Meet the Torchbearer Award finalists: four Cambridge companies where purpose isn’t bolted on, it’s built in 

Delivered in partnership with Innovate Cambridge and Cambridge Innovation Capital, the award was created to recognise something that is critical to the next generation of Cambridge entrepreneurs and important to recognise: companies whose commercial success cannot be separated from the measurable good they do in the world.

Cambridge has built its reputation on breakthroughs that reshape entire industries. What the Torchbearer Award celebrates is something different and that sets Cambridge apart. It is not simply whether a company has invented something remarkable, but whether that invention has been built to serve its community as deliberately as it serves its stakeholders.

Winning organisations, the award’s founders decided, would need to demonstrate breakthrough innovation in science or technology, measurable real-world impact, a genuine commitment to strengthening their community, and responsible leadership in how their technology is developed and deployed.

As Kathryn Chapman, CEO of Innovate Cambridge, put it when the award launched: “Cambridge has long led the world in scientific and technological breakthroughs that have changed how we think and how we live. This award highlights those companies showing that innovation can, and should, strengthen the communities in which it operates.” Andrew Williamson, Managing Partner at Cambridge Innovation Capital, added that the aim was to shine a light on businesses “not only delivering exceptional innovation but doing so with a clear and intentional approach to long term societal value.”

Entries closed on 30 June, and the judging panel brought together some of the sharpest minds in Cambridge’s innovation economy: Michelle Lamprecht, Head of Corporate Affairs at Cambridge Innovation Capital and a specialist in ESG and impact strategy; Faye Holland, ecosystem builder and Partnership Director of The Cambridge x Manchester Partnership; Dr Shima Barakat, founder and CEO of CamBAST, creating regenerative innovation ecosystems globally; and Tabitha Goldstaub MBE, a tech entrepreneur, co-founder of LichenAI and author of How To Talk To Robots, recognised with an MBE for her contribution to artificial intelligence. Every entry was assessed against three weighted categories: innovation excellence, embedded societal value, and vision and future plans. Four companies now go forward to compete for the inaugural title, with the winner to be announced at the Business Weekly Awards gala dinner at Queens’ College, Cambridge, on Wednesday 16 September.

Narrowing the field was not straightforward. The four finalists range from a 200-person clinical stage pharmaceutical company with global partnerships to a three-person start up barely two years old, and the panel was conscious throughout of judging each on the ambition and delivery appropriate to its stage rather than by a single fixed yardstick.

What united all four finalists, in the judges’ eyes, was that societal purpose was not an afterthought bolted onto a business plan. It was written into the ambition of the company and how it was built.

Bicycle Therapeutics

Founded in 2009 and now employing around 200 people across Cambridge and Boston USA, Bicycle Therapeutics has built its business on a novel class of medicines it calls Bicycle molecules: fully synthetic peptides engineered to reach cancers that conventional antibody drug conjugates cannot touch. Its lead programmes, including zelenectide pevedotin and nuzefatide pevedotin, have generated Phase 2 data that judges described as clear tolerability evidence, drawn from more than 600 patients.

The panel called Bicycle’s platform mature and clinically validated, praising its process and supply chain innovation, particularly its work turning legacy nuclear material into a supply of therapeutic isotopes. Its societal record impressed too: a ten-year graduate placement scheme with the University of Bath, multiple PhD sponsorships, and an independently verified ESG rating that places it in the top two per cent of biotechnology companies globally.

Judges also highlighted the strength and credibility of its long-term vision, pointing again in particular to its supply chain innovation as evidence of a wider, responsible outlook.

Cyclana Bio

Cyclana Bio was founded in 2024 and is based at the Babraham Research Campus with a team of ten. Its focus is endometriosis, a condition affecting one in ten women for which there is still no curative treatment, and its innovation lies in modelling disease in human tissue itself rather than in cells grown on plastic or in mice, which cannot replicate the condition at all. In its first year the company has banked tissue from 40 donors and launched an NHS observational study now recruiting 500 women, work that has already earned it a place on Eli Lilly’s competitive European Gateway Labs programme.

Judges were struck by how strongly Cyclana embodied the intent behind the Torchbearer Award, despite being the earliest-stage company on the shortlist. The company’s societal value section was judged as central to the business rather than supplementary to it, built on lived experience, patient co-design, and a stated commitment to release research data openly rather than keep it proprietary. Judges also praised its consideration of alternatives to animal testing under the 3Rs framework and its clear five-year route to the clinic.

OtoImmune

Also at the start of their journey sits OtoImmune, founded in June 2024 and still only three full-time employees strong. Its platform, mOI Health, is a registered Class I medical device that combines genomic sequencing, immune testing and wearable data into what the company describes as a continuously growing immune health record, aimed at a field the judges agreed had been left behind by the precision medicine revolution already transforming oncology.

Judges called it one of the most interesting submissions in the pack and were struck by how completely societal purpose was built into the company from the outset. Given the company’s age, reaching MHRA registration, launching the platform and securing a formal value proposition assessment from Health Innovation East, part of the NHS Health Innovation Network, was regarded as strong delivery, with judges particularly struck by the strength of its early patient testimonials.

It was the responsible innovation section that drew the panel’s strongest praise: a four-layer AI safety framework and a four-consent model, giving members independently revocable control over how their data is used, were judged among the strongest in the entire field of entries. One judge summed it up as responsible innovation built as architecture, not policy.

Owlstone Medical

Owlstone Medical has been developing breath-based diagnostics since spinning out of Owlstone Inc in 2016 and today employs more than 130 people at Cambridge Science Park under the leadership of co-founder Billy Boyle MBE. Its Breath Biopsy platform analyses volatile organic compounds in exhaled breath to detect disease non-invasively, with programmes underway in lung cancer, multi-cancer detection, cirrhosis and digestive health, backed by more than 160 patents, over 120 peer reviewed publications, and partnerships stretching from AstraZeneca and GSK to the Gates Foundation and the FDA.

More than one judge described Owlstone’s submission as one that matched the philosophy of the award, with scientific excellence matched consistently by a genuinely embedded commitment to widening healthcare access, workforce development and responsible innovation.

The panel pointed to a comprehensive record on societal value, from its Form the Future partnership helping young people move from education into employment to board level oversight of equality, diversity and inclusion, and praised its staged, evidence led approach to bringing new diagnostics to market through peer review and regulatory collaboration.

A shortlist that speaks to the award’s purpose

Reading across all four finalists, what stands out is not any single breakthrough but a shared instinct and value of the Cambridge innovation ecosystem: that the return on innovation should be measured in more than revenue. Judges repeatedly noted that the strongest submissions treated societal contribution as inseparable from business strategy, not as a charitable activity running alongside it, and that the companies best able to demonstrate this tended to be the ones building it in from day one rather than retrofitting it later.

Kathryn Chapman, reflecting on the process, said it had been an incredible longlist and thanked the companies for their outstanding submissions and the judges for the difficult job of narrowing down to a shortlist of four. “I would be delighted for any of these four companies to win,” she said, “because each of them embodies the ethos of why we started the Torchbearer Award in the first place.”

Whoever takes the title will receive more than a trophy for the evening. Innovate Cambridge will develop a case study on the winning company, shared with its network of over 200 partner organisations and more than 500 stakeholders, and presented at its annual conference in October. For a first-year award, that is a fitting legacy: not just a night of recognition, but a lasting record of what responsible innovation in Cambridge looks like in practice.