BQ2 Scotland Special Report

2 BUSINESS QUARTER Scotland: September 2016

SPECIAL REPORT

Working together

Collaborations bring together entrepreneurs, academics and clinicians

Spice of life

There’s more to life science than simply human health

Next generation

Students are benefiting from industrial experience

LIFE SCIENCES

In association with

Scotland’s Life Science Annual Dinner & Awards 2017

Network with key players in the Scottish life science industry and celebrate the success of the sector Venue: National Museum of Scotland Date: Thursday 2nd February 2017 Tickets on sale soon

NOMINATIONS ARE OPEN FOR THE LIFE SCIENCES AWARDS There are 7 Awards categories this year: • • • • • • •

Business Leadership Award (2016) Entrepreneurial Business Leader (2016) Innovation Award Investment of the Year (2016) Community Engagement Award Export and International Trade Award Innovative Collaboration Award

SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES There is a variety of sponsorship packages available for this sell out event and we would be happy to work with sponsors to develop a package that suits their objectives.

If you are interested in making a nomination, sponsorship opportunities or pre-booking tickets, please contact Susan Sewell (susan.sewell@scotent.co.uk)

BUSINESS UPDATE bqlive.co.uk

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EDITOR’S VIEW CONTENTS 06

SMALL’S BEAUTIFUL

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CREATURE COMFORTS

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FIGHTING FOOD WASTE

Scots life sciences spark commercial flame

Research breakthroughs help many kinds of life

Colourful ways of attacking global scandal

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AIMING TO EXCEL

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CLUSTER MUSTER

Drives draw academia and industry together

Hospital’s doors open to exemplary teamwork

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BIGGER PICTURE

28

LIVE DEBATE

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EXPERTS TOMORROW

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RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT

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CITY GUARDIAN

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SUCCESS MAKERS

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EVERYTHING GELS

50

GET IT TOGETHER

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Imaging advance helps patients and purse strings

What to do for global rating in life sciences

How firms are mentoring bright young researchers

The triple benefits of precision medicine

How a dedicated city polishes its treasures

SPECIAL REPOR T: LIFE SCIENCES Over the past decade as a journalist, few sectors of Scotland’s economy have fascinated me more than the life sciences. If the 19th century was the age of chemistry and the 20th century was the time of physics then the 21st century is already proving to be the domain of biology.

In this BQ Scotland special report, we take a trip with our partners – BioCity Scotland, Scottish Enterprise, UCB Pharma and the University of Glasgow – to explore the exciting landscape that is developing throughout the nation, touching each part of our country from rural areas through to major cities like Aberdeen and Inverness down to Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. One of the aspects of the life sciences that excites me the most is the opportunity for collaborations between businesses, the health service and universities, not only to improve the lives of patients but also to stimulate economic development and create jobs. The GLAZgo partnership between pharmaceuticals firm AstraZeneca and the University of Glasgow is just one fantastic example, while UCB’s project with Epilepsy Scotland in Dumfries and Galloway demonstrates the strength of links between the public and private sectors.

Precision or stratified medicine is at the heart of so many collaborations and it’s encouraging to see the life sciences cluster that’s growing up around the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. One of the exciting developments on the site is the construction of the Imaging Centre of Excellence – or ICE to its friends – which shows how tools for diagnosing patients can also help with research and commercialisation. Yet the life sciences are about much more than simply human health. Scotland’s scientists have expertise spanning the whole gambit of the sector – from agriculture and aquaculture all the way through to industrial biotechnology – and companies are working with academics to commercialise their research. And it’s not just about research and development either; manufacturing is a key focus for the sector too.

Peter Ranscombe, Editor, BQ Scotland In association with

Sound products get right manufacturers

MODEL FOR ALL Rural initiative helps a whole nation

BUSINESS QUARTER

Bryan Hoare Managing director e: bryan@bqlive.co.uk @BQBryanH

EDITORIAL

Peter Ranscombe Editor e: peter@ranscombe.co.uk @peterranscombe1

SALES

David Townsley Account director e: dave@bqlive.co.uk t: 0191 389 8513 @DaveTownsley99 Paul Regan Business development manager e: paul@bqlive.co.uk

DESIGN & PRODUCTION Steve Jessop Production manager e: steve@bqlive.co.uk Sarah MacNeil Head of design e: sarah@bqlive.co.uk Jake Charlton Designer e: jake@bqlive.co.uk

DIGITAL

Leanne Elliott Head of digital e: leanne@bqlive.co.uk Beth Hewitt Business engagement manager e: beth@bqlive.co.uk @bqbethh Bryce Wilcock, Suzy Jackson Senior online business journalists e: press@bqlive.co.uk Aimee Robinson, Ellen McGann Online business journalists e: press@bqlive.co.uk or call 0191 389 8468

PHOTOGRAPHY

KG Photography e: info@kgphotography.co.uk

And the result is a growing client base

‘Collaboration’ key to life science success

CONTACT S

Business Quarter is part of BE Group, the UK’s market leading business improvement specialists. www.be-group.co.uk

Business Quarter, Spectrum 6, Spectrum Business Park, Seaham, SR7 7TT. www.bqlive.co.uk. Business Quarter (BQ) is a leading national business brand recognised for celebrating and inspiring entrepreneurship. The multi-platform brand currently reaches entrepreneurs and senior business executives across Scotland, the North East and Cumbria, the North West, Yorkshire, the West Midlands and London and the South. BQ has established a UK wide regional approach to business engagement reaching a highly targeted audience of entrepreneurs and senior executives in high growth businesses both in print, online and through branded events. All contents copyright © 2016 Business Quarter. All rights reserved. While every effort is made to ensure accuracy, no responsibility can be accepted for inaccuracies, howsoever caused. No liability can be accepted for illustrations, photographs, artwork or advertising materials while in transmission or with the publisher or their agents. All content marked ‘Profile’ and ‘Special Feature’ is paid for advertising. All information is correct at time of going to print, September 2016.

BUSINESS UPDATE Collaboration to study cell growth Medical researchers could better understand the effects of drugs on cancerous cells and the development of stem cells as the result of a pioneering Scottish collaborative research project.

The initiative – involving Lanarkshire-based Biogelx, the University of Strathclyde and Censis, the innovation centre for sensor and imaging systems – will allow scientists to examine how stem cells grow and behave in conditions much closer to their natural environment. For the most part, cell cultures are currently analysed in a twodimensional format, commonly on a petri-dish or other flat surface, which doesn’t encourage them to grow in the same way they would in the body. However – by using Biogelx’s peptide gels and the University of Strathclyde’s sophisticated Raman spectroscopy capabilities – researchers could gain access to a more accurate, threedimensional understanding of how cells naturally develop and grow in the body.

Eventually, the new approach could be employed to study the effects of drug candidates on key disease models. Eleanore Irvine, business development manager at Biogelx, said: “Our project will design a platform that will both influence stem cell growth into specific cell-types and help us understand what the development path for the stem cell looks like. This will open up a whole world of insight.”

Advances: Better understanding of drugs’ effects on cancerous cells and support in respiratory medicine mark Scottish progress

ArrayJet wins Australian deal Griffith University in Australia has awarded a A$400,000 (£230,000) contract to Midlothianbased microarray instrumentation company ArrayJet. ArrayJet will supply the university’s Institute for Glycomics with the technology it needs to print arrays for ‘glycans’, complex sugar molecules that are present on the surface of all cells and are responsible for a variety of biological functions in humans and micro-organisms, such as cell-to-cell communication.

The Arrayjet Marathon Argus microarrayer can print the glycan compound library on 100 slides in less than six hours, significantly improving on Griffith’s current throughput of 28 slides in 14 hours. Iain McWilliam, chief executive at Arrayjet, said: “The Institute for Glycomics is at the cutting edge of this complex technology and we are delighted it has chosen us to partner with it at this exciting phase of its development. The Marathon Argus will provide the means to effect fast and accurate microarray production giving it complete quality assurance and confidence in its products. What’s more, we are building a solid customer base across the Asia Pacific Rim and, for a small business with its headquarters in Midlothian, we are delighted with our international reach and impact.”

GSK makes £110m investment in Montrose GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has unveiled a £110 million investment in its plant at Montrose.

The global pharmaceuticals company will expand the site to produce active ingredients for respiratory medicines. The FTSE100 firm already makes ingredients for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) medicines, vaccines and other respiratory medicines in Montrose, where it employs more than 450 staff. Andrew Witty, chief executive at GSK, said: “This announcement reflects further investment to

support our pharmaceutical pipeline and meet growing demand for our innovative portfolio of newly-launched products. It is testament to our skilled UK workforce and the country’s leading position in life sciences that we are making these investments in advanced manufacturing here.

“From their manufacture in the UK, many of these medicines will be sent to patients around the world.” GSK’s other Scottish site is at Irvine, where it created 55 jobs in April when it expanded its penicillin production plant.

The Irvine expansion was supported with a £1.5m Regional Selective Assistance grant.

BUSINESS UPDATE Life Sciences

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Dementia centre boost for Edinburgh BioQuarter Economic development agency Scottish Enterprise has hailed the opening of the Centre for Dementia Prevention at the University of Edinburgh as a boost for the life sciences sector. Julia Brown, director of life and chemical sciences at the agency, said: “The design and construction of this specialist facility is excellent news for the life sciences sector in Scotland and the Edinburgh BioQuarter partnership.

Scottish Enterprise, the University of Edinburgh and NHS Lothian are working closely together to create a world-leading hub for innovative health research and patient care. The Centre for Dementia Prevention brings in new investment and jobs whilst cementing Scotland’s world-leading position in neurodegenerative research.” Brown added: “I am delighted that the centre is backed by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, as an international innovation hub.”

Aridhia takes part in £6.9m Alzheimer’s study Data and analytics services developed by Glasgow-based informatics company Aridhia have been selected for use in a £6.9 million study into how to detect Alzheimer’s dementia.

The National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) and the Medical Research Council (MRC) have funded the study to try to improve dramatically the success rate of clinical trials for treatments in Alzheimer’s disease. The company’s AnalytiXagility platform will help researchers to analyse data gathered from 250 volunteers. Chris Roche, chief executive at Aridhia, said: “Alzheimer’s dementia is a brutally progressive disease, for which we have no cure. It is crucial that we gain a better understanding of the early stages, to help us discover which treatments can slow down or even stop the symptoms. AnalytiXagility will help researchers to faster identify biomarkers, which will allow them to speed up the clinical trial process and find out which drugs are effective, and which ones are not. This will ensure patients will benefit from the research more quickly, and also helps to streamline the process to make it more cost-effective.”

£1.8m R&D grant for Omega Omega Diagnostics, the Alva-based medical testing kit maker, has secured a £1.8 million research and development (R&D) grant from economic development agency Scottish Enterprise. The company, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange, will use the cash to expand the number of allergens that can be identified by its Allersys allergy testing system.

Over the next three years, the company will expand the range of allergens from 41 to 120.

Jim Watson, director of innovation and enterprise services at Scottish Enterprise, said: “This R&D grant, together with the company’s investment in its Alva site, means Omega can expand its current product range to target new export markets in an accelerated timeframe, giving Omega excellent competitive advantage.

“It’s also fantastic to see this grant helping Omega to recruit 14 skilled staff at its Alva facility over the next three years.”

Andrew Shepherd, chief executive at Omega added: “We are delighted with this level of commitment from Scottish Enterprise, which has supported the company over a number of years.”

Epidarex spins-out Nodthera from Selvita Epidarex Capital, the Edinburgh-based life science venture capital firm, has funded the creation of Nodthera, a spin-out company from Polish drug discovery firm Selvita. Nodthera, which will be based in Edinburgh, is the eighth company to join Epidarex’s European portfolio.

The new company will focus on the discovery and development of novel inhibitors of the NLRP3 inflammasome. Inflammasomes are large multiprotein complexes that assemble in a cell’s cytoplasm in response to environmental danger signals and are considered an essential part of an organism’s innate immune response.

Over-activation of the NRLP3 inflammasome is implicated in a wide range of diseases such as type-two diabetes, gout, rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. Elizabeth Roper, the partner at Epidarex Capital who led the deal, said: “Nodthera has the potential to create firstin-class small molecule modulators of the NLRP3 inflammasome complex.

“Epidarex is delighted to be partnering with Selvita to bring this exciting science to market.”

Genius goes on an allergy adventure Genius Gluten Free, the Edinburghbased food company, has unveiled a new corporate social responsibility (CSR) partnership with social enterprise Allergy Adventures to educate schoolchildren about food allergies and intolerances.

Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne, founder of Genius and a previous BQ Scotland magazine cover star, has teamed up with Hailey Phillips, founder of Allergy Adventures, to create an education programme for children. They will be visiting primary schools across the UK this autumn to educate schoolchildren on allergies and food ingredients. The new partnership follows research commissioned by Genius, which revealed a significant lack of knowledge and understanding amongst schoolchildren aged seven to 11 when it comes to food, ingredients and food allergies. The research showed that 80% of schoolchildren now have a classmate with an allergy but over half claimed to have never been taught about food allergies by a teacher. Bruce-Gardyne said: “We are delighted to be working with Allergy Adventures to help children across the country gain a better understanding in a fun and engaging way.”

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INTERVIEW Life Sciences

Scotland’s life sciences sector is big enough to offer the prospects for commercialisation yet small enough to create the opportunities for collaboration, as Scottish Enterprise director Julia Brown explains

Big ideas from a small country

INTERVIEW Life Sciences

Twenty years ago, Scottish scientists changed the world. On 5 July, 1996, on a farm in Midlothian, just south of Edinburgh, an ordinary ewe gave birth to what appeared to be a very ordinary lamb.

But this was no ordinary offspring; this was Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from a cell taken from an adult animal. When her birth was announced the following spring, the world’s media descended on the Roslin Institute, where Dolly had been created in partnership with life sciences company PPL Therapeutics.

Dolly’s birth sparked a renewed worldwide interest in cloning and put the Roslin Institute on the global map. It also shone a spotlight on the work of PPL and opened plenty of doors for its staff.

“The network of people who were associated with PPL and Dolly is very strong still across Scotland – we crop up in lots of different places,” laughs Julia Brown, senior director of life and chemical sciences at economic development agency Scottish Enterprise.

“The people who worked on Dolly the Sheep have gone on to work in all sorts of roles throughout Scotland, either setting up their own businesses or working in other ways to strengthen the sector.

“It’s a close-knit community – communications and collaborations are strong in Scotland. If one of us can’t help then we’ll know someone else who can. You can build a whole career here because of the diversity of the sector.”

Brown joined PPL in 1996 as head of clinical development, a role she retained until 2000 when she left to co-found Pleiad, a specialist consultancy firm that initially worked with large pharmaceutical companies and small biotechnology firms before specialising in medical devices, helping businesses with their regulatory and clinical work.

After a career in industry, Brown jumped the fence in 2008 and joined the Life Sciences Intermediary Technology Institute (ITI), which – alongside similar bodies covering digital media and energy – had been setup by the-then Scottish Executive in 2003 to commission research projects within universities that could

then be commercialised in the private sector.

The ITIs were rolled into Scottish Enterprise in 2008, with Brown taking up her current post in 2013.

“I am really interested in that interface between academia and industry,” she explains.

“Scotland’s universities have such a strong reputation in scientific research and so I always enjoy the challenge of helping to translate those discoveries from the researcher’s bench in a laboratory to the patient’s bedside in a hospital.

“Those links between businesses and universities are one of the strongest facets of the life sciences industry in Scotland. Our cluster of life science companies is growing all the time, which means that there are lots and lots of opportunities for people to come and work in the industry.”

The fact that Scotland is a relatively-small country means that the cluster of life sciences companies is quite compact, allowing businesspeople and academics to easily travel to meetings. People see each other on a regular basis and are able to keep up-to-date about the projects on which their colleagues and peers are working.

Scotland’s world-class universities don’t just provide some of the scientific research that fuels the life sciences industry; they also train many of the members of staff who go on to work in those companies. “Some students graduate and then stay in Scotland, while others have such fond memories of the country that they come back to work here later in their careers,” explains Brown.

“Our strong research base also offers an international flavour to our life sciences cluster.

People from overseas are attracted to come and study or carry out research in Scotland and will often stay and join our company base. There’s

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a blend of different cultures and nationalities – that was demonstrated when Dolly was created.

That was a multinational team, combining many different backgrounds.”

Scottish Enterprise has worked with fellow public agency Skills Development Scotland and with partners in industry to continue expanding the Modern Apprenticeships scheme, with graduate-level apprenticeships at master’s degree level and foundation apprenticeships for senior school pupils. The Women Returners project helps mothers to re-enter the science, technology and engineering industries after starting their families, while Edinburgh Napier University has developed a laboratory skills course for graduates and an increasing number of students are being offered internships.

As one of the four constituent nations that make up the UK, Scotland has always had its own education, legal and religious systems.

Those differences have been accentuated in the National Health Service (NHS) since devolution of power from the UK Parliament at Westminster to the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in 1999.

While the NHS in England has become more fragmented and has continued to develop competition through its internal market, the NHS in Scotland is small enough to continue to function as one cohesive unit. Scotland’s size means that the NHS can operate as a single unified healthcare system – each patient has a unique identification number that can be used to track them throughout the system, from appointments with general practitioners at the local health clinic all the way through to consultations with specialist doctors in hospitals.

Brown also points to Scotland’s stable population; with fewer people coming and going, it’s easier to track people who have

“Each health board now has an innovation champion. These people have helped to put innovation on the agenda at a senior level’’

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INTERVIEW Life Sciences

developed diseases and who could be suitable candidates for clinical trials or research projects.

Comprehensive disease registries are also kept, giving clinicians and researchers access to data on ailments such as diabetes and heart disease.

“The NHS’s attitude to innovation has also changed in recent years,” adds Brown.

“Particularly in the past two years, there has been a willingness to look at how to do things differently.

“Each health board now has an innovation champion. These people have helped to put innovation on the agenda at a senior level and to help the NHS think about its economic impact – that’s quite distinctive. When people visit us from outside Scotland, they’re quite surprised about the level of engagement between industry and the NHS. “Businesses now feel that there’s an open door and that they can have a discussion with the NHS, rather than an attitude of ‘Go away, we’re too busy’, which perhaps was the attitude in the past. Scotland is a great place for people who want to get together and try something different.”

Brown highlights the work undertaken by NHS Research Scotland (NRS), an organisation that offers a joined-up approach across the nation and a single point-of-contact for companies looking to conduct clinical trials. NRS has cut the time it takes to sign a contract by 60 per cent and now helps organisations to secure a decision on R&D permission within 30 calendar days and to recruit their first patients within another 30 days of gaining NHS permission.

The Chief Scientist Office within the Scottish Government has invested more than £40.4 million in research infrastructure, while a further £10m has been invested in research facilities for clinical trials and £12m has been set aside to fund up to 15 clinicians over the next ten years to expand the amount of health research carried out in Scotland.

