How Cancer Research Horizons is building the future of childhood cancer medicines

0:05Tony Hickson: Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from LaBiotech. I'm Dylan Kassane, and this is episode 210 for the podcast. Cancer is still the leading cause of death by disease in children and young people. Yet in the last 20 years, only a handful of drugs have been approved specifically to treat it. Most pediatric cancer treatments are simply adult drugs, repurposed, and often at real long-term cost to the children who survive. Today's guest is working to change that, and much more besides. Tony Hickson is Chief Business Officer for Cancer Research Horizons, the Cancer Research UK charity's innovation engine, responsible for turning early-stage science into new treatments, diagnostics, and startup companies.

0:52Tony Hickson: Tony's career spans big pharma, university tech transfer, and now the translational frontline of cancer research, and he's helped build dozens of spin-outs along the way. We'll talk about why charity and pharma need each other more than ever, and about C-Further, a bold new push to finally build medicines made for children, not borrowed from adults. I hope you enjoy my discussion with Tony Hickson. Tony, welcome to Beyond Biotech. Hi Dylan, nice to be here, thanks for inviting me. Tony, you've had a career that's been in all parts of the industry, big pharma, tech transfer, and now you're at a cancer charity's commercial arm.

1:33Tony Hickson: How do you draw a path like that together? Where did you get started? Well, I started out in the pharmaceutical industry. I worked for Wellcome, as it was back then, that later became Glaxo Wellcome and then GlaxoSmithKline. And I worked in the labs and it was a great start to my career. It gave me a sort of structure. It put me through training, gave me exposure to biology, and all the things I wanted to do. So it was a brilliant place to start and a great social life as it turned out. And then I moved to a startup company, which was really interesting because you went from a sort of 100 ,000 person sort of organization to a tiny little startup where I was one of the first 10 into the company.

2:12And that was really great. You become a much bigger cog in a smaller wheel. You get involved in so much more. It really exposed me to venture capital and the sort of rollercoaster of raising money. I think it gives you a little bit of empathy when you're sort of involved with those companies later on as to what they're going through. And then I had an opportunity to work for a tech transfer organisation, Imperial College. And that was fantastic to work there. I worked for Imperial Innovations. And with hindsight, there was some serendipity involved. I joined again an organisation that was just about to embark on a really exciting journey of raising one of the first university tech transfer organisations is to raise significant capital to list itself on the London Stock Exchange and to invest that capital back into university science.

3:01And I was very privileged to be able to go on that journey and be part of the management team and eventually become a director of that organisation. So I think it just goes to show that you don't always plan your career path, but exposure to lots of different areas can be really interesting on that way. And of course, now I've moved to Cancer Research UK.

3:21Tony Hickson: Yeah, so you jumped over from Imperial to Cancer Research UK. What made you want to take that jump from this university tech transfer office into a pretty disease-specific charity? Yeah, I mean, it's a combination of things. Obviously, the cause resonates. I think it resonates with everyone. Almost everyone, by definition, knows someone with cancer. I had a close friend that I travelled around the world with in my very early years backpacking who sadly died to cancer and that sort of, you know, it makes it real for you. Also, sort of timing wise, it looked like a great opportunity. There was an opportunity to now, the charity is very ambitious, it's a great organisation to work for and it really wanted to grow Cancer Research Horizons, its innovation group.

4:10and it really wanted to take that somewhere and it gave me a unique opportunity to sort of get involved with that. So the timing was good as well.

4:19Tony Hickson: So you've got Cancer Research UK, you've got Cancer Research Horizons, which you just mentioned. Where does your job actually sit? Yeah, I mean, it can sometimes seem a little confusing to the outside world, but Cancer Research UK is one of the world's leading cancer charities. It's focused on funding research, raising public awareness and influencing policy. Within Cancer Research UK, we have a wholly owned subsidiary company called Cancer Research Horizons that we describe as a sort of innovation engine and charity. And it's there to specifically take breakthroughs out of the lab, out of the research we're funding and to translate them into new treatments and drugs and diagnostics and things that we're actually going to help cancer patients.

