Introducing Zinc’s 2025 Science-for-Impact Report

Unlocking the Power of Science-for-Impact

Science has always been humanity’s greatest engine for progress. From antibiotics to the internet, vaccines to renewable energy, it has repeatedly reshaped what is possible: extending lives, transforming economies, and redefining how we live. But today, the global innovation system that once powered this progress is stalling. Despite record levels of funding, talent, and technology, too little of our collective scientific potential is translating into real-world impact.

Here at Zinc, we exist to change that.

Our mission is to unlock the power of Science-for-Impact – building ventures, partnerships and talent programmes that mobilise world-class research around the problems that matter most: improving the health of people and the planet.

Our 2025 Science-for-Impact Report brings this mission to life. It captures a growing movement of scientists, entrepreneurs, and partners who are building the future: from new diagnostics and therapeutics to green hydrogen systems, advanced biomaterials and AI tools for energy and agriculture. It also introduces new ways Zinc is working to rewire the system itself: building the connective tissue between science, innovation, and impact.

Why Science-for-Impact Matters

When science works, the results are extraordinary. The Green Revolution averted global famine. Antibiotics and vaccines extended life expectancy by decades. International cooperation repaired the ozone layer and eliminated acid rain.

Yet today, progress has slowed. Cancer, dementia, and mental health conditions remain among the world’s leading causes of suffering. Climate change is accelerating. Agriculture and industry still depend on unsustainable systems. The promise of emerging frontiers – from engineering biology to AI – is real, but translation into impact is too slow.

This is not for lack of ingenuity or investment. Rather, it is a symptom of systemic inertia: fragmented funding, misaligned incentives, and institutional siloes that make it hard for discoveries to move from lab to life.

Zinc’s Science-for-Impact Vision starts with a simple conviction: to meet the challenges of the 21st century, we must build new institutions and platforms that pull science forward by mission, not push it sideways by discipline. We need a new kind of ecosystem that connects researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and public institutions around shared goals for health and sustainability.

This is the mission Zinc was founded to pursue.

What’s Inside Our 2025 Impact Report

This year’s Science-for-Impact Report showcases the momentum building across Zinc’s three pillars – Investment, Innovation Partnerships, and Inflection – and across our growing portfolio of 38 ventures across health and the environment.

It is both a reflection of what has been achieved over the past year and a look ahead at what comes next.

1. The Science-for-Impact Opportunity

The report explores two of the greatest frontiers for impact: health and the environment.

• In health, the opportunity spans diagnostics, therapeutics, engineering biology, and clinical services, a global market exceeding $1.6 trillion, where scientific breakthroughs can extend healthspan and radically improve care delivery.
• In the environment, the scale is equally vast. Industrial decarbonisation, circular materials, and climate adaptation represent multi-trillion-dollar markets essential to economic resilience and planetary stability.

Zinc’s ventures and programmes operate at the cutting edge of both. They demonstrate how mission-driven science can unlock enormous value – not only economic, but human and environmental.

2. The Science-for-Impact Portfolio

At the heart of the report we take a look at Zinc’s growing Science-for-Impact portfolio: 38 early-stage ventures applying deep science to transform health and environmental outcomes.

Each of these companies has been backed by Zinc, with three quarters coming through a Zinc venture building programme, where scientists, clinicians, engineers, and innovators come together to design new solutions to mission-driven challenges.

In health, our ventures span four categories: Medical Devices, Therapeutics, Engineering Biology, and Clinical Services. They are building technologies to detect lung cancer from a single breath, revolutionise autoimmune disease management, and develop safer RNA therapies and precision biologics for complex diseases.

In the environment, our portfolio tackles the twin challenges of decarbonisation and resilience. Our founders are engineering low-carbon manufacturing processes, next-generation hydrogen systems, AI-driven energy optimisation platforms, and recyclable biomaterials that replace plastic and critical minerals.

These ventures exemplify the diversity of pathways through which science translates into innovation to become tangible impact. Some ventures are spinning technologies out of leading universities; others are spinning them in from industry or developing new IP from scratch. Collectively, they represent the front line of a new generation of science-based entrepreneurship – that is bold, interdisciplinary, and mission-driven.

