof Michele Barbour 

So what year are we now? 

00:31:04 Prof Michele Barbour 

The company's just formed. 

00:31:05 Prof Michele Barbour 

How long ago? 

00:31:06 Dr Luke Cox 

So early 2023 was when we went through the IQ options roundabout. 

00:31:11 Dr Luke Cox 

So that's where you present your idea. 

00:31:13 Dr Luke Cox 

We said we want to work on the cell passaging automation. 

00:31:16 Dr Luke Cox 

And then we were able to apply for the IQ grant. 

00:31:19 Dr Luke Cox 

We were very lucky. 

00:31:20 Dr Luke Cox 

We were the only one by cohort to get out on the first try. 

00:31:23 Dr Luke Cox 

So November 2023 was when we kicked off a company in earnest. 

00:31:29 Prof Michele Barbour 

Fantastic. 

00:31:29 Prof Michele Barbour 

And so one thing that all company founders discover, some of them expected it, some of them don't, is once you have a company, things cost a lot of money. 

00:31:38 Prof Michele Barbour 

And I actually think genuinely, like as researchers, we know what our reagents cost or what that microscope costs, but we don't always fully digest 

00:31:46 Prof Michele Barbour 

best, despite A university's best attempt, to really see the complexity and the cost of a proper organisation, even a really small one. 

00:31:55 Prof Michele Barbour 

So what I'm saying is companies need money. 

00:31:56 Prof Michele Barbour 

So you got some funds from out of the ICURE programme at the end of the options roundabout and you got a grant. 

00:32:02 Prof Michele Barbour 

Was there other things you needed to do? 

00:32:03 Prof Michele Barbour 

Did you need to look for other grant money? 

00:32:05 Prof Michele Barbour 

Did you look for investment? 

00:32:06 Prof Michele Barbour 

Did you look for, I don't know, charitable grants? 

00:32:08 Prof Michele Barbour 

Or did you manage to bootstrap it on just that initial grant? 

00:32:11 Dr Luke Cox 

So we had that initial grant, but one of the really important things that I think they only tell 

00:32:16 Dr Luke Cox 

right at the end of it, really ought to tell researchers earlier, because it matters when you're spinning out, is that no grant is ever paid in advance. 

00:32:24 Prof Michele Barbour 

Oh my goodness, what a nightmare that is. 

00:32:25 Prof Michele Barbour 

How are you supposed to pay your staff? 

00:32:26 Dr Luke Cox 

Exactly. 

00:32:27 Dr Luke Cox 

So everything is paid in arrears, which I think is a real systematic problem on the part of the UK government that enables rich people to take 

00:32:35 Dr Luke Cox 

more advantage of grants. 

00:32:37 Dr Luke Cox 

So we managed to get some money from the University of Bristol Evergreen Fund. 

00:32:41 Dr Luke Cox 

We also managed to corral some angel investors. 

00:32:44 Dr Luke Cox 

So that year I'd also won the new enterprise competition. 

00:32:48 Dr Luke Cox 

And one of the judges on that then went on to become an angel investor alongside some of their other connections. 

00:32:55 Dr Luke Cox 

And then a little bit later, we managed to close that pre-seed round for about 450K. 

00:33:00 Prof Michele Barbour 

That insulates you against these grants paid in a way it is that you've got some kind of, you've got liquidity. 

00:33:05 Dr Luke Cox 

Exactly, yes. 

00:33:06 Dr Luke Cox 

But it's very much a stressful experience, I think, thinking we've got this grant, Innovate UK is leaning on you to spend the grant as soon as possible because they don't want it to run over their financial years. 

00:33:16 Dr Luke Cox 

And of course, they will not give you the money 

00:33:18 Dr Luke Cox 

in advance in case the funds get misallocated, which is laughable given, I think, what we know about what happened in COVID. 

00:33:25 Prof Michele Barbour 

Absolutely. 

00:33:26 Prof Michele Barbour 

And I guess in a sense, the Innovate UK grants, I'm not going to say it de-risks it for the investors, but it gives the investors confidence because those Innovate UK grants are not easy to come by. 

00:33:34 Prof Michele Barbour 

There's a lot of research and diligence that I've done on assessing that application. 

00:33:38 Prof Michele Barbour 

So I would imagine for the angels, they're looking at this going, well, I know there's something here if Innovate are putting in this big chunk of cash. 

00:33:44 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah, exactly. 

00:33:45 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah, so we definitely do wish that. 

00:33:46 Dr Luke Cox 

I should also say the founders as well, we put 

00:33:48 Dr Luke Cox 

and some of our own money, and it wouldn't have been possible without that. 

00:33:51 Dr Luke Cox 

And again, that's another, it's another barrier to participation in that kind of innovation journey, I guess. 

00:33:57 Prof Michele Barbour 

It is, and it really narrows down the paths available to people who aren't in that fortunate position. 

00:34:01 Prof Michele Barbour 

I absolutely agree. 

00:34:02 Prof Michele Barbour 

So you formed the company, you've obtained funds to support it. 

