Introduction
With ten years working for the world’s largest medical charity
in oncology funding more than half a billion dollars worth of research
annually, Simon Youlton has acquired a broad knowledge of the state
of art and technology platforms emerging in the field of oncology.
Prior to this Simon served for 15 years in the capacity of sales
and marketing management positions and was one of the founders of
a life science company following a management buy out in the 90’s.
Whilst at Cancer Research Technology, the tech transfer and early
drug development organisation affiliated to Cancer Research UK,
Simon managed numerous licensing and collaboration deals to pharma
and biotech companies and is a familiar face to many of you. He
also served as a founding committee member of the CRUK Discovery
Committee reviewing applications for translational drug discovery
awards as well as sitting on the former London based Bloomsbury
Bioseed Fund SAB.
Simon was instigator of the ‘crack
teams in cancer’ initiative at CRUK to form teams of multi-disciplinary
experts across different geographical centres of excellence to combine
their expertise to bring exciting areas of basic research such as
cellular senescence, cancer stem cells and the histone code, in
to the limelight for commercial application and pre-from a team
of experts to collaborate with industry. This reinforces his belief
that there is a huge synergistic value in linking the right people
from academic research with the right companies. The clinical and
commercial returns can be huge multiples of the initial investment.
The problem for companies is one of finding ‘needles in haystacks’
and negotiating through the morass of internal politics and bureaucracy
that often accompanies such deals.
As well as a business development network, Simon has built up a
wide base of scientific knowledge and a network of contacts within
Europe’s most prestigious medical research centres having
managed CRT’s business relationships with such external non-CRUK
funded institutes for more than 6 years. These include the prestigious
Netherlands Cancer Institute, The Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum
(the German Cancer Research Center); IFOM/IEO in Italy, the Danish
Cancer Centre, PRBB and CRG Barcelona, University of Barcelona,
and numerous other Universities across Europe. Simon has conducted
technology audits at most of these. Simon also did the ground work
for setting up the first trans-Atlantic business for CRT and locating
the CRT Inc US office in Boston.
Any business expects a degree of staff turnover and workloads are
never evenly distributed. However the stresses managers of pharmaceutical
business development and alliance offices are exposed to in this
area are exacerbated by the complexity of the multi-disciplinary
technologies and the number of opportunities they must deal with.
Key individuals at these offices have both specialist scientific
knowledge and more importantly they have built up ‘on-the-job’
experience and competencies that only mature through the passage
of time. When they leave an office can be thrown in to disarray
and too much pressure on remaining over-stretched staff can lead
to dissatisfaction, lower quality work output and worse still, catalyse
more leavers. The problem does not normally stop when new replacement
recruits are appointed since far from being up and running they
routinely require a year of training before they can contribute
and be independent in their work.
For this reason P2F is happy to be contracted to act as a ‘middle-man’
to secure heads of terms and reasonable terms on behalf of pharmaceutical
companies to access research collaborations with academics in a
part-time retained ‘Alliance Manager’ role. He can also
seek out and point to the appropriate groups for bolstering particular
fields of technology or disease focus. Having come from this background
it can help to have someone facilitate an academic alliance deal
who is more than aware of the perspectives from both sides of the
table and has experience of mediatory clauses to appease most deal-breaking
situations, and has the ear of the institutes concerned.
P2F also offers a Pharma-licensing
club where current Executives of your business development team
can, with their employer’s approval join a ‘club’
of like minded business development individuals to review confidentially
anonymised late pre-clinical and phase I/II licensing projects arising
from industry and give a ‘club’ rating for each.
All members must agree to a confidentiality agreement before they
can access the full technologies for review and the source of all
technologies remains confidential between P2F and the client.
Once a year P2F runs a ‘closed’ workshop for Pharmalicensing
members to review in depth current opportunities and cross fertilise
opinions on the market and models to value technologies.
It is envisaged that such a ‘neutral’ forum, where
opportunities are introduced in an anonymous fashion may spawn closer
partnerships and end up with new opportunities to licence programmes
between partners on mutually beneficial terms.
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