“The NRS is very industry-friendly – it offers a single point-of-contact, it has a set contract and it offers set timelines that people will work towards,” Brown adds. “That’s why Scotland does well when it comes to attracting clinical research studies.

“Scotland has a relatively-small population of five million people and so we tend not to do many of the large phase-III trials, but instead concentrate on winning a lot of the

“The network of people who were associated with sciences firm PPL Therapeutics and Dolly is still very strong still across Scotland” more specialist work. In April, three clinical research champions were appointed to provide national leadership in the development of clinical research covering three specialist areas – diabetes, stroke and children’s medicine.”

Those close links between academia, the health service and industry also bring about economic development benefits. The Edinburgh BioQuarter, the science park built next to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, has created ten businesses in the past five years, with tenants such as Johnson & Johnson and Roche taking the site’s Building Nine incubator centre to full capacity.

The enthusiasm for the life sciences industry demonstrated by Brown and her team at Scottish Enterprise is infectious. One of the factors that stokes their passion for the industry is the sheer variety of sectors that call Scotland home – from companies working in the human health arena all the way through to businesses involved in agri-tech, aquaculture and industrial biotechnology.

Speaking to members of the team, it’s also clear how excited they get about the depth as well as the breadth of the sector. Companies in

Scotland aren’t just carrying out R&D; businesses are manufacturing products that are sold around the world, like Fife-based eye scanner maker Optos, which lists the United States as its largest market, and pharmaceuticals firm GlaxoSmithKline, which has sites at Irvine and Montrose and is this year [2016] investing a further £110m to bring further production to Montrose.

Another ingredient in the recipe for developing successful life science companies in Scotland has been the finance available through the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB), the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise and its partner, Highlands & Islands Enterprise. During the 2014-15 financial year, £10.6m or 16 per cent of the £66.5m invested by the SIB was in life science companies.

Out of the 275 companies in the bank’s portfolio, 28 per cent are in the life and chemical sciences, the second-largest group behind only technology and advanced engineering. Acquisitions of life science companies in which the SIB holds a stake – such as device maker Aircraft Medical to Medtronic and laser developer Cascade Technologies to Emerson – has helped to recycle money back into the Scottish investment ecosystem.

As well as the Scottish Seed Fund and the Scottish Venture Fund, the SIB also runs the innovative Scottish Co-investment Fund, which allows it to invest alongside business angels and other pre-approved partners. The Scottish technique has been studied as far afield as Canada and New Zealand.

Life science companies have access to wider economic help, such as Regional Selective Assistant (RSA) grants for creating or protecting jobs in Scotland and mezzanine debt through the Scottish Loan Fund, which is administered

by Glasgow-based Maven Capital Partners.

But life science firms can also tap into morespecialist help, such as that available from Epidarex Capital, an Edinburgh-based venture capital fund in which Scottish Enterprise is a cornerstone investor, alongside American pharmaceuticals giant Eli Lilly, the Strathclyde Pension Fund and several universities.

“The support available through the SIB makes Scottish Enterprise one of the biggest life science investors in the UK, in terms of the number of deals that we’ve done,” adds Brown.

INTERVIEW Life Sciences

“More broadly, Scotland’s life sciences industry attracted more than £40m of investment during 2015, which demonstrates the confidence that investors have shown in our companies.”

One of the priorities for both the UK Government at Westminster and the Scottish Government at Holyrood has been to increase the productivity of British and Scottish companies. Life science companies have always invested a lot of money in research and development (R&D) in comparison with other sectors,” Brown explains.

“It’s not just financial support that’s available either – the Scottish Manufacturing Advisory Service (SMAS) helps businesses to improve their production processes and save money along the way. Scottish Enterprise also works hard to

introduce companies to potential collaborators in academia to help them with their R&D, using services such as Interface, which acts as a matchmaker for businesses that want to work with universities to improve their products or services.”

Looking further afield, Scottish Development International (SDI) – the overseas arm of Scottish Enterprise and HIE – not only offers support to help Scottish businesses to export their products and services but also helps foreign companies to establish a base in Scotland. The organisation has more than 40 offices in around 20 countries and helps global life sciences companies to find the right partners in Scotland, whether it’s one of the 150 pharmaceutical services companies or the 250 medical technology outfits.

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“The number of takeover deals in the past year or so demonstrates what an attractive place Scotland is to invest,” Browns says. “Optos was bought by Japanese camera giant Nikon, while Biopta in Glasgow was taken over by stem cell specialist Reprocell, which is also from Japan.

“MSD, the European arm of American pharmaceuticals company Merck & Co, bought IOmet in Edinburgh, with French specialist Sartorius Stedim acquiring BioOutsource. These deals not only show that global investors have confidence in the scientific research that we carry out in Scotland but also in the abilities of our indigenous companies to commercialise those discoveries. Injecting foreign investment can help to accelerate a company’s development.” n

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OVERVIEW Life Sciences

Strength in diversity While human health is a considerable focus for many of the people working in life sciences, the industry in Scotland also includes a wide breadth and depth of subjects, including animal health, aquaculture and plant health

OVERVIEW Life Sciences

Drop the phrase ‘life sciences’ into conversation and people will immediately begin to imagine medical researchers wearing long white coats, wandering around laboratories and discovering medicines to tackle diseases. Yet the life sciences industry in Scotland is much broader than simply human health.

From tackling pests in order to protect the crops growing in the fields and the fish being farmed in the seas all the way through to improving the health of the livestock being reared for the food chain, the scientists working in Scotland’s businesses and universities are squaring-up to some of the most pressing issues facing the world today.

As well as making globally-important medical discoveries, Scotland also has a rich history of pushing forward advances in the fields of animal and plant research, including the development of new varieties of potatoes and soft fruits better suited to cope with our changing climate, and the creation of Dolly the Sheep, the world’s first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, which was born 20 years ago. [1996] When it comes to animal health, few sites can rival the University of Edinburgh’s Easter Bush Campus in Midlothian, on the southern edge of Edinburgh. The campus is home to the world-famous Roslin Institute, the birthplace of Dolly the Sheep, and to the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, along with hospitals for animals of all shapes and sizes.

“The Easter Bush Campus is already a centre of excellence with the largest concentration of animal science-related expertise anywhere in Europe, but we want to take that a stage further and become a world leader by 2025,” explains John Mackenzie, chief executive of the existing Roslin BioCentre and of the new Roslin Innovation Centre, which is due to open in the summer of 2017.

The current Roslin BioCentre offers traditional incubation space for life science businesses, while the new innovation centre will offer something a little bit different. The three-storey building will include 41,000sq ft of flexible laboratory and office space that companies

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“Easter Bush Campus is a centre of excellence with the largestconcentration of animal-science related expertise in Europe” can rent on a 12-month ‘easy in, easy out’ or longer-term basis, along with facilities that will be shared with other users on the campus, including a gym, a shop and a science outreach centre for visiting schools and other public engagement events.

“The innovation centre will allow businesses to better collaborate with the staff and students on the site and to tap into their expertise,” says Mackenzie. “The open lab and office space will allow them to work together – or to work more privately in partitioned areas if required – while the recreation facilities mean people will also be able to have more of those unplanned moments or ‘random collisions’ where they can just talk about the weather or discuss their work.”

A ‘pop-up’ incubator has opened in the nearby Sir Alexander Robertson Building and companies already using the pop-up include: Greengage Lighting, which supplies agricultural lighting, sensors and control systems and which relocated to Easter Bush from London; Kajeka, a spin-out from the Roslin Institute that provides visual software for big data and network analysis; and Roslin Technologies,

Roger Kilburn, IBioIC

a company launched by the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh-based private equity advisor JB Equity to commercialise research from Roslin Institute and the Royal Dick Vet School. JB Equity is currently raising a £15 million fund to support commercialisation.

“We’ve already had strong interest from a whole range of companies, from multinationals through to spin-outs and start-ups,” adds Mackenzie. “In the medium- to longterm, we aim to have between 15 and 30 tenants using the Roslin Innovation Centre as their new business location of choice for companies undertaking strategic, commercial and collaborative research in the animal and veterinary sciences, agri-tech and ‘one health’ industries.”

Scotland not only has a rich heritage when it comes to agriculture, but also has an historic presence in the petro-chemicals industry.

Grangemouth, which lies to the west of Edinburgh, is one of the largest refineries and chemical complexes in Europe and Scotland is now looking to bring together two of its most dynamic sectors – oil and gas, and life sciences – through the arena of industrial biotechnology.

“The whole point of industrial biotechnology is to wean the chemicals industry off its reliance on fossil fuels,” explains Roger Kilburn, chief executive at the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) in Glasgow. “Instead of extracting oil and gas from underground, using them as feedstocks to create products and then throwing those products away and starting again, industrial biotechnology offers the opportunity to use more sustainable feedstocks.

“One hundred years ago, the petro-chemicals industry didn’t exist – now it’s worth US$3.8 trillion (£2.9tn). If the 20th century was all about industrialising chemistry then the 21st century is going to be all about industrialising biology.”

The IBioIC brings together industry and academia to develop the

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OVERVIEW Life Sciences

industrial biotechnology sector. Its academic members consist of 18 of Scotland’s universities and research institutes, while its 62 industrial partners – which pay to be members of the centre, demonstrating the way in which they value it – range from household names such as Diageo, GlaxoSmithKline and Unilever all the way through to start-up companies.

“Scotland has three main advantages when it comes to industrial biotechnology – we have readily-available feedstocks, we have the infrastructure in the oil and gas and petrochemical industries, and we have a skilled workforce, both in our highly-active universities and in industry,” says Kilburn.

He points to three major feedstocks that Scotland aims to develop: wood, which can provide cellulose for processing into feedstocks; seaweed and other marine flora, which can be used to produce ingredients for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals; and both commercial and industrial waste. All three can be viewed as sustainable sources, which can help to fuel the circular economy and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The IBioIC is already running 20 projects, which have an average value of £250,000 each. The centre is also at the heart of developing skills in the sector, funding 28 PhD studentships, around 20 collaborative masters’ degrees, and higher national diploma courses introduced by three further education colleges this year. [2016] “We often talk about the four ‘colours’ of life sciences,” adds Kilburn. “Red, which is human health; green, which is agriculture and food and drink; blue, which is marine and aquaculture; and white, which is industrial biotechnology and which actually impinges on all three of the other colours.

“Scotland has a rich research base in areas such as synthetic biology and genome mining and so it makes sense to apply these areas of life science study to industrial biotechnology.

This is an area that has a long way to go in its development – it’s going to be an exciting journey.”

Synthetic biology brings together the worlds of biology, engineering and information technology (IT), using computer power to model how biological processes could be altered and then stepping in with genetic modification to change those processes’ outcomes. A report from the Scottish Science Advisory Council in

OVERVIEW Life Sciences

Phil Jones (European Screening Centre)

“We recognised these skills and experience don’t only apply to human health but could be used in other parts of life science” October 2014 highlighted the broad range of economic benefits that could come from harnessing synthetic biology, including industrial biotechnology, the growing of crops for generating renewable energy and in precision or stratified medicine.

Another important component in the country’s diverse life sciences ecosystem is the Scottish Aquaculture Innovation Centre (SAIC) in Stirling, which brings together 26 companies and 13 research organisations. The centre supports collaborations between businesses and universities, from fish and shellfish health through to breeding and stock improvement.

Fish and seafood mean big business in Scotland – the aquaculture industry is worth £1.8 billion to the nation’s economy and provides more than 8,000 jobs. The size of Scotland’s aquaculture industry and the expertise available in its research institutions have been among the factors that have helped to attract businesses to the country, including Sheffield-based Benchmark Holdings.

The Alternative Investment Market (AIM)-quoted company owns Fish Vet Group, which offers clinical and diagnostic laboratory facilities in Inverness for the fish farming industry, while its Benchmark Animal Health subsidiary is developing a base on the BioCampus science

park on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

One of the locations that exemplifies the breadth and depth of Scotland’s life sciences capabilities is the European Screening Centre (ESC) at Newhouse, in North Lanarkshire. MSD, part of American pharmaceuticals giant Merck, closed down its research centre on the site at the end of 2010, but the state-of-the-art equipment and facilities available at Newhouse were rescued.

Roslin BioCentre and BioCity Nottingham teamed up to open BioCity Scotland on the site in 2012 as a home for life sciences companies, adding the MediCity Scotland incubation centre in 2016. BioCity Scotland and the University of Dundee also worked together to bring a key part of the £169 million European Lead Factory (ELF) to the site to carry out drug discovery work.

The ELF is a consortium of 30 partners and was set up by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a major public-private partnership that brings together the European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries & Associations (EFPIA). The ESC is one of the partners for the ELF and carries out biological screening, chemistry and computer modelling of molecules and testing some of the 500,000 samples of compounds stored by ELF

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partner BioAscent at Newhouse to see if they could be used to develop drugs.

The Newhouse site has already been involved in the search for drugs to combat cancer, diabetes and infectious diseases, as well as anti-microbial resistance. The ESC is now also involved in setting up the UK Translational Agri-sciences Consortium (TASC), a proposed alliance that will bring together scientists from global agrichemical companies Bayer, Dow, Dupont and Syngenta along with academics from the James Hutton Institute and the universities of Dundee and St Andrews to turn research on plant health into methods for protecting crops.

“We have recently grown our staff from 20 to 25 people and many of them have extensive experience in industry,” explains Phil Jones, director of the ESC. “We recognised that these skills and experience are not only applicable to human health but could also be used in other parts of the life sciences, such as agri-sciences.

“There are clear needs for this type of work – when it comes to food security and pest control, the world’s population is continuing to grow and so there will be a greater requirement for food in the coming decades. There are also clear requirements in areas such as aquaculture, which is a significant industry globally.”

Jones adds: “Our connection with the University of Dundee is really important. There are a number of techniques that we don’t have access to here, so having the expertise and facilities at Dundee adds considerably to our activities.

Collaboration is a key part of what we do – all of our programmes are collaborations n

John Mackenzie (Roslin Innovation Centre)

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CASE STUDY Life Sciences

Fresh ideas to tackle food waste From its base at BioCity Scotland, Insignia Technologies develops smart pigments and inks that change colour when exposed to a variety of gases or ultra-violet light, which are already helping to cut down on food waste It’s a problem that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever gone rummaging around at the back of their fridge. All of a sudden, you come across a half-opened packet of ham that you forgot was there.

You have a sniff, you have a smell, you have a poke and a prod, but you still can’t tell whether the ham is safe to eat and so you chuck it in the bucket “just to be on the safe side”. If only there was an indicator on the label to advise you on how long the packet of ham has been open.

Food waste is a problem on an international scale. Between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of the food produced globally never reaches the consumer because it ‘goes off’ while still in transit.

Yet the world’s growing appetite shows no signs of abating. With the latest figures from the United Nations predicting that the earth’s population will rise from 7.3 billion at present to 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, farmers will have even more mouths to feed in the years ahead.

Step forward Insignia Technologies, a company based at the BioCity Scotland life sciences incubator at Newhouse in Lanarkshire. Insignia makes a range of ‘smart’ pigments and inks that can change colour when exposed to a variety of gases or ultra-violet (UV) light.

The company has used its pigments and inks to create indicators that show what stage food has reached – whether it is still fresh, whether it needs to be used up soon or whether it is past its best. The indicator can be built into the film lid or the bag; once the packaging is opened and the protective carbon dioxide is released, the indicator starts the countdown and begins to change colour, with the time for the colour change pre-set to match consumer guidelines and varying with temperature – so if that pack of ham was left out of the fridge then the label will know and indicate that it has ‘gone off’

CASE STUDY Life Sciences

quicker. Insignia also makes products for earlier stages in the food production process. In the foodservices industry – which covers a broad range of outlets from bars, cafes and restaurants all the way through to staff canteens, sandwich factories and other food processors – the company makes ‘smart dots’, which can be attached to packaging and show when it has been open for 24, 48 or 72 hours, turning from yellow, through red to purple.

The smart dots are designed to help prevent human error by replacing older systems in which the date that a package was opened is written onto a label and then stuck onto the bag or jar.

Further back in the food chain, the company also makes labels that can be used when fresh food is being shipped and distributed. Insignia’s detection labels show the level of carbon dioxide inside the protective wrapping surrounding a pallet.

This means that forklift drivers or other warehouse staff can immediately see the freshness of the food inside the pallet, allowing them to identify pallets that have been delayed and now need to be shipped, or whether the carbon dioxide levels need to be topped up to help protect the food.

The company has also developed intelligent stock rotation labels, which can be attached to punnets or shipping boxes. Just like the smart dots for the foodservices industry, the stock rotation labels change colour to show how long a box or other packet has been opened, allowing warehouse managers or shop staff to make sure produce is sold while it’s still fresh.

“We commercialised our first products about 18 months ago and our customers on the west coast of the United States – including Transfresh – are already using our labels as part of their systems for transporting soft fruit,” says Jonny Macneal, business development manager at Insignia Technologies. “We also work closely with a number of quick-service restaurants and supermarket retailers in the US. “In the UK, we are running a number of pilot studies with customers and we hope to start seeing revenues from the UK in early 2017.

In South America, we’re involved with a project in Argentina that’s about to be extended into Brazil.”

Insignia Technologies was formed in August 2012 through the merger of Dundee-based

Insignia Pack, which had created a range of intelligent inks, and Novas Technologies, a spinout company from the University of Strathclyde, which was developing smart pigment technology. The business has grown to employ seven full-time staff in the UK and a part-time member of staff in the US. The company raised £865,000 of funding in October 2013 from a group of investors led

by Equity Gap and including Highland Venture Capital, Scottish Enterprise’s Scottish Investment Bank, the University of Strathclyde, management and high net worth individuals. All of the investors contributed to further investment rounds of £985,000 and £886,000, with 24 Haymarket – a London-based early-stage private capital investor – joining the shareholders during

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the second fundraising tranche.

“Being based at BioCity Scotland gives us access to the laboratory facilities that our three chemists need in order to carry out stress testing on new and existing products as well as any additional research and development work,” explains Macneal. “We can also modify products for specific customer needs and we can use BioCity’s on-site good manufacturing practice (GMP) stability storage units to carry out experiments.

“We were one of the first companies at BioCity Scotland, so it’s been interesting to see the facility grow and more neighbours arrive.

We use some of the services from other companies that are based here, including microbiological work.” n

“Being based at BioCity Scotland gives us access to the laboratory facilities our chemists need in order to stress test new and existing products, as well as additional R&D”

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INTERVIEW Life Sciences

As a doctor, Anna Dominiczak has risen to the very top of her field. She’s the Regius professor of medicine at the University of Glasgow, she’s head of the College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences (CMVLS), and she was appointed as a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s birthday honours list – not bad for someone who didn’t want to study medicine in the first place.

“I come from a medical family, so I was surrounded by medical talk as a child,” she remembers. “As a very young child, I decided I would never touch medicine with a barge pole because there was too much of it at home and it spoiled my appetite – there were frequent discussions about blood and urine over the dinner table.”

