Welcome to Oxford+, the podcast series that takes you deep into the myths and
truths of the Oxford investing landscape.
I'm your host, Susannah de Jager and I've spent over 15
years in UK asset management.
My guest today is Rowan Gardner.
Rowan is a serial entrepreneur and CEO with over 30 years of
experience in health tech, digital health, deep tech, and biotech.
She has an unusual claim not only to have been part of one of the university's first
spin outs, Oxford Molecular Group in 1989, but also to have subsequently listed it
on the main London Stock Exchange in 1994.
Rowan is currently Chief Business and Investment Officer at Precision
Life, a platform that links chronic disease patients to the drugs they
will respond to via mechanistic patient stratification biomarkers.
A huge advocate and advertisement for Oxford, I am delighted to have Rowan here
to share her experience and her views.
Rowan, thank you so much for joining today.
So slightly different to what I've done with other people, but because you are
the guest with by far the most experience of Oxford over a longer period of time
to date, I'd love to just hear a little bit of a roll call of some of the things
you've been involved in and then we can kind of go on from there because I think
it'll be interesting for people to hear.
Well, thank you for the opportunity, Susannah and just reminding me that
I'm quite old these days but I guess my adventure in Oxford started like many,
I read biochemistry at the university and really because I was absolutely
fascinated by a picture of DNA I saw as almost that early teenager being
dragged around the science museum.
You know, that really has been the common thread, molecular thread through
my career and very early on, I joined a company called Oxford Molecular and
some of the listeners will be familiar with Oxford University's Innovation.
They have a slide, which is a time series of all of Oxford's spin outs
and Oxford Molecular, I think, is about number four and that was a great
adventure very early on in my career.
We listed on the main board of the London Stock Exchange in 1995, we grew
by acquisition of many US companies and really that was a trailblazer for some
of the Generative AI and high performance computing applications around life
science data that Oxford is known for.
So we have Excientia, we have Genomics PLC, Nanopore, all of those companies
coming from that thread and I had a great experience with Oxford.
I did leave Oxford and go to the other place for a period of time.
Surely not!
Sure, I did.
I did.
But you know, that's what experience teaches you, I came back and
while I was based in Cambridge, I ran an advisory business.
I was a co-founder of a very early sort of cloud computing architecture business
called Sonomics, where we worked with those people at CERN who are phenomenal,
in building an integration, architecture for bringing together life science data
and had a ball and really discovered the technology behind the current work venture
that I'm involved with, Precision Life while we were in that entrepreneurial
environment and so Precision Life has three founders, myself, Steve Gardner
and Gert Muller, who is a whip smart mathematician based in Denmark and we
are doing amazing world leading work pioneering our understanding of chronic
disease biology, which we believe will make it much more efficient to both
discover new medicines but also develop them and enable the pharmaceutical
industry to be much more effective in how it invests capital to bring drugs to
market that serve unmet clinical need.
Wonderful, thank you!
That was a brilliant and efficient whistle stop tour of your years of
experience and I wanted to just go into something you touched on, being
in Cambridge and I'd love to understand from your perspective having started
here gone to Cambridge now come back.
Do you observe differences?
Do you think they're more similar than people make out?
What's your experience taught you about it?
So I was thinking about that on the drive over because it was an inevitable question
and I think what's slightly fascinating.
is when I was at university, we always used to observe that Oxford
was a more multidimensional place.
It had the car industry and it had the university and you know, we like
to observe that Cambridge was mostly the university and you roll forward
the several decades further on and when it comes to entrepreneurship
and innovation, Cambridge is perhaps more heterogeneous...
Okay.
...it has a greater focus on repeat entrepreneurs and because of that
it has a more heterogeneous funding environment than perhaps Oxford,
and Oxford really has built its game around world class, phenomenal new
ventures coming out of the university, both high growth and social ventures.
But the track record of repeat entrepreneurs in Oxford is not quite
as balanced as you see in Cambridge and I think that's fascinating.
That's really interesting and I've certainly heard that from other guests
already that there's less of that recycling of talent but also that so
often what can help companies that are in their infancy is having the recycling
of capital from those really great success stories and so it's both elements
that perhaps have room for improvement.
