For Life Sciences, Enter London, Cambridge, Oxford Via MedCity

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

The U.K. sounds a challenge to Boston and San Francisco bio-clusters 

Dr. Eliot Forster jokes during our conversation at BIO in San Diego that he doesn’t know his Pythagoras theorem well enough to calculate the area of the U.K.’s southeast region, named the Golden Triangle. Actually, this geographic designation (London, Cambridge, Oxford) forms an equilateral triangle of about 100 miles on each side, so we can leave Pythagoras for another day (thank goodness). The point Forster, executive director of MedCity, is making is that a vast amount of life sciences capabilities reside in a compact area (and in case you were wondering, its ~4,330 miles).

MedCity is a newly formed organization to support all that life science activity in the region. Hopefully not too indelicately, I immediately ask Forster: If you already align and define yourself with a nom de guerre as ostentatious as the Golden Triangle, why do you need a separate organization?

Forster provides his raison d'etre. “The concept of combing the three life science centers as a Golden Triangle materialized first. At the same time, there was a growing realization that a point of entry is needed to navigate this sophisticated environment, as the French would say, of varied businesses, academic and research settings, hospitals, large patient populations and various outsourcing providers. The central principle of MedCity is to now provide that service of facilitating connections and introductions across the life sciences spectrum.”

Despite the French expressions above (which we’ll end here), it is to the U.S. biotech centers that Forster turns for analogies describing his region’s assets and MedCity’s challenges. “Traveling to each of our destinations is similar distance-wise to getting out to Waltham, MA, from downtown Boston,” he says, and then raises the ante. “Think about all that we include within the Golden Triangle. If you take the locations of UCSF (University of California San Francisco), and bring them directly together with Harvard and MIT (Massachusetts Institutive of Technology), well that strength of academic output is the same as we have in a much smaller geographic area. Whilst London, Oxford, and Cambridge are world leaders in a variety of areas in their own right, collectively they are an even stronger proposition. The challenge, though, is that there is so much there you need a place to start for guidance.”

The challenge of guiding this commerce of life science activity, so to speak, is accompanied by at least two more challenges for MedCity: one a financial conundrum and the other a philosophic approach (to business).

A Need For Financing in a Financial Center

To form MedCity, in April of this year the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, announced funding that totaled £4.1 million ($6.1 million), and a partnership with Imperial College Academic Health Science Centre, UCL Partners and King’s Health Partners. The objective, made clear in the mayor’s press release, is “so that the region rivals Boston and San Francisco as the premier, interconnected cluster for life science research, development, manufacturing and commercialization.”

Although those are lofty locations to compete with, there is substantial enthusiasm for this initiative. For example, the recently released JLL Global Life Sciences Cluster Report says, “We are likely to see an expansion of the UK life sciences sector over the next few years. The government is giving the sector strong backing through MedCity…It is hoped the life sciences sector in the South East will come to match the crucial position of financial services in the national economy.”

Within this vote of confidence the italicized last sentence offers a paradox and specific challenge for Forster. As the JLL report mentions, a benchmark of success will be if life sciences can approach the importance to the U.K. economy held by the financial services sector. Ironically, life science companies and local governments alike feel it is a lack of financing that has stymied opportunities for industry growth. London, rivaling Wall Street as the leading global investor center, hasn’t seen that wealth drop down to the biotechs or emerging life science businesses at its doorstep.

Forster brings this point out himself in our discussion. “Financing in our sector is not as good as it could be, and we recognize that is a real area we must focus on. Right now,” he says, “if entrepreneurs and more established companies think mostly about capital as a differentiation from San Francisco or Boston, then their choice may be those areas over us. Clearly part of our mission is to fix that so it is not a defining feature.”

One way MedCity is taking this on headfirst is by starting its own investment fund “designed to catalyze activities between groups that wouldn’t naturally work together.” Forster provides an expansive example. “So if I’ve got a businessperson who makes a certain kind of coffee machines and who wants to talk to someone who is a cancer therapist, who in turn wants to talk to a politician for funding a new research venture, than we will catalyze that. In that type of mix there may be something extraordinary. You get ideas at intersections you would not normally anticipate.”