Striving for excellence Dame Anna Dominiczak is leading the College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow towards closer links with industry and entrepreneurs

INTERVIEW Life Sciences

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“I felt very strongly that if we brought everything together with the same or similar amount of money we could achieve more”

As she grew up, Dominiczak began to realise just how fascinating the world of medicine can be and how there would always be a need for doctors in the world. “I saw that this was the type of job in which you’d never be bored,” she laughs. “I grew to understand that this was what I wanted to do and I’ve never regretted it since.”

Dominiczak was born in Poland during the Communist era. Her secondary school in Gdansk was at the gates to the shipyard where Lech Wałes founded the Solidarity movement that would eventually topple the Communist Party.

After studying medicine in Poland, Dominiczak moved to Glasgow when her husband got a job as a clinical registrar in biochemistry at the city’s Royal Infirmary. “It was on 12 July, 1982, and it

was raining,” she laughs. “I just came along for the ride. It was he who persuaded me – I would probably have never made the move without him.”

That move was to launch Dominiczak on her rise to the top. After passing her Professional & Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB) exam – the conversion qualification needed for doctors who had studied under different training systems – she became a junior house officer at the Royal Infirmary.

After six months at the royal, she trained to become a member of the Royal College of Physicians while working at the Royal Alexandria Infirmary in Paisley, now the Royal Alexandria Hospital, and it was there that she met Dr Joan McAlpine, a consultant geriatrician. Having a woman in such a senior role was a rarity in Glasgow at the time and came in stark contrast to the situation in Poland, where many women had trained as doctors following the Second World War, including Dominiczak’s mother.

From Paisley, Dominiczak moved to the Medical Research Council (MRC’s) unit at the Glasgow Western Infirmary, which she says was, at the time, “one of the best units in the world for high blood pressure research”. She studied for her doctor of medicine (MD) degree by research at the University of Glasgow. “It’s the degree that you would normally do at your home university but I couldn’t go home because martial law had been declared,” she explains.

Her move into research was cemented by a year as a visiting associate professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbour in 1990, which led onto a British Heart Foundation (BHF) senior research fellowship back at Glasgow in 1993.

From there she began to build her own research group and the university’s Cardiovascular Research Centre, for which she served as director between 2000 and 2010.

Her relationship with the BHF continued too, with Dominiczak holding the charity’s chair of cardiovascular medicine at Glasgow between 1997 and 2010. During her career,

she has become one of the world’s leading cardiovascular scientists and clinical academics, carrying out major research into hypertension and cardiovascular genomics over the past 20 years.

Dominiczak’s career took a different turn in 2010 when she led the creation of the CMVLS, which brought together three former distinct faculties. “I wasn’t sure about the move into management to begin with because it was a difficult change and some people never make this change.

“But I had done a lot of research and I had a very strong feeling that the colleagues who had started off with me as juniors were ready to run it perhaps better than I would have. By that stage, I could do something more strategic because I was ready to have this bigger vision for biomedicine in Glasgow.

“Also, for a number of years before, I felt there was a need to bring together biomedicine across the university rather than have three separate faculties. We used to have the faculty of medicine, the faculty of life sciences and the faculty of veterinary medicine, and each had its own dean and its own strategy.

“I felt very strongly that if we brought everything together with the same or a similar amount of money then we could achieve more through inter-disciplinary collaboration by harnessing that translational potential. So I felt I was ready for this jump, this change. My current role has been the best job I’ve ever had.”

Six years later and there’s been no looking back. The college has a budget of around £230 million a year and employs more than 2,200 staff, making it larger than many universities in the UK. Together, those members of staff teach some 5,000 students and generate £106m of income through their research.

The college is organised into three schools: medicine, dentistry and nursing; veterinary medicine; and life sciences. It also has seven research institutes: biodiversity, animal health and comparative medicine; cancer sciences;

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INTERVIEW Life Sciences

cardiovascular and medical sciences; health and wellbeing; infection, immunity and inflammation; molecular cell and systems biology; and neuroscience and psychology.

“By creating the three schools and seven research institutes, we very clearly showed – both internally and externally – what are our priority areas,” explains Dominiczak. “That, in turn, allowed us to push for excellence, both in teaching and in research, because nobody now in this world can do everything.

“If you try to do a bit of everything then excellence is impossible. If you select areas in which you want to be not locally but truly internationally competitive then you have a chance. Through this structure, we have said to colleagues internally and externally that Glasgow biomedicine strives for excellence.”

The college has worked closely with the Scottish Lifesciences Association (SLA), with the trade body joining in industry days at the university.

Double the number of people turned out for its second industry day compared to its first, showing the increased interest in working with the college.

“These seven research institutes showed our priority areas to industry,” Dominiczak says.

“That’s palpable now – if you come to Glasgow then you know what you’re going to get. If you’re an SME interested in immunology, for example, then you don’t have any difficulties finding out information about what we do in that area.

“That clarity has been very important in forming successful links with industry. Prior to 2010, it would have been more difficult.”

One of the jewels in the college’s crown has been bringing the Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre (SMS-IC) to Glasgow.

The organisation was one of the first three innovation centres created in 2012 by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), in partnership with Highlands & Islands Enterprise and Scottish Enterprise. There are now eight innovation centres throughout Scotland.

Dominiczak points to the SMS-IC as one of the college’s successful collaborations with industry.

The centre brings together National Health Service (NHS) Research Scotland, the universities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, services company Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Aridhia, a small business run by software entrepreneur David Sibbald that specialises in

“Once you’ve been here and understood Glasgow you can’t go anywhere else - the tower’s like a magnet that keeps you here and helps you do things better’’

analysing vast amounts of genetic data and patient records.

The SMS-IC isn’t the college’s only partnership though. AstraZeneca, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical businesses, and the university came together to create the GLAZgo Discovery Centre in 2014, with members of staff freely moving between the company and the university to carry out joint research.

The new Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE) – which is due to open alongside the SMS-IC at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in Govan, on the south side of the River Clyde – will also contain a whole floor for industrial partners. That’s in addition to the university’s incubator space available for precision medicine businesses, which sits beside the SMS-IC, where Aridhia has already moved its head office, with space for 40 staff.

One of the challenges of the role has been raising the cash needed to support so many projects. “I suppose it’s all about people and money, isn’t it?” smiles Dominiczak. “We have raised £70m from external sources for clinical academic facilities on the QEUH site. Raising money slows you down.

“The other thing in academia is that – as they say at the Harvard Business School – every academic is their own ‘strategic plan’.

To bring people together in a world where not everything can be a priority is a challenge.

To maintain that balance between excellent research and excellent teaching is a challenge.

And to bring everybody on board to have teams that work together.

“I sometimes think that the college management group is now my lab group. Just as when you’re running a big laboratory group, you need to bring everyone together to have the same priorities – it’s even more difficult with ten senior professors but that’s what we try to do.”

And it’s something that Dominiczak does very well indeed. Her achievements as both one of the world’s top cardiovascular experts and her abilities as a university manager were recognised in the Queen’s 90th birthday honours list this

summer, when she was made a dame, having previously been appointed as an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) back in 2005.

“I felt fantastic,” she laughs. “It’s very strange really – it comes as a thick letter and you wonder what it is. You know it’s something unusual because there’s a stamp on the envelop that tells you it’s from Downing Street and I normally don’t get letters from Downing Street.

“I was thrilled because, no matter whether you’re a royalist or not, it’s a recognition of your life’s work and it’s fantastic. It’s just magical. I’ve not been to the palace yet to be invested.

“The nicest thing that happened was the reaction of colleagues. It was amazing. I kept every card I got and every email I got and there were hundreds. The generosity of people and the nice things they said have been fabulous.

“Academia is based on merit and so I don’t think it will open any doors that wouldn’t have been open otherwise, but I see it as something good for the college and the university. I don’t see it as an award for me, it’s for the team really.

In these types of jobs that involve buildings and strategy and development and new projects it’s really about the team and not the individual. I’ve been blessed with fantastic teams.”

Six years into her role as head of the college, Dominiczak is still clearly brimming with enthusiasm for her job. As she looks out of the window of her office at the Wolfson Medical School along University Avenue to the university’s iconic tower, she gives a hint at what continues to motivate her.

“In Glasgow, we have a ‘tower syndrome’,” she explains. “Once you come to Glasgow, you realise that it’s such a fantastic city and the university is such a fantastic place. It has grit, it’s real, it’s so linked with the city.

“You feel that, when you do things for the university, the whole of the city of Glasgow benefits. It’s been a fantastic place to work.

Once you’ve been here and you’ve understood Glasgow then you can’t go anywhere else – the tower is like a magnet that keeps you here and helps you to do things better.” n

INTERVIEW Life Sciences

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OVERVIEW Life Sciences

Standing in the foyer of the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in Glasgow and looking up towards the top of the bright and airy atrium, it’s hard not to be impressed.

The £842 million facility has 14 floors, 1,109 patient rooms, a 500-seater restaurant and even a helipad on the roof.

Each of the rooms on the general wards has its own private shower and toilet, while patients have access to free televisions, radios and wireless internet connections. The building brings together the services that were previously offered at three adult hospitals onto a single site. While it might have been the multicoloured meeting rooms sticking out from the walls that grabbed the attention of the media when the site was officially opening in 2015, the hospital is simply one piece in a much larger jigsaw puzzle. The QUEH is surrounded by a campus that includes the Royal Hospital for Children, the Institute of Neurological Sciences, a maternity unit, and a unit for care of the elderly and rehabilitation.

Having such a rich variety of services available on one site has allowed the University of Glasgow and its partners to create a world-class life sciences cluster, with the QUEH at its heart.

As well as the medical facilities, the campus is home to the Queen Elizabeth Teaching &

Building a cluster

Glasgow’s new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital – the largest in Western Europe – is allowing the city to develop a worldclass life sciences cluster

OVERVIEW Life Sciences

Learning Centre (QELTC), a £27m facility that provides training for clinicians at each and every stage of their careers, all the way through from undergraduate medical students to the doctors, nurses and other medics who are continuing their professional development in the neighbouring hospital.

The first two occupants of the 10,000sq ft innovation floor in the QELTC are biomedical informatics company Aridhia and the Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre (SMS-IC), a public private partnership that brings together Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities with the National Health Service (NHS), global biotechnology company Thermo Fisher Scientific and Aridhia. Stratified medicine involves finding the right treatment for each individual patient, based on their genes and using the very latest imaging technology to examine their body. The QELTC is also hosting

one of the six centres of excellence for the UKwide Precision Medicine Catapult.

The centre will act as a hub that can feed into wider UK efforts in stratified medicine. Having both the catapult’s centre and the SMS-IC on the same site means the two organisations can work together, avoiding duplication of efforts.

Next door to the QELTC is the Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE), a £16m building that will be home to a magnetic response imaging (MRI) scanner cable of producing a magnetic field measuring seven Tesla (7T) in strength, one of the most powerful in the world. The 7T scanner and the other imaging instruments at ICE will not only bring benefits for patients

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and for medical research, but will also act as an economic development tool.

One of the floors in the ICE is available for industrial partners, which will work with clinicians and academics to develop the hardware and software needed to power 7T scanners and to handle the vast amounts of data that are produced by modern imaging techniques. The QELTC also has incubation space to help start-up and spin-out companies get off the ground, along with facilities for more-established businesses that want to form collaborations and partnerships.

Specialist clinical research facilities within one of the other buildings on the campus have

“It’s important we’re in an environment or a space where innovation and collaborative R&D can take place”

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OVERVIEW Life Sciences

also been purpose-built for advanced clinical trials, meaning that pharmaceutical companies can access services at each and every stage of the drug development process, taking candidates from the very basic scientific research stages all the way through to bedside tests in the clinic.

“It can sometimes be difficult for companies to engage with the healthcare sector,” explains David Sibbald, who is executive chairman of Aridhia and chair of the SMS-IC. “In the past, it’s very much been the domain of the universities and the domain of the NHS. “Yet when it comes to precision medicine, there needs to be genuine collaboration between industry, academia and the health service. If any one of those groups was to try to figure it out by itself – or even two of those groups together – then they would fail. “It’s a new model that

Gideon Ho (HistoIndex)

David Sibbald (Aridhia)

“When it comes to precision medicine there needs to be genuine collaboration between industry, academia and the health service”

OVERVIEW Life Sciences

“From Scotland we can push out products and services to other parts of the UK and also to other parts of Europe, regardless of Brexit” requires domain expertise from those three areas to come together and collaborate in quite a deep way. It’s not superficial collaboration – it’s about bringing different assets, different areas of expertise, different technologies to the party and working on it together.

“It’s important that we’re in an environment or a space where that innovation and collaborative research and development (R&D) can take place.

That’s what’s really important about the cluster that’s getting built-up around the hospital – it’s creating a sandbox in which lots of different people can play and participate.

“It might sound a little old-fashioned to talk about the need for a physical space for that when we live in a globally-connected virtual world but the reality is that it’s an incredibly difficult journey to get that research into clinical practice and there are all sorts of scientific, technical, regulatory, health economic and ethics challenges that we need to get through. It’s easier and better if you can create a culture in which the three groups work together.”

Sibbald adds: “Having a cluster means that we can bring together academics, businesspeople and clinicians so that they can see that actually they’re not that different from each other and their motivations aren’t that different.

Even though they all speak slightly different languages, they can still work together.

“It helps to break down cultural barriers. I can see that first-hand because I’ve lived through that journey.”

One company that has already been attracted to the innovation floor of the QELTC is Singaporebased HistoIndex, which was spun-out from the Institute of Bioengineering & Nanotechnology at the Agency for Science, Technology & Research in Singapore in 2010.

HistoIndex’s lead product is the Genesis 200, an automated imaging system that can produce both two-dimensional and three-dimensional images of a tissue sample and carry out a full quantitative analysis to help pathologists determine the stage to which a disease has progressed. The device doesn’t need the samples to be labelled or stained, which reduces the chances of human error and increases the objectivity of the diagnosis.

HistoIndex’s products and suite of software and services are already being used in more than 100 hospitals, universities and pharmaceutical companies throughout the world, helping clinicians to diagnose and identify the stages to which diseases like fibrosis and cancers have progressed, as well as helping researchers to carry out experiments to develop drugs and treatments. With more than a dozen strategic partnerships, HistoIndex’s Genesis Imaging Services (GIS) labs have opened doors

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for clinicians, researchers and healthcare professionals all over the world. Each of the 13 international GIS partners has a Genesis 200 imaging system in its facility and its own network of dedicated users. The only GIS lab in the UK is based at the QEUH where it has begun to have an impact on both the scientific and medical communities.

“The initiatives that are taking place in Scotland around personalised medicine – such as the SMS-IC – are very exciting,” explains Gideon Ho, the chief executive and co-founder of HistoIndex. “The whole ecosystem is being developed in such a way that I feel it will serve our products and services very well.

“Scotland is unique because of the harmonisation of the National Health Service (NHS). When I speak to people in other parts of the UK, they all have a list of acronyms and abbreviations that I need to be acquainted with, which could vary from one health board to another, but in Scotland there is a concerted approach.

“Scotland is a great pilot site for us. From Scotland, we can push out products and services to other parts of the UK and also to other parts of Europe, regardless of the current issues regarding Brexit.” Ho studied for his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Glasgow and then gained his master’s degree in engineering from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He later returned to Glasgow to complete his doctorate in bioengineering at the University of Strathclyde, which is also based in Glasgow.

“The University of Glasgow has been very approachable and supportive,” he adds. “I got to know Dame Anna Dominiczak, Glasgow’s Regius professor of medicine, when she was here in Singapore and she invited me to speak at the university’s industry day last year. [2015] “They have awesome facilities in Glasgow – the newly-built QEUH is futuristic, and full of state-of-the-art technologies. We are beginning to collaborate with a number of groups at the university that are carrying out clinical research into areas including cancer, fibrosis and kidney transplant.

“They have a vision about where they want to take integrative diagnostics in personalised medicine and that appeals to me. You want to partner with somebody who shares a vision with you.” n

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INSIGHT Life Sciences

INSIGHT Life Sciences

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Seeing the bigger picture The Imaging Centre of Excellence at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow will be the most sophisticated facility of its kind in Scotland when it opens this autumn, bringing benefits to the economy as well as to patients Keith Muir is excited. As the Scottish Imaging Network: A Platform for Scientific Excellent (SINAPSE) chair of clinical imaging at the University of Glasgow, he’s about to get a brand new toy to play with – a seven Tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner.

The 26-tonne device will generate a massive magnetic field measuring seven Tesla (7T) in strength, allowing medical researchers and clinicians to scan the human body in greater detail than ever before. “For my own specialism in stroke, the MRI scanner will allow us to produce detailed images of the damage caused by stroke and give us the capability of visualising the very small vessels responsible for many strokes,” Muir explains.

“These devices are already being used for research into the brain. But so far we’ve only scratched the surface of what these pieces of equipment can do.”

While MRI scanners have become common in many hospitals, the new £7 million device will be the only one of its kind for human use in Scotland. Just three are operational in the UK – at Cardiff, Nottingham and Oxford – with Cambridge and London also due to install machines in the coming year.

Having a 7T scanner means Glasgow is joining an exclusive club – and the university is building a very special home for its new device.

Construction work on the £16m Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE) began in October

2015, with the topping out ceremony taking place in July 2016. The centre is connected to the new £1 billion Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in Govan on the south side of the River Clyde in central Glasgow, the largest acute medical facility in Western Europe, which opened in 2015.

“What sets Glasgow’s 7T MRI scanner apart from those at other sites in the UK – and indeed internationally – is that it will be housed at a hospital,” says Muir. “Most other facilities can only handle patients who can walk into a university research building, but we’ll be able to bring patients in their beds from the hospital into the ICE building to use the scanner.”

Yet the ICE building is about much, much more than just housing the 7T device. The facility will bring together imaging specialists from a broad range of disciplines to work together on the same site.

“At the moment, we are all working in separate places and we are often faced with the same challenges when it comes to working out how to analyse images,” Muir says. “A problem that might take me months and months to figure out could be perfectly routine for someone else working in a different discipline – but I might not see that person until I bump into them at the next international conference.

“Bringing together researchers into the same building will help us to share our knowledge with each other. Hospitals are already used

Keith Muir

“These devices are being used for research into the brain. But so far we’ve only scratched the surface of what they can do”

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INSIGHT Life Sciences

to radiologists crossing multiple specialist fields, so we’re extending that idea into medical research too.”

Once the scanner is up-and-running, the medical research being carried out on the device could eventually lead to new ways of diagnosing diseases, meaning that the machine will not only speed-up scientific research but will also directly help patients. The location of the ICE building at the QEUH is not only important for patients and researchers but also for the emerging field of personalised or stratified medicine. Personalised medicine will allow clinicians to look at each patient’s genes so that they can diagnose the specific form of disease affecting that individual and then prescribe a treatment or medicine that is tailored to work for their body.

The ICE building is being constructed next door to the £20m Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre (SMS-IC), a facility led by the University of Glasgow but with a Scotlandwide remit. The SMS-IC is bringing together the genome sequencing technology needed to analyse a person’s genes with the complex bioinformatics needed to handle the large amount of genic data and link it to the National Health Service’s (NHS’s) clinical data – this will allow patients to be categorised or stratified according to their genetic profiles.

