Levelling Up Life Science with Digital Clusters: The P4 Approach

The UK's university life science sector is world-leading, with unrivalled potential to translate this research excellence into commercial success through university spinouts. However, academic founders face unique challenges that may lower their odds of success.

These can range from lacking access to mentoring and business support to the wide range of spinout terms offered by different universities, which in turn complicates the spinout fundraising process.

Nathan McNally will share how he co-founded the P4 Precision Medicine Accelerator to address these challenges.

By creating digital clusters for life science spinouts, the P4 accelerator and its sibling programme, Cancer Tech Accelerator, have taken a distributed approach to mimicking the benefits of being part of an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

P4 enables academic founders anywhere in the UK to enjoy the same level of investor networking, expert mentoring, and entrepreneurial community that they would find in an existing life science entrepreneurship hub.

Since 2019, the P4 Precision Medicine Accelerator has supported more than 170 companies through its accelerator programmes to raise over £200 million in equity funding and more than £30 million in grant funding.