Business initiative of the year - Apatech

Queen Mary, University of London. ApaPore, a safe and effective bone-graft material that approximates human bone, could mean an end to worries over the short supply of human bone confronting the medical profession. The manufacturer, ApaTech Ltd, expects ApaPore to improve the quality of medical procedures.

The product is a practical application of research from the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Biomedical Materials at Queen Mary, University of London, which set out to engineer the optimum structure and chemistry for a natural-bone substitute.

ApaTech is now a world leader in bone-graft technologies. Its products are used in 18 countries in a wide range of orthopaedic and spinal applications.

Magnus Goodlad, chief operating officer at IP Group and an award judge, said: "ApaTech is addressing an important area of unmet medical need and has delivered significant technical progress within the past year, including (US) Food and Drug Administration clearance for its Actifuse product, combined with continued strong revenue growth and a product launch in the US."

The other judge, Arthur Francis, dean of Bradford Management School, called ApaTech "a worthy winner from a strong field of candidates for this award", adding that it gave "an impressive all-round business performance".

The judges gave a special commendation to Ingenia, a spin-off from Imperial College London, that has developed a new anti-counterfeiting technology. They said: "The company is very new, but it has done all the right things to exploit this novel technology, in terms of obtaining funding, intellectual property protection and finding appropriate global partners that should enable it to establish a large market for the technology very quickly. It is poised to be a worthy contender for the award next year."