While the medical and scientific benefits of the ICE building are clear to see, the centre also has a third role to play. The facility will not simply bring advantages for patients and researchers but will also act as an economic development tool. The construction of the centre has been supported not only by cash from the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) but also by £16m from the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) through the £1.13bn Glasgow City Region City Deal, which brings together the UK Government, the Scottish Government and the eight local councils across Glasgow and the Clyde Valley in the largest funding agreement of its kind in the UK. The ICE is expected to create 400 jobs over the next ten years and bring nearly £88m of gross value added to the economy. As well as housing 40 clinical staff and 100 researchers, the centre also has space for a further 120 people working in industry.

Bringing together academics, businesspeople and clinicians is designed to stimulate collaboration between the three branches of the life sciences sector, which in turn will create

“Most other scanners can only handle patients who can walk into a university research building. We’ll bring patients in their beds from the hospital”

further jobs. Researchers will be able to draw on the expertise of their industrial partners and vice-versa. Muir and his team will be working with the companies that design and make the hardware and software for the 7T MRI scanners so that they can help to expand the machines’ range of services from the clinical research sphere into the diagnostic arena to help patients. There will also be opportunities for digital technology companies to work together with the ICE to develop the software needed to handle the vast amounts of data being generated by the imaging equipment and the massive reams of patient data, which will need to be treated in an ethical and sensitive way.

Such partnership will bring together two of the most exciting areas of the Scottish economy – digital technology and life sciences.

Working collaboratively isn’t just an opportunity for big companies though, with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) also having the chance to work with academics and clinicians. The size of the partners on the site will range from German industrial and technological giant Siemens – which is supplying the 7T scanner – all the way through to start-up and spin-out companies, some already attracted from overseas.

“An entire floor within the ICE building will be dedicated to working with industry,” explains Carol Clugston, chief operating officer at the College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences (CMVLS) at the University of Glasgow. “The whole business case for ICE has been built around economic development and job creation.”

The industrial area within ICE will be managed alongside the university’s existing incubation facilities adjacent to the neighbouring SMS-IC. Small businesses will have the opportunity to rent flexible laboratory or office space in either building, depending on their needs and their specialities. “The 20,000sq ft of industry space that we have here in ICE and adjacent to the

SMS-IC is for companies that need to be within the hospital campus,” Clugston says. “But there’s land adjacent to the hospital site that is available and so we’re talking to property developers and land owners about what could be done there.

“There’s also still space within the campus site that the NHS might be open to using. There’s lots of potential for expansion. This isn’t just about what’s in the building but it’s the knockon and indirect effects for other businesses and what may grow up around the ecosystem.”

Companies are already showing an interest in being located at the ICE building. “The coils that are used in the 7T scanner are not made by the MRI scanner manufacturers – they are developed and built by a components supplier,” explains Clugston. “We have just recruited one of the best coil engineers in the world, who has come from Germany and has been attracted by this site. He had multiple job offers from the United States but we attracted him to come here.

“That’s just one example of the benefits that this building will bring. These are new skills that are being brought to Scotland and to the UK that we’ve never had before. This is about attracting the right people to come to work in Scotland and be able to develop these new skills.

“What we’re trying to do is attract other companies like this to come to this new building. They might be directly related to the 7T or to other types of imaging or they might be related to precision medicine more broadly, because imaging is another aspect of precision medicine.

“So it’s about finding companies that want to make connections with us. We’ve got a lot of ongoing collaborations that have arisen because of ICE. Because we’re developing this critical mass and this reputation around what we’re doing, we’ve got a lot of companies that are speaking to us and are developing projects with us right now. It’s all because of the fact that we have this building.” n

INSIGHT Life Sciences

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Carol Clugston, chief operating officer at the College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences (CMVLS) at the University of Glasgow

LIVE DEBATE

THE VOICE FOR BUSINESS DEBATE

The issue: “How can Scotland capitalise on the success of its life sciences sector and what must we do to ensure that we position Scotland as a global leader within the sector?”

Scotland’s life sciences sector is a hidden economic gem. With 650 organisations together employing 35,000 people, Scotland has one of the largest life sciences clusters in Europe, with companies spread across a broad range of disciplines from human health to agriculture, aquaculture and industrial biotechnology.

The nation has ambitious plans to double turnover within the sector to £6.2 billion by 2020 and double the gross value it adds to the economy to £3bn. Collaboration is at the heart of that growth, drawing together Scotland’s companies, its 19 universities and higher education institutions, and its unified National Health Service (NHS), which has the most advanced electronic health records in the world.

How to capitalise on the sector’s success and position it as a global leader were in sharp focus during the latest BQ Live Debate, which was held at the Blythswood Hotel in Glasgow. Laura Gordon, Glasgow chair of leadership training organisation Vistage and a regular chair of BQ’s

debates, asked the participants what challenges lay ahead.

Carol Clugston, chief operating officer at the University of Glasgow’s College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences (CMVLS), mentioned the industry facilities available at the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in Glasgow, the largest and most advanced in Europe. “My challenge is how can Scotland’s life sciences community work together to exploit that asset because it’s not just about Glasgow, it’s about the whole of Scotland,” she said.

Having taken over as managing director of life sciences incubator BioCity Scotland in March, Toby Reid introduced himself as one of the newest members of the community. “I’m looking forward to learning about the challenges facing the Scottish life sciences scene,” he added.

Douglas Maxwell founded PAL Technologies in 2001 as a spin-out from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and described himself as a “recovering academic”. He explained

PAL’s challenge last year had been to deliver a behaviour change device for a European project looking at older football fans, while this year’s challenge is delivering a wearable component for the follow-up of the 1970 birth cohort.

Selling life sciences as a career and ensuring graduate employability were top of the agenda for Scott Johnstone, chief executive of the Scottish Lifesciences Association (SLA), a trade body founded in 2011 with 15 members, which has now grown to 130. “We need a lot of people if we’re going to grow the sector,” he said. “As an industry, we’re not good at selling into schools to children and their parents.”

Sinclair Dunlop, chief executive of Epidarex Capital, was worried about getting across to all stakeholder groups, including politicians, that the sector is different; timelines are longer and risk-profiles are higher. “Expectations of the sector’s performance are often not realistic and are compared to the wrong peers,” he said.

“We’re not very good in terms of articulating

LIVE DEBATE Life Sciences

“How do we take a little more risk on winners? We don’t put enough money in to ramp up companies for success. They’re immediately looking for money once they’ve been incorporated” what we do in Scotland and we’re overly modest,” said Julia Brown, senior director of life and chemical sciences at Scottish Enterprise.

“When you go overseas and talk about some of the things we take for granted in Scotland, we underestimate ourselves. We also have a habit of being quite negative and focusing on all of the things that aren’t perfect instead of looking at the things we have done quite well in comparison to our peers and how innovative we are.

“Unless we do more to sell what’s great about life sciences, and the diversity of it, then we’re going to struggle to bring through the talent from our schools, colleges and universities. My challenge is how do we encourage companies to be much more ambitious? They could be more ambitious when it comes to the markets they want to be in and the amount of investment they want to raise. They’re quite conservative.”

Specsavers franchisee David Quigley spoke about his close connections with Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) and praised it for improving its graduates’ skills. He asked whether that success was being repeated in other sectors.

“There are a lot of technologies out there and we should be considering where they have applications in the life sciences,” he pointed out.

Malcolm Bateman, chief executive of the Roslin Foundation, which runs the Roslin Biocentre science park near Edinburgh said: “Maybe we get it wrong because we always focus on having a life sciences cluster but maybe we should challenge that and look at other technologies and bring those on board.”

Graeme Milligan, dean of research at the CMVLS, said he was “still addicted” to being an academic and explained how he had spun Caldan Therapeutics out from the University of Glasgow, backed by Epidarex. “I might argue Scotland’s life sciences sector isn’t quite as successful as we sometimes like to think it is on a global scale, even for being a small country,” he said.

“How do we much more effectively move ideas and concepts out of the academic community?

How do we take a little more risk on winners rather than spreading the butter a little too thin across the whole sector? We don’t put enough money in to ramp up companies for success; they’re immediately looking for money once they’ve been incorporated.”

Getting talent into the sector was a key focus for Neil Partlett, managing director at Grangemouth-based chemicals firm CalaChem.

“Getting young people coming through the apprenticeship programme is just as important as coming through university,” he said. “There’s a big gap that needs to be filled by people who come from that route.”

Anita Simmers, head of the Department of Life Sciences at GCU, described her passion for her students. “We should be laying the foundation for global leaders from day one in year one, not when they finish in fourth year,” she said.

“One thing I’d like to discuss isn’t scientific or technical but cultural,” said David Sibbald, executive chairman of Aridhia Informatics and chair of the Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre (SMS-IC). “How do we get people and organisations from the academic, clinical and industrial communities to think about how they can work together? That’s what’s required for precision medicine.

“We can’t throw money or people at it in the same way as China or the United States, but what we can do is be really smart about how we cooperate and collaborate. We’ve started that process and so should celebrate it but we’re by no means through it – Scotland can still sometimes be a federation of fiefdoms, both geographically and academically.”

His comment about fiefdoms stoked the discussion about collaboration between academia, industry and the NHS. “David is right – historically, we did have a lot of issues around collaborations not encompassing the whole of the country, but there’s been a lot of work done then to bring the ‘fiefdoms’ together,” explained Brown. “We shouldn’t be complacent about that. What’s impressive when we go south of the Border and overseas

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TAKING PART Malcolm Bateman, chief executive, Roslin Foundation Julia Brown, director of life and chemical sciences, Scottish Enterprise Carol Clugston, chief operating officer, College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow Sinclair Dunlop, managing partner, Epidarex Capital Scott Johnstone, chief executive, Scottish Lifesciences Association Douglas Maxwell, chief executive, PAL Technologies Graeme Milligan, dean of research, College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow Neil Partlett, chief executive, Calachem David Quigley, joint venture partner, Specsavers Toby Reid, managing director of BioCity Scotland David Sibbald, chair of the Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre and executive chairman of Aridhia Informatics Anita Simmers, head of the Department of Life Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University Also taking part: Dave Townsley, group account director, BQ In the chair: Laura Gordon, Glasgow chair, Vistage Taking notes: Peter Ranscombe, editor, BQ Scotland Venue: Blythswood Hotel, 11 Blythswood Square, Glasgow, G2 4AD

BQ is highly regarded as a leading independent commentator on business issues, many of which have a bearing on the current and future success of the nation’s economy. BQ Live is a series of informative debates designed to further contribute to the success and prosperity of our economy through the debate, discussion and feedback of a range of key business topics and issues.

#bqlivedebate Join in the debate online and have your say on the issues raised. If you would like us to organise a BQ round table dinner debate call 0191 389 8468 or email info@bqlive.co.uk

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LIVE DEBATE Life Sciences

is being able to say our universities and health boards aren’t just working with each other but also working across industry. That’s something people are interested in hearing about, but we need to keep that momentum going.”

“One of the reasons we set the SLA up was to get companies to help each other to build their businesses – we see collaboration within industry every day,” added Johnstone. He pointed to the Health Innovation Partnership and the Innovative Medical Technologies Overview (IMTO), which allow businesses to have their technology reviewed, bought and used in the NHS. “There are now innovation champions in each health board,” he said. “It’s quite easy for companies to engage with the right people to find out if the NHS would buy their products.”

Maxwell said: “Talking of fiefdoms, there are four universities in Glasgow. Even as a Strathclyde spin out, we’ve done a lot more work over the years with Edinburgh. We do engage with Glasgow and Caledonian, but we live with this internal competition and I think we could do a lot more together than we do apart.”

“I totally agree that we’re stronger together than we are apart,” nodded Clugston. “But I disagree that we’re fiefdoms – we have been in the past, but we’re making huge inroads. Healthy competition doesn’t do us any harm.

“Medical schools in England are insanely jealous

of what we have in Scotland – each medical school works with a single partner health board and we’re all joined up under a single NHS Scotland, which they don’t have in England.

Sometimes we don’t all agree but we have the ability in Scotland to all sit around a table and make a decision.”

Sibbald highlighted the need for collaboration between industry, the NHS and academia in precision medicine. He pointed to the SMS-IC as an example of where such collaboration was already taking place. “Our competitive advantage is how we collaborate at a deep level,” he said.

Collaborating with companies from outside the life sciences sector was also a major theme during the debate. Bateman explained about working with engineers at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh on three-dimensional (3D) printing using stem cells. He also pointed to Well Cow, a joint venture between the Roslin Foundation and TPP Group, that uses sensors to monitor the health of cows and then transmits data over Bluetooth or mobile phone signals.

“Malcolm’s right – people are so focused on what they’re good at that they don’t take the time to look left or right,” agreed Sibbald.

“When you look at the collaborations happening in the US around precision medicine, the companies involved aren’t life science companies, they’re tech and data companies. “The majority

“Look at collaborations happening around the US around precision medicine; the companies involved aren’t life science companies, they’re tech and data companies”

of the investment and resources going in are from people like Cisco, Google and Intel.

These technologies have been proven in other industries, so the question becomes how do you adapt them for use in the life sciences?”

Quigley asked why such collaborations were happening in the US but not Scotland?

“The difference is the money, the scale of investment they can make,” replied Sibbald.

“Companies like Google are revolutionising where life sciences is going to go,” Milligan chipped in. “One of my good friends used to be head of diabetes at the National Institute of Health in the US. He’s moved to Google because the power of its informatics is so strong and he thinks it’s going to revolutionise how you treat individuals. One of the great things we can do in Scotland is take advantage of the NHS’s databases.”

Milligan also questioned how precision medicine could work within a socialised medical scheme, like the NHS? “That’s one of the big challenges that still needs to be sorted out,” admitted Sibbald. “The precision medicine agenda in the US is in some ways more advanced than ours because there’s an available market, with customers willing to pay. That’s not the landscape in Scotland or the UK.” The availability of investment is not just a challenge for companies targeting the precision medicine market but for any business operating in the life sciences sphere. Gordon asked whether enough funding was available and whether Scottish businesses lacked ambition?

“The short answer is ‘no’ there’s not enough

LIVE DEBATE Life Sciences

funding and ‘no’ there’s not enough ambition,” replied Dunlop. He highlighted the need for “convergence” between Scotland’s “centres of excellence” – such as life sciences and informatics – to bring together experts from different fields, which he said would appeal to investors.

“Scotland also needs to look at our track record,” he added. “How many companies born and bred in Scotland have actually made money in this sector for their investors? And specifically for institutional investors, because the public sector can only do so much and the universities themselves can only do so much.

“We need half a dozen home-grown success stories that have delivered competitive financial returns at scale. We’re on the cusp of seeing that in other sectors, such as Scotland’s so-called digital technology ‘unicorns’, so we need a life sciences’ ‘unicorn’.”

Reid pointed to the BioCity UK Life Science Startup Report. “The last one we produced, which was for 2011 to 2014, showed 62 per cent of start-ups in the life sciences in Scotland were from university spin-outs; the second highest in the rest of the UK was the West Midlands with only 38 per cent and Cambridge had just 20-25 per cent. That shows the strength of the research base in Scotland.

“Scotland’s start-ups made up 13 per cent of the UK’s total but only accounted for 5 percent of the investment raised. Scotland had the same number of start-ups as London, but only raised one-seventh of the investment. Is that about availability of finance or ambition? It’s a 50-50 split.”

He added: “Ambition is raised when you see

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“Scotland’s start-ups were 13% of UK’s total but only accounted for 5% of the investment - the same number of start-ups as London but only one seventh of the investment’’ successful people raising big money in your own backyard and you think you could do the same.

People are limited by the stratification of finance – if you go to your most immediate source and it can only give you £100,000 then that’s what you write your business plan around. London’s only an hour and 20 minutes away. Money will go where the quality opportunities are.

“There’s a shortage of deep pockets that can do multiple follow-on investments – £100,000 doesn’t get you anywhere in life sciences and it lessens the appetite of angel investors to do it again in the future.”

Dunlop responded: “That’s a really good point – Scotland has one of the best angel investment communities in the world, but it and the life sciences sector rarely meet and certainly not in a therapeutics context. That’s a good example of us having two pockets of excellence but we haven’t found a way to bring them together yet.”

“One of the challenges we have at the moment is that funding streams are targeted at individual sectors,” explained Clugston. “Universities can get money from the research councils or the Scottish Funding Council, industry can get money from Scottish Enterprise, and the NHS is different as well. We’re going into territory where we have to work together and the current funding streams don’t lend themselves to that. We’re falling short of attracting funding because we

don’t fall into the right categories.”

Milligan commented: “Angels investors in Scotland are fabulous, but there’s only so much money that they’re willing or able to invest. Carol mentioned the research councils – the average research council grant falls somewhere between £500,000 and £750,000 at the moment – that essentially pays for the equivalent of one fulltime member of staff. Why does someone think £100,000 will go anywhere?”

Reid added: “The bit that doesn’t get done well – and this is a big opportunity for Scotland with its single NHS – is for an end customer to declare its problems and then have companies coming together to provide a solution to that problem, rather than coming up with a piece of technology and then asking where it’s useful.

“Market-led innovation rather than technologyled innovation is cheaper and easier to fund. I’ve also noticed NHS Scotland is more open about talking to companies at an earlier stage. That’s really tough in England.”

“That’s exactly why we setup the HIP,” Johnstone pointed out. “We’re seeing more companies starting up around that market need, not a technology. From an investor’s point of view, it’s like falling off a log.”

“Toby’s point is really valid,” added Sibbald.

“Our approach has been to have some technology push and some market pull, with a

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LIVE DEBATE Life Sciences

multidisciplinary team in the middle. Science and research is global but healthcare is local.

“We’re trying to work collaboratively to get, for example, a diagnostic test into the NHS, and come to an economic arrangement with the health service so it gets access to that test.

It’s not necessarily going to pay money up front for it but, as part of that collaboration, it will act as our global reference customer to demonstrate the viability of what’s been built and then commercialise that globally. Our business model is to say that if everyone is chipping-in and working on a particular solution then when a commercial product comes out the other end there’s a revenue royalty distribute to everyone who’s played within that game.” BQ group account director David Townsley asked what Scotland had to offer to encourage entrepreneurs to start life science companies here? Brown listed reasons including the availability of finance, facilities, support, strength of the universities’ research and talented graduates.

Clugston pointed to two examples of people

“Our approach has been to have some technology push and some market pull with a multidisciplinary team in the middle”

being attracted to the University of Glasgow.

“One is Professor Andrew Biankin, who moved his research group from Australia to Glasgow to do precision medicine because he’s looked the world over and he thinks there’s nowhere else he could possibly do it,” she said.

“The other example is a German company that is leading the development of the coils for the seven-Telsa magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner at the QEUH. The owner of that company was sitting with multiple job offers from the US but chose Scotland because he sees the NHS is open to working with him. He can do things here he can’t do anywhere else.”

