Proteus is a free educational VR experience developed by FourPlus Immersive, a Birmingham-based life sciences VR company co-founded by Professor Ivan Wall of the University of Birmingham and Dr Hayley Mulhall. It is explicitly designed to address a real skills gap: the UK cell and gene therapy sector needs thousands of trained manufacturing professionals and technicians over the coming decade, and Proteus aims to be the gateway experience that generates that interest among young people.

The experience takes students on a journey from the clinical context — patients receiving life-saving cell and gene therapies — through a real Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) production facility, into a suspension of living cells, and finally inside a human cell itself. Each stage is grounded in real science and real facilities: the manufacturing environment is modelled on the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult's large-scale GMP facility in Stevenage.

The app runs on standalone Meta Quest headsets, requiring no PC or wired connection. That makes deployment in classrooms straightforward: a set of Meta Quest headsets can be pre-loaded with Proteus from the App Lab store and used without internet connectivity during the session itself. The experience is self-contained, guided, and approximately 15–20 minutes long, fitting comfortably within a lesson period.