b'ForewordA FEW WORDS FROM OUR CEOThe National Biofilms Innovation Centre (NBIC)RESEARCHenters its fourth year still very much focussedOur funding has allowed us to continue to support on supporting and connecting the industrial andour cohort of Interdisciplinary Research Fellows (IRFs) academic biofilm community across the UK and withacross our four core universities. They are all actively our international partners in the USA, Singapore,engaged in a mixture of underpinning research, and India and Europe. NBICs intent remains to behaveprojects with industry partners.in a national, inclusive and transparent way to benefit our community.We judge ourselves byINNOVATIONour ability to harness and translate the capability,This year we ran our fourth Proof of Concept (POC) knowledge and technology in the prevention,call, with a record number of applications from which detection, management and engineering ofwe awarded 18 new projects. This brings our portfolio biofilms across the UK. We believe we are havingto 81 POC projects funded from 207 applications and a significant impact across all these dimensions asan NBIC (on behalf of UKRI) investment of 4.4m, with you will see in this report.We recently updateda total of 6.7m value when company contributions our market impact report and estimate the valueare included. As our first projects finish, we are now in the UK of addressing biofilm opportunities andtracking the impact of these on the translation of challenges is 45bn (and $4tn globally). technology. In addition, we have run four themed workshops resulting in policy papers and multiple I am delighted that our membership has further grownindustry and academic collaborations and connections. to 63 UK research institutions and that these academicIf circumstances allow, our fifth workshop will run later partners share our desire to collaborate and connectthis year.with the (approximately) 250 companies we continue to talk to across a range of sectors. The last year hasAll of this innovation activity is supported by a core been immensely challenging for everyone. DespiteNBIC team including three field-based sector specialists circumstances, we have been able to continue towho visit and connect our partner companies and communicate with companies and academics via web- research institutions. based tools and we have also held several well attendedTRAINING webinars in conjunction with groups as diverse asWe continue to build our cohort of PhD students across the Society for Applied Microbiology (SfAM), the Indiaour four core universities, for whom we are running a Biofilms Society, the Singapore National Biofilmscore Doctoral Training Programme (BITE). Consortium (SNBC) and Cosmetics Cluster UK (CCUK).At heart we aim to connect unmet industrialIt is very clear that everyone involved in biofilms across and commercial needs and possible scientific orthe UK remains jointly committed to our vision of technological solutions that may exist in our partners.delivering both breakthrough science and technologies We do this both through personal introduction, and byto control and exploit biofilms, and to inspire the next sharing needs and solutions across our network.generation of research leaders and entrepreneurs. We endeavour to build on three key pillars that our- MARK RICHARDSON, CEO, SEPTEMBER 2021funders (BBSRC, Innovate UK and the Hartree Centre) have asked us to establish, namely:3'