Welcome to this public session of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. Before we start, I want to welcome Layla Moran, the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, who is our first guest and will be joining us for this morning’s proceedings. I am excited to introduce what is my innovation for the Committee, with the support of the entire Committee: the first innovation showcase session. The UK has fantastic innovators: scientists, businesses, technicians, technologists and researchers up and down the country. They develop the products and services that make life better for all of us, but too often we do not hear enough about them. We do not know their stories—their successes, failures, opportunities and challenges. We do not know what might be just around the corner. We are starting today with my first choice, Dr Marie Labus. She is the founder and CEO of Newcastle University spin-out AMLo Biosciences Ltd. I chose AMLo because its innovation is about something we all know about and all fear—cancer and, specifically, skin cancer. It can help to save lives as well as helping the NHS to provide better patient care through improved diagnosis and better use of resources. Dr Labus leads an all-female exec team and is concerned that only 3% of funding goes to female-led innovators, as she believes that radical change in attitudes is required to make commercial reality from the fantastic potential arising from British, and especially north-eastern, innovations. Dr Labus, you have 10 minutes to present your innovation.

Thank you very much. Good morning, and thanks for giving me and my company the opportunity to be the first to come and speak to you in the Committee. I want to tell you what we are doing to improve outcomes for patients with early-stage melanoma. As Chi said, I am Marie Labus, the female CEO of AMLo Biosciences. We are based in Newcastle upon Tyne in a thriving ecosystem of life science companies, which are spun out of the five wonderful universities there. I and my co-founder, Penny Lovat, started AMLo because we were really interested in personalised medicine, which means that every patient is treated based on their own disease rather than one size fits all. In melanoma we saw an opportunity, and a need, to do things differently. What do I mean by that? The image I have here is of a skin biopsy taken from a patient with a suspected melanoma. It goes to pathology, where they take a couple of sections from it and stain it pink, so that the pathologist can see the cells clearly. In this case, there is a melanoma in the top layer of the skin, between the epidermis and the dermis. The good news is that most melanoma diagnoses are made at this stage, when there is no evidence of spread. That is a good thing, because melanoma is the most serious of the skin cancers, because it likes to spread. The bad news is that, even though the diagnoses are made early, 15% of the patients will go on to develop metastatic disease requiring surgery and drug treatment. There is no way the pathologist can look at the early biopsy and tell who will develop metastatic disease and who will not. What happens is that all the early-stage patients are treated in the same way, as if they are at risk of developing metastatic disease. That watchful waiting causes patients huge anxiety, because they have to return to hospital regularly, for up to five years, to be monitored. It uses a lot of resources in the NHS, unnecessarily, and, ultimately, it adds to waiting lists and there are poorer patient outcomes. The other challenge of melanoma is that it is a cancer whose incidence is increasing at an alarming rate. That is partly because of an ageing population and people like me—I include myself in the demographic—who went out, in their youth, with no sun protection. There was not as much publicity as now around the damage that UV causes. Now that we are ageing, melanomas are the result of this uncontrolled UV exposure. More alarmingly, in the younger population and especially young women, the incidence of melanoma is increasing because of sunbed use. Our clinical colleagues tell us that there is a tsunami of new cases on the horizon and there is no way our healthcare systems can manage them through watchful waiting. How are we addressing this? The little packet I am holding contains two antibodies and it is our first product, AMBLor. We developed it through seven years of blood, sweat and tears and £8 million of investment, to get to the stage where it is now approved for use in the UK and is CLIA-approved for use in the US. We truly believe that the two antibodies in the packet could be game changing for the management of early-stage melanoma. How does it work? Here on the two boards I am holding is the same biopsy I showed you, but it has been stained with the two antibodies in the packet—you can see the brown staining, which stains the skin overlying the melanoma. The two proteins AMBRA1 and loricrin are present normally in everyone’s skin. We have shown through extensive clinical validation that a patient with a melanoma tumour that is at low risk of spreading will get a picture, with staining of the two proteins, the same as on these two boards. If the melanoma is at risk of spreading, the pathologist will see gaps, or there will be pieces of staining that do not exist any more, compared to the normal skin; so it is quite simple for them to identify low-risk tumours, versus those where there is a risk. It is very simple to do. It uses the same biopsy that is taken to diagnose the melanoma and can be done in the same pathology lab where the diagnosis is initially made. Using the test, a patient who is at very low risk of metastasis can be reassured and have a more conservative follow-up, which saves money and resources and has a positive impact on waiting lists. That allows healthcare professionals to focus on the patients for whom there is genuine risk of the disease spreading. Ultimately, that will improve patient outcomes. The next stage for us is to get wide adoption in the UK and the US. That is where the real hard work begins. Getting healthcare innovations adopted is very difficult and expensive. We are currently trying to raise another round of funding, which is challenging. In the UK, there are a limited number of funds that will invest in a company that is at the stage mine is at. As Chi said earlier, less than 3% of funding goes to female-founded companies, so I am up against a real challenge to get my company funded. In the last six months, I have spoken to investors who are not based in the UK. They are mostly in the US. The challenge for a UK-based company is that the investors will try to encourage you to relocate outside the UK, as part of the investment deal. That sucks innovations out of the UK. It means that UK patients are unlikely to benefit, we lose jobs, and the economy fails. Our early work, which got us to develop AMBLor, was funded, originally, by UK charities; so for us it is important that UK patients benefit from the technology. The next challenge we face is getting innovations into the NHS. The NHS is not encouraged to be innovative. It wants to do things the way it has always done things. The process for adoption is bureaucratic and slow, and very focused on drugs. We have found with AMBLor that adoption has been far easier and quicker in the US than in the UK. That is really disappointing. We would like NHS trusts to change mindset and be empowered to adopt innovations quickly. That is something that the Government could help us with. I do not want to end on a negative note. The future is really bright for us as a company and for the ecosystem that we have in the UK. Besides AMBLor, we have five other products in late development that could help other patients with different skin cancers. Once they are on the market they will help clinicians to treat patients based on their own individual risk. They will save resources, which can be invested elsewhere, and, ultimately, they will improve patient outcomes. That is why we started the company. Thank you for listening.

Thank you very much.

We are trying to raise £10 million, currently.

Thank you.