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Teams have been awarded funds to further their original ideas to tackle healthcare challenges after taking part in a 10-12 week training programme for leadership, communication, and teamwork.
ACCELERATE Innovation Team Challenge Winners & Finalists
The ACCELERATE Innovation Team Challenge is an annual 10-12 week training program initiated by the UCL Therapeutic Innovation Networks (TINs). It aims to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations and help UCL biomedical research communities upskill in translational research. This initiative is part of the ongoing efforts of TINs to nurture the product and talent pipeline for fostering healthcare translations within UCL.
The Team Challenge is open to healthcare researchers across UCL and the three UCL Biomedical Research Centres, from any discipline and background, starting from first-year post-doctoral fellows. Participants apply individually to the program and placed into interdisciplinary teams based on shared interests. Throughout the program, participants combine their unique knowledge, skills, and experiences to develop a proposal addressing a real-life translational research challenge of their choosing within an interdisciplinary team.
The primary focus of each proposal is to address real-life healthcare translational challenges. This may include a commercial idea for a healthcare need (e.g., a new product or service) or an improvement to an existing service in a non-commercial setting (e.g., enhancing the efficiency of hospital processes, healthcare data sharing, etc).
Teams pitched their ideas to a Dragons’ Den style panel and were awarded funding and/or further non-financial support for their proposals on a competitive basis.
Participating teams received training sessions covering healthcare innovations, entrepreneurial mindsets, and pitching skills. At the programme's conclusion, teams had the opportunity to bid for a £10,000 award and non-financial support to advance their proposal during a six month period.
Over the course of three cohorts, the ACCELERATE Innovation Team Challenge scheme has awarded a cumulative total of £80,000 to support the development of innovative translational research ideas.
Each team's proposal was found to be sufficiently novel to make a meaningful difference to the real-life translational research challenge identified.
Cohort 3 (2023)
What is each team’s project (in no particular order):
- Team EpiSync: (a wearable seizure detection health device): A dependable and potentially life-saving solution for people with drug resistant epilepsy, enabling them to independently manage potentially fatal seizures. This device aims to improve patient quality of life, reduce hospital admissions, and improve long-term patient outcomes.
Team members: Dr Thomas Jensen, Dr Rob Lesniak and Dr Shirin Shahbazi
- Team ApySense: (a portable device to help Psychologists confirm mental health diagnosis e.g. depressions and anxiety): a non-invasive, portable device, for use by mental health care professionals, which complements traditional assessments. The characteristics of the device are immediate readouts (absence of lab analysis), ease of use and absence of behavioural data requirements (reducing privacy/ethical concerns). It will aid healthcare professionals provide rapid, reliable diagnosis, increasing confidence in medical treatments and patients’ recovery.
Team members: Mariam Basiouny (PhD), Dr Francois Sicard, Dr Mohamed Hassouna and Professor Anne Young
- Team RecoverEase: (a remote monitoring wearable health tech): to support clinicians with innovative technology for remote monitoring of post-surgical patients during both hospital and home recovery. Our platform integrates normal observations with wearable metrics, providing key clinical insights and a modified early warning score for deterioration. This approach aims to enable safe home monitoring, leading to earlier discharges, improved hospital capacity, and minimized A+E readmissions.
Team members: Dr Sarah James; Areeba Paracha (PhD) and Dr Taner Shakir
Cohort 2 (2022)
- Team COOLNeo: (an autoregulated cooling blanket): to be used in therapeutic hypothermia for newborns with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) in Lower middle-income countries (LMICs). The cooling therapy will help increase safety and ease, globally and ultimately reduce the risk of death and disability in newborns with HEI.
Team members: Dr Dinarda Ulf Nadobudskaya; Dr Tigmanshu Bhatnagar and Dr Minhong Wang
- Team EMMA: (a web-based software): Efficient Medical record Manager & Administration tool. EMMA will be a web-based software application only accessible to NHS staff that will scan patients’ electronic health care records and clinical notes to autofill preclinical forms used in elective, non-urgent, procedures. EMMA is an innovative tool that will reduce preparation time associated with clinical appointments and improve healthcare capacity in the NHS.