5:06So my role within that wholly owned subsidiary is as a chief business officer. My role is to focus on the commercialization of intellectual property assets, new startup creations, industrial interactions, collaborations with business.

5:21Tony Hickson: You talk about these startups and these new innovative companies. So far, you've helped create dozens of spin outs. What do you actually do that a normal tech transfer office at a university, for example, doesn't do? yeah um i suppose a standard and having worked for one i guess um i've seen it from from both sides uh a standard university tech transfer office manages the intellectual property for a very broad range of disciplines it manages basically everything that comes out of the university most of the universities are pretty broad churches in terms of what they handle um and they're focused on their their local campus or campuses you know very focused on obviously their unique infrastructure which is generally tightly geographically clustered.

6:07So they're sort of very tightly bound to a geography but very discipline agnostic looking very wide. When we were at Imperial we were doing quantum in the morning and rockets in the afternoon and therapeutics in the evening you know it's that sort of thing you have to have a team and advice able to cope with that. At Cancer Research UK it's sort of the other way around it's that we are very sector focused you know we are focused solely on oncology which enables us to really curate those networks of companies that are active in that space the pharmaceutical companies the investors and really liaise with them and understand them in a unique way but we are nationally focused so we don't have a single geography you know we are cancer research uk is funding research across the entirety of the uk and increasingly beyond international as well so we have to be able to find and locate that intellectual property to form startups across the entirety of the UK.

7:00So it brings with a different challenge, but also a different set of opportunities. The other thing I'll say is that we don't just do intellectual property commercialization. We cover drug discovery. So we're providing drug discovery support. We have a team of over 200 people in white coats based in labs throughout the country that support academics with commercialising or developing new therapeutics for cancer, because often academia struggle to access that type of support. We have clinical trial management, so we can help move some of these early stage therapeutics into first in human studies.

7:38And again, that can be a challenging area to know how to do. We provide translational funding, so very early stage de-risking capital, which is often quite hard to get to validate these ideas before they are necessarily spun out or licensed. And we provide venture funding. We have a seed fund, 30 million pound balance sheet seed fund that we invest in these startups to help get them off the ground. Now, there are a number of tech transfer offices that provide some of those services, but there are very few that provide all of them with such a sort of sector-based focus. So we tend to think of ourselves more like an active biotech partner or a collaborative co-investor.

8:17I'll finish by just saying, However, we have very good relationships with university tech transfer offices across the country. We have to work and do work with them very closely. We work together. It's a collaborative endeavour. And so with some of them, we work more closely, with some less, because they all have different levels of capability. Certainly my 20 years plus of doing this in a sort of tech transfer world, I've seen a big rising of the tide in UK tech transfer. And a lot of these university tech transfer offices are very good and very skilled at what they do.

8:51Tony Hickson: Tell me a little bit about how it all works in practice. If a researcher's got themselves an asset or a molecule that they're developing or some sort of therapy that they think might eventually with some support work out, what's that journey like from where they're working at the university up to the point where they've got a company, a name, a board, and maybe some funding and support from you? yeah uh we sort of touched on some aspects of it haven't we i mean firstly not not every idea is a spin-out company so sometimes we're licensing directly to industry sometimes we're structuring a collaboration with a biopharma company sometimes we are uh forming a new startup but let's just go with the sort of startup scenario here what we would do is we spend a lot of time with researchers kicking the tires on the idea initially you know do we all believe that it is truly novel can we find other people pursuing the same approach you know is this going to have a sort of unique uh uh angle to it compared to what's already out there then a lot of discussion about the commercial model should we license it should we spin it out should we collaborate with industry and then often it's what is needed to then actually engage industry or investors and this is often the area i think that requires the most debate is there were very few the old days if you like a tech transfer, the sort of model of 20 years ago, file some patents and then flip them to industry.

