Abstract
To help capitalize on the commercial potential of their discoveries, the Manchester Biotech Incubator uses state-of-the-art facilities to lure top academic bioscientists.
A northern British city that saw the birth of the Industrial Revolution is now nurturing the infants of the Biotechnology Revolution. Manchester Biotech Ltd. aims to encourage academic scientists to take their first steps in the commercial world without fear of falling flat on their faces.
"The best scientists are motivated by jealousy," says Mark Ferguson, the company's chairman. "They want to discover something before someone else, to make something before someone else, they want to have the best labs, the most grants, whatever. If you offer them a fantastic infrastructure, really high-quality labs, really high-quality colleagues, then the best people say, 'How can I get in there?'"
Ferguson's strategy for luring top academic bioscientists from Britain and overseas to capitalize on the commercial potential of their discoveries has been to create a state-of-the-art laboratory building with full commercial backup - the Manchester Biotech Incubator. The Incubator is located on the campus of the University of Manchester, where Ferguson (whose title, Professor of Basic Dental Sciences, does not begin to hint at the breadth of his research interests) was formerly dean of the largest biological sciences school in Europe. While many universities have developed commercial activities through science parks on the outskirts of their cities, for Ferguson the fact that the Incubator is physically linked to the University of Manchester's School of Biological Sciences will be the key to its success.
"Proximity is important as a motivating factor," he says. "It's important because most of these people are hyper-busy. If your commercial exploitation facilities are some distance from the university buildings, then something is going to suffer, because it's not easy to move from one to the other on a day-to-day basis. Also, I think it's important for changing the culture, for students and postdocs to see that there is an alternative career."
The Incubator building is almost complete and will be ready for occupation at the beginning of 1999, a tribute to Ferguson's dynamism. He first dreamed up the project, along with his colleague John Hickman, little more than two years ago. "We realized that there's an increasing gulf between discovery in the biomedical sciences, and whether that discovery can be taken through to some kind of commercial product. And we recognized that many people were frustrated about the time and effort that went into trying to persuade large companies to take forward academic discoveries, often without success." The idea was to set up a company that would help scientists evaluate their discoveries for scientific worth, intellectual property position, and commercial potential, and to carry out further development work if need be, so that if an idea proved viable, a company would be in a much stronger capitalization position. Small companies could then begin their lives in the protected environment of the Incubator, at the heart of a research community and with Manchester Biotech overseeing the financial, intellectual property, and commercial sides of the business.
It was an idea that quickly garnered support. Manchester University vies with Oxford, Cambridge, and London as a center of "research power" in Britain, and was keen to maximize the potential for commercial development. It provided some of the funds for the £13 million ($20 million) building, and endowed Manchester Biotech Ltd. with a portfolio of more than 25 projects, mostly generated by researchers from the School of Biological Sciences. Almost half the funding for the building came from the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union, and the rest has been raised from private sources.
The building consists of 16 fully equipped laboratories, each of which can accommodate up to 20 people. There are also core facilities for product testing, and services such as mass spectrometry, NMR, and electron microscopy are available at the School of Biological Sciences next door. Across the road is the city's main teaching hospital, Manchester Royal Infirmary, and a new clinical research center set up by the Wellcome Trust. And most important of all, there is a restaurant just at the intersection between the academic and commercial buildings. "A restaurant is the hardest thing in the world to raise money for," says Ferguson, "so in the plans it's called the data exchange center. And that's not just a euphemism - my hope is that people will bump into each other and there will be conversations that will lead to collaborations, and it will be done in a very high-quality atmosphere."
The task of implementing Ferguson and Hickman's vision has fallen to a team of managers recruited from industry. Chief executive officer Graham Allaway's first task, with general manager Linda Magee, was to look at the portfolio of projects endowed to the company and decide which had a serious chance of success. They quickly whittled them down to half a dozen. "Of those, we are starting three companies right now," says Allaway.
One, based on the work of David Denning in the clinical school and Jayne Brookman in biological sciences, is using transposon technology to find new antifungal targets in Aspergillus fungi. These and related fungi are important medically, in agriculture, and in the biotechnology industry itself, where they are used to produce genetically engineered proteins. Transposons are mobile DNA elements that can move around the genome, creating new variants of the fungus and revealing protein functions by knocking out genes. The transposon acts as a "tag" to locate and identify the mutated gene. With some private funding, and support from Manchester Biotech's seed fund, an important feature of its work with early-stage discoveries, the company is about to start work.