The Philosophy: Life Sciences Exist to Drive the Economy

Forster extolls the business and economic development side of the life science industry. At one point in our conversation he apologizes for again repeating, “the focus is on life sciences driving the economy.” His bona fides for serving as this messenger are solid. He started at Merck at the turn of the ‘90s, joined Glaxo in ‘92, and then settled into Pfizer for 11 years, including a substantial amount of time on assignment in the U.S. For the past seven years he has been an entrepreneur helping start biotechs, one of which (Creabilis) he still serves as CEO.

“MedCity is a catalyzing organization that has some simple but well-recognizable objectives,” he explains. “Using the life sciences to grow the economy is the key. If everyone involved begins to carry that in their heads, they also understand that competition is important. I think we would all believe that in a market environment you get excellence through competition. Of course some of that intra-competition can be collaborative if we are all working towards that ultimate goal of economic development in our region. And that really is as simple as it gets.”

Along with focusing on this “coordinating and combining efforts to drive the economy, get new investments, new jobs, new companies,” Forster speaks eloquently of the need for new therapeutics, medical breakthroughs and improved patient outcomes. “Access to patients for clinical trials is really second to none,” he says. “The greater London area has 8 million patients, served by a single health system, with a divergent population where nearly every phenotype exists. As a matter of fact,” he continues, “Pfizer has recently announced the establishment of a rare diseases initiative based around that patient population, because even very rare conditions exist within a single space of about 15 miles by 15 miles.”

I asked Forster if there was a bio-cluster or life science business model that has influenced the establishment of MedCity. He replies that after having established his message of economic growth and analyzing the assets and potential in his own ecosystem, MedCity did study and reach out to other global clusters.

“Rather like when Zantac was around 45 percent of revenues for Glaxo in the early 90s,” Forster says taking a lesson from his early days in pharma, “in southeast England we rely heavily on our enormous financial industry. So we started with the premise that life sciences must grow as another supporting economic pillar; we are part of the need for diversification. The tech sector – gaming and programing – has gone huge in London, for example, so there is a new pillar beginning there. Then based on this, we looked for the best practices around the world. Is it the model of a hub-and-spoke, is there some algorithm, is it to just create a mixture, is it a physical entity or not?”

It is not a surprise Forster points to the U.S., specifically mentioning Massachusetts, as a model they looked at. “The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio) and their formation of partnerships was instructive for us. They were actually quite open to talking to us and very helpful,” he says.

“I think the Boston-Cambridge area has gone through version 1.0, 2.0 and so on,” he continues. “I hope what we have done based on these learnings is to go straight to MedCity 3.0. We try to anticipate what health needs will be rather than what health needs are today. It is unlikely that those exact elements which are useful and effective today in tackling health problems will be on there own useful and helpful in the future. There will be those plus other things we have never thought of, all coming together.”

Forster notes that for pharma and biotechs alike, outsourcing is an increasingly preferred option. He says the outsourcing model fits well with MedCity, which was founded on the assumption that collaboration is the best option. “Our region has high quality drug research, development and manufacturing providers, resources for finance, professional services, and of course strong clinical trials support.”

Forster finishes our conversation with this final thought. “To be clear we are not just talking about biotech-pharma when we talk about life sciences; we are talking about hospitals, health-care providers and other service providers of all kinds, med-tech and digital health. Actually, we believe that the combination of med-tech and digital health is very important in terms of delivering our aspirations. This includes the patient side, but also includes prognostics, diagnostics, big data – evaluating data sets to see what health patterns might be emerging and therefore can be intervened.”

MedCity will do well to continue that foresight in combining the substantial existing assets, and growing new life science companies, within the Golden Triangle. At the same time, Forster will be keeping an eye on and anticipating further advancements and developments in the competing global industry-clusters he emulates on the one hand, and now competes with on the other.