10:12It just doesn't happen anymore. You know, they're not prepared to pick up assets that early in general. And so therefore you need to put some de-risking capital in to answer some key questions. And the most important thing is to get early input from investors and to get experts, domain experts in the room who can work with the PI and with us to make sure we're doing the right series of experiments, the right validation work. And that, I think, is the real step forward that we're all trying to make now is to become some development functions where we do the right things to get to that value inflection point that will unlock the formation of a company, the crowding of investors or an industry partner willing to license it at that point.

10:58and then then we really hand off at that point you know we are we're handing off to either the company to take on development or we're handing off to a group of sophisticated life science investors who have you know more extensive management talent networks and deeper pools of capital to take the idea forward and we've sort of done our job at bridging the gap between the

11:18Tony Hickson: two it makes me think this sounds like an incredible amount of engagement how many people are we talking about on the team there? So within Cancer Research Horizons itself, there's around 250 people. So it's quite a lot. However, I would say the majority of those are in the drug discovery group doing that sort of, you know, that supporting academics with their therapeutic innovation. In the commercial partnerships team, we have about 80 people. So we're a similar sort of size to a large tech transfer office like Oxford or Cambridge. And then we also have a small group of about 20 people that do sort of cancer reagents.

11:58So they're at the other end of the spectrum. They're taking the ideas that arise naturally as a byproduct of our research, all the antibodies and reagents that appear in academic freezers. And we're making sure that they're available to the rest of the community to sort of lubricate the wheels of research. So it's a bit of a service we provide to people.

12:17Tony Hickson: on this commercial side is there a project or a particular spin-out that you're especially proud of one that really shows how the model worked yeah i mean um i mean we're very lucky at cancer research uk we've had a long track record of success um nearly 100 companies form now over 18 exits 14 drugs to market so it's kind of hard to pick the sort of you know the one stand out but but i'll do what most people do in these scenarios is you gravitate to the most recent exit because that's the one most fresh on your mind. So recently, Myrick's bio was sold to Novartis for about$1.5 billion in total consideration.

12:57And I pick on that one just because it's fresh in your mind, but also because it's a great story, a sort of linked-up story. So Cancer Research UK, as a research funder, has been funding Professor Ed Tate's lab for over 17 years now in various different forms, both at Imperial College and at the Francis Crick Institute. Along with the tech transfer offices of those organisations, we came together to put the intellectual property into the company when we got it started, Mirix Bio. It's a company developing sort of new novel linker and warhead technology in the ADC, antibody drug conjugate space.

13:36And then we invested, as Research Horizons, invested in it using our seed fund to sort of help bridge finance it and can help keep it going alongside some obviously very large venture capital firms. And then to exit that to a pharmaceutical company who are now going to continue the journey and sort of take that platform into a variety of different drugs, I think is a great validation of that sort of joined up ecosystem, that contiguous pathway that we're trying to form for these things.

14:04Tony Hickson: What about the other side, though? Because every venture studio, every tech transfer office has many more ideas that don't work. as opposed to the ones that go on and exit for more than a billion. What's a failure rate like? How many ideas never actually make it to that next stage? Yeah, I mean, the failure rate is high. You know, I don't think we shy away from that. In some ways, we almost embrace that high attrition rate because that shows we're doing our job. We're right at the cutting edge of science here. We're funding some really sort of out there stuff. And you would expect a large number of them not to work, but it's worth it to find a winner so we spend a lot of time on due diligence both when we're just identifying something to file a pattern on when we're identifying something to put translational funding in when we're identifying something to put seed funding into in the venture stage you know they're all different levels of due diligence involving uh expert networks to bring sort of good advice to what we're doing but at the end of the day you know certainly if we just talk about therapeutics a cancer therapeutic like most therapeutics has a 50 50 chance at phase three of success so even once you take it all that far and you spend nearly billions of dollars you're still flipping a coin to see if it's actually going to benefit patients or not so i think we you know the high attrition rate is built into our model it's a lots of shots on goal model it's move a lot of ideas forward except a high failure rate where it is a badge of honor almost because it means we're doing cutting edge you know difficult stuff that other people perhaps won't challenge um and and that all sits on a layer of research funding you know at the end of the day we're publishing all of this research our academics that we're funding and publishing all this research and that is getting out there as well and increasing the amount of ideas that are getting progressed so it's a combination of all of those things you know sometimes there's a perception out there that the end benefit to the patient and the commercial success of a product these can pull in different directions that pharma companies aren't particularly interested in solving problems as much as they are in making money and that's uh that's quite persistent uh in the general in general environment maybe outside of the industry is that your view as well can you have a commercial success and a patient benefit is that where you're trying to go yes i mean i think yeah where we are trying to go is patient benefit we are very clearly focused on patient benefit and outcome and maximising the value of all this research we're funding.