Team members: Dr Athina Dritsoula; Dr Florencia Tettamanti Boshier and Dr Dimitris Priftakis
Cohort 1 (2021)
- Team AccessBrain: (an innovative and robust 3D model of the human blood-brain-barrier to test/screen new drug candidates with potential to treat rare disorders). To accelerate much needed drug development for rare and common, neurological and non-neurological disorders with the aim to provide novel treatments for affected individuals, thereby making a real difference for patients and their families.
Team members: Dr Umesh Vivekanada; Dr Smita Salunke; Dr Karin Tuschl and Dr Francesco Paonessa
- Team PEEK: Participation, Education, Empowerment, Knowledge, aim is to build a patient led and patient focused, YouTube-based community, to aid the transition from paediatric care to adult care. Young people transitioning from paediatric to adult care risk being 'lost' in the system and their health deteriorating as a result. PEEK aims to help these young patients take ownership of their disease and managing their healthcare.
Team members: Dr Meredyth Wilkinson; Dr Matthew Bancroft; Dr Alexandra Vaideanu; Dr Evangelia Chrysikou and Dr Mehrdad Mizani
All teams consist of UCL researchers from various disciplines and backgrounds. The teams, and the funding, have been brought together as part of ACCELERATE Innovation: Team Challenge, a scheme that forms part of the wider ACCELERATE programme at UCL. ACCELERATE aims to promote, enable and support translational research for researchers through training and development and is a joint venture from the UCL Academic Careers Office and the UCL Translational Research Office. The Team Challenge has been organised in partnership with the UCL NIHR Biomedical Research Centres.
“We are so proud of what the teams have achieved, and we are inspired by the energy and enthusiasm that each participant brought to the ACCELERATE Innovation Team Challenge. We hope that the participants will draw on the skills and lessons, that they learnt during the training programme, in their careers going forward as they champion interdisciplinary working for healthcare research.“ ~ ACCELERATE Manager
Team Challenge was based around the idea of ‘What happens when researchers from different backgrounds and disciplines put their expertise together to solve healthcare challenges?’ It brought together participants who are all UCL researchers with an interest in healthcare. Their backgrounds, expertise, and experiences are wide ranging and diverse to create a truly interdisciplinary cohort. This includes engineers, molecular biologists, clinicians, among others.
Teams form in the first few weeks of the multi-week programme and are supported with training, hands-on experience, and funding for their healthcare innovations. Participants are encouraged to come up with proposals that are best solved by the unique combination of skills and experiences of their team members.
Teams are coached through a four-stage innovation process comprising (1) ideation, (2) influence, (3) iteration, and (4) implementation, to learn:
Effective team working strategies
Negotiation and engagement skills within a team and with external stakeholders
Solution creation and risk mitigation
Pitching skills and strategic planning for the future.
A major focus of the Team Challenge is the personal career development of each participant through training in leadership, teamwork, and communication. Indeed, we have received very positive feedback about the initiative in terms of both developing new collaborations as well as developing skills for how to work effectively in teams, which we hope participants take forward into their careers.
Feedback from participants include:
“The Team Challenge is a great opportunity to establish new collaborations across multiple disciplines that would have not developed without this programme. I have also developed new contacts across UCL and with external stakeholders that has helped my own work as well as the team’s.”
“I've been lucky to work in teams outside of the programme where there hasn't really been any conflict (personality, work or otherwise). The team [for the Team Challenge] at points had some moments of conflict so experiencing that, how to deal with it and move forward has been really valuable.”
Accelerate Team Challenge 2025 now open! Click here to apply
We look forward to further promoting the translational research culture within the UCL biomedical community. Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in our future training sessions and translational research initiatives.
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For enquiries about ACCELERATE translational research training, please contact:
Nasema Uddin, Translational Training Manager, Academic Careers Office (ACO)
Email: nasema.uddin@ucl.ac.uk