From tours of local university research and lab space to visits with local tech incubators and accelerators, hospitals, and health systems, a delegation of more than 20 U.K. companies spent two days immersed within the Tampa Bay region’s innovation ecosystem.
The U.K.’s Department for Business and Trade hosted the trade delegation in collaboration with OCO Global and the British Consulate-General in Miami.
The mission brought the delegation of life sciences companies across Florida and to Tampa in partnership with the Tampa Bay Economic Development Council. The visit provided U.K. companies the opportunity to explore potential market expansion, collaboration and partnership opportunities.
Niall Mackenzie, His Majesty’s Trade Commissioner (Ambassador) for North America, also joined the group in Tampa.
“The United Kingdom and Florida are deep and significant economic partners. With bilateral goods trade worth $6.4 billion last year, and with 67,500 Floridians employed by U.K. companies in 2021, we are collaborating more than any other foreign direct investor,” Mackenzie, said in a statement.
The companies participated in a pitch night on Sept. 10 at The University of Tampa’s Entrepreneurship Center to showcase and discuss the assistance or opportunities they seek. On Sept. 11, a fireside chat with local and statewide leaders examined key Florida initiatives and the health care innovation and research taking place in Tampa.
Jonathan Watkins is the CEO of Optellum, an Oxford-based lung cancer AI company. Optellum has an FDA-cleared reimbursable software device that optimizes lung cancer diagnosis and treatment.
“One of the problems with lung cancer as a whole is that you get poor survival rates because it gets diagnosed very late,” Watkins said. “Whereas if you catch people at the stage that they have these lung nodules, you can diagnose and treat it very early and truly improve patient outcomes.”
According to its website, Optellum has an office in Houston at the Texas Medical Center and Watkins said the opportunities to expand into the Florida market are “attractive.”
"I think there are so many innovative opportunities with Tampa General, BayCare, and other health systems that give fantastic rundowns of the innovations they want to bring into their hospital settings,” Watkins said.
Cultivating life sciences
There’s also a compelling business case for international companies like Optellum looking to continue expanding into the U.S. market, said Craig J. Richard, president and CEO of the Tampa Bay Economic Development Council.
“We’ve had an intentional strategy focused on cultivating our life sciences industry for the last 15 years,” Richard said in a statement. “Similarly, we have spent the last 10 years strengthening ties with international trading partners for foreign direct investment opportunities, and we’ve seen strong interest from companies in the U.K. that have ultimately chosen to expand to our area.”
Medwise AI CEO and Co-Founder Keith Tsui said the trade corridor mission has been “influential” because the founders and innovators come from various healthtech, medtech, biotech, and pharma spaces.
Medwise AI leverages large language models and builds an AI-powered search engine for health professionals.
In recent months, Tsui said the company wants to focus on the people it serves and find partners who value the same things.
“There can be limited resources. We're not Google, we're not Amazon. We need to [narrow] down and focus on some areas or pain points that our partners want us to solve together with them. So that's what we're here for,” Tsui said. “We really want to find those partners.”
U.K. life sciences are in global demand, with goods exports valued at more than $34.7 billion in 2022, according to Tampa Bay EDC. The group will head to Palm Beach before closing out the trip in Miami/Fort Lauderdale.
“The British Consul General described [this visit] as organized serendipity. What he means by that is that you've got these chance collisions from people that you wouldn't think will necessarily be part of your mission and your journey,” Watkins said. But they can lead to second, third, fourth, and fifth-degree connections that mean you can bring tremendous value and lasting impact into places you didn't think of.”