16:33So if you look at the objects written for Cancer Research UK at Companies House, where they're filed in the UK when you incorporate a charity, it says we're not only there to fund research, but also to translate those ideas for patient benefit. So it's quite forward thinking of a charity that's been around for 125 years to actually have thought from the very start, We're not just here to fund research. We really want to see some of these ideas move forward. And so our main measures are patient benefits. Now, if we generate revenue as a result of that, that's upside. That's all reinvested. Any surplus goes back into cancer research.

17:13But it's not the main mission for doing that. And for that reason, we don't have targets. We don't have revenue targets. Our targets achieve impact. so we're increasingly trying to get more sophisticated about measuring impact so for example we measure the number of doses of drugs that we have helped move forward given to patients you know we're over 28 million so far and and we measure the number of quality adjusted life years added to patients lives there are over 1.5 million additional years added to patients lives you know time people can spend with their loved ones and that's important for us because we can demonstrate to our donors that all this research they're donating to us to move forward is having a real effect on cancer patients.

17:59It's not just publications. There's more to it than that.

18:03Tony Hickson: That's very different to a typical tech transfer office or a public pharmaceutical company. I don't think anybody else is tracking these sorts of things as key performance indicators well ahead of profit making revenue coming in. Yeah, I think tech transfer offices are primarily public benefit focused as well. I think their societal benefit is a key outcome for them. Yeah, we're lucky because we're sector focused. I think we're developing a sophisticated set of impact measures to help us demonstrate that. It is tougher when you're in a tech transfer office. You've got to cover a lot of bases to show that.

18:44But they are measuring jobs created and tax revenues and things like that. They're not just measuring income. Obviously, pharmaceutical companies, they are generally set up as for-profit entities. They have to return profit to their shareholders. That's the system that we have created. We see our job. We are never going to be able to put billions of pounds into development of a new drug. CRUK is typically deploying about 350 to 450 million pounds per year in research. We couldn't pay for development of a single drug on our own. So therefore our job is to get it into the hands of those who have the equipment to do that.

19:20And that is the biopharmaceutical industry. So we work with them, not against them or around them.

19:26Tony Hickson: One of the things you've talked about before is this gap between academic research and then the translational work that really is needed to start a drug discovery project. Is that gap getting bigger? Is that something you're addressing? yeah i mean is the gap yes there's a perception i think that the gap is getting bigger yeah i mean i think that you know what we've seen is that the it's a buyer's market for the pharmaceutical industry and that they are increasingly waiting to see biotechs get clinical data before they're prepared to acquire them later on in the sort of market um and And therefore, we are going to have to fund it and bridge it for longer using translational funding, using a seed fund, working with investors to get it to that value inflection point where the biopharmaceutical industry will actually pick it up.

20:19I think the good news is at the same time, we are seeing a cultural shift in UK academia. We've all been, us and the universities, have all been investing a lot of time in entrepreneurial programs and accelerators and things like that. And we are definitely seeing a new cadre of early career academics coming through who don't see having a startup company as being mutually incompatible with being a successful academic. They want both. And so there is a push to create more startup companies and get them funded. and many organizations like us are reconfiguring themselves to be venture builders and have seed funds and venture funds associated with them and to move these ideas forward so that we can bridge that gap that has got bigger.

