Caution from UK investors is sending many life science start-ups to the USA in search of finance. But the country retains its edge in developing innovative technology.

A discussion session at the UK Science Park Association’s three-day 40th anniversary conference, at Warwick University, heard that investors and venture capital firms were nervous of the high failure rate in drug development.

Hitesh Sanganee, head of emerging innovations at Astra Zeneca, said end-to-end costs of developing a drug were “north of £2 billion” while the success rate for new drugs was less than 10%.

Those statistics are behind a new business called Ignota Labs, that is using AI to rescue failed drugs that have been shelved.

Chief executive Sam Windsor explained that more than half of the 100,000s of drug failures every year were down to safety problems.

Ignota’s AI platform uses deep learning to solve the safety problems, allowing previously discarded drugs to be used in treatment.

A two-year-old seed stage company, Mr Windsor said it had survived with grants and constant fundraising but had struggled to secure serious UK investment. A trip to San Francisco had resulted in a $5m venture capital investment.

Mr Windsor said US investors saw their UK and European VC opposite numbers as “risk averse”, or as one American commented: “UK investors are wimps”.

Kelly Zalocusky, senior director of computational biology at techbio company Recursion Pharmaceuticals, said: “I lived in San Francisco for 12 years before coming over here, and I do think there is this interesting mindset specific to the San Francisco Bay area investor community. What you’re deciding is not whether you think this person is going to succeed, or do I think this idea is going to succeed, it’s ‘is this an idea that’s worth making a bet on? Does this person have a good enough idea that I’m willing to make the wager?’”

If the idea failed to pan out, “We don’t say, oh, you failed. We say, oh, you learned so much. What’s your next idea? What can I get in on next?

“There’s this incentive to go out and do the risky thing. There’s no such thing as being on the scientific edge without some percentage of failure.”

Joe Healey, co-founder of Warwick University spinout Nanosyrinx, is another entrepreneurial scientist on the cutting edge of life sciences. A targeted biologics drug delivery company  it engineers naturally occurring ‘nanosyringes’ to selectively deliver peptide and protein payloads – including functional gene editors and a range of other enzymes – directly to the cytosol of targeted cells.

He argued that the UK’s comparatively small geography was part of what gave it a scientific edge. Alongside the world-leading universities and the density of talent; “I think one of the things that makes the UK quite unique actually is because we are small, even being outside the Golden Triangle still makes you quite a compact

“We’re on the fringes of the Golden Triangle. So we’re we’re close enough that we benefit from that. Half the scientists we hired, we’ve stolen from companies in Oxford because it’s cheaper to live around here and it saves them an hour commute each way.

Astra Zeneca chose to move its global R&D facility to Cambridge in 2016. Hitesh Sanganee admitted he had initially been sceptical about the move but now realised it had placed the company “at the heart of innovation”

“I think it’s definitely paid dividends and now we’re part of the ecosystem and we’re trying to expand beyond Cambridge and move across the UK. And we’ve got hundreds of collaborations across the UK, so it’s been a good move.”

He also spoke of the benefits of the new facilities large coffee shop, open to anyone, which had produced unexpected benefits and interactions across the surrounding ecosystem – despite initial concerns from the IP lawyers.

Discussion panel chair Professor Sir Mark Caulfield said this was a very important point.

“When Dave Wetherall designed the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford he had a giant fight about the size of the coffee room. People said why can’t we just cut half in half and build labs instead? And he said no, because the coffee room is where everyone will go. Then they bump into each other and when academics collide, great ideas are born.

“You get all sorts of serendipities and interactions you wouldn’t expect.”

 Alice Tuff-Lacey, from Genomics England, is the government-funded 100,000 Genome Project, sequencing 100,000 genomes from around 85,000 NHS patients affected by rare disease or cancers.

“We are looking at taking genomics more into preventative space and really using it as a screening tool,” she explained.

“We have government funding that is enabling us to build things at a national level, which automatically accelerates things into a different sphere. The partnership with the NHS is a critical part of that. It creates that shortcut to taking things from that research setting and really driving it into clinical practise.

“On average it takes about five years to identify a rare condition and during that time, generally, the child got progressively more ill.

“There are actually hundreds of rare conditions which you can treat. It’s a potential game changer if you can use this technology to look for these rare conditions and doing it almost within one test. You can make that dramatic difference for children.

“So our role is to generate the evidence for the NHS and for the screening committee nationally to understand if this is something we should invest in.”

Author: Simon Penfold

Photography: Ed Nix