Sibbald pointed to the “valley” that entrepreneurs need to cross between research and commercialisation. “What we’ve done in

Scotland is make that valley narrower and not as deep as in other parts of the world because we’ve got a collaborative environment and we’ve got a willing and open NHS,” he said.

Despite only becoming BioCity Scotland managing director in March, Reid has already seen why entrepreneurs should pick Scotland.

“I’ve noticed three areas: the quality of the research and the talent in the universities; the size, which means there’s a community you can be introduced to and the unitary nature of the health service; and funding, because despite the challenges, the public grant funding available here is amazing compared to other places and the angel scene is phenomenal.”

Partlett said Scotland’s big advantage is its size: “You can get immediate access to the Scottish

LIVE DEBATE Life Sciences

Government if you need it.”

Townsley also asked how universities were engaging with entrepreneurs?

“There’s been a culture change in recent years at many universities,” explained Clugston.

“Nowadays, the universities are thinking right from the word ‘Go’ about the impact of their research. We’re reaching out to companies and think a lot about how the research is going to be used.”

“From the investors’ perspective, the shining light should be unmet market need and you should work back from that,” Dunlop emphasised. “That will be controversial in some university quarters, but we as investors often see university-sourced opportunities that are ‘solutions in search of a problem’ and ultimately they’re not fundable for that reason.”

Milligan suggested: “Universities need to look really carefully at having staff who can move rapidly when industry addresses a question to us. Most of our staff are committed to working on a particular project and we can’t easily transfer them.”

Simmers agreed: “It is a challenge. We’re a much smaller institution, so we can turn things around that little bit quicker, but I agree with Carol – there are very few universities that aren’t focused on a specific question. Researchers aren’t in an ivory tower anymore. That’s been a massive culture change.”

As the debate drew to a close, the way in which the sector communicates – both with potential collaborators and with students, pupils and parents – was discussed. Quigley asked: “Should the convergence and cooperation begin with a marketing exercise to advertise these capabilities on a global basis?”

“Marketing the diversity of the life sciences sector in Scotland internationally can be challenging,” Brown admitted. “Part of the work we want to do with our industry leadership groups and others is to think about marketing. If we can’t market everything all at once to the same level then we have to think more strategically about marketing campaigns around particular activities. At the moment, we’re supporting our companies to trade internationally. The majority of our companies are medical technology or pharmaceutical support service, so when we’re marketing Scotland we focus on those two areas.

“When we’re thinking about how to attract others to Scotland for collaboration or

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“The universities are thinking right from the word go about the impact of their research. We’re reaching out to companies”

investment then there are a number of themes that have come through strongly in terms of what the international community is interested in: regenerative medicine; precision medicine, particularly our assets around our health record system and our connections with our academic base; and animal health, such as livestock research, along with fish and plants.”

Clugston said the Scottish Funding Council had put aside money for postgraduate degrees that help to plug industrial skills gaps and gave the example of the master of science degree in precision medicine, which is training graduates to enter the emerging supply chain. “That’s a small example, but there are pockets where we’re developing courses by sitting down with industry so they can tell us what they need,” she said.

“That has to come at an undergraduate level as well,” added Simmers. “We need to look at what we’re delivering and is it fulfilling industry’s needs. You can go even further back. If you look at schools then the careers advice is dreadful.

“This is a massively-exciting sector and there are so many opportunities for these graduates.

But I know very few parents who understand what the life science sector is. There’s a visibility problem. It’s such a booming sector and the general Scottish population have no idea about it.

“Right from day one we need to make sure students are involved with industry so they can see the opportunities. I would love for those opportunities to be global, so graduates bring knowledge back to Scotland.”

“It sounds to me like the life sciences needs a public relations (PR) campaign,” said Quigley.

“Perhaps a collaborative PR campaign that would raise awareness of the industry among the public and among students.”

Dunlop agreed. “It needs to reach the kids whose parents aren’t scientists. The only kids who want to be scientists are those whose parents are scientists. There’s something missing there. “Something needs to explain the social impact of the sector in layman’s terms.

How do we get across more concisely and more effectively that there’s not another sector on the

face of the Earth that has more social impact?”

“Sex it up,” was Quigley’s solution.

“I’m not knocking graduates, but companies have done very well from modern apprenticeships and that’s something we should expand,” added Bateman. “The people who need to talk about the industry are the young people who are starting these companies.

“We need ambassadors, people who have only been working in the industry for a few years, to explain what it’s like. Make it sexy, make it fun. A lot of the young people who work in our labs do a fantastic job of explaining what it’s like.”

He also highlighted the need for staff with good manufacturing practice (GMP) skills. “We can’t find those people. How do we train people to do that? No disrespect to graduates, but it has to be more focused.”

Partlett said: “I’m passionate about apprentices.

Getting apprentices is hugely beneficial. You need to get to people before they’re 13 years old. You need to get them to pick science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which are harder, and that brings you up against the school targets system in which schools just want to get good results, so children take easier subjects.

“There’s also the ‘outcome’ mentality that says if you go to university then that’s a great outcome but if you go on an apprenticeship then that doesn’t count. You need to get teachers to be the ambassadors for the sector because they’re there all the time.”

Brown added: “We’ve had a lot of people spending time with companies as interns. It’s sometimes a challenge for companies to take interns, so we need to be more open to putting in more effort. It pays back in the future.”

In conclusion, Brown added: “We started with David’s comments about fiefdoms, but it’s been good to highlight it’s not just about fiefdoms between organisations but about fiefdoms between sectors. How do we create an environment in which people from outside life sciences can work more closely with us? Perhaps there’s some more work to be done in breaking down the fiefdoms.” n

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INSIGHT bqlive.co.uk

Investing in the next generation Scotland’s universities produce many of the talented researchers who will go on to work in the country’s life sciences sector, and companies such as UCB Pharma have a big role to play in helping to develop the skills of those graduates

INSIGHT Life Sciences

Studying science can open up a whole world of possibilities. From the tiniest cells that make up the human body through to the massive stars and planets that form the galaxy, the choice of courses at Scotland’s universities is awe inspiring.

But what happens when it comes to finding a job at the end of it? After three, four or even five years of undergraduate study followed by a further four years at postgraduate level, the world of work can sometimes seem like a scary place.

Students who are completing their doctor of philosophy (PhD) degrees at some of Scotland’s top universities are being given a helping hand by companies including UCB Pharma.

As well as carrying out research within their own universities, the students also get to tap into the expertise available within UCB’s laboratories, giving them exposure to industry as well as academia.

UCB supports around 40 PhD students at any one time at 17 UK universities, including the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde. The company invests upwards of £50,000-worth of support for many students, with its current commitment standing at around £3.15 million.

As well as top-up grants to supplement those awarded to students by the UK Government’s research councils, UCB also pays for the consumables used by the PhD researchers in their laboratories. Where possible, the student also taps into UCB’s internal research infrastructure to access cutting-edge, specialist technologies not available back at their universities. Working with universities to help train the next generation of scientists doesn’t just bring benefits for the students though – it also helps the pharmaceutical companies too.

“R&D is important to every pharmaceutical company that’s trying to bring medicines to market,” explains Neil Weir, senior vice president of discovery at UCB. “You can discover and develop those medicines yourself, or you can go out on the hunt for someone else who has discovered them, or you can do a combination

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Neil Weir, senior vice president of discovery at UCB

“We work closely with universities because academic science in the UK is really of a very, very high standard.

We’re building and maintaining links”

of the two and work in partnership.

“Our internal R&D is very productive – we invest around 28 per cent of our top line back into R&D. “We also work closely with universities because academic science in the UK is really of a very, very high standard. We’re building and maintaining our links with the academic community from which a lot of the real fundamental insight and biology comes.

“One of the great assets that keeps the pharmaceutical and biotech industry here is the opportunity to collaborate with great scientists who are doing fundamental work to understand cellular processes or disease processes.”

One of the steps in UCB’s R&D process is to speak to patients to find out which symptoms of a disease they find the hardest with which to cope. This allows the company to then develop

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INSIGHT Life Sciences

drugs or therapies that will meet the specific needs of patients.

“We value information from all sorts of sources,” says Weir, who began his career by studying biology at the University of Edinburgh.

“Understanding what it’s like from a patient’s perspective – as well as understanding what a doctor thinks about the disease and how they see it – adds an additional dimension that I think is very important to us.

“So we ask what is it that’s really affecting that person’s life, or in some cases their family’s life?

What is it that really makes a difference to them?”

Weir points to the importance of academia and industry working together. “It highlights the notion that we’re not just doing science for the sake of science,” he says. “While I think that it’s still important to sometimes do science for the sake of science, we’re also doing science as a means to an end, of actually applying that science for the good of humanity. And in our area that is to be in new therapies.

“I think it brings benefits for the students too.

A student who has completed part of their PhD in conjunction with industry has been given a broader outlook, not just in terms of great science but also in terms of how businesses run and what it takes to have a career in industry.

“I think that there’s sometimes a natural inclination in science to be very focused in your area of expertise. And I think one of the things that our students get is a broader overview.”

Part of that wider experience comes through UCB’s annual PhD networking days, which took place at the Royal College of Physicians in 2015 and 2016. The networking days are designed to help early-career researchers build up their own professional networks, which could open the door to further collaborations and partnerships in the future. Students are also given the chance to develop and practice their transferable skills by giving presentations about their research and discussing their ideas with their fellow researchers. As well as developing their public speaking and presentation skills, the students also receive prizes for the best talks.

Last year’s event included representatives from the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBRSC), and the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC),

“I think there’s sometimes a natural inclination in science to be very focused in your area of expertise. I think one of the things our students get is a broad view” and a keynote address on the latest in antibody research. Hearing such talks helps students to widen their horizons and see what other options are available to them later in their careers.

“At our PhD networking day, we bring together all of our PhD students for one large symposia,” explains Weir. “We ask the students who are nearing the end of their research to present their work. It’s good for them – although I’m sure they don’t think so at the time – to stand up in front of a lot of people because communicating science is important.

“They also get to see an extraordinarily broad range of science. They will see mathematicians talking about bio-infomatic models to try and put together genetic information. They will see fundamental cell biology. They’ll see physicists looking at protein structure. So they get the opportunity to put their piece of work in the context of a much broader range of science, which I think is good.

“It’s also very good for our scientists to get out of their labs and build networks. I’m generalising, but very often scientists tend to be somewhat introverted – I think there’s something about the scientific mind that tends towards that behaviour.

“Supervising a PhD student is an important part of the personal development plan of a UCB scientist. They may not actually be that long out of doing PhDs themselves, so they can have

some empathy.”

Tilo Kunath, Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Regenerative Medicine, has worked with UCB on a project for one of his PhD students, Fergus McWhinnie, who will spend three months at UCB’s laboratories in Slough as part of his three-year MRC-funded studentship.

McWhinnie is studying alpha-synuclein, a disordered protein involved in Parkinson’s disease, and is using chemistry tools to staple part of the protein into an alpha-helix shape, making what’s called a ‘healthy fold’. His work is primarily being supervised by Alison Hulme, senior lecture in organic chemistry at the university, while the biological aspect of his project is being overseen by Kunath.

“Fergus will then take the material he’s made here in Edinburgh down to the UCB lab in Slough,” Kunath explains. “Instead of simply learning techniques that he can bring back to Edinburgh, UCB will be generating antibodies that recognise this helical protein.

“It could lead to a therapeutic treatment or it could be used as a tool in the lab. It’s not just a token visit to learn stuff – he’ll actually be doing very practical work towards his PhD while he’s down there.”

Kunath thinks that the students, the academics and the wider university all benefit from the industrial placements. “The placements with

INSIGHT Life Sciences

UCB are very student-centred,” he says. “UCB has been nicknamed ‘the University of Slough’ because it carries out so much R&D work with academics, which is fairly unique in industry.

“The students benefit because they can see the differences between carrying out research in industry and in academia. They get to see the real-world outcomes of their work, which they don’t always get to do with a purely academic PhD. “It’s also good that the students get exposed to different supervisors’ styles – as well as myself and Alison, Fergus is also supervised by Terry Baker from UCB. One of the other advantages we’ll see in the future is the PhD students who have been through the industrial placements will be more employable because they have more experience.”

It’s not just the students who benefit from the industrial placements though – the university is also able to reap the rewards. “We gain access to technology and expertise that otherwise wouldn’t be available to us,” Kunath explains.

“UCB has antibody generation technology in Slough that no-one in academia has.

“UCB also contributes to the student’s stipend and pays for the consumables they use. The company is one of the more generous industrial partners, always making a contribution above the level suggested by the MRC.” Kunath has also enjoyed an unexpected benefit from his work with UCB. The company has recently begun funding a one-year contract for a post-doctoral fellow who will work with him on a project that isn’t related to McWhinnie’s work.

“This new post wouldn’t have been created unless we had worked with UCB through the PhD scheme,” he adds. “We’re now working with Patrick Downey at UCB’s headquarters in Belgium.”

Neil Bulleid, professor of cell biology at the University of Glasgow, thinks that academia and industry have roles to play in the support of the development of students. “There are benefits for both in this kind of relationship,” he says.

“For the students, these include gaining the experience of working in an industrial environment and for the company the freedom to go into areas of research that it would not otherwise be able to. A good example would be if one of my students found a way of creating new antibody formats – that would be very important. n

The view from the students “Collaborations between academia and industry are an essential step forward in closing the gap between science and pharmaceutical companies. I have just completed a collaborative PhD between UCB Pharma and the University of Glasgow, which was thoroughly enjoyable. It is essential at the start of a career with two separate directions to firstly be given the opportunity to experience both and secondly to be shown that, as collaborations move forward, the two can be interchangeable. As a result of the knowledge, expertise and training I received from both partners, I was able to secure a post-doctoral position in an academic lab, which is also a collaborative project, but also with the knowledge that I have the skills to enter into an industrial career as well.”

Chloe Stoyle

“My PhD is centred around making improvements to the way that cells make proteins in order to increase the yield of therapeutic protein manufactured by UCB. The project utilises the strengths of the two collaborating groups, mixing the expertise of Neil Bulleid’s lab at the University of Glasgow in the biochemistry of protein folding, with the practical manufacturing know-how of UCB. As I am close to completing my four-year project, I am now seeking a postdoctoral job in either an academic lab or an industrial one, and I believe the knowledge and experience obtained from my collaborative PhD has set me up well to undertake either career path.”

Fiona Chalmers

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Right drug, right patient, right time Precision or stratified medicine doesn’t just offer better treatments for patients – it can also help to deliver wider benefits too, both for the health service and for economic development Few areas of science can match the excitement that currently exists around precision or stratified medicine. By analysing a patient’s genes – and then studying that genetic information alongside images of their body, the results of blood tests, and other diagnostic tools – clinicians can build up an entire picture about that individual and treat their specific condition instead of following a more general protocol.

For patients, precision medicine can’t come soon enough. At the moment, only about 25 per cent of medicines will work for the people for which they’re prescribed. Clinicians often have to try a series of drugs in sequence or in combination with one another to find the medicine that will work for each individual patient. That process can take months or even years and can take too long for patients with terminal diseases.

“For infection and immunity – and in particular the auto-immune diseases – we now have some remarkably effective therapies that work in a proportion of our patients,” explains Iain McInnes, Muirhead professor of medicine and

director of the Institute of Infection, Immunity & Inflammation at the University of Glasgow.

“Put simply, precision medicine would allow us to deliver those very effective therapies to such individuals, and at the same time, to very quickly identify people who aren’t going to benefit and go down a different route with them.

“It’s a hackneyed phrase, but it’s about the right medicine for the right patient at the right time. I can’t think of a better way of describing it than that. It’s about the appropriate decision for an individual in the journey through their illness.

“The practice of medicine, particularly in the field of chronic inflammatory diseases, has to some extent been driven by hit-and-miss. We treat according to algorithms and for some people that means there’s a good result but for others we know there will not be a good result for a given treatment – either they will not respond or, worse than that, they’ll have a side effect.

So we’re trying to choose the most appropriate inflammatory modifying medicine as early as possible in the patient’s care to prevent future

damage and disability.” If up to 75 per cent of the prescriptions that are currently written for patients aren’t effective, then that poses a huge problem for the National Health Service (NHS) and for the taxpayers who fund it. The NHS in England spends around £15.5 billion each year on drugs, with NHS Scotland buying around £1.1bn.

If clinicians could prescribe the right drug for the right patient at the right time then the savings for the public purse would soon mount up.

“The challenge for the NHS just now is that the drugs bill is becoming completely unaffordable,” says Carol Clugston, chief operating officer at the College of Medicine, Veterinary & Life Sciences (CMVLS) at the University of Glasgow. “People are living longer, the population is growing, and the drugs that are coming onto the market are incredibly expensive and we can’t afford to pay for them all. If it carries on like this then the NHS will be bust. It’s unaffordable.”

Tailoring specific drugs for specific patients also presents opportunities for pharmaceutical

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companies too. It currently takes between ten and 15 years to develop a drug and that process can cost in excess of £1.2bn.

As patents on blockbuster drugs expire, pharmaceutical firms are under increasing pressure from their shareholders to deliver results.

Many of the drugs they try to produce fall at hurdles during the development process and so if companies can produce more targeted medicines that they know will work for specific patients then they can save both time and money.

Precision medicine can also offer wider economic development opportunities. Studying the genes of patients generates vast amounts of data, which then require smart software to carry out analysis and identify which treatment will suit the individual’s genetic makeup.

Developing the software to power precision medicine – alongside the new drugs, therapies and devices that could be used to treat patients – creates opportunities for both established businesses and start-up companies, including university spin-outs. The University of Glasgow has provided incubator space within its Queen Elizabeth Learning & Teaching Centre (QELTC) at the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) to help precision medicine companies to turn their ideas into reality. The incubator sits next to the Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre (SMS-IC), a Scotland-wide partnership that brings together NHS Scotland, four universities and two companies, Aridhia and Thermo Fisher Scientific. Further industrial space is also available in the neighbouring Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE), which is being built to house Scotland’s first seven Tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and other cutting-edge technology, highlighting the role that imaging has to play.

“The promise of precision medicine is to move away from the one-size-fits-all therapeutic model and towards stratifying a patient population in a more precise configuration according to the likelihood of them responding well to treatment,” explains David Sibbald, who is executive chairman of Aridhia and chair of the SMS-IC. “Cancer is an important area of focus, but the same approach applies to areas such as neurodegenerative diseases – including Alzheimer’s, dementia and multiple sclerosis – and inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. One of the opportunities for industry is to help extract knowledge from all of the data generated by these new techniques, such as sequencing DNA or RNA, our buildings

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“The challenge for the NHS just now is that the drugs bill is becoming completely unaffordable. If it carries on like this then the NHS will be bust” block as humans. That generates a vast amount of data that needs to be interpreted into something useful for each individual patient and each individual disease.

“Enormous amounts of data are also generated by advanced imaging techniques, which are particularly important for areas such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and multiple sclerosis.