You said something else about Oxford that sort of caught my attention because
actually we had a guest Mark Preston who comes from Formula One and was talking
about the really amazing motorsports cluster, however his view was that
perhaps Oxford as a place the university and indeed the industry have not made as
much of their proximity to one another as they might have done and what a shame
that is because they could both benefit.
So I would be interested to know if you see any ways from your experience
that could be improved upon?
So, he's right, you know, most of the big problems that society is facing is going
to require all of the talents to solve it and that involves bringing you know,
world class engineering, sensing, data scientists, computational scientists,
the physical scientists, anybody from the arts listening, we need you too.
I will always start from a place of science and there's some real
lessons actually that I remember from the conversations that I had with
Paolo Zanella, who was a co founder of Sonomics with us, which was the
data integration business and Paolo had led the computing lab at CERN.
So Paolo was the guy who found funding when there wasn't any to give Tim Berners
Lee his computer to write the World Wide Web on and you know, someone with that
kind of imagination and flair you might imagine as being quite interesting and
we worked with a number of people in that computing group and in the field
of very large physics, you have to have collaboration because the requirement
for capital to fund big ideas, to do the big experiments, means you have to
coordinate and there are endless lessons in what happens when the particle physics
community organises to do that and so you know, if you think back to the Large
Hadron Collider, not only did we have a large hadron collider and a great piece
of particle physics, we found a hadron and all the things that flowed from that, we
also got cloud computing, we got very fast networks, we got the ability to do atom
perfect welding in order to build some of the sensors, you got amazing innovation in
terms of tackling very low cost sensors.
There was endless innovation that came from that big project because you
had to bring all of the capabilities together to do it and in the biosciences
where I'm from, actually, much of bioscience can be done by an individual
with a pipette and a bench and so trying to find those organisational
principles and those questions that allow us to move beyond our training
area are quite few and far between.
When they do happen, like the Human Genome Project, you know,
they can be transformative.
But generally, the life sciences have not had to do quite so much innovation
that requires bringing different skills together and I think the
exception to that would be the genome sequencing companies like Nanopore.
Really interesting, and going back to something you said earlier about
precision life and what you're aiming for and hoping which is you know, if
I paraphrase it correctly really that you can help, you know, pharmaceutical
companies direct their R&D more effectively by using AI and data
sets that will help them apply that.
It occurs to me that more and more and this is as a layperson but more and
more R&D arms are being shut down and that there seems to be an over reliance
upon startups in each area and before we went live you were talking about
how much kind of research has gone in which is brilliant to oncology but to
the detriment of other areas and do you think that with more precise directing
from companies such as Precision Life that there will be a change in that
trend and that people will effectively have more confidence that their
investment in R&D will be yielding more?
Yes, so that's a...
I'm obviously going to say yes.
I'm co founder Precision Life.
Do I think it's going to change the world?
Yes.
Excellent!
Now, that question you asked is like an onion, there's a lot of things to peel.
I know I'm bad at precision ironically.
That's fine and you know, that's actually the challenge in healthcare, right?
So there are a lot of different factors that, you know, the
pharmaceutical industry face in bringing new medicines to market.
So if I sort of delve into the origin story of Precision life a
little bit, I think it, it starts to answer some of those questions.
So I mentioned the Human Genome Project, and we were very fortunate, Steve and
myself, to be working at Oxford Molecular in the very early days when Jim Watson,
the Nobel laureate, was writing the grant to the NIH for the Human Genome
Project and I think, you know, if you'd asked, most biologists in the early
90s, you know, what was the impact going to be of the Human Genome Project?
Certainly, if you ask Jim Watson, you know, he's a very reductionist
person, still sort of that central dogma, you know, one gene makes one
protein, we know all that is rubbish.
But, you know, we'd sequence the genome, we'd find all the genes, we'd find all
the bad genes that caused disease, we'd wumpf up a drug, and hurrah, by now you
know, I would still look like I did at 30, we'd all be living well and ageing well.
Of course, that isn't what happened and that's because there are
different types of diseases out there.
So, you know, rare diseases tend to be very single gene, you know,
driving the disease biology.
