LONDON – June 24, 2026 - Deep Science Ventures (DSV), a UK-based venture creator, today announces that its Venture Science Doctorate (VSD) has expanded its global network to include 40 leading academic lab partners. This milestone, coinciding with the progress of its three doctoral cohorts, solidifies a radical ‘de-institutionalised’ model that grants 14 Venture Scientists unprecedented, fluid access to world-class laboratories across the UK, EU and US.
The partners include The National Physical Laboratory, CGIAR’s Alliance of Bioversity; Health & Life Science Alliance Heidelberg Mannheim (including the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the German Cancer Research Center); GlaxoSmithKline; King’s College London; Max Planck Institutes; The Satellite Applications Catapult; and Europe’s largest research asset- The Helmholtz Association. Additional partner institutions reach as far as Scotland, Saudi Arabia, India and the Bahamas.
The VSD is a pioneering model of entrepreneurship-focused doctoral training, backed by a high-profile consortium including SPRIND and Builders Vision. It was built to systematically dismantle the structural barriers that traditionally prevent scientific breakthroughs from reaching the real world.
Traditionally, PhD researchers are tethered to a single institution’s equipment and specific faculty interests. The VSD removes these geographic and bureaucratic barriers, allowing candidates to move between specialised labs to follow the science where it leads. By decoupling the researcher from a single institution, the VSD ensures that the quest for societal outcomes- such as boosting longevity or scaling the energy transition- is never limited by the physical walls of one lab.
Additionally, securing independent research funding is notoriously difficult for PhD students, often forcing them to align their work with existing grants rather than market needs. The VSD provides a dedicated funding safety net, enabling Venture Scientists to focus entirely on high-impact venture creation without the constraints of traditional academic grant cycles.
Finally, while traditional PhDs focus on publication, the VSD is optimised for commercialisation. Through its portable, high-speed approach, DSV has empowered elite Venture Scientists to enter world-class laboratories and rapidly prototype their breakthroughs. Current cohort members are tackling monumental global challenges: Daniela Pamias Lopez is collaborating with Harvard's renowned Professor David Sinclair’s lab to rejuvenate ovaries and prevent diseases linked to hormonal decline, while Vlad Iorgulescu has secured a prestigious €200k validation grant from SPRIND to convene a top-tier fusion reactor consortium alongside key figures from Commonwealth Fusion, the University of Alabama Sefkorp and Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Simultaneously, other visionaries are leveraging major institutional partnerships to deploy their innovations. Climate Venture Scientist Brett Cornick developed a grid-rebalancing, AI-driven virtual power plant designed to curb global warming, prototyping it within SPRIND’s €12 million Composite Learning Challenge. Meanwhile, Todor Cross is analysing real patient samples at King’s College London to build a life-saving continuous monitor aimed at intercepting heart failure during critical, post-heart-attack timeframes.
"The Venture Science Doctorate is designed to drive the creation of high impact, de-risked companies that launch with a clear path to commercialisation,” said Dr. Thane Campbell, Dean of Education at Deep Science Ventures. “By stripping away the typical constraints of traditional academia and giving talent the freedom to move fluidly between labs, we are optimising the conditions for PhDs to solve complex problems, not just generate papers."
Through this decentralised infrastructure, candidates can use the world’s most advanced facilities as needed- from high-precision measurement labs to biological containment units. This collaborative lab-sharing model accelerates the transition from hypothesis to prototype, bypassing the typically long wait times for institutional resource allocation.
"We are proud to open our doors to members of the Venture Science Doctorate cohort and be a party to the vital work they are doing to tackle both environmental and social challenges,” said Maddy Parsons, Dean of Research Excellence Frameworks, King’s College London. “This model helps create the safety net that prevents high-impact venture creation from falling through the cracks of traditional academic funding."
“DSV has a coding language for invention,” said Sinclair Dunlop, Managing Partner, Epidarex Capital. “This is the unlock the UK needs to launch potentially hundreds of robust deep tech and related spinouts. It also includes the process data needed to transition scientists into successful entrepreneurs across key sectors. This platform will scale multiple startups every year which is hugely exciting.”
The Venture Science Doctorate remains the world’s first sector-agnostic, venture-focused PhD, with a commitment to diversity and outcome-led reasoning. By training the next generation of Venture Scientists, DSV is not just creating startups but rewriting the blueprint for how we solve our most complex global problems.
About Deep Science Ventures
Deep Science Ventures is a venture creator building deeptech companies in 4 sectors: Agriculture, Climate, Computation and Pharmaceuticals. For just under a decade, DSV has pioneered venture creation through funded partnerships with organisations like Coca-Cola, AbbVie, Anglo American, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency - ARIA (the UK's ARPA), and Cancer Research UK. DSV’s portfolio, worth over half a billion dollars, has raised more than $240m from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Sequoia, Sam Altman, and Patrick Collison. DSV is a global team of scientists and exited founders based in London, Tokyo, and Boston, with backgrounds from Bell Labs, Imperial College, and Intel.