Companies can create products and services that optimise the data management and the analytics around those data sets.”

Sibbald co-founded communications software company Atlantech Technologies in 1992 and sold the business to American networks giant Cisco in 2000. He launched Aridhia in 2008 alongside Andrew Morris, professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

“Precision medicine will turn healthcare into a very informatics-intensive industry, which we’re pretty familiar with in manufacturing, high tech and financial services, which many of us engage with during our daily lives,” he says. “In the longer-term, that could create opportunities for individuals to have access to their own data and for companies to help link it with some of the wearable technology now available, measuring people’s blood pressure, blood sugar and how many steps they’re taking each day.

“At the moment, it’s very difficult for people to engage with the health system in the same way as you would engage with your bank. Health is the most important thing we’re interested in, but we’re disconnected from it at the moment.”

The Scottish Government has signalled its commitment to stratified medicine by unveiling £4 million of funding over the next five years to create a precision medicine ecosystem that will coordinate resources and opportunities throughout the country. The investment was announced by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon

during her visit to the SMS-IC in February. [2016] The University of Glasgow is also leading the training of the next generation of scientists to work in precision medicine across academia, the health service and industry. It runs an award-winning, pan-Scottish postgraduate master of science degree in stratified medicine and pharmacological innovation. Five Scottish universities contribute to the teaching, and students can choose to be based at either Glasgow or in Aberdeen.

That speciality in precision medicine has also been recognised at a UK level. To mark the Queen’s 90th birthday in June, [2016] the UK Government created Regius professorships at 12 of the country’s top universities.

“In the past, the monarch used to award Regius professorships,” explains Dame Anna Dominiczak, Regius professor of medicine at the University of Glasgow.

“Our university has had more than its fair share in the past.

But there weren’t any awarded for many years.

The tradition was revived for the Queen’s diamond jubilee in 2012 and again this year. n

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It takes a city to raise a life science child

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As the new managing director of BioCity Scotland, Toby Reid is drawing on his years of experience in setting up his own companies to help other entrepreneurs turn their life science dreams into reality It’s quite natural for anyone to get nervous before their first day in a new job – but Toby Reid had more reasons than most to feel apprehensive before taking over as managing director of BioCity, the network of life science business incubators that stretches from Newhouse in Lanarkshire down to Nottingham.

Reid has a long track-record of helping to get new businesses off the ground, but having trained as a civil engineer, the world of life sciences was something of an unknown quantity to him.

“If I’m honest, I was actually quite anxious when I first started because I knew that I didn’t have a thorough understanding of the science behind what all of these life science companies were actually doing,” he says. “Fortunately, they’re the experts in the science but where they often need support is around the establishment and running of the business and that’s where I and the proven BioCity model can help.”

Having studied at the University of Nottingham, Reid became a design engineer and later a project manager at consultancy firm Arup before going into business for himself. After launching his own companies in the leisure and financial services sectors, he then set up Growth Investment Network East Midlands to help entrepreneurs find sources of funding for their businesses. Reid joined BioCity as a director in 2011 to run its site in Nottingham and, over the course of this summer, he also became managing director of the group’s site in Newhouse. At BioCity Scotland, he took over the reins from Diane Harbison, who was interviewed in the winter 2015 issue of BQ Scotland magazine and who is now chief business development officer at Edinburgh Molecular Imaging.

BioCity Nottingham traces its roots back to 2001 when chemicals giant BASF donated more than 129,000sq ft of offices and highly-equipped laboratories to Nottingham Trent University.

Trent teamed up with the University of Nottingham and the East Midlands Development Agency to transform the vacant site into the original BioCity incubator, one of the first facilities of its kind in the UK. The Nottingham site opened in 2003 and now covers 166,000sq ft spread over four buildings.

Alongside the office and laboratory space, BioCity also offers business support services to early-stage life science companies, helping entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into reality.

When MSD, the European arm of American pharmaceuticals giant Merck & Co, closed its site at Newhouse in 2010, a similar opportunity presented itself. BioCity teamed up with Edinburgh-based incubator operator Roslin Biocentre to open BioCity Scotland, which offers 130,000sq ft of laboratory and office space on a 20-acre site just off the M8 motorway.

“I was very excited when I first visited BioCity Scotland,” Reid remembers. “The sheer scale of the site is impressive enough but, crucially, the facilities we have here are second to none and it is these that can make all the difference for growing businesses.”

As well as its two BioCity sites, the group also runs the 36,000sq ft BioHub facility at AstraZeneca’s former Alderley Park campus in Cheshire. BioHub offers a similar mix of laboratory and office space for start-ups and early-stage life science companies and is run in partnership with Manchester Science Park.

Back in Nottingham, where it all began, the group launched its MediCity subsidiary in 2013 at high street retailer Boots’ head office in Beeston, which is part of the Nottingham enterprise zone. A joint venture with the Walgreens Boots Alliance, MediCity offers specialised incubator space and services for businesses working in consumer healthcare, medical technology, diagnostics and beauty products. Building on the success of this model, plans for a second MediCity site on the BioCity Scotland campus at Newhouse were unveiled in 2015. The Scottish project received £18 million of funding as part of the £1.13 billion Glasgow City Region City Deal, which brings together the UK Government, the Scottish Government and the eight local authorities covering Greater Glasgow and the Clyde Valley.

BioCity and MediCity Scotland have also been designated as an enterprise area by the Scottish Government, which brings with it business rates relief and other bonuses for companies locating

“I was very excited when I first visited BioCity Scotland. The sheer scale of the site is exciting enough but crucially the facilities are second to none”

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on the site. Yet the facilities available are only half the story.

“At BioCity, we don’t just think of ourselves as a landlord,” explains Reid. “Our role, each and every day, is to create an environment in which businesses are more likely to be successful at our five sites and across our BioCity and MediCity brands.”

When it comes to supporting businesses, a quick glance at the figures illustrates BioCity’s success, with a 91 per cent survival rate for supported business across its five sites over the past 12 years.

As a result of this success, there are now more than 250 businesses occupying space across the group’s five sites, which together employ more than 1,000 people. Twenty of those companies are based in Scotland, employing around 150 staff at Newhouse.

“I actually think there is more in the offing in terms of early-stage opportunities here in Scotland than I’ve seen elsewhere,” admits Reid. “The challenge for us will be converting these early-stage businesses into companies with financially-robust business models, that are ready for investment, ready to grow and ready to realise their potential.

“Our Nottingham site is on the verge of being fully-occupied, so we’re now constructing another building adjacent to it to cope with the demand. About 80 per cent of the space taken year-on-year is used by growing companies, not by new companies. In fact, nearly half of the space is occupied by companies that we first met in their development stage, when they were drawing up their business plans.

“Those statistics really tell a story – we’re creating a strong pipeline that will form the next generation of growing businesses and investment opportunities. Our activity is focused on generating new companies, helping them get started, get funded and get growing.

“The model has worked very well elsewhere and is beginning to really ramp up here at BioCity Scotland. I’m sure we can replicate that here because of the number of early stage opportunities that we’re seeing already. Having run the Nottingham site for five years, there’s nothing to tell me that we can’t repeat our success here in Scotland and even take it to another level.”

Reid points to strong interest from Scotland’s

“ These statistics really tell a story. We’re creating a strong pipeline that will form the next generation of growing businesses and investment opportunities. Our activity is focused on generating new companies”

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“It is difficult getting all your investors aligned and interested at the same time.

We want to work with our partners to accelerate that”

universities in the two-day boot-camp BioCity runs as part of its accelerator programme, during which staff and students can work on their ideas for businesses and hear about the services on offer from the group.

Reid goes on to explain the BioCity “five core components” that make up its business support services. First is the fact that all of BioCity’s office and laboratory facilities are flexible and modular, so they can be configured to suit the needs of each company. If a business moves to the site as a start-up but then begins to grow, its office and lab space can be quickly increased to suit its size. The second component is payas-you-go services. Companies can access time on expensive pieces of scientific equipment, buy consumables through centralised service and hire executive meeting rooms so that they can host their investors or potential clients.

“We’re removing unnecessary overhead costs or unnecessary capital expenditure for earlystage companies,” explains Reid. “This allows companies to conserve cash for other things that they might need it for.”

Thirdly, the support programmes offered by the group include one-to-one coaching to help entrepreneurs set up their companies. Peer-topeer support from neighbouring companies, at later stages in their journeys, offering advice and experience to earlier-stage businesses.

Access to finance is the fourth key area of support offered by BioCity. “We have very good relationships both in regard to awarding bodies and many early-stage equity investors,” Reid says.

“We are also able to help at the early-stage ourselves, investing in a handful of the opportunities coming through. We’ve made a relatively small number of investments to-date but we’ve had a healthy return and we’re now looking to increase that level of activity in the

coming months and years ahead.“One of the biggest challenges for companies in the sector is the stratification of finance. Generally, you have to go to one group for £150,000 another for up to £500,000 and then a different group again for the next tranche. It’s very difficult getting all of your investors aligned and interested at the same time. We see that as a problem, so we want to work with other partners to accelerate that process for our companies.”

Tying it all together is the ‘innovation community’ that has been fostered throughout the BioCity sites, built by companies interacting with each other and by linking into the group’s wider ‘expert network’. “We work very hard to make sure that everyone has plenty of opportunities to interact with everyone else,” Reid explains.

“We’re creating a culture and a forum in which serendipity and opportunity can present itself, with chances to collaborate, jointly promote and present, and to work for or on behalf of other companies. That might be through a breakfast briefing on a particular topic, or through a social event such as a quiz or a football tournament.

“These interactions are crucial. Picture the innovation community as a web with our businesses at the centre. Around them you’ve got support services firms – solicitors, corporate financiers, human resources specialists, public relations agencies, bookkeeping firms – providing the professional advice and guidance that the companies need.

“Around that you have the BioCity expert network, experienced, senior industry figures, UK-wide, that provide meaningful introductions, advice, guidance, mentoring or particular scientific expertise or knowledge to companies when they need it. It’s a flexible resource with a level of seniority and connectivity in the industry that you just wouldn’t be able to access if you

were at a typical science park.”

Reid is keen to ensure that potential businesses start-off on the right foot. “In the early-stage support programmes, as part of the BioCity accelerator, we spend a lot of time challenging whether there’s real commercial viability to an idea,” he explains. “We do that by challenging the assumptions that people are making, and then devising ways to go and get the evidence to prove whether those assumptions are right or wrong.

“Often you’ll find that, when a company launches, it has made a lot of assumptions in its business plan and those assumptions can prove to be a very costly mistake at a later stage when it has running costs, it has raised money and it is trying to execute its plan.

“Rather than discovering incorrect assumptions too late, we put a lot of emphasis on tackling those questions earlier on, whilst it’s free and cheap to do so and it isn’t a potential point of failure later on. That allows you to adapt and change your business plan or your business model.

“It also means that you can base your business plan on evidence from going out and talking to potential customers and partners, instead of dreaming up the plan, polishing the plan and then trying to execute it.

Part of Reid’s challenge, now that he’s taken over the running of the Newhouse facility, is to make sure that the community feeling extends across all five of the group’s locations, allowing Scottish companies to interact with their English neighbours and vice-versa. “There are variations across all of the sites but there is a common thread that is woven into the fabric, a culture of working together for the greater good,” he says. “It is an approach that has paid dividends to date and will continue to do so long into the future.” n

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The march of the makers

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Manufacturing is an important part of the life sciences industry in Scotland, with the sector stretching from large household names to start-up and spin-out companies Scotland has an enviable reputation when it comes to scientific endeavour – from Sir Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin and Sir Ronald Ross linking mosquitos to malaria, to Sir James Black developing beta-blockers and Ian Donald utilising ultrasound. Today, Scottish universities remain at the forefront of innovation, providing much of the knowledge and many of the skills that can be used by the nation’s life sciences industry to turn scientific ventures into products and services that save lives and save the planet.

Yet life sciences in Scotland aren’t just about research and development – they’re about manufacturing too. Household names like AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Johnson & Johnson – along with the latest start-ups and spin-outs – make a wide range of products, ranging from drugs, ingredients and therapies all the way through to components and medical devices.

One of the many manufacturing operations that calls Scotland home is Capsugel’s Livingstonbased Encap Drug Delivery division, the world’s largest organisation dedicated to making liquid and semi-solid pharmaceutical capsules. The business was founded in 1989 when oral drug delivery was still in its infancy.

“There are two main advantages of delivering a drug as a liquid in a capsule instead of as a solid tablet or as a powder in a capsule,” explains Stephen Brown, managing director of Encap. “The first is that you can more-accurately control the dose being given to the patient, with that dose being more-effectively absorbed by the gastrointestinal (GI) tract as a liquid than a powder or solid.

“The second advantage comes with drugs that are delivered in very low doses or which are highly potent – when you have those sorts of drugs, if you can formulate them into a liquid then they are safer to handle and you can get much better dose-reproduction and dose-

“Working in manufacturing today isn’t like the dark and cramped manufacturing of the past – we work in bright and modern facilities and our staff are constantly involved in improving the way we work” homogeneity from dosage unit to dosage unit than with a tablet or a powder-filled capsule.”

Capsugel, the world’s largest manufacturer of empty capsules and an innovator in drug delivery systems, bought Encap in 2013. New Jersey-based Capsugel had been a hard-capsule manufacturing unit inside pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer before being sold in 2011 to investment management firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) for US$2.4 billion (at the time around £1.5bn) and then embarking on a series of acquisitions to diversify its business.

Encap has continued to thrive under Capsugel’s ownership and now has 130 staff. The company’s diversified customer base ranges from some of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world to small biotech start-ups. The firm’s facility in Livingston is the largest in the world for producing liquid-filled medicine capsules and holds a licence from the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare Product Regulatory Agency (MHRA), as well as having been successfully inspected by the United States Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

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Now that Encap is part of a much larger international company, it could base itself anywhere in the world. So what makes Scotland attractive for such manufacturers?

“The people are a big attraction,” says Brown. “The universities produce high-quality graduates who are well-trained to work in the manufacturing industry. There is also a thriving manufacturing sector in Scotland, so there are experienced staff available to join us from other companies, whether that’s doing development or production work.

“Another of Scotland’s attractions is how easy it is for people to get here. Our customers can very easily come and visit our facility – that’s not always the case in other parts of the world.”

People are also one of the most important factors for Sarah Jardine, director of manufacturing at Optos, a Dunfermline-based company that makes machines for taking highresolution digital images of the retina. Optos’ devices can take pictures that cover 82% of the back of the eye, something that no other machines can do.

“I grew up on a diet of television programmes like Blue Peter and Tomorrow’s World,” laughs Jardine, who has been with the company for the past 16 years and who began managing the manufacturing division six years ago. “I wanted to make things that no-one else had thought of yet, and I’m lucky because I get to live out that dream at Optos.

“No-one used to want to go into manufacturing – it was seen as a threat if you didn’t do well at school. My granny used to warn me that I’d end up down at the wire factory.

“But working in manufacturing today isn’t like the dark and cramped manufacturing of the past – we work in bright and modern facilities and our staff are constantly involved in improving the way we work. We spend a lot of time working with local primary and secondary schools to show children that manufacturing can be just as exciting as design.”

Jardine points to the academic expertise in Scotland’s universities as one of the factors that has made the company successful, especially in areas such as photonics, software and image processing. The firm was founded in 1992 by Douglas Anderson, whose five-year-old son went blind in one eye after his detached retina was spotted too late. Even though Anderson’s son had been having regular eye tests, the

“X7x6crx7trc txr ctrxcyx yctuuyxtc yuxt cyutx cyutxcyutx cxytuc yuxtc yuxt cyuxtc yuxtcyuxtc uxytcyuxt cuyxt cyutx cyutx cytxyctxuyct yctuxuxc’’

routine tests were uncomfortable for children, making it hard for doctors to examine their younger patients. Optos’ first product, the P200, went on sale in 2000, with the company floating on the London Stock Exchange in 2006.

“When Optos began, the intention was to design products that other companies could then manufacture for us,” explains Jardine. “But then we realised that third party manufacturers couldn’t cope when we were pushing components to their limits and so we brought manufacturing in-house.

“Now we have people coming to visit our factory to see how we do things. That’s one of the most rewarding parts of my job. I’m proud of my staff every day.”

Optos was taken over in 2015 by Japanese camera giant Nikon in a £259 million deal.

“Nikon bought the business because it was

successful,” explains Jardine, who is also the chair of the Scottish Manufacturing Advisory Board (SMAB) run by Scottish Enterprise.

“They’ve said to us that they have no plans to move it anywhere else – it’s a successful business that’s been built in Scotland.

“We have about 170 staff in Dunfermline, including around 65 people working in manufacturing, and then another 130 people in the United States working in product development, research, IT, sales, servicing, and a smaller amount of manufacturing – the US is our biggest market, accounting for 75% of sales.

“Continuous improvement has been one of our priorities in our manufacturing facility – staff are given two hours each week to come up with ways of improving the way we work. People are surprised by how we can still make all of our

OVERVIEW Life Sciences

machines by hand on such a small site.

“Some of the Nikon staff who have visited us from Japan have even said that there are lessons they can learn from us when it comes to continuous improvement. That’s very satisfying.”

One of the biggest manufacturers in the life sciences sector in Scotland is pharmaceuticals firm GSK, which has sites at Irvine and Montrose. GSK invests around £30m a year in its Scottish plants and, over the past three years, has pumped in a further £150m to increase capacity at the facilities so that they can manufacture a greater range of drugs and in larger quantities. In July, the company announced it would invest an additional £110m at Montrose to make respiratory medicines.

Dave Tudor, vice-president of global primary manufacturing at GSK, said: “Fundamentally, there are three key things that you need to have in your country if you’re going to manufacture.

You have to have the skills and the resources to be able to manufacture, you have to have infrastructure for your goods to be supplied around the world, and you have to have a fiscal strategy that is compatible with commercial growth.

“The great news for Scotland is that we have all three of those in abundance. The skills we are developing at our academic institutes are among the best in the world. The investment in port and airport infrastructure is very strong. In addition to that, the patent box legislation has become very strong and enables Scotland to export at a competitive rate.”

Not all of the manufacturing that takes place in Scotland involves medical devices or pharmaceuticals; some of it involves the most cutting-edge techniques using human stem cells, which may ultimately cure major diseases.

Roslin Cell Therapies (RCT), which is based on the Edinburgh BioQuarter science park, makes cell therapies that are used in clinical trials across Europe and the US. The company provides contract manufacturing services and has made therapies for American drug company Pfizer for its age-related macular degeneration trial at Moorfields eye hospital in London and for the stroke trials being carried out at sites including Glasgow by ReNeuron, which is quoted on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange.

RCT manufactures the therapies using manufacturing facilities within the Scottish

Centre for Regenerative Medicine (SCRM), which is also located at Edinburgh BioQuarter.

“As well as manufacturing cell therapies for clients, we can also help them to improve and develop their production processes,” says Janet Downie, chief executive at RCT. “Communication is key when we are transferring these manufacturing processes and understanding the intricate scientific details.