00:34:06 Prof Michele Barbour 

What next? 

00:34:07 Prof Michele Barbour 

What were your priorities? 

00:34:09 Prof Michele Barbour 

What did you need to do? 

00:34:10 Dr Luke Cox 

So the main priority we had was turning it from something that worked on our benchtop and we'd sort of done some of the basic proof of principles into something that actually looked like the real product, so to speak, and could perform the whole process end to end. 

00:34:28 Dr Luke Cox 

So we'd sort of proved some things on single wells and on smaller pieces of hardware, but it did not work reliably. 

00:34:35 Dr Luke Cox 

My GCSE, electronic 

00:34:37 Dr Luke Cox 

designed boards, literally my design, I have a GCSE in electronics, that was the level it was at, was not good enough, so we needed to upgrade that. 

00:34:45 Dr Luke Cox 

We needed to sort of do some deeper validations as well and actually optimize those processes. 

00:34:50 Dr Luke Cox 

We knew where we wanted to get to and we had confidence that we could get there, but 

00:34:54 Dr Luke Cox 

there is still a lot of work to get there. 

00:34:56 Dr Luke Cox 

And obviously, developing hardware takes a lot of time. 

00:35:00 Dr Luke Cox 

Doing live cell biology takes a lot of time. 

00:35:02 Prof Michele Barbour 

So it's primarily technological sort of challenges and milestones you talked about there, including doing your own biology. 

00:35:08 Prof Michele Barbour 

So you weren't sort of having, I don't know, somebody else supply the cells for you to work. 

00:35:12 Prof Michele Barbour 

You actually brought that in-house? 

00:35:13 Dr Luke Cox 

No, we have a, yeah, live cell biology lab which we run up at Future Space. 

00:35:18 Prof Michele Barbour 

I know it will. 

00:35:19 Dr Luke Cox 

I've realized now we're actually relatively unusual, even among companies aiming to automate cell culture. 

00:35:24 Dr Luke Cox 

I have spoken to companies with multiple millions of pounds worth of seed funding. 

00:35:30 Dr Luke Cox 

who their entire thing is automating cell culture, who do not have any live cells in their lab, which is extraordinary to me. 

00:35:36 Prof Michele Barbour 

They can quite possibly do it with polystyrene beads or something like that. 

00:35:39 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yes, I'm less surprised than that, but only because I learned it the hard way as well. 

00:35:43 Prof Michele Barbour 

You've already made really clear that this kind of cell manipulation for passaging is ubiquitous, like any cell biology lab will need to do this. 

00:35:51 Prof Michele Barbour 

But you've also pointed out there are tiny labs with just a couple of people and there are vast industrial labs and everything in between. 

00:35:57 Prof Michele Barbour 

At this stage, are you 

00:36:00 Prof Michele Barbour 

targeting a particular segment of that market? 

00:36:02 Prof Michele Barbour 

Are you going for a particular size of lab or have you identified where the need is most urgent or indeed where they can pay for it? 

00:36:08 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:36:08 Dr Luke Cox 

So our current target is actually on the larger automation systems. 

00:36:14 Dr Luke Cox 

So we found the best educated customers, shall we say, are those already working within automation because they understand that this is an extremely common process. 

00:36:24 Dr Luke Cox 

They understand that it's difficult to automate. 

00:36:26 Dr Luke Cox 

And if you could make it easier to automate, that would turn 

00:36:30 Dr Luke Cox 

the top branch fruit into low hanging fruit. 

00:36:33 Dr Luke Cox 

So they have a strong understanding of it. 

00:36:35 Dr Luke Cox 

And often within large pharmaceutical companies, for example, they have groups of automation engineers whose broad mandate is automate things within this company. 

00:36:44 Prof Michele Barbour 

Okay, I see. 

00:36:45 Prof Michele Barbour 

So it is the big large companies with their automation divisions within. 

00:36:49 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes, yeah, very much so. 

00:36:50 Dr Luke Cox 

But as part of that, in order to focus our technology development, we're also working quite closely with 

00:36:58 Dr Luke Cox 

the liquid handling companies. 

00:36:59 Dr Luke Cox 

So our first product, we intend to sit within existing pipetting robots. 

00:37:04 Dr Luke Cox 

And they're quite excited about that possibility of opening up a new, not a market segment they couldn't access before, but one that's very difficult for them to access before. 

00:37:15 Dr Luke Cox 

So those are the people we've really found understand the problem and like the first solution we can get. 

00:37:20 Dr Luke Cox 

So that's sort of our focus at the moment. 

00:37:23 Dr Luke Cox 

And that is something that we also iterated over the 

00:37:27 Dr Luke Cox 

progress we've made since we sort of launched the company, because you never really stop talking to your customers during that process. 

00:37:35 Dr Luke Cox 

So we've sort of gone from, we think we can do this thing, here's a little bit of data that we've got, to, okay, we've generated this much more robust data, what do you now think, how would you like to see it? 

