On Monday 23 February the Rainbow Seed Fund hosted an event at the CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory to celebrate of Fund's achievements in investing in the science and technology of its partner organisations since it began operating in late 2002. The celebration was attended by senior managers of the partner organisations, Fund directors, technology transfer specialists and other friends of the Fund.

Rainbow's Chairman, Bruce Smith, and Terry Swainbank, representing the Fund Manager, Midven Ltd, gave an overview of the Fund's progress and an insight into its plans for the future. During the evening, David Gahan and Gareth Jones gave enlightening talks on two specific investments with which they are associated.

David Gahan from Oxsensis Ltd spoke about the development of innovative fibre optic sensor technology for extreme industrial environments, originating from the Central Microstructure Facility at RAL and Gareth Jones from L3 Technology Ltd, in association with the Synchrotron Radiation Source at CCLRC's Daresbury Laboratory, spoke about the design of a revolutionary new near-patient cholesterol testing kit that could slash the lab-based test turn around time from the present two weeks to less than 60 seconds.

At the end of the event, the winner of the 2003 Business Ideas Competition was announced. The winning proposal came from Jonathan James, Chris Mann and Brian Maddison of CCLRC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, for their idea behind the world's first compact terahertz imaging camera for security screening purposes. Jonathan, Chief Executive Officer of ThruVision Ltd, the company set up to exploit terahertz technology said of the award, "I am delighted to accept this prize on behalf of the ThruVision team. The prize money has come at the best time for us, just as ThruVision is spinning out from RAL, and it is further motivation for the team to accelerate our product development".

The competition was run to attract ideas for commercial exploitation from researchers at CCLRC, PPARC institutes and UKAEA' s Fusion Division. Fund Manager Terry Swainbank said of the winning proposal, "The idea is of such merit that we are proposing to back a spin-out company based on the idea with £250,000, and another venture capital fund has offered co-investment of £2.25m". On the other entrants in the competition, Terry explains, "There were other interesting ideas submitted and we are pursuing them in the hope that we might be able to commercialise their technology in the future".

For further information:

The Rainbow Seed Fund - enquiries@rainbowseedfund.com
ThruVision Ltd - http://www.thruvision.com /  info@thruvision.com
Oxsensis Ltd - http://www.oxsensis.com /  info@oxsensis.com
L3 Technology Ltd -  p.m.vernon@dl.ac.uk