René R. Kuijten: The Cancer Cure Breakthrough Will Come From Early-Stage Investments, not Big Pharma
While treatments and therapies must come from global pharmaceutical firms, real innovation to end the world’s worst diseases will come from scientists with big ideas who need funding.
The brightest ideas and biggest breakthroughs in cancer research are usually born in universities. Fundamental research, the purest form of scientific inquiry, allows curious minds to roam freely and advance our knowledge in this important field. It gives no guarantee that a new treatment or diagnostic technique will emerge from each study — far from it — but it does give scientists the freedom to be at their most creative.
I say this to counter the widely-held belief that Big Pharma is at the forefront of cancer research. Pharmaceutical companies have a significant role to play, of course. They have extensive experience with running large clinical trials and the commercial nous to bring new treatments to a global market. But most of the real innovation comes from academia.
In the life sciences industry, venture capital sits between academia and Big Pharma. Broadly speaking, a venture capital firm will fund a start-up that already has a management team and business plan in place, aiming to bring it from the laboratory testing phase to phase two trials, which involve the first tests on patients. It is typically around this point that a pharmaceutical company buys the start-up, and then moves on to comprehensive phase three patient trials. If all is well, the treatment goes to regulators for approval before reaching the patients.
Unfortunately, many scientists in Europe are not getting the support they need to turn innovations into businesses that are capable of attracting venture capital. There is a worrying shortage of finance for life sciences prior to the venture capital stage; indeed, at the point that European pharma and biotech companies receive early-stage venture capital, their funding amounts to about a fifth of their peers in the United States.
Some of this is down to geography. The European market is, by nature, more fragmented than the U.S. market. Some is down to history. Thirty years ago, the U.S. was well ahead of Europe in terms of patent creation and entrepreneurial ambition. Europe has since caught up — consider that the 3 out of 4 COVID-19 vaccines were developed in Europe — but financing has lagged and continues to do so.
Governments see research funding as a budget cost for the near term. Yet research can generate significant tax receipts over the long term, not just from successful companies but from the services infrastructure that grows alongside them.
While financing research is inherently important, so too is bringing scientists together with business professionals who know how to get a particular treatment to market. Commercializing scientific innovation requires specialist skills that universities and research centers often lack.
“Pharmaceutical companies have a significant role to play, of course. They have extensive experience with running large clinical trials and the commercial nous to bring new treatments to a global market. But most of the real innovation comes from academia.”
Several European governments have attempted to address the finance and skills shortfall by backing organizations that invest in life sciences start-ups and pooling scientists with business professionals. One of the better examples of this is the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) in Belgium. The institute, founded nearly 30 years ago, has turned Flanders into a global hub for life sciences innovation, spawning new sources of funding and a growing infrastructure of support services. Government funding for the institute has almost quadrupled since its inception, to €85mn today, but the economic value it has created for Belgium is more than ten times that.
The VIB was such a success that I used the same founding principles when launching the Oncode Institute in the Netherlands in 2018, with the aim of speeding up the process of turning cancer research into treatments. It has proved to be a huge success and can now be considered one of the top three research institutes globally for biomedical sciences. Imperial College London in the UK is charting a similar course.
Organizations such as these help us progress toward finding and deploying the next breakthrough cancer treatment. For example, a decade ago we were talking about immunotherapy, a treatment that harnesses the power of the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells as if they were foreign bodies. Today we are talking, among others, about radioisotope therapy, whereby patients are administered radioactive particles that attach themselves to individual cancer cells to destroy them. I do not know what we will be talking about in 10 years but I am sure the science will be astounding.
I do not think there will ever be a complete cure for cancer. Our cells are constantly under attack from our environment, be it the food we eat or the background radiation we absorb. Instead, we should focus on prolonging our lives by investing in science to improve cancer detection and treatment. Perhaps we will soon have blood tests that detect the presence of a minuscule number of cancer cells. Maybe treatments will become so effective that cancer is seen as a controllable chronic disease rather than a potentially fatal one.
If we in Europe want to accelerate progress towards these goals, we must ensure that brilliant scientists get the financial and commercial support they need to bring their innovations to the wider world.
ThinQ is the must-bookmark publication for the thinking investor.