00:37:46 Dr Luke Cox 

And you often find that you need those proof points in order to deepen the conversation and get more information out of people and more engagement with people. 

00:37:54 Dr Luke Cox 

But as long as they see motion, 

00:37:57 Dr Luke Cox 

They're happy to give you some engagement. 

00:38:00 Dr Luke Cox 

And yeah, we've been figuring out what our next stages of testing are as well. 

00:38:03 Dr Luke Cox 

Obviously, there are millions of different cell types. 

00:38:06 Dr Luke Cox 

We can only work on a certain number at a given time. 

00:38:09 Dr Luke Cox 

So being able to prioritize those, as well as something we've communicated with customers with as well. 

00:38:17 Dr Luke Cox 

And also understanding what the exact specifications of a final product need to be and asking for them, no, really, no, really. 

00:38:32 Prof Michele Barbour 

I do think that's a skill that has to be learned and developed over time. 

00:38:37 Prof Michele Barbour 

And it's certainly something I think a lot of early entrepreneurs don't appreciate is it's easy to get a polite answer to when you pitch your technology that actually masks 

00:38:47 Prof Michele Barbour 

actually, no, this isn't what we need to, this isn't what my company would invest in, or it's all very nice, we wouldn't pay for it. 

00:38:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

sounds like you've developed a relationship. 

00:38:54 Prof Michele Barbour 

How have you achieved that? 

00:38:56 Prof Michele Barbour 

Because that's not easy to do. 

00:38:58 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah, so I think on one level it is once you have found something that people actually do and want, I knew I was onto something when people kept introducing me to their boss. 

00:39:09 Dr Luke Cox 

Well, yes, But I think there was definitely a sense of, 

00:39:14 Dr Luke Cox 

When people want something, they'll put work into it. 

00:39:17 Dr Luke Cox 

And I've heard some salespeople talk about it as making them feel some pain. 

00:39:23 Dr Luke Cox 

And I guess on some of that too, but I think it's when people want something, they will put work into making it happen. 

00:39:32 Dr Luke Cox 

And that is really the measure of it. 

00:39:35 Dr Luke Cox 

If you're able to follow up with people and they want to respond, you know, and sometimes you have to, people will be honest, like, yes, I would like this, but I can't engage at this point. 

00:39:43 Dr Luke Cox 

Please come back to me when you're at 

00:39:44 Dr Luke Cox 

at this point, and that's a helpful traction point. 

00:39:47 Dr Luke Cox 

And we have found that people have said, yes, get back to me when you've got this thing. 

00:39:50 Dr Luke Cox 

When you come back, they do continue to engage in you. 

00:39:52 Dr Luke Cox 

So there was definitely something there. 

00:39:54 Dr Luke Cox 

I think there was an important question that often people don't ask, but is an important one, which is what would stop you from adopting this. 

00:40:04 Dr Luke Cox 

And actually, if you try and push people a little bit, you can gauge from people's answers there what their actual interest is. Because sometimes, if you say, what would stop you from doing it, and people would be like, oh, if it was too expensive, I wouldn't do it. That tells you that there was a price point that they are willing to pay. And if the user interface was really bad, for example, is one that we hear a lot, that shows you that they have value. It's very interesting, actually, when we've talked to academics, this is another important point, is academics 

00:40:34 Dr Luke Cox 

are often terrible early adopters of new technologies because their incentives are to do the thing that nobody else is doing, which is not a very scalable business model. But we've sort of focused on something that everybody is doing. And when we've talked to academics, they would go, oh, well, no, I couldn't possibly automate that because I think it's a core skill that I think my PhD students need to learn. Of course, when I was a PhD student, I had to mix all my own reagents, and now I just buy them off the shelf. Of course, when I was a PhD student, I had to do this, and now I just do that. And so you realize, oh, the 

00:41:04 Dr Luke Cox 

The answer is you will adopt this. You're just going to be last in line. Find the person who's got a KPI or something. Really interestingly, some but not all pharmaceutical companies, for example, have KPIs related to plastic waste. So if you say we can reduce your plastic waste by 50% in this process, suddenly they're immediately thinking in their mind's eye for a second, they are in their performance with you and they're asking what you've done against your KPIs and they're writing it down. They're going, we bought this machine and it's 50% plastic reduce. 

00:41:32 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's really interesting. And I would imagine. 

00:41:34 Prof Michele Barbour 

I imagine that was not what you thought was going to be one of your core technology offers when you started out. 

00:41:39 Dr Luke Cox 

No. 

00:41:40 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yeah, that's fascinating. And yeah, valuable insights and transferable to other sort of applications as well. 

00:41:46 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:41:47 Prof Michele Barbour 

Barely 18 months old, your company, Impulsonics. Where are you now and what does the next 12, 18 months look like? 

00:41:56 Dr Luke Cox 

So we're currently at the stage where we've got a machine 

00:41:59 Dr Luke Cox 

in a box, which essentially works, but is definitely something that sits within our lab and is not something that we'd be able to put into other people's labs. So really the next stage, but what we're looking at the moment is being able to bring up that technology to a level where it can work into other people's labs and actually start getting it tested within integrated systems. 