21:06Tony Hickson: One of the things we've seen in biotech funding in the last couple of years in particular is that the money has started to go to later stage or in particular anything that's de-risked, anything with data, good data. What does this mean for that science that could be really, really promising, but is still maybe too early? Do they come turning to a group like Cancer Research Horizons? Yeah, I mean, I think we're trying to bridge that gap. So the combination of having funding, but also capacity. So the example here, I would say, is in our clinical trial networks. so if we're going to move it far enough for the pharmaceutical industry to engage we're probably going to need human clinical data and in that case working with CRUK there's a real benefit because we have our centre for drug development that takes things into first in human studies we have our CTU network our clinical trial unit network we have experimental cancer medicine centres network throughout the UK so we have all this infrastructure that can help access patients and expose some of these early stage ideas, whether they're still held in academia or whether they have been put into a startup company.

22:18And we can help now. We're much better configured than we were a while back to help bridge that gap and get them moved forward enough to engage the farmer industry.

22:28Tony Hickson: You know, one of the things that stands out about a charity doing this sort of work is that some people might say, look, it's a charity. You shouldn't be acting like a venture investor. You shouldn't be risking money. you shouldn't be making bets that aren't going to pay off. How do you respond to someone like that? Well, I think as I mentioned earlier, you know, the system is there that we cannot move forward these ideas ourselves to the point at which a patient could take a drug. It requires industry with deep pockets in order to do that. So our job is to bridge the gap between where our research ends And we're either investors, venture capital startups or pharmaceutical industries, licensing technologies or through collaboration.

23:14We'll pick them up and take them forward because they have the resources and the deep pockets in order to do that. So we've got to work with those type of industries and find a way to work with them. And we do work with them, I think, very well. You know, we we know how to do this. We've done many, many license deals, hundreds of license deals, nearly 100 startups. And we've done this a lot. They know us. They trust us. I like to think. And I think we generally have a track record of moving these things forward. Now, there are some areas, however, where it's more challenging to make that model work.

23:47So if you look at the diagnostics industry, it's hard to get investors engaged with that because it's harder to make the big returns they want to see. If you look at some areas like brain cancer or ultra rare cancers or paediatric cancers, again, it's difficult for for profit industries to make the type of returns they'd like to see unless they can see an adult follow on. And therefore, they tend to shy away from those areas. We're not blaming them for that. They're just acting rationally. They're shareholder funded. They've got to deliver a return. so what we have to do as a charity sector and government sector is work together to find other ways to move them forward and there's a number of new sort of models developing in those markets where you could actually conceivably take a therapeutic medicine all the way to patients without actually ever involving a pharmaceutical company.

24:38Tony Hickson: Tell me a little bit more about these partnerships with pharmaceutical companies like you say you've done licensing deals you've done many licensing deals. What does it actually look like to have a partnership between a charity or cancer research horizons like yours and a pharma company? How do you actually work together? Yeah, there's a number of models. The most common, I think, in the past was probably the license deal. So we effectively package up a package of intellectual property. you know it might be some patterns might be copywriting code it could be a data set that rises there's a lot of interest in data sets now to train ai and tech company technologies and we package it up and we license it to them and there may be some milestone fees and some royalties that come back in the future and some clauses that allow us to get the asset back if it doesn't move forward because that's important for us we need to make sure we need to know that it's being moved forward.

25:37The other way is a collaboration with industry. So we structure collaborations, say, with our clinical development unit or with our drug discovery unit, where industry and the drug discovery unit are working together in a certain area of cancer to discover sort of new drugs against a series of targets. So it might be more of a collaboration and an industry have an option to take up the targets that work. Another way might be a corporate venture capital unit of a pharmaceutical company invests in one of our startups. And they're doing that because they're trying to keep, you know, a window on early stage science and sort of keep their eye in as to what's happening.

26:18And we can bring them in as an investor in some of our startups. And I think the final way is where the pharma company is actually engaged directly with the academic institutes. So they do a sponsored research collaboration. And generally the universities handle those, but sometimes we may be involved in work as well if it's heavily in the cancer space and there's lots of background intellectual property involved. So several different ways, and we have learned to be flexible. You can't just enter the room and demand a certain model. You have to listen to your partner's needs and structure the right structure in accordance with that.