So one thing, we can find it, you know, if we can find enough data to spot a pattern,
we have a very good chance of developing medicines and certainly the human genome
has had a big impact on rare disease.
In oncology, one of the reasons that so much money has gone into oncology is
because the cancer biologists have got very good at characterising different
types of tumors and therefore we are beginning to see cancer at very high
resolution and therefore we understand the problem that we're trying to
solve in finding new medicines and we have become very experienced as
an industry in making the case for those medicines to be reimbursed and
so pharma can see a way of creating value for shareholders and, you know,
oncology has driven a lot of investment and healthcare outcomes for cancer
patients over the last couple of decades.
What we haven't seen is the human genome impact chronic disease biology and that's
because chronic disease biology is much more complex at its heart, it's a time
bound situation and that means that we have in each of us a genetic capability
propensity to have certain risk factors for disease and then we go out and live
our lives and make certain choices and, you know, maybe don't do the exercise or
don't eat our five vegetables a day or any of the other generalised advice that
we get and so that will create different disease processes in us and the second
challenge for chronic disease is much of the way that we diagnose it is really
being built on the clinician's experience of what they can observe in a patient.
So we classify diseases on what we can see in the clinic and not necessarily
according to their underlying biology.
So we've done an analysis of Alzheimer's patients and yeah, we
can see six broad disease processes that are contributing to Alzheimer's.
Only one of which is that amyloid tau lipoprotein approach that the industry
has, you know, spent a lot of money trying to find effective medicines
and I think there's about 139 failed clinical trials in that space and if we
can find, match the patients who will benefit from those medicines, they will
work really well for those patients.
But there are still five other disease processes that will be present in other
patients who will still have unmet needs and so what we're doing at Precision Life
is we have a very smart branch of maths that is allowing us to stratify patients
and then see into those different patient groups what's driving disease and that way
we can land whether there are effective drugs out there to treat patients already,
perhaps repurposed medicines, or whether we need to find new ones and it is
tremendously exciting what we're doing.
So...
It sounds very exciting, I mean, you know, it's interesting how much more
discourse there is on this subject of preventative medicine, how can
we get in front of chronic disease?
I've been reading the book Outlive by Peter Attia which I'm sure has come
across your radar even if you probably don't need to read it and it talks
about the four horsemen diseases that we basically done nothing to move the
needle on because it's preventative medicine or we've been pointing in
the wrong direction to your point.
To the point that we were discussing around sort of R&D and funding and again
touching upon something you brought up earlier about Cambridge having more
heterogeneous sources of funding, do you think that's something that Oxford in
particular needs more of and if so how can you see that it might make a difference
or is that a bit of a red herring?
So in some regards, Oxford has a lot of funding.
So you know, OSE is a wonderful example of a lot of funding being in one place.
They're doing a great job of supporting the university spin outs.
They are syndicating well, we're seeing exits.
So there's some real celebration, success here and you know, we want that quantum of
capital to be successful in our ecosystem and then alongside that, what you might
see in a more well developed balanced ecosystem, you might also expect to see
a vibrant angel investment community, you might want to see family offices,
you would want to see other investors in the ecosystem funding the companies that
perhaps OSE don't see so much of, you know, if we're going to retain and recycle
management and the fruits of wealth creation amongst the entrepreneurial
community, you know, where are the funds that those people are investing
in and how are they, looking to support the next generation of entrepreneurs?
And that in Oxford is just a little bit thin, to the point that some
of the venture funds probably would lean more into London and yet their
partners are probably living very...
in Oxford or near to Oxford and just a little example
of that was at the recent J.
P.
Morgan conference in San Francisco, having flown all the way to San
Francisco, at one of the first drinks parties, I was speaking to a partner of
a venture firm, phenomenally interesting venture firm, very active in the UK and
sort of two or three minutes into the conversation, it turns out he lives a
three minute cycle ride from our office.
So I flew all the way to San Francisco to find that out, so shame on me and
that's one of the problems that You know, that behavior is certainly driving
climate change in the wrong direction.
No and listen, it's amusing, David Ford, who is an angel investor and who
you know in Oxford and Cambridge, said exactly the same thing about the J.
P.