00:42:20 Dr Luke Cox 

So we've already got some people who we know are very interested in doing that. And we've sort of aligned those, this is what it needs to look like. And now we just need to do it, I guess. 

00:42:29 Prof Michele Barbour 

I guess so. Yeah, exciting though. And you've got partners lined up as well, which means that's not your barrier. In the broader sense, you know, you talked about your excitement for the technology and making an impact in your field when you selected your PhD. If we went forward 5 or 10 years, what would you be really satisfied if the company and the technology had achieved? Where would you like to see it making sense? 

00:42:50 Dr Luke Cox 

I would like to see a box with our technology in it in every hospital in the world. And for me, I think one of the biggest areas that I'm really excited about our technology is the ability to culture multiple cell types in parallel, which enables what's called functional personalized precision medicine. So essentially testing different types of drugs on particular patient derived cells in order to see which one is going to work best for them. 

00:43:17 Prof Michele Barbour 

For that individual person. 

00:43:18 Dr Luke Cox 

For that individual person. 

00:43:20 Prof Michele Barbour 

Exactly, yeah. 

00:43:22 Dr Luke Cox 

So the way that drug discovery currently works is they will test it on different cell types and they will see which is likely to work and they will bring it into clinical trials. And there's been a lot of work done on trying to use genomic sequencing to be able to identify what the best candidates are going to be. And the review I read recently said that depending on the exact disease type, we're looking at about 10% of people being able to benefit from that at the moment. 

00:43:49 Dr Luke Cox 

The early studies into precision functional medicine already showing 80% plus success rates. And you've got to think as well, we've probably had 10 to 15 years worth of billions, let's be frank, investment into this genomic sequencing. I think there is something that nearly every cell in your body has the same DNA, and yet we do not exist in bodies of single cells. So that basically is screening things for a personal cancer, for example, but also screening to make sure that the toxicity profile is not going to be worse for you. 

00:44:19 Dr Luke Cox 

you than other people. So doing all kinds of different things as well. And being able to grow lots of different patient cells in parallel means that becomes a much more scalable approach. 

00:44:28 Prof Michele Barbour 

I suppose in theory, one could do this now with manual passaging techniques and similar things, but it's just completely unattainable because of the scale that would need to be done. So this automation could make it much more in the horizons of what could be achieved. 

00:44:40 Dr Luke Cox 

Exactly, yes. And there have already been trials doing it with manual processes, but I think you'd be sort of starting up huge schools of lab technicians. 

00:44:49 Dr Luke Cox 

if you wanted to roll that out across every hospital. And to be frank, the economics probably would not stack up. 

00:44:54 Prof Michele Barbour 

I can well understand that. Luke, you've had an extraordinary journey in such a short number of years. You've been an engineering student, you've been a PhD student in an interdisciplinary project, but where the cells are sort of provided to you, then you've formed a company and then... Have I missed it? 

00:45:08 Dr Luke Cox 

No, but I was going to say, if it's for PhD, we didn't get the cells provided to us. 

00:45:13 Prof Michele Barbour 

I'm going into your personal journey. Look, you've had such a journey over really quite a short number of years. You've gone 

00:45:19 Prof Michele Barbour 

from an undergraduate here in the university studying engineering. You've done your PhD working on this device that has much promise, but at that point, not yet a really specifically designed application. You've explored a whole bunch of applications. You've taken cell biology in your stride. You've become a CEO and you're out pitching to investors and pitching to Innovate UK and also in quite breakneck speed. 

00:45:39 Prof Michele Barbour 

How has that felt to you? Because that's a lot of skills in a short number of times. How is that? 

00:45:45 Dr Luke Cox 

When I reflect on my life, I think that I do not enjoy being good at things. Which is to say, when I get good at things, I think I'm always looking for the next challenge. When I worked for Building Services Engineering Firm, I was sat down by one of the engineers who sat next to me and had sat in that office for 30 years. And he was like, you can come back here after your degree and then you can get this qualification and then you can get this qualification and then you get this qualification. And at the end 

00:46:09 Dr Luke Cox 

In the 30 years, you can be sat right at the desk opposite you. 

00:46:12 Prof Michele Barbour 

And to some people, that's a really attractive, stable, known. 

00:46:15 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes. 

00:46:16 Prof Michele Barbour 

Specific. 

00:46:17 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah. I saw a carpet rolling into my own grave. 

00:46:21 Dr Luke Cox 

I think there was something about the next challenge about doing things which are difficult and exciting and ambitious that really attracts me. And I think doing my degree, I found that really tough at the time, but I found it very rewarding. And then I found the idea of doing research, knowing things that nobody else knows, only for a brief moment until you actually tell them. But you know, there's something very exciting about being the first person in the world to do something or know something. That's hugely exciting. And then going 

00:46:51 Dr Luke Cox 

actually, I want to do something. I've always been an engineer. I like building things and I want to, I don't think I'm interested in knowing things for the sake of knowing them. I want the things I do to matter. And so going on that journey, I guess, has been exciting, exhilarating, stressful, hugely stressful at times. Let's not pretend it's not. 