26:53Tony Hickson: Let me change tack a little bit. I want to pick up on something you mentioned just a minute ago, which is oncology for children, paediatrics. It's an area that Cancer Research Horizons has some interest in. The last few years, the last few decades, we've only had a handful of drugs that are approved specifically for childhood cancer. Why is this just being neglected commercially? Is it just that rational decision-making on the part of pharma companies? Well, yeah, I think it is. I mean, I know the data is in the last 20 years, there's only been nine approvals exclusively for children from the EMA and the FDA in the USA.

27:32So that compared to 60 adult indications alone in a single year in 2024. So, you know, there is a real dearth of new medicines being developed for paediatric child and young people's cancers. And the reason for that is that they are generally small patient groups. They're very difficult to actually drug. Much of the biology here is developmental. I mean, children are not small adults. They are still developing. So their biology is different. And a lot of it is very complex. There's fusion proteins and transcription factors and all sorts of things involved that are traditionally difficult things to hit with a drug.

28:15And then, of course, there's just the market size type thing. Many of these conditions are also, by definition, rare conditions. um now sometimes you see some some great successes like the day one sort of story um where there is an adult follow-on to that so you start into pediatric cancer and you can progress into adults and there's a commercial case to be made for that this is all from drug story um but sometimes there are tragically a number of childhood cancer conditions that just don't have an adult follow-on there will only ever be in that market and i think that's where we're very interested as a charity in trying to help correct this broken market problem.

28:53Tony Hickson: I want to ask a little bit more about one of these companies, which is C-Further. They've got two therapeutic programs at the moment, CF012 and CF033. What are these programs trying to do? What are they focused on? Yeah, just to be clear on that, C-Further is not a company. is a joint venture between ourselves, Cancer Research Horizons, CLUK, Lifehark is another charity in the UK and they're focused on rare diseases and Great Ormond Street Hospitals Charity, which clearly is focused on paediatrics. So we've all come together, put some money on the table and some support and people and teams to try and move forward some ideas in this space and really put a bit of pressure on the system because you end up caught in a cycle where because there is no market for them, there's no impetus to start development of them and then nothing happens.

29:53So we're trying to put some pressure on the system at the start to say, well, actually we are developing some molecules here. They're novel and we need to find a route forward for them. So let's sort of embrace that challenge and move forward with that. So see further is that joint development. it has raised about 50 million dollars so far and funded uh announced the funding of two programs but we have several more that we're currently uh sort of homing in on hope to almost certainly will announce more before the end of this kind of year um the first two programs one is um developing a drug against ewing sarcoma which is a sort of bone and soft tissue disease in primarily in children.

30:34It's with ourselves, the University of Virginia Cancer Centre, Dana Farber and Max Brigham in Boston. And we're trying to develop a new sort of small molecule, first in class small molecule for that. And what we offer we see further is, it's not just that here's a grant, go and do it. We're offering our drug discovery capabilities alongside the funding, alongside the biology capabilities within those universities. So it's really trying to bring it all together. The other program is slightly different. It addresses several different types of childhood cancer. And it's with a company actually, Mink Therapeutics and the University of Southampton working together.

31:13And it's an off-the-shelf cell therapy format. So we're trying a very different type of approach, looking at sort of trying to address some of the limitations in that therapy area.

31:25Tony Hickson: Is it more difficult to find the academic researchers in the first place who are interested in childhood cancers just because of this commercial, this lack of commercial appeal? Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, there are, the paediatric oncology community is a very tight knit and very well networked community who do an amazing job. They're incredibly good at engaging with patient advocates, and they're highly impassioned people who really want to fix this market. broken problem here. So they're all looking for different solutions. And certainly, we feel very embraced by that community and bringing new ideas, expressions of interest to us and trying to move things forward.

32:09But I think, you know, they would admit, along with us, that that community is still relatively small in the grand scheme of things. And that means there's only a select number of new start points for therapeutic medicines for us to sort of harvest and mine and move forward. and there's lots of challenges in developing those medicines. So I think it's important that we focus both on the academic community as a source of new ideas, but also on industry, on biotechs and pharmaceutical companies who may have stored or shelved assets. So maybe for a pharmaceutical company, they stopped development of something because they don't consider the market to be big enough, but we could help them move it forward.