Morgan conference being where he can meet people from Oxford and how ironic
that is and so I suppose I would ask you the explicit question and
what would you want to see in Oxford to make sure that doesn't happen?
Do we need a conference here where we just say, stop it.
Everyone just come five minutes down the road.
So I think part of it is we haven't joined our ecosystem together very well.
So you know, we have OBN, which is a life science network.
The O originally stood for Oxford, they have a broader interest
than just Oxford these days, they have a series of meetings.
We have the OION Angel Network that has a series of meetings.
There is a lot going on in the university.
to encourage entrepreneurship.
But what there isn't is a lot of quality crosstalk and it's the
crosstalk that is interesting to the wider entrepreneurial ecosystem
They don't care where you come from.
They don't care what you represent.
And you will see, you know, ideas happening in different pools that when
you put them together are, you know, much more than the individual pieces.
So I think that's a bit that's missing and I also think, you know, where you've
seen the Cambridge Angels have tremendous leadership, Simon Thorpe did a lot of
support of the Angel Academy Group, which was developing female angel investors
in London, we have Pam Garside as the chair of Cambridge Angels, there is a
active and strong female angel community in Cambridge, and you look at what Jenny
Tooth has been doing at the British Angel Network, we don't have the same
participation in Oxford and that lack of diversity makes us less competitive.
You know, if we are about solving big problems, then diversity is part of
the ingredients that you want to bring, because all of the work on diversity,
whether it's the hard problems, or it's management, or it's funding, you know,
show that Diverse groups outperform, you know, the kind of echo chamber
of largely white Oxford educated men.
Well, any group right?
You know, Matthew Syed covers this beautifully in his book Rebel Ideas, when
he talks about just even one divergent perspective makes the experience less
harmonious, but the outcomes better and I think that's an important point you make
there and actually depressingly yesterday in the press and you will have seen
this, that they are re categorising what it means to be a sophisticated investor
and that because they're raising it from 100,000 to 170,000 you need to earn, it's
going to reduce the number of women that qualify and I think it was from 320,000 to
70,000 and that the impact that therefore has on female funded businesses who are
arguably proportionately, but you know, get more funding from female angels, is
going to be very negative and we should be doing lots of things, many of which
you've pointed out just now to try and mitigate what's not an unreasonable
move in line with inflation, but will have a disproportionate effect on female
founded, in this case, businesses.
And it reinforces so much inequity.
So women for the same job are quite frequently paid below the median.
So, you know, there is a imbalance already priced into those sorts of cutoffs that
are imposed by the treasury and also you know, it flies in the face of the
experiences of more entrepreneurial leaning communities around the world.
So I think it's problematic.
I also do have an observation that the conversation comes down to women
investing in women and I think it is a bigger picture than that, in that when
men and women come together and invest together, everybody makes bigger returns.
So the story needs to be told from a perspective of what's in it for men.
And indeed, you know, the pension funds and everybody who's there creating long
term value, I'm obviously, you know, returning to the theme of I'm old.
No, this is top of my list too!
Don't worry, Rowan.
But you know, the pension firms have so much capital tied up and the ability to
make high quality decisions is in part about bringing diverse perspectives to
bear on those decisions and I love the point that you say, well, the process
of discussion may be, you know, more argument based because there's a divergent
thought in the room and then I go back to the origins of Oxford University and
the three R's of rhetoric, where, you know, we used to debate actively and the
term scoring points off each other comes from us having an elongated thumb that
we would kind of run over our opponent's neck when we felt we'd landed a point very
well, so I think, those through Oxford...
I've never heard that!
The Oxford, kind of system are more than qualified to hold their own and make
those points in a mixed environment.
It really feels, this conversation, it's quite neatly sort of coming together
insofar as it does feel that there are meaningful things that can be done.
That there needs to be, you know, more bringing in of pharma, but
also industry, we spoke about the cluster of motorsports around Oxford.
There needs to be more bringing together of the existing excellent networks, they
shouldn't be standing on their own and you know, if I captured it correctly,
it sounds like Oxford is probably crying out for a female specific Angel Network
as well, to really encourage that thread not to be too adversely affected by
these changes at the top and to make sure that we counteract as much as we can.