00:47:13 Prof Michele Barbour 

Well, but it's really interesting because we've been talking for however long now and that's the first time that's come up. A lot of people, particularly entrepreneurs 

00:47:21 Prof Michele Barbour 

to often talk about how scary it is and how intimidating it is and how much they felt like overwhelmed by it. And actually, what I hear from you is just this excitement and this joy and this anticipation of the next big challenge. Do you recognize that or am I describing something that you don't agree with? 

00:47:36 Dr Luke Cox 

I think that does make sense to me. I think I really do love learning new skills, but doing it in a very practical way. And I think this is definitely an opportunity to continue doing that. But as I say, it's always got to be making a difference to some extent. And I think there's something 

00:47:51 Dr Luke Cox 

as well, but definitely there are times when it is extremely stressful. I don't want to pretend otherwise from that. I think there's also an aspect about it as well that our chair Steve Kitson has a really interesting insight about an entrepreneur not necessarily being a risk taker, but a risk engineer. 

00:48:09 Prof Michele Barbour 

Oh, I like that. 

00:48:10 Dr Luke Cox 

So you don't 

00:48:12 Dr Luke Cox 

have to take the biggest risk possible at any given time, if you can take a smaller risk, which will then still move you in the right direction, one of the things that's really insightful that he pointed out is, yes, there is a financial and time commitment risk from doing a spin out or startup company, but there's also another aspect to it, which is the skills that you build. And it's very difficult to do a journey like that and not learn a damn thing. And so I guess you have to have some 

00:48:42 Dr Luke Cox 

Call it confidence, call it arrogance. There is a risk to doing this, but if it doesn't work, you will find something else equally exciting and interesting to do. If it's worth doing, it's worth taking a risk on. 

00:48:54 Prof Michele Barbour 

But I love the concept of, I'm going to add precision risk engineering. That's a really nice way of looking at it. You don't have to take the biggest possible risk. That's fantastic. 

00:49:02 Dr Luke Cox 

There's also luck engineering as well. I'd like to point back. Well, I think you don't get to decide where the dice land, but to some extent, you can often control 

00:49:12 Dr Luke Cox 

how much you roll the dice, and often the cost of rolling the dice is quite cheap. I actually think the IKEA program is sort of built around this idea. It says go out and have 100 conversations, and you know, that's 100 conversations, a lot of them will not... 

00:49:27 Dr Luke Cox 

teach you anything. Some of them will just teach you you're barking up the wrong tree, which is valuable, but some of them will become extremely valuable. And actually, by having some kind of a metric, it forces you to go out and roll the dice a lot more. From my experience, I turned out to be in the wrong room in Boston, having flown out to Boston just for this two-day conference to learn I was in the wrong room. But I talked to one of the most valuable people that we ever spoke to, who now continues to give us some advice. But 3 months later, I was in San Diego in the 

00:49:57 Dr Luke Cox 

the right room, and I wouldn't have been there if he hadn't told me to be in that room, and I wouldn't have spoken to the right people if he said, oh, I didn't realize you were here, let me introduce you to this person from a big pharmaceutical company. 

00:50:06 Prof Michele Barbour 

Which makes the room in the Boston the right room after all. 

00:50:08 Dr Luke Cox 

Exactly, yes. 

00:50:10 Prof Michele Barbour 

But now you've revealed that you like to do something new and learn new skills. In your words, you don't like to be good at things, although I would challenge that. When Impulse Sonics is a huge success and is acquired or exos or whatever, which I no doubt it will, what next? Would you do this again? Would you do another spin out? Or is it like, well, I'll have done that then? 

00:50:27 Dr Luke Cox 

Not knowing what's next is quite interesting to me. I think on the days where it goes really well, I can't think of any better job. On the days when it's really hard, I would love to walk away and do something completely different, run my political feces or something like that. 

00:50:43 Prof Michele Barbour 

Oh, we've got a little glimpse there. Well, whatever it is, I have no doubt it will be something exciting and bold and probably unexpected. So you'll have to come back in a few years' time and tell me about it then. You've had that whole journey from undergraduate, postgraduate through to wonderful. 

00:50:57 Prof Michele Barbour 

work you're doing in the company. If you were to be speaking to researchers now, maybe people starting off their PhD or in the early phases of their PhD, so they haven't probably crystallized their full plans yet, or hopefully keeping an open mind, what sort of advice would you give them? 

00:51:15 Dr Luke Cox 

The main thing for me is working interdisciplinary. 

00:51:19 Dr Luke Cox 

And also recognising that the skills that you have there might actually, in academia, be way in advance of what is actually the biggest wins in another industry. And that interconnection of academics love to do the most advanced, most complicated, most complex, most difficult thing, which is brilliant, and that is fantastic, and we really need that. But when you step across, you often find that actually, oh, it's not the most 

00:51:49 Dr Luke Cox 

the most complex thing that is going to solve the biggest problem that we have right now, it's this much simpler thing that you can achieve, which is often something that you might be dismissing or thinking as simple. 

