Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Tuesday 29 April 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 29 April 2025.
Members present: Chi Onwurah (Chair); Emily Darlington; Dr Allison Gardner; Tom Gordon; Kit Malthouse; Steve Race; Adam Thompson.
Culture, Media and Sport Committee member present: Paul Waugh.
Question 14
Witness
I: Jake Davies, Managing Director, CoolLED.
Witness: Jake Davies.
Chair: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our innovation showcase. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovators and what more can be done. To inform our work, each member of the Committee takes a turn to select an innovator to share their story before our main evidence session. Kit Malthouse has brought today’s innovator, Jake Davies, from CoolLED. Kit, could you introduce them, please?
Q14 Kit Malthouse: Thank you very much, Chair. One of the great joys of being a constituency MP is discovering things about your constituency that you didn’t know. When I was first invited to visit CoolLED in my constituency, I thought, “Great, we need some ideas for lighting in the sitting-room and possibly disco lights for the kids.” Little did I know that lurking behind Tesco Enham Arch in Andover—although they have now moved and expanded—was a cutting-edge, internationally renowned business doing remarkable things with lighting in science. It is my great pleasure to present to Committee colleagues Jake Davies, who is the managing director of CoolLED.
Jake Davies: Thank you for inviting me. As mentioned, CoolLED is based in Andover in Hampshire. We design, manufacture, sell and support cutting-edge LED illumination systems, primarily for fluorescence microscopes for life science research, but also for industrial microscopy systems all over the world.
We introduced the first commercially available LED illumination system for fluorescence microscopy in 2006, following research at the University of Southampton. Fluorescence microscopy is a powerful imaging technique wherein scientists tag specific biological structures within the cells using fluorescent dyes, which must then be illuminated with very specific wavelengths or colours of light so that they can be seen clearly in the image. I have an example, which I will pass around, so that you can see that different parts of the cells become very apparent in the image once they have been dyed and illuminated with very specific lighting under the microscope.
Our illumination systems fundamentally consist of LEDs of particular colours mounted on to a substrate with a heat sink on the back to allow them to stay cool, hence the name CoolLED. Those LEDs are precisely controlled electronically and then optically combined. The particular example here has four such LEDs or channels. We then have some optics to bring them all together and combine them into one path. This attaches to the microscope and illuminates the sample within the microscope for imaging. Those are the insides of our product. We provide a family of products that are tuned to specific life science applications, varying in complexity and number of control channels—that particular example has four—with different wavelengths of interest for different fluorescent dyes and applications. Clearly, there are fitment options to fit all common microscopes. We also design and supply customised illumination systems based on the same technology but for specific OEM customer requirements—for example, for automated slide scanning microscope systems and for industrial optical inspection systems.
The problem we addressed was that, before CoolLED’s LED-based technology, mercury-based bulbs were frequently used for fluorescence microscopy, with many drawbacks. They are power hungry. They frequently need replacing, creating both downtime and hazardous mercury waste. They are difficult to control, often leading to photo damage of the tissue sample itself because they are simply too powerful, so you damage your sample before you can even image it—not ideal. LEDs offer superior performance, reliability, controllability and energy efficiency as well as environmental and sustainability benefits.
Our market opportunity began with microscopy in life science research labs. This is now well proven, developed and accepted globally. The traditional manual microscopy techniques are now transitioning into automated systems using robotics to move potentially hundreds of samples, and computer vision, big data processing and even AI to perform high numbers of sample imaging very quickly and with ever more detail faster than ever before. We see rising demand for automated imaging techniques which, too, require precise light delivery on to a sample of interest for quality control or defect detection across many verticals, from food processing to plastic sorting to semiconductor manufacturing.
Who uses and benefits from our technology? The end users of our systems are typically laboratory scientists involved in cutting-edge discoveries. For example, we have product on the International Space Station for research looking at how cells grow in 3D. Back down on earth, world-leading laboratories around the globe use our technology. In the UK this includes many leading universities and the Francis Crick Institute. Within life science and biomedical science, the research has led to new treatments for critical diseases such as cancer and dementia. In more industrial settings, automated optical inspections systems can increase the efficiency and quality of various industrial processes—for example, in semiconductor production, meeting the global demand for growth in computing, electronic and automotive industries, with significant industrial and economic impact.
Our approach is that we design and build everything in Andover, UK, where we employ around 50 people, but we export over 90% of our sales. We distribute our standard product range globally through resellers, but partner directly for customised solutions. Our approach to product development is to try to really understand the application’s needs, often through partnerships, whether academic or industrial, and then deploy our best-in-class engineering team to deliver world-class solutions. We believe in continuous improvement to maintain and further drive our differentiation. We are ambitious, committed, innovative and supportive of each other, our customers and our wider environment.
I generally consider the UK an excellent location for a niche technology company such as ours with global ambition. We have time zone overlap with practically the whole world, good global transport links, sensible taxation and export policy and a strong supply of university research that may be ripe for commercialisation. CoolLED’s core technology came from a university research project. We have since developed another product through a joint project with Strathclyde University.
Challenges in the UK are that engineering, in my opinion, does not have the reputation it should have, meaning that we do not create or struggle to create the home-grown engineering talent our technology businesses need. It can be challenging and complex to hire foreign talent. We have ever-weakening trade deals, first with Brexit and more recently with US tariffs, which can pose serious challenges to export to major developed markets.
What more could be done? UK technology business needs innovation, talent and ease of global trade. We need strong university research output and strong technological and commercial talent pools to draw on to bring those ideas to successful global commercial deployment, as well as schemes, policies and incentives to encourage those people to even try. In terms of driving innovation, we must continue to fund cutting-edge research and create the engineers of tomorrow. More kids, especially girls, in STEM, alongside world-class education opportunities, will create the talent needed for the CoolLEDs of the future. Schemes to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation from this talent pool, such as entrepreneurs’ relief, R&D tax credits, and Patent Box, should be bolstered and not cut. A faster patent application review service would also be helpful—two years is not a fast-track service—alongside clearer guidance to small, UK-based SMEs on how to access funding from schemes such as Innovate UK.
As UK technology businesses create solutions to global problems, making exporting easier, or remaining easier, is critical. A free trade deal with the US would certainly help businesses like CoolLED cement their already impressive competitive position in North America. Most important, we need to raise the profile of engineering in the UK as an opportunity to create meaningful careers, strong UK employment and global export potential. It is still impactful, motivating and important to make stuff in the UK. Thank you very much for your time.
Chair: Thank you so much, Jake. As an engineer, I very much support your thoughts on the importance and the contribution of engineering, but it has been absolutely fascinating to hear the number of applications of your technology and how you are making and designing it here in the UK. All I can say to you, Kit, is that you can find great scientific innovation walking around your constituency. Thank you very much, Jake, for joining us.