And within the existing networks, I'm a real fan of not recreating the
wheel, but I think there are some good foundations that have been built
that we could add a lot of value to by signaling very strongly that you are
welcome, you know, please turn up at the, you know, at OION, participate.
But there are other angel networks in Oxford and other family offices, and
the family offices I think are a very important driver of this type of change.
So just after I founded Precision Life, I went off and was a CEO of a hygiene
business in North Oxford for a period of time and most of our capital was
raised from either female angels, but also from family offices and the thing
about family offices is, you know, you can't really have an effective
family without women being involved.
It's quite hard to produce the next generation without us and so there is
a very strong interest in how you plan for long term value creation and you
involve the entire family in some of those decisions and the women can be significant
drivers of change in investment policy and that's been fantastic
to see over the last two decades.
And actually, it is one of the few areas in financial services that one sees
women over represented proportionately is ESG, impact investing, that sort of
planning for the next generation and I think you're right to draw it out in
family offices too because, as you say, by their nature, there are women there and
quite often they do bring these different perspectives on how to create value,
both in absolute terms, financially, but also what does value mean if you are a
wealthy family and how can you make sure you apply your money in meaningful ways.
Yes and I've seen so many advances in the family office sector.
So, I can think of a Middle Eastern family office, which, you know, had the
law changed in Saudi to enable the female members of the family to make their own
investment decisions without references to husbands, brothers, uncles and you
know, their priorities are perhaps different to the men and it becomes a
balanced portfolio across the family as a result and I've also had conversations
with younger generations of families who perhaps have a greater interest in
some of the ESG matters, you know, come to the table with that perspective and
ask for a proportion of the investments that they will make in high growth
businesses, which are generally a very small proportion of the total wealth,
you know, most of the wealth will go into capital preservation activities,
but on the capital growth agenda to see an allocation to ESG or to specific
themes that they have an interest in.
So that is a great driver of change that we perhaps don't hear enough about.
There was one thing when we met that I just wanted to go into and we touched
upon it but not in any detail, which is the pension fund capital in the UK and
how because of the Mansion House Compact, which I spoke to Alderman Nicholas
Lyons about, there is going to be this influx of capital from currently DC
pensions aiming for 5 percent by 2030.
You brought up something really interesting, which I would not have
observed from my seat, about the talent that was coming into the UK, looking to
help advise those pension funds, who are going to be in some cases, dipping a toe
for the first time into unlisted equities.
I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you're seeing and whether you saw
anything more recently at JPM as well.
So, I think the Mansion House Accord is very exciting.
So for all entrepreneurs who want to see more capital flow into their areas,
I think we're all watching it with great interest and of course, the fund
managers in the UK are also very excited.
to see additional LP potential in the UK.
I see it as potentially catalysing another aspect of our investment ecosystem, which
is that funds around the world have always come to London to raise money and they
have raised money in London from high net worth families and they have tended to
return to their domestic environment to invest there and it's one of the things
that we don't track when we say, well, you know, we've got money coming in, inward
investment in the UK, it's quite often, the money started in the UK, it went to
a West Coast fund manager, perhaps, or an investment group in New York, and it's
come back into the UK to be invested.
It's not so much foreign investment as boomerang investment, but what I'm
seeing with the Mansion House Accord is more of the experienced big name
investors that have huge track records in the US actually coming to the UK
and establishing funds in the UK and I can't help but think that part of that
is because they are very alive to the opportunity of what the Mansion House
Accord is and that means two things.
It means that there will be more funds out there competing for the money
and that's generally a good thing, and secondly, it also means that the
talent pool that we are developing in our investor base is enriched by that
broader experience and I think that's likely to be incredibly positive.
Wonderful.
Well that is a positive note on which to leave this conversation, but is
there anything else, Rowan, that you wanted to add to the conversation?
I think Susannah, just to thank you for the focus on some of the
opportunities that we have in Oxford.
Of course, there are challenges, but there is an incredible richness here
that could be always improved on how we deliver solutions to the world.
So I wish you every success and thank you very much for the opportunity.
Thank you, Rowan.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford+, presented
by me, Susannah de Jager.
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