3. The Journey to Success

Building science-led ventures is hard. Traditional success metrics like revenue or user growth often lag far behind the early scientific and technical milestones that determine whether an idea can scale.

To address this, Zinc has developed its Science-for-Impact Journey to Success Framework, a structured way to define, measure, and communicate progress across different categories of venture.

The framework maps eight archetypes – from therapeutics to green technology devices – each with distinct scientific, regulatory, and market pathways. By tracking progress across key dimensions (technology, market, business model, IP, team, and funding), it provides a transparent, accountable view of how early-stage innovation matures into measurable impact.

This approach helps founders, funders, and partners align on what success looks like at each stage, turning the uncertainty of deep tech innovation into an intentional, evidence-based journey.

Beyond Ventures: Building the Ecosystem for Science-for-Impact

Zinc’s ambition extends beyond venture creation. Achieving Science-for-Impact at scale requires systemic change: new models of collaboration, funding, and talent development.

Zinc Innovation Partners

Through Zinc Innovation Partners, we are working with leading funders and institutions – including UKRI, NIHR, the Vivensa Foundation, and Wellcome – to reimagine how science is translated into impact.

This year’s report highlights ecosystem programmes such as:

• The Multidisciplinary Food Systems Catalyst, with BBSRC and ESRC, bringing together 100 scientists across disciplines to tackle food system challenges.
• Healthy Ageing Catalyst Programmes, which have supported 73 research teams across 43 UK universities to commercialise innovations that help people live longer, healthier lives.
• RADIANT, the UK’s new Centre of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation for AI and digital health, where Zinc is helping design user-centred regulatory tools for SMEs.
• A collaboration with Wellcome, catalysing partnerships across academia, startups, and lived experience to accelerate innovation in digital mental health.

Together, these initiatives show how the barriers between research and application can be dismantled, and how funders, entrepreneurs, and policymakers can co-design systems that make science work faster and better for society.

Inflection by Zinc

The third pillar of Zinc’s work, Inflection, focuses on people.

Over the next decade, Zinc aims to unlock the power of 100,000 mid-career professionals – the extraordinary individuals with 10–25 years of experience who are ready to pivot their careers toward impact.

Inflection is a new peer-to-peer platform that helps these individuals identify and achieve their next “inflection point”, the pivotal 100-day steps that compound into a 1,000-day transformation. Combining coaching, community, and AI tools, Inflection offers an operating system for purpose-driven careers in science and innovation.

It’s a bold bet: that by unlocking frustrated talent at scale, we can unlock a new era of applied science and purposeful innovation.

A New Kind of Institution

Just as the Max Planck Institutes, DARPA, and the Human Genome Project redefined what science could achieve in their time, we believe the 21st century demands a new type of institution – one capable of bridging discovery, invention, and adoption at speed and scale.

Zinc is building that institution.

By combining investment, venture building, innovation partnerships, and talent development, we are creating a system optimised not for maintenance, but for transformation. A system that breaks siloes, rewards risk-taking, and aligns capital, talent, and science around shared missions.

Our vision is simple but ambitious: a world where the best minds and ideas are applied to the biggest problems, not trapped in incremental projects or disconnected systems.

Looking to the Future

The Science-for-Impact Report 2025 is both a showcase and a call to action. It demonstrates what can be achieved when science, entrepreneurship, and purpose come together – and invites others to join us in scaling this movement.

Through our three pillars:

• Investment turns scientific ideas into scalable ventures.
• Innovation Partnerships work with funders to reshape the ecosystem.
• Inflection empowers individuals to achieve greater impact in their careers.

Together, they form a new architecture for how science can deliver for society.

The challenges we face – from health crises to environmental breakdown – are immense. But so is the potential. We believe the solutions are within reach, if we can unlock the talent, knowledge, and collaboration already around us.

To everyone working at the intersection of science, innovation, and impact: join us. Whether you’re a researcher, entrepreneur, policymaker, or investor, there has never been a more important time to turn science into impact.

Read the full report, explore the ventures and collaborations, and discover how you can help unlock the extraordinary individuals who will unlock the future.

Download the 2025 Science-for-Impact Report here