32:52Or it may be for a small biotech company that their venture capital funders are focusing all of their efforts on their lead molecule in a certain indication, and their number two and number three, which could be great in childhood cancer, are being sort of neglected a bit. Again, could we help get that out, structure a deal, move it forward? So I think that whilst it can be challenging to find some of these ideas, I think that there is still plenty of scope for us to move forward a number of exciting programs.

33:23Tony Hickson: You've described See Further in the past as a child-first approach to discovery and development rather than just adapting adult science. And you mentioned children are not just small versions of adults. They're very different biology. What does that actually mean in terms of mindset and what sort of practical impact does that have on the science? So, I mean, I think there's child first and child only, and See Further will do both. But what we won't do is adult only. So we are, Child First is of, well, Child Only is of particular interest to us because as a charity, we are uniquely positioned, you know, and as a group of charities with Goshen Lifehark to take on the risk of moving these things forward and find novel ways of getting them funded, novel access to clinical trial structures and things like that.

34:14And frankly, it's very unlikely that industry of venture capital will ever take forward some of those sort of niche conditions. um child first is also of interest as well um because uh the incentives that have been created by governments which are great to see have not always worked in terms of getting the biopharmaceutical industry to run pediatric trials either alongside or shortly after the adult ones there's a very large delay historic delay between starting a pediatric study and the adult drug reaching the market most of the time the adult drug actually reaches the market well before they even start the first paediatric study.

34:52Some recent legislation changes in the US have helped start to create that, but there's still sort of more to be done there. So I think we are very interested in that child first model in terms of building a portfolio alongside the child only model. And you want a mixed portfolio of both really, because that maximises the chance of seeing success and it maximises the chance of us leveraging more money for C further in the future, because we're going to need more than$50 million. You know, we're going to have to raise money against this. We need philanthropy and industry and other people to gather around it and sort of believe in the cause we're trying to create.

35:26Tony Hickson: So what does success look like then for Seafother if we're thinking five years ahead, ten years ahead? Yeah, I mean, I think we want a science. We want to see a science-led portfolio. So the first task is to create, you know, a portfolio. Because of this attrition problem we've spoken about before, you know, we need a significant portfolio of assets It's all being developed all at different stages. So, you know, early preclinical, late preclinical, in the clinic and so on to really show the model is moving. And we're moving a number of things forward. And we'd like to see that a mixed bag of child first and child only indications within that, covering a broad depth of diverse cancers.

36:03You know, we don't want to all focus on certain types of cancer. And then I think we're also thinking about the commercial model. So how do we then sort of, you know, how do we move these ideas forward? There'll be a combination of licensing, some to industry, some there won't be any sort of industry take up. So we're going to there may be the risk is considered higher. So we're going to have to take it further into the clinic before we'll get industry engagement. And in the sort of third category is there will never be industry engagement. And they're the ones we're really going to have to think about novel models with.

36:36And I guess the final part is, you know, we want to become a voice in this market. You know, we want to shout from the rooftops, this market is broken, it has a problem. We need collective solutions here. We need everyone to crowd in and work with us or us work with others, you know, to help solve this. So we'll probably put out some white papers and some policy influencing things as well alongside the development of the drugs.

36:58Tony Hickson: Let's take a little bit of a look forward now. If there's one thing that you could pick out that would unlock earlier stage cancer innovation in the UK, what would it be? What would you like to see? Yeah, well, I'm going to face my answer here because you're picking one, I think is really difficult. I think I'm not going to be cancer specific because I've spent my lifetime, my career close to universities and close to research trying to bridge that early stage gap. And I think that firstly, we need more early stage de-validation, de-risking money. So proof of concept money is often called within universities.