00:52:01 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yeah, think is a little bit humdrummer. Yeah. Well, a bit like you thinking biologists can use a soldering iron, but like that's sort of not realizing where other people are coming from or where they're starting from in their skills or what problem they've got that needs to be solved that you can help with. 

00:52:14 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah, exactly. And also just thinking laterally about it, because I've realized the core of our technology is being able to 

00:52:19 Dr Luke Cox 

move cells to one place and move liquid to another place. There's a huge amount of what we do at the moment, which seems obvious in hindsight, but it's not obvious that there's not a great solution to that. A lot of the pain that we solve for people is just that it's annoying to have a large rotating centrifuge mass and the same system as your highly calibrated optical system. 

00:52:42 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yes, because centrifuge is like, for those that don't know, your washing we've seen is a centrifuge and we all know how the kitchen floor vibrates when that's going off. 

00:52:48 Dr Luke Cox 

Yes, exactly. 

00:52:50 Dr Luke Cox 

So it's odd. But also there's a recognition that talking to different people, you might explain things in different ways, and that will make a huge difference to how they understand it. 

00:53:00 Dr Luke Cox 

I think there's also something of you don't have to give up the dream or the vision of the big thing. Because I would still really like to take Impulse Sonics to those really big, ambitious, complex things. I just realise that 90% of the hardware we need to build will also solve this problem that people have today, now, and they're lining up. So let's solve their problem first. 

00:53:20 Prof Michele Barbour 

It's a little bit about having your eye on the point of the horizon that you want to get to, but recognising there's lots of different routes between here and there. And actually the one you thought of first may not be the one that's most likely to be. 

00:53:30 Prof Michele Barbour 

to lead you to success. Luke, clearly you've gained a huge amount from your commercialization journey and you've made great progress, but were there any barriers or difficulties you faced along the way? And I suppose from my point of view, what can I and we back in university learn about that to try and remove those barriers for future entrepreneurs? 

00:53:46 Dr Luke Cox 

I think one of the biggest barriers and difficulties that I faced, particularly when I was coming out of my PhD and before we launched the company, was actually the insecurity. 

00:53:58 Dr Luke Cox 

So there was a period of about two years where the longest amount of job security I had was six months, I think. 

00:54:07 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's hard. That precarity is excruciating. Very, very difficult. 

00:54:11 Dr Luke Cox 

Definitely, I felt supported by the people that I knew within the university to try and access the resources that were available. 

00:54:17 Prof Michele Barbour 

Sure, but they're finite. 

00:54:20 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah, the resources were finite and also the nature of the resource allocation was a progressive de-risking technique 

00:54:28 Dr Luke Cox 

on the part of the government, but in de-risking that, they then pass the risk on to the individual. 

00:54:33 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yes, exactly. 

00:54:34 Dr Luke Cox 

And I think the other thing is that people do not do their best work when they're worried whether they're going to have a job in a few months. Absolutely. 

00:54:41 Dr Luke Cox 

And, there were times where I was also only working on this 50% of the time I was paid by the university, 50% of the time I was working for another company. Really, I was working sort of 70% of the time on this and 50% of my time with another company. So there's definitely something there. And I think it creates A structural barrier where I was lucky that I could deal with that risk. Other people would not be able to do so. And I think there's a real problem there that from my experience, I have been totally 

00:55:11 Dr Luke Cox 

disillusioned by the notion that our current system enables the best technology to make it out into the world. I don't think that's true at all. I think we get fantastic technologies out. 

00:55:23 Dr Luke Cox 

Probably the system is effective at filtering out bad ideas, but I think it's also that filter is hitting a huge amount of good ideas, not on the quality of the idea, but on the position of a person who happens to have the expertise to be able to implement that idea relative to the position of the funding. And I think that's a huge shame and is hugely to our detriment. So it was odd when I started a company with 18 months of runway when we launched it to suddenly have the biggest job security I'd had in years. 

00:55:53 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yeah, it's a huge barrier to inclusivity in the whole world of entrepreneur, isn't it? In your time over the last number of years, you've worked obviously in your own company labs in Pulsonics, but you've also worked in research labs in university. How different or similar are those two environments? You've done them really quite close together. So compare and contrast. 

