The University of Cambridge is reaping the rewards of handing six entrepreneurs with successful track records a “golden access card” to scour its departments for breakthrough technologies that can be commercialised quickly.
One biotech created under the programme, called Immutrin, has just raised £65 million led by Silicon Valley investors such as Frazier Life Sciences.
The company, which is developing antibody therapies that could repair the heart after attacks, was co-founded by Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), a preferred investor for the University of Cambridge, and the force behind the access scheme.
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To get the company off the ground, CIC’s entrepreneur-in-residence (EiR) Mihriban Tuna teamed up with Immutrin’s academic founders Professor Sir Mark Pepys, the Nobel laureate Sir Gregory Winter, and Professor Daniel Christ. Tuna, a former chief scientific officer at Adaptate Biotherapeutics, is now chief executive of Immutrin.
Andrew Williamson, managing partner of CIC, said: “It’s a real validation that people who could literally invest anywhere in the world in anything are seeing what our EiRs are doing and thinking that is really impressive.”
Adaptate was acquired by the Japanese company Takeda in 2022, and Tuna stayed with the company for a short period of time as part of the deal, but venture capital suitors were already circling.
“People who can successfully build businesses and exit them are few and far between but Mihriban is one of them,” said Williamson. “We called her up the minute the acquisition was announced and said ‘Hey, come and be an EiR with us’. Some of our competitors called 15 minutes later.”
The University of CambridgeAlamy
There are many initiatives to match academic research with people who have experience of applying it to the real world. Universities ranging from Surrey, Glasgow, Sheffield Hallam, Oxford, Imperial College London and London Business School all host either experts-in-residence or entrepreneurs-in-residence. The University of Southampton is currently advertising for up to six experts-in-residence, paying £25,000 for their time.
The Royal Society’s entrepreneur-in-residence scheme also supports placements. It appointed 15 last year, and since its launch in 2018, the scheme has funded more than 130 placements in 65 institutions.
However, few match the salaries on offer at CIC, which pays a “market rate” salary “for a c-suite employee of a start-up” for a year, and holds out the promise of equity in any venture they launch.
Williamson argues it is vital to match up leading technology with the best business nous. “World-class people can take technology that has some flaws and fix them and bring it to market, whereas mediocre management teams can break world-class technology,” he said.
Finding these people is not easy. They need to have expertise in deep technology or life sciences, an “entrepreneurial bug”, and working knowledge of global companies. “The Venn diagram of overlap of people who have all of those skills and experiences is quite small,” he said.
Last summer CIC committed at least £100 million to back the businesses emerging from its EiR initiative. Its EiR’s include the likes of Ferenc Huszar, who was the lead researcher at London-based visual processing specialist Magic Pony, which was acquired by Twitter in 2016 for a reported $150 million. After a stint at the social media company, Huszar returned to academia as a professor of computer science at Cambridge and then threw his hat back in the ring to help lead AI startups.
Cambridge Innovation Capital’s entrepreneur-in-residence Mihriban TunaSylvaine Poitau
The venture Huszar is now helping to commercialise is “in this incredibly exciting space of using AI to write code, and check that the code is verifiable,” said Williamson. “What we are learning here is that for these fields that are moving faster than we have ever seen, the only way you can be successfully investing is if you are backing people who are at the coalface day-in, day-out.”
Entrepreneurs-in-residence are a common feature at international venture capital firms, so to attract the best, CIC plays on its “partnership” with Cambridge University. “We can reach out to candidates and say we have this unique access into this treasure trove of innovation. We can walk you in there with a golden access card and you’ll be amazed how many times [the academics] will say, ‘We’ve been waiting for someone with your commercial background to come along and help us commercialise this technology.’”
Damian Crowther is another EiR. A former head of early drug discovery at AstraZeneca Neuroscience and co-founder of the health-tech start-up GPnotebook, Crowther joined CIC and did some desk research to identify potential areas of drug discovery that could be of commercial interest. He then went into Cambridge University’s laboratory of molecular biology and met two researchers who had been working on Trim21, a biological process for degrading deposits in the brain that could be used to combat diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s.
“Over coffee, Damian asked, ‘Have you thought about commercialising this?’ and they were, ‘Yeah, we think this could have massive impact but we have full day jobs, we are teaching, researching, and have not done a startup before. And they asked, ‘Can you help us?’”
Andrew Williamson, managing partner at CICTom CampbelL
It resulted in the creation of Trimtech Therapeutics. CIC provided some early-stage capital before the company raised £25 million last year from the likes of SV Health Investors and the corporate venture arms of drugmakers Merck and Eli Lilly.
Williamson said: “All the researchers at Cambridge are brilliant. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t. And all their ideas are interesting. But the commercial potential of these ideas varies dramatically and the ability to commercialise something in a capital-efficient, quickly scalable way — which is what a venture capitalist is looking for — is a much smaller subset.
“The EiR has that pattern recognition of seeing how something could get into the clinic versus ‘this needs another five years of fundamental research before it will be ready for that.’”
Williamson worked in the US for much of his career, before returning to Cambridge nine years ago. He said he had noticed how Britain had more entrepreneurial depth in technology commercialisation to draw on.
“When I first joined CIC almost all the companies we were investing in had first-time CEOs. They were learning on the job. Now that is less than half the companies we back. We are backing people in their second, third and fourth company,” he said.
“It is the result of the fact that entrepreneurship and the start-up ecosystem in Cambridge and throughout the country is growing and evolving. It takes time. You can’t short-circuit the time it takes to do your first business, your second one.
“But the talent pool of people who have got experience building early stage businesses, as well as experience working in large businesses, has grown a lot. That is a great thing. It wasn’t there 10 to 20 years ago.”