From biotech boardroom to Cabinet room: Paul Drayson
Drayson said his appointment puts science at the heart of government, adding that he was asked to do the job, “Because I know how to deliver on science and innovation.”
As one of Europe’s most successful, though not serial, biotech entrepreneurs, Drayson piloted the formation, growth and eventual sale of PowderJect Pharmaceuticals plc to the US vaccines firm Chiron for £542 million cash in May 2003.
The sale occurred the week after a very rare event: PowderJect proposed the first ever dividend by a UK biotech, of three pence per share, after reporting profits of £25.3 million.
In Drayson’s view the future for the UK, “has to be as a high-tech, high-growth, high-intellectual property economy”. And the path to achieving this is to be as good as possible at “building, developing and exploiting our science base”.
Procurement is a key
After selling PowderJect, Drayson was appointed to be responsible for procurement at the Ministry of Defence. Based on that experience he believes that governments need to think more carefully about what they buy. “One of my priorities will be using procurement to support the science base to help get their products to markets,” he said.
The appointment will give the UK biotech sector someone in government who well understands the stresses and strains of turning promising science into successful products. While it evidently had some good luck, PowderJect also had problems along the way, with knock backs from regulators, clinical trials not providing the hoped-for results and the original script of the business plan having to be torn up and re-written.
PowderJect was spun out of Oxford University in 1993 in the early days of the development of the UK biotech sector. At that point companies wanting to go public had to join the US market Nasdaq, as the London Stock Exchange rules did not allow unprofitable companies with no products to list there.
The company was set up to commercialise a needle-free injection system in which drugs formulated as dry powder are administered by a disposable syringe that uses a burst of helium gas to accelerate the drug particles through the skin. This avoids the pain, infection risks and other hazards of using needles and also presents a route to delivering vaccines into immune system cells in the skin.
Along the way, PowderJect moved into vaccines manufacture, becoming Europe’s largest producer of flu vaccine, and the company eventually sold the injection device in 2002 to the US firm AlgoRx Pharmaceuticals Inc (now called Anesiva), retaining the right to use it to deliver its own vaccines.
In 2001/2002, as Chairman of the UK BioIndustry Association, Drayson led the charge against animal rights extremists, saying they were “criminals” and that the industry had to “defend its right to carry out bioscience without fear of violence”. The comments were made as the animal testing company Huntingdon Life Science plc was forced to delist from the London Stock Exchange following a two-year campaign by extremists.
For the past year Drayson has been taking time out to indulge a passion for motor racing. Somewhat bizarrely, he intends to hold up this experience to inspire young people to opt for science and engineering careers, as opposed to dreaming of the celebrity status of being a racing car driver.
“Look at me – I have had a blast,” he said. “I am out here racing cars because I was a successful biotech entrepreneur.”
He added that had depended on putting in the hard work first, studying maths, physics and chemistry at ‘A’ Level.
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