“The processes that are involved are much more complicated than manufacturing something relatively-simple, like a paracetamol tablet – there’s a lot of expertise involved in the processes and so we have to become experts. That’s why communicating with clients is so important.”

RCT has 30 highly-skilled members of staff and can also draw on the expertise of the other 200 cell scientists within the SCRM, who are actively

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researching regenerative therapies. The facilities follow good manufacturing practice (GMP) and are licenced by the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which allows RCT to produce cell therapies that reach the standard required for clinical trials on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Manufacturing cell therapies that will be administered to patients is a very sensitive job,” adds Downie. “We recruit staff from around the world who share our commitment to the old-fashioned Scottish values of integrity and honesty – they need to have the right workethic to get each job exactly right. Scotland is a great place to manufacture cell therapies because we can draw on the expertise within universities and on the testing facilities that are available in the Central Belt to help us ensure the quality of our products.” n

“Some of the Nikon staff who have visited us from Japan have even said that there are lessons they can learn from us when it comes to continuous improvement”

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CASE STUDY Life Sciences

Everything gels together Biogelx has expanded from its base at BioCity Scotland to open a satellite office in New York and has grown its customer base across Asia, Europe and the United States

Some slogans will always stick in the mind – catchphrases like ‘Because you’re worth it’ by L’Oreal, ‘Just do it’ from Nike and ‘The car in front is a Toyota’ all trip off the tongue with ease. Soon, Biogelx may be able to add ‘Gels for your cells’ to that list.

“I think the idea came from some banter that our team was having over lunch one day,” smiles David Lightbody, chief executive of Biogelx. “We used it internally for a long time, but then when we were adding the ecommerce function to our website we thought why not use it?”

Biogelx was spun out from the University of Strathclyde in early 2013 thanks to £60,000

of seed funding led by Glasgow-based Gabriel business angel syndicate and a £100,000 Smart Scotland research and development (R&D) grant from Scottish Enterprise. The company was one of the first companies to move into BioCity Scotland, the life sciences incubation centre created in the facilities at Newhouse in Lanarkshire that were vacated by MSD, the European arm of American pharmaceuticals giant Merck & Co. Since then, the growth of Biogelx and BioCity Scotland have mirrored each other, with Biogelx adding more and more customers, while BioCity has added more and more companies. The business was setup to produce gels in which cells could be grown for scientific experiments – what set its gels apart is that they can be ‘tuned’ to mimic the behaviour of the body’s tissues and organs.

Biogelx’s rate of growth accelerated last summer [2015] following a £630,000 investment from Gabriel, the University of Strathclyde, Scottish

CASE STUDY Life Sciences

Enterprise’s Scottish Investment Bank and new shareholder Peak Capital Advisors. The funding allowed the company to open an office at the Harlem Biospace in New York and to increase its headcount from seven members of staff to ten.

“Up until that point, our customers had mainly been academic institutions in the UK, Europe, Asia and the United States,” explains Lightbody.

“The funding enabled us to fully commercialise our gels and they’re now being used by four of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world and one of the largest cosmetic companies too.”

One of the major steps for the company was developing a powder that it can sell through its website, which customers can then turn into gels in their own laboratories. The business anticipates bringing in just under £300,000 in sales this year [2016] and could break-even early next year. [2017] Opening the New York office also marks a return to the US for Lightbody. After cutting his teeth as a chemist with British Petroleum (BP), he joined the Scottish Development Agency – the forerunner to today’s Scottish Enterprise – and served with the organisation in Chicago.

Later in his career, he worked for the Daedalus Project in Washington DC. “One of the reasons we expanded into America so early was due to my previous experience,” he explains. “I had set up a couple of other companies during my time in the States, so I knew how to go about setting up our subsidiary and dealing with the legal and accounting sides of the process.

“It feels very comfortable to be doing business in the US again – like an old pair of shoes. I’m enjoying the experience.”

Lightbody is also preparing for further expansion. He plans to raise £2 million before the end of the year to fuel Biogelx’s growth.

“We want to grow the company’s headcount, both from a business development point-of-view and from a technical point-of-view so that we can increase production,” he says. “Raising the money will allow us to add more resources to the business.”

Lightbody founded Biogelx alongside its chief science officer, Rein Ulijn, who is professor of nano-chemistry at the University of Strathclyde and director of nanoscience at the City University of New York’s (CUNY’s) Advanced Science Research Centre.

The company’s achievements have been recognised with a number of prizes along the way, including: a grant from the Scottish Edge Fund in 2014; winning the ‘pitch of the day’ competition at Engage Invest Exploit (EIE), the investment conference organised by technology accelerator Informatics Ventures; and a runnersup spot at this year’s [2016’s] ‘Pitch at the Palace’ event at St James’s Palace in London.

Most of Biogelx’s staff come from a chemistry background and so BioCity Scotland was a natural home for the early-stage biomaterials business. “We needed a laboratory that had extraction facilities, fume hoods and standard analytical equipment, like high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC),” explains Lightbody.

“When we were starting up the business, BioCity was just getting started too, so we were able to come out and take a look around at what was basically a pharma lab. It had the right kind of look, the right kind of feel, the right kind of fume-hood capacity and so we were able to

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put in a small lab here on day one.

“The other big advantage was that we could rent some of the analytical equipment that had been left by the pharma company that had moved out. In effect, we’ve got a peppercorn rent on HPLC equipment and other standard lab equipment.

“Once we’ve been through our next fund raising round, we’d like to expand our headcount at BioCity. We want to increase our production capacity so that we can make more powder and make it in bigger batches.”

The firm has just hired its first biologist, who is working in its New York office. “We’d like to grow our team by bringing in more biologists,” Lightbody adds.

“Sometimes our customers will ask how their cells will react in our gels under specific conditions. We plan to open a cell biology facility at BioCity so we can then replicate those conditions in our own laboratory. That will allow us to offer even more services to our customers.” n

“The funding enabled us to fully commercialise our gels and they’re now being used by four of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world and one of the largest cosmetic companies too”

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OVERVIEW bqlive.co.uk

Come together One of Scotland’s major advantages is the size of its life sciences community, which enables businesses to not only collaborate with each other to grow their sales but also to work in partnership with universities and the health service Business is often caricatured as being cut-throat, with share traders wearing bowties and red braces yelling “buy, buy, sell, sell” down the phone line and wheeler-dealers dressed in donkey jackets chasing profit, no matter what the cost.

Yet a different mind-set is beginning to take hold among companies in Scotland’s thriving life sciences sector.

“We want companies to stop asking ‘How can this benefit me?’ and start asking ‘How can this benefit we?’,” explains David Scott, senior director at Livingston-based Tepnel Pharma Services and industry chair of the Pharma Services Scotland Steering Group. “Businesses need to see each other not as rivals but as potential collaborators.”

The Pharma Services Steering Group – which brings together more than 9,000 scientists and business people working in Scotland’s pharmaceutical services sector – is working on a strategy that aims to grow the sector’s turnover by 9% year-on-year to reach £2.6 billion, with a special focus on exports and international trade.

“There are around 180 organisations in Scotland that are offering services to the pharmaceuticals

industry, all the way from research and development through manufacturing and then onto sales and marketing,” says Scott. “But there’s no single company that is offering services at each and every stage of the supply chain.

“By working together, Scottish companies can offer big pharma an end-to-end service.

Traditionally, businesses in this sector would either grow organically by learning the skills they needed in order to provide a service or they would acquire other firms in order to gain that expertise.

“Collaboration offers a third option – companies can work with one another to utilise each other’s expertise. It’s not about one company growing at the expense of others and swallowing them up – instead, it’s about growing the size of the overall pie so that everyone gets a bigger slice and together we’re able to offer a joined-up approach for our customers.”

Tepnel was founded in 1992 to exploit technology developed at the University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST). The business was quoted on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) before being

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OVERVIEW bqlive.co.uk

“There’s no single company that is offering services at each and every stage of the supply chain.

By working together, Scottish companies can offer big pharma an end-to-end service” bought by NASDAQ-listed Gen-Probe in 2009 for £93 million. Gen-Probe in turn was taken over by fellow American company Hologic in 2012 in a US$3.8bn (£2.4bn) deal. Tepnel now acts as the outsourcing arm of Hologic’s diagnostics division, offering pharmaceutical services and developing biomarkers that could be used in precision or stratified medicine.

“Precision medicine demonstrates another aspect of collaboration,” says Scott, who has worked in the sector for 25 years, including the past 16 with Tepnel. “Health services are now interested in how they can use precision medicine to deliver drugs or therapies that they know will work for a specific patient, instead of spending millions or indeed billions of dollars each year on medicines and treatments that don’t work.

“Doctors are collaborating with academics and business people to develop precision medicine

and we’re working on the biomarkers that will help to identify which treatments work or don’t work for individual patients.”

It’s not only individual companies that can collaborate – partnerships can bring together the public and private sectors too. Scotland is home to a number of innovative schemes that combine the experience and expertise of pharmaceutical companies and university researchers to identify materials that could be developed into the next generation of medicines and therapies.

AstraZeneca and the University of Glasgow work together through their Glazgo Discovery Centre, while the University of Edinburgh has two programmes running through GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK’s) Discovery Partnerships with Academia (DPAc) initiative, one covering liver diseases and the other pancreatitis.

Collaborations are also at the heart of the

Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) at the University of Dundee, a small molecule early-stage medicine development group that was setup in 2006 to translate world-class biology research into validated drug-targets and candidate drugs.

One of the stumbling blocks for pharmaceutical companies is the cost of developing medicines – with some estimates suggesting it can take as much as $3.5 billion (£2.7bn) to create a drug – and the high failure rate of drug candidates means businesses have to carefully select the targets on which they will concentrate their efforts.

The DDU was founded by professors Alan Fairlamb and Mike Ferguson. When the pharmaceuticals industry wasn’t able to translate their research in tropical parasitic diseases of the developing world into more-effective treatments for some of the most neglected diseases –

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including African sleeping sickness, Chagas’ disease and Leishmaniasis – they decided to do it themselves. They secured grants from the Wellcome Trust and Scottish Funding Council to setup the DDU, which takes novel drug targets and disease pathways and carries out further research to ‘de-risk’ them, identifying the ones that have the highest chance of becoming successful therapies. From their initial work on diseases of the developing world, the DDU was expanded in 2009 when the Medical Research Council (MRC) chose Dundee as one of five UK centres to undertake a devolved portfolio approach with the support of its Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme.

The result was the innovative targets portfolio, which looks at global diseases of unmet medical need – including cancer, diabetes, inflammatory diseases and genetic skin diseases – bringing biological targets together with medicinal chemistry on an industrial scale. The DDU now employs 85 staff and has the highest concentration of medicinal chemists in Scotland.

“The aim was always to expand beyond neglected tropical diseases utilising the previous expertise of our staff, many of whom have come from the biopharmaceutical industry working across a wide range of therapeutic indications,” explains Julie Brady, who joined the DDU in 2013 as business development manager after a decade working as a life sciences manager with Scottish Enterprise.

“Collaborations are key to the success of the DDU. We look globally for novel biology in therapeutics areas of unmet medical need and work with these disease experts to help translate their world-class research into drug discovery programmes and candidate drugs.

“We also collaborate with product development partners and partners in the pharmaceutical industry to advance our candidate drugs through preclinical development and clinical trials in humans.”

Those partners include the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative and GSK for Chagas’ disease and Leishmaniasis, and Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), with whom the DDU has delivered a drug candidate for malaria that is now in clinical development with Merck Serono.

The DDU’s work on tuberculosis (TB) is part of the international TB Drug Accelerator program [sic], which brings together 15 pharmaceutical companies and research groups with support

“The aim was always to expand beyond neglected tropical diseases utilising the previous expertise of our staff, many of whom have come from the biopharmaceutical industry working across a wide range of therapeutic indications” from the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Collaboration isn’t just about individuals working together either – it can also have an influence on how facilities are designed.

After the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh moved from its Victorian buildings on Lauriston Place to the purpose-built premises at Little France on the edge of the city in 2003, NHS Lothian, Scottish Enterprise and the University of Edinburgh began working together to create Edinburgh BioQuarter, a science park that brings together academics, businesspeople and clinicians.

Today, Edinburgh BioQuarter is home to a host of services, including the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine, translational research at the Queen’s Medical Research Institute, health informatics at the Farr Institute, and Building Nine, an incubation centre for life science companies. The Royal Hospital for Sick Children is due to move into a £150m facility on the site

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in 2017, with the new Edinburgh Eye Pavilion following in 2018-19.

Having partners working so closely together on a single site is continuing to bring benefits. “NHS Lothian is currently looking at how it can better manage all of its eye care activities,” explains Julia Brown, senior director of life and chemical sciences at Scottish Enterprise.

“At the moment they’re spread across different areas of Edinburgh and the health board wants to bring them all together at the BioQuarter campus. Thanks to the BioQuarter programme, for the first time Scottish Enterprise has been able to bring together industry with the NHS and the university to design a new facility that will put research and patient care at its centre.”

One of the other pieces in the collaboration jigsaw is funding, with the Scottish Government and its agencies making cash available to prime the pump for partnerships. To support recent investments in the area of precision medicine in Scotland, Scottish Enterprise has launched the Genomic Medicine Industrial Catalyst Fund, offering up to £3.5m for industry-led projects to work in collaboration with Scotland’s nextgeneration sequencing facilities.

The money is available to Scottish and international life sciences companies, including consortia constituted with academic partners.

Individuals who are setting up a business in Scotland or plan to move their business there within the next two years are also eligible.

The focus on genomics ties in with the Scottish Genomes Partnership (SGP), an initiative led by the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, along with the National Health Service (NHS) in Scotland, NHS England and Genomics England.

The SGP kicked off in January 2015 with a £15m investment in ten HiSeq X genome sequencing instruments divided between the two universities.

A further £6m investment was made jointly in February 2016 by Scotland’s Chief Scientist Office and the Medical Research Council to enable the sequencing of the genomes of more than 3,000 people in Scotland. There is also the £20m Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre (SMS-IC) – a public-private partnership hosted by the University of Glasgow at the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. The SMS-IC is at the heart of the newly-created Scottish precision medicine ‘ecosystem’, offering industry a single point of contact to work with academics and clinicians. n

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A meeting of minds AstraZeneca and the University of Glasgow have taken collaboration to a new level through the GLAZgo Discovery Centre, with staff moving freely between academia and industry Collaboration is a word that’s used a lot in the life sciences industry in Scotland. Academics collaborate with clinicians, clinicians collaborate with businesspeople, and businesspeople collaborate with academics, creating a threeway partnership that underpins much of the work in the sector.

Global pharmaceuticals company AstraZeneca and the University of Glasgow have taken collaboration a step further. In October 2013, they unveiled plans to work together in the area of immunology and inflammation medicine.

The result was the GLAZgo Discovery Centre, which was setup by the Respiratory, Inflammation, Autoimmunity Medicines Unit at AstraZeneca as a fully-embedded unit within the Institute of Infection, Immunity & Inflammation (IIII) at the University of Glasgow. Together, the company and the university are exploring new pathways for immunological disease processes with the ultimate shared goal of creating better medicines for patients.

“I love the agility that the partnership offers us,” says Rose Maciewicz, chief scientist and vice president for respiratory and inflammation strategy at AstraZeneca. “It’s a unit that’s defined in terms of people and not in terms of projects so we have the ability to close something down if it’s not working and open up something if we have a new experiment.

“When we talk about the collaborations of tomorrow then they are going to include that agility. It’s a good model. It’s about having that meeting of minds and having as few boundaries as possible around everything you do. If you have that with like-minded people then it’s much more likely to go swimmingly.

“One of the great things about working here is the attitude of Professor Iain McInnes, the director of the IIII. Not only does Iain share the same long-term ambition with us but he’s also freely opening up his unit to us, like we’re

opening up what we do to him and his group.

“We’re all in it for the same reason – to help humanity. It’s just that one of us is coming at it from a very ‘applied’ point-of-view and the other is coming at it in a more ‘open-ended’ way and the two need somewhere to come together.”

The centre was officially launched in October 2014, with its initial projects focusing on research into novel approaches to cell differentiation and migration. Current research areas include asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and rheumatoid arthritis.

“As we get new projects coming in, I’m interacting with different people in the university,” says Maciewicz. “I’m a bit of a science junkie and I love the adrenaline rush I get when I talk to someone at the cutting-edge of their field and they’re really passionate about it.”

She points to a recent example in which her

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team has begun collaborating with an engineer from the University of Glasgow to understand the effect of a drug candidate on human bones.

“To me, that’s one of the exciting things – who’s going to be around the next corner that I’m going to talk to,” she adds. “What new idea will they talk about?”

Maciewicz thinks that collaborating with the university has brought a range of benefits for AstraZeneca, including adding value to its projects, opening up avenues of research through ‘blue-sky thinking’, and by stimulating the interactions between staff at her company and students and staff at the university.

“Even with a well-funded place like AstraZeneca, we don’t have all the knowledge and all the ability to do everything,” she explains. “So when you work with something like GLAZgo, which has access to very specific human cells, then we can add value to some of our projects very quickly.

“Because we have a nice collaboration set up, it doesn’t take us long to move from an idea to actually undertaking the work. It’s much shorter than if we had to start that process from scratch. We know where our strengths lie and where our gaps lie, so we can use GLAZgo’s strengths to fill in our gaps.”

Tapping into the expertise in the university has also allowed AstraZeneca to begin conducting small, pilot experiments or ‘blue sky research’ that could lead to drug targets or to a better understanding of disease mechanisms. Either way, coming into contact with university researchers also bring benefits to the company’s staff.

“In industry, you tend to begin thinking very linearly and you know what to expect,” explains Maciewicz. “You have a set of assays that you run and you run them really robustly. There’s creativity involved in setting them up, but after that it’s about turning the handle.

“In academia, it’s almost the opposite end of the spectrum. You come in to do ‘What if?’ experiments. By mixing our staff around a little bit, we try to learn from the best of both worlds and grow from that. It’s about getting our scientists to think a bit more innovatively or creatively.

“We also do quite a bit of training in Glasgow because we have PhD students there. You have to think about where the next generation

of scientists come from. By working in collaboration with the university very closely, we get scientists who much earlier really understand the bandwidth of what lies within an industry type of job. We gain much more in the longterm.”

Having PhD students training at the centre has also been one of the highlights for Professor Iain McInnes, Muirhead chair of medicine and director of the IIII. “We have a PhD training programme built into the centre,” he explains.

“I’ve been delighted by the willingness of AstraZeneca to let us bring in PhD students.

A highlight for me is seeing young people receiving training with both an academic focus and an industrial focus.

“It’s been brilliant to see the exchange of knowledge that has taken place and the enthusiasm that scientists within the university and within the company have expressed in coming together for conversations and sharing ideas and sharing experiments.

