Translate MedTech was a partnership of six Universities in the Leeds and Sheffield City Region: Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds, Leeds Beckett, Sheffield Hallam and York. We have offered a wide range of support for early stage medtech ideas, including training courses, workshops, innovation clinics and secondment schemes.
Translate has aimed to develop innovation skills that couldn’t be taught in a classroom, offered experience in a new sector or environment, and helped build new contacts outside of the usual workplace. We have worked with businesses, charities and innovation organisations in the medical technology sector to develop a secondment scheme, providing access to academics at the cutting edge of science and technology. Secondments help to diversify a workforce and have enabled our network to identify and secure future skilled employees or collaborators.
Translate ran a very successful Training and Development Programme delivered through a flexible, pick and mix of introductory, stand-alone training courses, designed to equip researchers with the skills needed to translate research ideas into medical technology products and clinical solutions. We covered a range of topics from medical device regulations and IP, to managing a professional social media profile.
As the programme draws to a close, we developed two of our most popular topics into virtual on-demand courses which are free for our consortium to access.
Each course is broken into digestible chapters, and lasts a total 30 minutes:
This course is an introduction to developing medical technologies, understanding the market opportunity, identifying unmet needs, intellectual property rights and more.
By the end of this course, you will be briefed with everything you need to know to develop robust medical technology solutions to real problems.
This course is an introduction to the regulatory requirements for placing medical devices on the market and CE marking. It will help you to decipher all the regulatory jargon and understand the new Medical Device Regulations in Europe as well as UK legislation.
By the end of the course, you should be well set up to understand requirements and responsibilities, and plan your regulatory and clinical strategy.
Visit our Bulletin page to access the full course content via your individual institution.
Our secondment scheme has provided the opportunity for researchers at our partner universities to temporarily take up a role in a complementary organisation, with travel and accommodation funded by the Translate MedTech programme. Host organisations came from across the sector, and included hospitals and healthcare providers, companies, innovation teams, international laboratories, and more. We also encouraged secondments-in: for academics and researchers to host clinicians, industrialists or innovation specialists.
You can read blogs from our secondees.
We have hosted innovation workshops that are driven by a real clinical need. These workshops have provided an opportunity to form new collaborations and develop potential new technologies. We have also provided support with research-led funding applications exploring new technologies, and secondments to help progress early stage ideas.
Our Innovation Champions, embedded in each of the Translate MedTech partner universities, shared a wealth of experience and expertise in developing medical technologies.
They have been on-hand to offer advice about technology progression and/or to enhance innovation skills and capabilities. Together, they have shared good practice and created new opportunities for collaboration.
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