Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent results have been achieved from medical research conducted by British and Israeli scientists through the Britain-Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership.

BIRAX will soon have funded 19 collaborative research projects focused on regenerative medicine and raised almost £10 million of funding, more than 90% of it from research foundations and philanthropic donors. This year a major new initiative, BIRAX Ageing, will launch which will be the main academic research theme for the next 4-5 years.

Principal Investigators presented BIRAX supported research at 71 conferences and workshops to over 21,000 Principal Investigators, postdoctoral students and students across 22 countries including the US, India, China, France, Japan, Germany, Sweden as well as to audiences in the UK and Israel. To date, 27 scientific articles have been published as a result of BIRAX projects and BIRAX funded research has been cited 635 times.

Three of the seven BIRAX projects which concluded in 2016, have registered patents and two project teams have been approached by biotech companies expressing an interest in licensing their intellectual property. Three BIRAX projects have secured further funding for research initiated under the BIRAX initiative.