37:36There's a very clear gap there. I've seen the data on it the Stanford University for example has over£20 million a year to spend on proof of concept the Leuven University in one region in Flanders in Belgium has£20 or£30 million the UK's entire government budget to give the universities approved concept is£8 million a year and that's to spread over all of the universities so we have a huge gap there and that is the undoubtedly leading ideas on the shelf so we need to find a way to crowd more money into that very early stage gap that is not to say there's also there's also a later stage gap the scale-up gap and we're going to as a country we're going to need to address that if we want to keep those companies domiciled here in the uk and not have them sort of going off but that's the sort of that's that's off the topic for today you know the other thing i'd like to see is engaging with investors earlier we sort of hinted at it you know earlier in the conversation is that um we have really started to learn that the earlier we can form relationships with and engage with the investment community the better the feedback we get the more likely we are to do the right experiments that will de-risk it enough for them to engage with it later rather than sort of going what do you think and then saying well it's very interesting but you haven't done this and you haven't done that and you know you're missing a key bit of data and having to go back and do it again so I think engaging with industry and investors earlier is key to our future success

39:04Tony Hickson: I mean these would be amazing things to see and I guess this is part of the the process and the work to try and lobby to get this done but what about right now what's exciting you most about the the pipeline right now of the stuff that Cancer Research Horizons is involved with well yeah I mean it is fair to say that we genuinely feel like this is a golden age for oncology you know i'm sure maybe people have said that before but it does feel like it to us where we are at the moment we're seeing some really amazing advances here so um i think not only a combination of amazing technology advances but a real upping of the clock speed maybe it's the sort of effect of china and the fast followers maybe it's the effect of ai but there is certainly the pace of innovation is speeding up and we're seeing more and more sort of big advances so for example you know ai unlocking alpha fold and protein folding crisper and that sort of exquisitely precise base editing the use of genomics now we're moving away from treating cancers and by indication and moving to treating them by genetics you know sort of targeted thing and moving from blunt instruments like chemotherapy and radiotherapy to targeted therapies like adcs and radioligand therapeutics you know it's the future safer and kinder treatments not not just better targeted and if you look in our own portfolio within co uk we're really seeing some cutting edge stuff starting to emerge now whether it'll make it or not we don't know but you know we're seeing things in extra chromosomal dna we're seeing exon poisoning we're seeing condensates and intrinsically disordered proteins you're really cutting edge science that hasn't yet been fully proven but could be really interesting and that's our job is to go after those sort of you you know, interesting areas and try and get ahead of everyone else and try and get those things exposed and then see which ones win ultimately and get out there.

40:59And we've certainly seen that. We've seen a whole host of what were previously considered undruggable drug targets now, KRAS and things like that, being targeted. And I think we're going to see some of the other big stalwarts, you know, glues and degraders, things like that coming on that are really going to open up our toolbox of the ability to hit different targets on oncology. It's genuinely a really exciting time.

41:21Tony Hickson: You know, for researchers who are listening today who might have something that might be worth translating or would like to work with you, or for people who want to come in and get you some more cash as well, that would be nice. What are the sorts of steps they can take? Where can they find you? Where can they learn more about you? Yeah, I mean, the best thing is, is look at our website, Cancer Research Horizons. It has, it deliberately goes into detail about all our contacts so you can see every single person in the organization is profiled on there there's contact emails there's telephone numbers you know we deliberately try and make ourselves open for you to approach you can approach our ventures team if you're interested in seed funding your voucher search evaluation team if you're interested in filing patents see further and we segment ourselves as well so you sort of hopefully it's pretty clear who you need to go to and i would encourage you to come and talk to us you know we we get lots of approaches from companies we're just saying, can you help us understand the UK scene in cancer?

42:18Can you introduce us to different people? We're always happy to help.

42:22Tony Hickson: Tony, it's been great talking to you today. Thank you for joining us on Beyond Biotech. Great. Thanks, Dylan. Enjoyed it. That's it for this episode. Don't forget to check out all the latest news and analysis at labiotech.eu. I hope wherever you are in the world, you have a great week ahead. thanks for listening and I hope you'll join us again next time for another Beyond Biotech.