Ieso wins major accolade in Business Weekly Awards
Ieso Digital Health has been crowned Business of the Year in the 29th annual Business Weekly Awards, held at Queens’ College in Cambridge.
Ieso provides live, one-to-one cognitive behavioural therapy on behalf of the NHS and some of America’s biggest healthcare providers.
It is now integrating Artificial Intelligence into its platform for the first time, enabling therapists to receive date-led insights about each patient during the assessment stage of treatment, providing them with predictions of a patient’s presenting condition, severity of presentation and likelihood of completing a full course of therapy.
Kevin Calder, for sponsor Mills & Reeve told 250 local and international guests at the presentation dinner: “The platform encompasses the therapy, guides the therapist and improves therapy, as demonstrated by ever improving outcomes – something that has not been achieved in important areas like depression for 30 years.
“Ieso is also partnering with leading US institutions (Harvard and the Beck Institute), to help with the Ieso training in what will be a massive market opportunity for the business.”
The Cambridge Enterprise Lifetime Achievement Award went jointly to Sir Shankar Balasubramanian and Sir David Klenerman partner pioneers in genome sequencing.
Other Cambridge academic entrepreneurs honoured on the night were Tuomas Knowles for his work with Fluidic Analytics and Wren Therapeutics, and Professor Steve Jackson, founder of three companies and originator of Olaparib/Lynparza, partnered by AstraZeneca with Merck and valued as an asset at up to $17 billion.
Cambridge superchip designer Arm won the Graduate Business of the Year Award sponsored by Cambridge Judge Business School.
Judge also backed the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year which was won by Poppy Gustafsson, CEO of cyber defence world leader Darktrace. She pipped three other terrific finalists in Dr Jill Reckless (RxCelerate), Dr Sarah Howell of Arecor and Loubna Bouarfa of OKRA Technologies.
There was ample compensation for OKRA as the young company won the inaugural AI Innovation Award.
Life science companies contributed to a record entry for the sector this year and this was reflected by the decision to award two trophies in the Life Science Innovation category sponsored by AstraZeneca and MedImmune.
AstraZeneca executive Shaun Grady named PredictImmune (Best Product) and Crescendo Biologics (Best Platform) as the respective winners.
Another life science company, Mogrify, won the Disruptive Technology Award. Jeanette Walker of sponsor Cambridge Science Park told guests: “Mogrify’s technology can convert any mature cell type into any other mature cell type without going through a pluripotent stem cell – or even a progenitor cell-state. Mogrify will transform the development of life saving cell therapies via the licence of proprietary cell conversions tailored to any therapeutic application.”
The Young Company of the Year Award went to KisanHub, which is accelerating development of its Crop Intelligence Platform which brings data-led decision-making to both producers and suppliers within the agriculture industry.
KisanHub already has a user base of over 3,000 and its technology enables big data, cloud computing and machine learning to come together and make agriculture predictable and profitable.
The Kate Gross Award for Social Enterprise was won by CBM which tackles poverty, prevents blindness, improves health and changes the lives of disabled people around the world.
Last year it protected 23 million people from blinding diseases, enabled 39,008 children with disabilities to go to school and restored sight to 413,468 people through cataract surgery.
Engineering companies across various disciplines also starred. PragmatIC Printing won the Engineering Excellence Award while coding and marking world leader Domino Printing Sciences took the International Trade Champion prize.
International trade was also to the fore in the new UK/China Business Award sponsored by Cambridge China Centre. From an incredibly strong initial shortlist, Abcam emerged victorious.
China was once again its fastest growing major market in the last year, with sales increasing by over 22 per cent. Abcam, which sells life science tools to researchers worldwide, opened a China office in January 2014 and has grown exponentially ever since, showing a sustained commitment to the Chinese market.
Owlstone Medical, which has also forged an important alliance with China recently, took the ScaleUP of the Year accolade for accelerating trials and demand for its disease breathalyser.
Paul Mason of Innovate UK and Tim Minshall from the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge University each spoke at the event which also raised important funds for East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices. That was due in no small part from handsome prize donations from London Stansted Airport and The Jockey Club in Newmarket.