00:56:10 Dr Luke Cox 

So I think working within a company lab, one of the things that I found is that we do a lot more 

00:56:18 Dr Luke Cox 

risk management and iteration on the technology. So I think it is relatively rare for an academic to really sit down and seriously go, here's the big risks of this project, and here's how we're going to progressively mitigate them so that we're tackling the biggest ones earliest on so that we've got the most resource for them, and also being able to iterate and go, actually, we don't need to try and build the whole thing now. What we're aiming for is this thing, which might not be the full thing, but we think that we know enough 

00:56:48 Dr Luke Cox 

there, but we can iterate and iterate and iterate and get there. Let's solve this problem and this problem and this problem. Interestingly, actually, in academia, you often found yourself going, what's the most ambitious version and then working your way back. Whereas in industry, you're more working towards the minimum viable product is a software term often used. I don't think it's necessarily as applicable as hardware or in biotechnology, but there's something about the minimum viable proof of concept, for example, when you're looking in academia, for example, 

00:57:18 Dr Luke Cox 

you might generate very high level of data to be able to publish. In industry, you might generate lower levels of data that give you confidence that you can move on to the next level. You know, if you want 100% of something, you might try and get to 80% 1st and then see if that works and then move on to another big risk rather than trying to get on to 100% on that one if you think there's a reasonable expectation that you can come back and get 100%. And it's also about framing your goals relative to what the person wants to achieve. One of the big things that we've learned 

00:57:48 Dr Luke Cox 

but in some labs, they are throwing out 50% of the cells, because they just want percent of the cells to be alive when they are ready to go. It's not true for every lab, but that realise, OK, actually, for some people, they want the quickest, quote unquote, dirtiest way of doing it. They don't care what their recovery is, so we can make something for them that works even faster. 

00:58:08 Prof Michele Barbour 

And if some of the cells don't get transferred, it doesn't matter. Exactly. 

00:58:11 Dr Luke Cox 

For someone else, we need to optimise in a different way. They're going to want 100% retention of their really valuable cells, in which case, that's a different optimisation we can 

00:58:18 Dr Luke Cox 

You still do, but there's a trade-off there, and you're iterating both the business case and the technology in tandem, so understanding what the real core of someone's problem is, and it's often not what they think it is. 

00:58:32 Dr Luke Cox 

But you have to listen quite carefully 

00:58:34 Prof Michele Barbour 

to almost seize out what it was really behind. 

00:58:36 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah. I think that's a way that you work very differently. And academics often set their own goalposts, whereas in this, you're trying to iterate your goalposts and your technology in tandem with your customer feedback. 

00:58:47 Prof Michele Barbour 

What part, if any, does AI have in your company's strategy? Is this something that's useful to you or is it something that's just not really applicable? 

00:58:55 Dr Luke Cox 

For us, we can help in feeding data into AI. Every large pharmaceutical company is interested in using 

00:59:02 Dr Luke Cox 

using AI to mine data from their existing experimental results. One of the realizations they've come to is that actually a lot of the data they've stored is not of good enough quality to feed into your model. So you're essentially feeding in noise. I talked to someone from a big pharmaceutical company who was one of the senior technology people just over drinks at a conference in 2023 and they said, oh, the data from 10 years ago, we can't put that in, that's just noise. I talked to someone earlier this year and they said, oh, the data from five years ago, it's not good enough quality, it's just noise. 

00:59:32 Dr Luke Cox 

So at the current rate, things are looking good. I think one of the difficulties we faced is that AI is sucking up a lot of attention in the investment ecosystem. I'm so wonder that might be an impact, yeah. I think there's definitely some real applications of AI. I'm skeptical of some of the others. I was at an investment review where they talked about SAS was a big thing, FinTech was a big thing, and AI is now a big thing. And you go, well, hang on, wasn't there the blockchain and the metaverse? Why are we not talking about blockchain 

01:00:02 Dr Luke Cox 

the metaverse. 

01:00:02 Dr Luke Cox 

Now I think AI has more utility than blockchain or the metaverse. 

01:00:05 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah, no, I think having like the feedstock is good. 

01:00:07 Dr Luke Cox 

I think it's just hugely important to have real data feeding into the AI. 

01:00:12 Dr Luke Cox 

We have to be careful about how we use it because it's a probabilistic model. 

01:00:17 Dr Luke Cox 

And so sometimes it can be very helpful if you're doing a first pass on a grant application. 

01:00:21 Dr Luke Cox 

I tried out one of the deep learning things to say, what kind of a application could we make for this? 

01:00:26 Dr Luke Cox 

How might we fit into the scope? 

01:00:28 Dr Luke Cox 

And it gave an interesting first pass of it. 

01:00:30 Dr Luke Cox 

And you went, wow, that would be a fantastic thing. 

01:00:33 Dr Luke Cox 

But I don't think it's possible. 

01:00:34 Dr Luke Cox 

It was completely impossible. 

01:00:35 Dr Luke Cox 

And actually, when you ask it more detailed questions, it does confess, but it's impossible. 

01:00:39 Dr Luke Cox 

But I think you have to know 

01:00:42 Dr Luke Cox 

something about the field. 

01:00:44 Dr Luke Cox 

I also get a million AI emails, so I'm very skeptical of AI marketing. 

01:00:47 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yes, I can identify with that. 

01:00:56 Prof Michele Barbour 

I have to ask you one more question. 

01:00:57 Prof Michele Barbour 

You are the graduate, the PhD, the CEO, the entrepreneur, how many different sort of strings to your bow are there? 