Until the Incubator building is ready, the company will operate from Jayne Brookman's lab. "I don't think we could have done it without Manchester Biotech," says Brookman. "Although I am learning about the business, I feel I have enough to do keeping up with the science - it's the combination that makes it doable. I'm very excited about the whole thing." The company may eventually encompass other antifungals, not necessarily developed at Manchester. "Our mandate is not only to develop projects from here," says Allaway, "but also to consider projects from anywhere else in the UK and internationally, and to set up collaborations."
Also in the pipeline is a tissue engineering company based on discoveries that came out of Mark Ferguson's own work on wound healing and scar formation. In the course of studying tissue grafts in early embryos as part of his long-term research interest in palate development, Ferguson noted that the wounds healed perfectly, with no scars. He has gone on to identify some of the factors that contribute to scarring in adults, and to find ways of manipulating them to reduce scarring. "Some of those products have already been tested in preliminary clinical trials, so that is quite far ahead," says Allaway. "We know from talking to venture capitalists that we could get funding for that immediately." Another promising project from Manchester, a platform technology for producing new collagen-based biomaterials for the delivery of cells or drug treatments, could extend the range of products from the same company.
The third company, Bioinformatics Solutions Ltd., is rather different. Andy Brass and his team from the biological sciences and computing departments are developing a computer system that represents the knowledge of an expert biologist, to help in the interpretation of the bewildering wealth of data generated by genome sequencing. For the time being the company provides an advisory service to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that wish to use these data. "It fills a gap," says Linda Magee. "Few companies have any expertise in bioinformatics, and skilled bioinformaticians are in short supply. Here at Manchester we have the first and until recently the only M.Sc. in bioinformatics in Europe, so we have a group of these skilled people to build on, and to provide to biotech companies the expertise they need to make the most of the data they are accessing from databases."
Manchester Biotech itself is less than a year old, and so could hardly expect to fill the Incubator with new companies as soon as it opens in January. So the plan is to rent some units to established companies in order to generate income to support the embryonic ones. This is not just a matter of money - it will also help to build up a critical mass of industry-oriented researchers and create a flourishing labor market of highly skilled people that can only benefit the new companies. And it also opens up the possibility of collaboration on projects that might not in themselves lead to new companies.
The philosophy behind the Incubator is that it enables academic scientists to take a risk, under expert guidance, with no loss of face (or personal fortune) if their gamble ultimately fails. "The conventional way," says Ferguson, "is to form the company early as a vehicle for getting the money - and then you wonder what you're going to do when the projects don't work. Hopefully ours will be somewhat further down the line. It also follows that there will be some projects that will not be suitable for company formation - they may be best dealt with by straight licensing." But he and his colleagues recognize that not all the projects they pick will be winners. "I personally have said that if 50 percent of projects don't fail in the first year, we're not doing our job properly," he adds, "because we really should be taking a risk, and looking at projects where there is a brilliant idea, and yes, there is a patent, but no, we don't know if this will make it to a diagnostic or whatever. If we play too safe, then we don't fill the need that I identified at the beginning.
"The vision is that if you do things carefully, then one or two good successes in novel areas will more than pay for the 50 to 60 percent of failures, because they'll be relatively cheap failures. The proof of the pudding will come in the next few years. But I personally believe there is evidence that it is beginning to happen."
Georgina Ferry is a scientific journalist based in Oxford, England.
Endlinks
The University of Manchester - located in the principal city of England's northwest; its history of scientific achievement includes Ernest Rutherford's work on splitting the atom, and the world's first stored-program computer. Its Graduate Programme in Biotechnology pages outline biotechnology research projects, including of some of those mentioned in this article.
Oxford Science Park - another British venture-friendly complex.
Look Before You Leap: Tips for Academics Considering Industrial Careers - HMS Beagle Adapt or Die article drawing out some differences between work life in the academic and industrial sectors.
If You're So Smart Why Aren't You Rich? - HMS Beagle Adapt or Die advice for scientist-entrepreneurs on developing a business plan.
Web sites mentioned in this column: