Science and Innovation Strategy

Baroness Greenfield Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greenfield (CB)]

I, too, commend the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for giving us the opportunity to speak in this very important debate. The transition from science and innovation to industrial strategy inevitably includes the monetisation of basic science, typically from universities. Here I declare an interest, as I have personally made that journey—from research in the Department of Pharmacology at Oxford to founding, in 2013, a completely independent biotech company, Neuro-Bio Ltd, where I am currently president.

Sir John Bell’s report, Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, covers many areas. However, time permits me to comment only on the section headed “Reinforcing the UK Science Offer”, which recommends that we should,

“work more effectively with industry and support high-risk science”.

Let us consider each of those two goals in turn: first, working more effectively with industry. The difficulty here is the very basic tension between pure and applied research. More than 500 years ago, the 16th-century philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon drew a distinction between experiments that were lucifera, those shedding light, and those that were fructifera, those bearing fruit. Nowadays this fundamental divergence in goals is acerbated by a seeming divergence in agenda between scientists in universities and potential private sector investors.

For example, universities often prefer a licensing deal to parting with intellectual property, which makes them less attractive to entrepreneurs. This is because academic institutions are ideas-rich but capital-poor. But from an investor’s perspective it is like acquiring a leasehold interest in a property development of the building only, not the actual land, and even then not knowing the final height, width, build cost or market value of end site, whereas if they can buy the land they have more scope for control. The answer is for universities not to fear, as they often claim, that the new owners of the intellectual property may risk being unable to continue funding it. To the best of my knowledge, such a scenario happens seldom, if at all. Instead, the public sector needs to realise that one size does not fit all and that bespoke packages based on negotiation are deep in the entrepreneurial DNA.

Meanwhile, things may not even get to the stage of filing a patent. Scientists mistakenly think that in so doing, they will never be able to publish in the all-important gold-standard peer-reviewed journals. The answer is to ensure that all university scientists are aware that so long as a patent is robust and filed, they can publish with hardly any delay. Investors, especially early-stage “angels”, may have little biotech experience, may find the work too high-risk, will look askance at the high burn rate, and be discouraged still further that not enough money is needed to constitute a serious return with an exit that is readily identifiable and realistic—which, to make matters worse, it does not appear to be.

The answer is for the scientist to receive training in presenting their work to the non-specialist in a way that is honest, concise and, above all, compelling. The investor really needs to understand for themselves the risks they are taking in the long term but also the implications if the outcome is successful. The scientists, meanwhile, will be baffled as to why the investors are so concerned about the management structure of a nascent spin-out. After all, they might argue, the telephone number salary quoted for a CEO would pay for several lowly paid post-doc researchers. They certainly would not grasp why investors often say that they put their money on the person as much as the technology. Scientists should realise, first, that having on their team individuals who know how to run a business is really important and that the investors are looking at their personal qualities—their innovative thinking, which in turn depends on character traits such as confidence, courage and sheer persistence. This will make all the difference to the eventual outcome, as it will to their attractiveness to investors.

Yet all too often, universities will kill this goose before it lays its golden egg by paying too little heed to the interests of the scientist and how they can be motivated to work as hard and fast as possible. The answer is to adopt a longer view and not necessarily to prioritise immediate revenue. Rather, it is to adopt the model seen so often in the USA and Israel, where handsome and much greater returns arrive, albeit eventually, from grateful alumni. Clearly, much more needs to be done for the scientists and the investment community to understand each other and their respective agendas. Yet despite this misalignment of cultures, funding science from the private sector offers real advantages, such as fast evaluations with a heartfelt belief in innovation, compared to that from the public sector review bodies, which are often perceived as secretive and lengthy, even nepotistic and frequently risk-averse.

For the second goal—to support high-risk science—let us take an example from my own field. There has been no new drug for Alzheimer’s since 2002, yet over £2 billion is spent globally each year on drugs that are variations on the same old theme but are not really effective. We need to risk a new approach by making use of the 10 to 20-year window of opportunity, once degeneration in the brain is under way but before the cognitive impairments appear. For that we would need a blood marker, as for high cholesterol and hypertension, where the problem can be detected in routine GP visits. An effective treatment can then stabilise cell loss by being given early—before the symptoms are apparent, so that they are never apparent. That would be an effective “cure”. But for such a dream, which is so needed, to be realised we need to understand the basic process underlying Alzheimer’s. For that, we need to work effectively with the investment community, and above all to take risks and be disruptive. Only then will science’s lucifera, which shed light, and science’s fructifera, which bear fruit, be as one.