“Another highlight is the fact that we have real science being done. We’ve gone from a standing start to actually doing discovery science together in a relatively short period of time. We’ve proven that this model can work and can discover new things. That is clearly very exciting.” As well as the training and the swapping of ideas, McInnes thinks the discovery centre brings very palpable benefits to the university. He highlights the advantages of working with a partner that has such a high international reputation.

“AstraZeneca is world class and we are interested in partnering with organisations with that kind of skillset, ambition and vision,” he says. “As a university, we’re committed to making a difference through our research activity. And, as an academic research group, we’re obviously curious, but we want that

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curiosity to deliver value.

“With the best will in the world, we’re a university, not a pharmaceutical company, and in my area of expertise many of the innovations that occur come through the creation of new medicines. Other advances – through diagnostic techniques or treatment strategies – do also occur, but it’s new medicines that are fundamentally important to us, and particularly new medicines that are very selective and specifically chosen for individual patients, which we call stratified medicine.

“Working with AstraZeneca gives us the chance to work in partnership with an organisation that’s capable of delivering that final product. It’s exciting to be involved at that kind of level.”

McInnes also echoes Maciewicz’s comments about the importance of working together on basic science, which could lead researchers off in new directions. “The pharmaceutical industry contains high-quality biomedical science,” he says. “There are great minds there and also great resources.

“The partnership, from the university’s pointof-view, allows us to work with those really fantastic scientists who think differently from us and therefore we benefit from that. Also, we clearly benefit from some of the development resources and basic scientific capacity that they have in the company that we may not have.”

In May, [2016] McInnes was presented with the Sir James Black Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The citation for the award, which is one of the four senior prizes handed out each year by the learned institution, said that McInnes was receiving the honour “for his outstanding contribution to the field of immunology through his work in establishing the GLAZgo Discovery Centre, which aims to create better medicines for patients”. Singling out the centre in the citation for the medal highlighted the esteem with which the facility is already being held within the scientific community, only two years after being opened.

Even though the centre is still in its early stages, it’s already making waves in the academic and industrial communities. The project has been held up as a case study by both the National Centre for Universities & Business and the Russell Group, the organisation that brings together 24 of the UK’s research-led universities. n

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Bringing the team together An innovative project involving Epilepsy Scotland, NHS Dumfries & Galloway and UCB Pharma could become a model for programmes in other parts of the country and for other conditions Epilepsy is the most common, serious neurological condition in the world. A brief disturbance in the brain’s normal electrical activity causes the nerve cells to fire off random signals; the result has been described as an ‘electrical storm’ that causes a temporary overload in the brain. In Scotland, around 55,000 people have the condition – more than one in every 100.

Despite being a relatively-common condition, the services that are available to support people with epilepsy vary greatly throughout the country. Not every health board has an epilepsy specialist nurse (ESN) and so the support that patients receive can differ from area to area.

Accessing the right help and support can be especially difficult in rural locations, such as Dumfries and Galloway. Lying in the south-west corner of Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway’s population of 150,000 people is spread over a massive area covering 2,400 square miles.

Back in 2010, a local support organisation called the Dumfries & Galloway Epilepsy Group expressed its concerns over the lack of help for epilepsy patients. This was one of the factors that prompted National Health Service (NHS) Dumfries & Galloway, the local health board,

to contact national charity Epilepsy Scotland to discuss the introduction of a specialist service in the area.

Chief executive Lesslie Young and her team were able to offer the services of Grant Wright, an ESN employed by Epilepsy Scotland, who was seconded to NHS Dumfries & Galloway from June 2012 through until May 2015. Young brought aboard three pharmaceutical companies – UCB Pharma, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Eisai, which at the time were all working in the field of epilepsy – with Eisai providing £10,000 for start-up costs and then UCB and GSK committing to financial support on a monthly basis over the full three-year project.

“This has been a truly ground-breaking collaboration,” explains Young. “We’ve brought together the public, private and voluntary sectors to create a project that is unique in the UK. This has set a new benchmark when it

comes to real partnership working.

“Historically, industry and the NHS have not been natural bedfellows. They didn’t have a good history or a good relationship. But we were able to overcome those historical challenges by giving evidence of partnerships in other parts of the UK in which the NHS and industry had worked together.

“Epilepsy Scotland became the conduit between the NHS and industry. We were paid by industry and then we delivered the service to the NHS.” Steve Turley, managing director of UCB in the UK and Ireland, believes that the ability to bring together the public and private sectors has been one of the greatest achievements of the project.

“If you look at the 1980s and the 1990s, the way that the pharmaceutical industry promoted its medicines was fundamentally about transactional relationships,” he explains.

“The company would talk directly to the

“Historically, industry and the NHS have not been natural bedfellows.

They didn’t have a good history or a good relationship. But we were able to overcome those historical challenges”

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“If patients are being able to access better epilepsy services then hopefully those services will also be able to make best use in the appropriate way of some of the innovative medicines�

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prescribers about the attributes of a medicine in a transactional manner and the true benefits for the patients didn’t come across.

“I think that the nature of the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the NHS raised some eyebrows and had some question marks set against it with regards to the appropriateness of that relationship.

“We’ve now moved to a point where I think both the industry as a whole and the NHS recognise that we cannot continue the way that we did through the 1980s and 1990s.

Yet there is a lot to be said for an appropriate collaboration and relationship between the industry and the NHS in order to further patient care.

“So for us, at the most fundamental level, this relationship with Epilepsy Scotland and this project were about first of all demonstrating that the industry and the wider healthcare

system can work together in a way that is appropriate, transparent and for the ultimate benefit of patients. I’d say as much as anything it was a proof of principle around how that relationship should be structured and should work.”

UCB and GSK continued to be the private sector partners all the way through the project, with representatives from UCB joining those from Epilepsy Scotland and NHS Dumfries & Galloway at the Scottish Parliament on 9 March, 2016, when the final report from the scheme was published.

Over the course of three years, Wright worked with NHS Dumfries & Galloway to raise awareness about epilepsy and to highlight the need for better service provision. Instead of carrying his own caseload of patients, Wright trained general practitioners (GPs) and practice nurses at some of the 34 medical practices

spread throughout the area, along with hospital consultants, nurses and other healthcare workers in acute hospitals.

Wright also carried out an audit of primary care in GPs’ practices. After examining the treatment of 168 patients, he discovered a raft of areas that could be improved, including that: 50 per cent had no record of who had diagnosed their condition; 44 per cent had no care plan; only 43 per cent had been given advice regarding pregnancy; and 7 per cent had no record of seizure classification.

The project then went on to deliver significant service improvements, which included: handheld patient records; toolkits for training NHS staff; and medication and care plan reviews in accordance with national guidelines. Patients and their carers were also given encouragement and assistance to seek further help from patient support groups and other organisations to

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manage their conditions. Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence has been the appointment of a full-time ESN by NHS Dumfries & Galloway. Wright’s secondment was extended for a further two years so that he could act as a mentor for the new ESN. Patients in Dumfries and Galloway now have accelerated access to medical treatment from a trained specialist epilepsy nurse. Previously, they would have to have waited for several months to have an appointment with a visiting neurologist.

“There’s now a service there that wasn’t there before as a direct result of the project,” says Young. “They will have a very skilled ESN of their own, who will continue to provide that service in Dumfries and Galloway.”

While the benefits for people with epilepsy are clear to see, what prompted UCB to become involved in the project? As well as demonstrating that partnerships can be forged between the NHS and industry, are there other benefits for the company?

“If patients in Scotland are being able to access better epilepsy services then hopefully those services will also be able to make best use in the appropriate way of some of the innovative medicines that we specialise in,” explains Turley, who was born and brought up in Falkirk. “So indirectly, down the line, we hope that the right patients will be able to benefit from our medicines – but clearly that was not one of the overt criteria for getting involved in the project in the first place.”

While having a permanent ESN will have a longterm effect in Dumfries and Galloway, Epilepsy Scotland hopes that it will be able to use the project as a model for other parts of the country too. “We have looked at the possibility of using a similar model in the Borders,” explains Young.

“It could also be applied in other rural areas, such as Argyll and Bute.

“One of the challenges at the moment is that Scotland doesn’t have a full complement of ESNs in each area, so I would have to bring in someone from outside Scotland, otherwise we would be robbing from one area to help another.”

Beyond epilepsy, the model of bringing together the NHS, the private sector and the voluntary sector could also be applied to other conditions.

“The model itself is quite adaptable,” Young says. “It is replicable in terms of both the

geographical areas and in condition. ‘So, for example, if a patient representative group for diabetes wanted to use the model then that would be absolutely fine, anywhere in the country. The key thing for success is that you have to have a champion on the ground. You have to have somebody who has a passion for improvement in the service provision for the condition, and who is also willing to be the advocate of the project on the ground. And that sounds very easy, but it’s not.

“So I need a champion on the ground and a commercial partner to make it work. But the commercial partner doesn’t necessarily have to be a pharmaceutical company. With epilepsy, for example, it could be the company that makes the leads for electroencephalogram (EEG) machines that are used to record brain activity.

“There are lots of companies that could be approached that have connections to lots of different conditions. This type of funding mechanism might also appeal to a philanthropic organisation or to a large company that wants to fulfil its corporate social responsibility (CSR).”

One organisation that is already looking at the approach is the Crown Office & Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), the public prosecution office in Scotland. At the time of the launch of the project report, COPFS was exploring the possibility of using the business model in

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developing diversion strategies from prosecution for appropriate cases.

Young’s comments about extending the model into other areas are echoed by Turley. “I think that, as an industry, and UCB is very much at the forefront of it, we believe strongly that, whilst we have some goals that may be different to the NHS, we actually have a lot of common goals, not least to do better for patients,” he says.

“If we’re going to do better for patients then the way we would do that is through collaboration and the Dumfries and Galloway project was maybe a pilot to demonstrate that we can work well together. We would very much want to roll that out in other areas. I think the important thing to recognise is that we want to work in collaboration and we want those relationships to be transparent.

“At the same time, let’s not avoid the fact that we are a commercial organisation and we should stand tall about that. There’s nothing wrong with that but it should be transparent.

“What I would like to do is to roll this out further and show that we’re able to effectively integrate those commercial needs with the needs of the NHS and with patients to have a true common goal that benefits everybody.

That will be what we’ll look at as we try and expand the thinking beyond the Dumfries and Galloway project.” n

What is epilepsy?

Epilepsy is defined as repeated seizures – not just one – that start in the brain.

There are many different kinds of seizure. Some end in seconds while others may last for several minutes. People might lose their awareness of what is happening or where they are during a seizure. They may lose consciousness altogether.

Epilepsy can occur if the brain tissue is not properly formed or has been damaged or scarred by, for example, an infection or head injury. This is referred to as symptomatic epilepsy.

In around seven out of ten cases, epilepsy has no identifiable cause. This is called idiopathic epilepsy.

It is thought that, in some cases, there could be a genetic link. The likelihood of this depends on whether or not another family member has epilepsy and, if so, what kind of epilepsy they have.

Although seizures can appear dramatic and frightening to an observer, the person affected normally feels no pain during a seizure and may have no memory of it afterwards.

Most seizures are not harmful to the brain and the person affected usually recovers quickly.

Public ignorance and misconceptions about epilepsy in the past have led to fear and prejudice.

Today, epilepsy is better understood.

Being informed about the condition, knowing the medical terms and how to handle any problems helps reduce the impact epilepsy has on a person’s life.

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Money talks From business angel funding for start-ups and spin-outs all the way through to venture capital for scales-ups, Scotland has the resources and the international connections to help life science companies to grow

OVERVIEW bqlive.co.uk

When you’re an entrepreneur, you never know when inspiration will strike: you wake up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea for a new drug or medical device or other life sciences innovation.

You quickly grab a pen and a piece of paper to scribble down your idea before drifting back off into a satisfied sleep. But then you wake up the next day and begin to ask yourself: “How am I going to fund this idea?”

When it comes to raising finance, Hugh Griffith has “been there, done that, got the t-shirt”. As the chief operating officer at Bioenvision, he led the company’s operations based in Edinburgh from the start-up stage all the way through to a NASDAQ listing in New York, with the business’s market capitalisation soaring from US$22 million to US$345m in the space of just five years, before it was taken over by Genzyme in 2007.

In the process, the firm developed the first new medicine specifically for the treatment of childhood leukaemia in more than 30 years.

Now, Griffith is on the investment trail once again at NuCana, an Edinburgh-based company that is developing drugs to tackle hard-to-treat cancers. The firm is exploiting its ‘ProTides’, which are designed to overcome the key cancer resistance mechanisms associated with chemotherapy.

NuCana’s first ProTide, called Acelarin, is already being used in a phase-III clinical study for pancreatic cancer that will involve 30 centres throughout the UK. It is also entering phase-II studies for ovarian cancer and phase-I studies for cancer of the bile duct.

Its second ProTide, known as NUC-3373, has entered phase-I clinical studies in Oxford for bowel cancer and is about to be tested at the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre in Glasgow. A third ProTide is expected to enter clinical studies next year.

“You don’t have to have all of the capital available on day one,” Griffith says. “When we

started NuCana, myself and the management team financed the first three funding rounds using our own money and then funding from friends and family.

“We launched the company in 2008, but it wasn’t until 2011 that I was confident that the business was ready for venture capitalists (VCs) and institutional investors, when we raised US$10.4m. We completed a second VC funding round in 2014 for US$57m.”

Griffith chose to setup NuCana in Edinburgh because the city is his home, but he was spurred on by the Scottish capital’s international transport links, allowing him to travel to meet collaborators and investors.

“When it comes to setting up a company, Scotland’s business angel community is as good as any in the world,” he says. “In Scotland, we have business angels who have experience of

Alan Wise

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investing in life science companies and who understand the risks involved.

“Scottish Enterprise’s Scottish Investment Bank has also been instrumental in developing the start-up community, especially through its co-investment fund, which allows it to provide finance alongside business angel syndicates.

“When it comes to taking on board VC funding then Scottish companies need to consider looking overseas to places like the United States, Europe or the Far East. But that’s no bad thing – it makes a company more international in its outlook.

“Only 2% of the world’s healthcare market is in the UK and so if you want to make the most of the opportunities available then you need to look overseas for customers – so there’s no harm in looking abroad for investment too. If you have good technology that addresses an unmet

Hugh Griffith

“For VC funding then Scottish companies need to consider looking overseas to places like the United States, Europe or the Far East. But that’s no bad thing – it makes a company more international in its outlook”

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medical need, a strong intellectual property position and you’re prepared to travel then you’ll always be able to find investment.”

One such investor with international experience is Sinclair Dunlop, who worked in the finance community in the United States before returning to his native Scotland. In 2014, Dunlop and his team raised £48 million to launch a venture capital fund to provide start-up funding for early-stage, high-growth companies that target areas with an unmet medical need.

Financial backers for his Epidarex Capital vehicle consist of the European Investment Fund, Scottish Enterprise through the Scottish Investment Bank, Strathclyde Pension Fund, pharmaceuticals giant Eli Lilly and Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities, along with King’s College London and three family office investors.

So far, the European arm of Epidarex – which also runs a similar fund in the United States – has invested in eight companies. Five are spin-outs from universities: Edinburgh Molecular Imaging; Glasgow-based diabetes specialist Caldan Therapeutics; Clyde Biosciences of Glasgow, which is testing how drugs affect the heart; Sirakoss, a synthetic bone graft developer from Aberdeen; and Mironid Therapeutics from the University of Strathclyde.

The other three portfolio companies have an interesting difference – they emerged from industry rather than academia: Brightonbased drug developer Enterprise Therapeutics was founded in February 2015, while Topas Therapeutics of Hamburg was spun-out from Frankfurt-listed drug developer Evotec and Edinburgh-based Nodthera has been created using technology developed by Polish clinical research firm Selvita. Dunlop chose to launch Epidarex in Scotland because of its world-class universities, but he thinks the life sciences community needs to be more positive when it comes to news about takeovers of indigenous businesses. “On occasions in the past when we’ve seen an acquisition of a Scottish company, we are sometimes too quick to see that as a ‘glass half-empty’ result, when actually it could be a ‘glass half-full’ result,” he recently told BQ Scotland magazine. “If we were in California or Massachusetts then there would be much less angst around those types of transactions.

“In fact, what we could do is see that as a ‘halffull’ outcome because it is in fact a validation of

“For technology and innovation, companies are changing hands and there’s merger and acquisition activity every day of the week. That’s seen as a sign of success”

the quality of the fundamental, research from which we’re building these companies and it’s a validation of our ability to build those companies to a point at which you can generate a positive return – in every sense – for all concerned. If you can’t demonstrate to the outside world – and in particular to those very same big institutional investors whose capital we need in Scotland – that you can make a profit by investing in Scottish companies then we’re not going to break out of this cycle of under-realising our immense potential.

“In the most-active hubs of technology and innovation, companies are changing hands and there’s merger and acquisition activity every day of the week. That’s seen as a sign of success.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive. The key is to get more private sector activity and specifically more venture-backed, technology-driven small and medium-sized enterprise private sector activity. That’s the key. From that, the broader economic benefits will flow.”

The finance available from Scottish Enterprise’s Scottish Investment Bank – including coinvestment and venture funding – has been one of the factors that has helped to attract a number of life sciences companies to Scotland.

In 2010, former healthcare sector fund manager Peter Trill and University of Oxford biochemist Tom Brown raised £9.6m in Series A funding, including £2m from the Scottish Venture Fund, to setup TPP Global Development.

Brown and Trill chose Edinburgh as the home for TPP – which has since changed its name to IOmet Pharma – due to the investment available and the pool of talent in Scotland. The company was able to recruit a number of staff from pharmaceuticals company MSD, which closed its research centre at Newhouse in Lanarkshire

at the end of 2010. “IOmet has an interesting model because we’re a virtual company,” says Alan Wise, who joined the business five years ago as head of biology and is now its chief executive. “We are an office-based operation and we outsource all of our ‘wet work’ to professional contract research organisations (CROs) or to our academic partners.”

IOmet was set up to identify novel drug targets that it could then develop and sell on to other businesses, which in turn would take the drugs into clinical studies. The company began to specialise in molecules that target key enzymes involved in controlling the body’s immune response and that it hopes can be developed into drugs to treat cancer.

“We raised a Series B round of top-up investment in 2014, which came from our existing shareholders,” says Wise, who spent 12 years at GlaxoSmithKline before joining IOmet. “That was a really important step because it showed the faith that the investors had in the science behind our drug targets and it allowed us to accelerate our development work during 2015.”

In January 2016, IOmet was bought by MSD, the European arm of American pharmaceuticals giant Merck & Co, with Trill and Brown leaving the business as part of the takeover deal.

“Since the acquisition, MSD has used IOmet as a platform to expand its base here, appointing John McNeill as its country lead for Scotland,” Wise adds. “MSD has recognised our expertise and it’s been a very positive experience.

“We collaborate with laboratories throughout Europe, the Far East and the United States, so we could be based anywhere. But MSD recognises the pool of talent that’s available here in Scotland.” n

“Our cluster of life science companies is growing all the time, which means that there are lots and lots of opportunities for people to come and work in the industry.�

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