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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of benefits to the UK from Israeli advances in medicine, science and technology.

BIRAX (the Britain Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership) is a £10 million initiative of the UK Government and the British Council in Israel funding cutting-edge research into regenerative medicine. Over £8 million has been committed to 19 projects in the UK and Israel funding research in Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham and Edinburgh universities. The programme provides an invaluable framework for enabling knowledge exchange between UK and Israeli researchers.

Researchers presented BIRAX supported research at 71 conferences and workshops to over 21,000 scientists and researchers, 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.

In BIRAX’s first five years, three scientific conferences and two workshops have been held for BIRAX grantees, reaching over 1,000 participants from over 110 British and Israeli universities.

This year a major new initiative, BIRAX Ageing, launched which will be the main academic research theme for the next 4-5 years.