01:01:05 Prof Michele Barbour 

I found out recently you also do improv theatre. 

01:01:08 Dr Luke Cox 

But I found out recently you mean the producer ratted me out? 

01:01:11 Prof Michele Barbour 

Yes, okay, I found out in the last 10 minutes that you do improv theatre, which I have to say both surprised me, but also having spoken to you for a little while makes quite a lot of sense. 

01:01:21 Prof Michele Barbour 

So tell me a little bit about that and what, if anything, what utility that has or how you've used those skills in your commercialization journey? 

01:01:29 Dr Luke Cox 

So I think communication and storytelling are 

01:01:34 Dr Luke Cox 

key to any kind of commercialization journey. 

01:01:38 Dr Luke Cox 

I think definitely sort of like being able to communicate with people effectively is hugely powerful. 

01:01:44 Dr Luke Cox 

Obviously, if you want to do a spin out, you're probably going to find yourself pitching, not just to investors, which is a classical one, but also on some level pitching to potential customers. 

01:01:52 Dr Luke Cox 

And that's also where storytelling comes in, because particularly in deep tech, which is often what comes out of universities, you will require a significant amount of capital or investment or grants to be able to realize your vision, 

01:02:04 Dr Luke Cox 

which therefore in the current system means that you have to therefore have a huge impact and a potential for financial return, particularly in terms of investment. 

01:02:13 Dr Luke Cox 

So being able to tell that story of how the thing that you're developing now weaves into a future, hugely impactful, important, both valuable for society, but also capable of generating a financial return. 

01:02:24 Dr Luke Cox 

And I think generally, something that has a large impact in society is capable of sustaining a business model that can support venture-backed companies, like most deep tech companies are. 

01:02:33 Dr Luke Cox 

But being able to link 

01:02:34 Dr Luke Cox 

those two together and compellingly tell that story and really iterate on that story is really useful. 

01:02:39 Dr Luke Cox 

I also think for improv in particular, you spend a lot of time training yourself not to be afraid of looking like an idiot and you've made a bit of a career being unafraid to look like an idiot. 

01:02:54 Dr Luke Cox 

Both in terms of improv comedy, but also being able to, when you're trying to understand something like biotech, ask stupid questions. 

01:03:01 Dr Luke Cox 

And just going, this is probably a stupid question, but is often a very powerful way of getting answers, and people appreciate that. 

01:03:08 Dr Luke Cox 

But also, there is sometimes something that you have to put a proposition to someone, say, I think this, 

01:03:14 Dr Luke Cox 

And you might not believe that, but you need them to tell you if you're right or wrong. 

01:03:18 Dr Luke Cox 

People like to correct you. 

01:03:20 Dr Luke Cox 

I'm sure there's an internet law about that as well-being able to effectively communicate, I think public speaking, definitely being unafraid of that, having some confidence in that, but also being unafraid to look like an idiot. 

01:03:31 Prof Michele Barbour 

I love it. 

01:03:31 Prof Michele Barbour 

A lack of fear. 

01:03:32 Prof Michele Barbour 

We could all do with less fear. 

01:03:34 Dr Luke Cox 

I didn't say lack of fear. 

01:03:36 Prof Michele Barbour 

Okay, A tolerance for fear. 

01:03:39 Prof Michele Barbour 

Okay, yeah, an embracing of fear. 

01:03:41 Dr Luke Cox 

Yeah. 

01:03:42 Dr Luke Cox 

Scared, but did the thing anyway. 

01:03:44 Dr Luke Cox 

And often you realise, I think in improv they have this concept of a happy fail, which is the stakes of failing are quite low. 

01:03:50 Dr Luke Cox 

And particularly in something like ICURE, the stakes of talking to someone and asking them, do you think this idea was good or bad or not? 

01:03:56 Dr Luke Cox 

Well, actually, it's that risk to luck engineering thing again. 

01:03:59 Dr Luke Cox 

The objective stakes are they might tell you that your idea was bad and then you'll walk away. 

01:04:06 Dr Luke Cox 

The true, the potential upside is enormous if they go, that is exactly what my company's 

01:04:12 Dr Luke Cox 

been looking for how can we possibly work with you or let me introduce you to my boss. 

01:04:16 Dr Luke Cox 

But the perceived stakes are what if they don't like it, what if they don't like me? 

01:04:20 Dr Luke Cox 

And you're going to feel quite bad about that because you all feel like you've made a mistake. 

01:04:25 Dr Luke Cox 

So being able to look a bit past that and go, well, I might make a mistake and I might feel a bit bad and that's okay. 

01:04:32 Prof Michele Barbour 

Thank you, Luke. 

01:04:33 Prof Michele Barbour 

I have enjoyed our conversation enormously and I've learned a lot, both about you, about your technology and about your company more broadly. 

01:04:40 Prof Michele Barbour 

So all that remains to say is thank you. 

01:04:42 Prof Michele Barbour 

Thank you very much indeed for being so generous with your time and your insights. 

01:04:45 Dr Luke Cox 

Thank you for having me.