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Government investment into research and development has helped the UK become a leader in life sciences, engineering biology, and artificial intelligence.
As humans, we depend on scientific advancements for our development and vitality. These innovations keep us healthier longer and living more fruitful, happier lives. But developments in science often require years of trial and error — and finding success in engineering biology, life sciences, and AI is easier said than done.
Take the costly enterprise of drug discovery, for instance. It costs around $2 billion and 13 years for a drug to go from proof-of-concept to final pill. In part, that's because the odds of success are stacked against companies. Around 95% of projects that start fail because of one reason or another, said Ben Taylor, chief financial officer and chief strategy officer at Exscientia, which blends the twinned fields of AI and life sciences.
"There's usually some sort of Achilles' heel to most drug candidates," he explained. "What we do is we try and identify the Achilles' heel for different pharmaceutical compounds and various disease indications. And then we make predictive models using AI, aiming to design a better-quality drug candidate without that Achilles' heel — or others — before it ever reaches a patient."
Exscientia is a leading global biotech company headquartered in the UK, using AI, machine learning, and automated experimentation to rifle through millions of permutations of molecules within a potential drug to find the "perfect fit" before putting compounds into patient trials. It saves time, effort, and money. Above all, it can lead to better quality drug candidates. Using AI to predict what qualities may have the most benefit for patients and then how to design the molecule to match those qualities changes the drug discovery process, Taylor said.
The company, which floated on the Nasdaq stock market in October 2021, raising $510 million — the largest initial public offering (IPO) for a European biotech company in history — has developed eight "development candidates" for medicines to date.
"We've been able to take about 75% of the time and cost out of going from an idea to an actual drug candidate," Taylor said.
Born in the UK
Exscientia was spun out of the University of Dundee around 12 years ago and is now located in Oxford, with nearly 500 staff members working on around 20 separate projects. "The talent pool has been terrific here," Taylor said, setting the UK apart from its peers. "The UK has been a great place for us to really set up home and build our headquarters from."
Government support and a receptive business environment mean Exscientia is far from the only home-grown success story in life sciences. AstraZeneca helped spearhead the fightback against COVID-19 by developing the world's first vaccine, saving millions of lives around the world. And medical equipment manufacturer Smith & Nephew is a UK-born business helping improve lives by manufacturing the artificial joints used in countless knee, hip, and other joint operations around the world.
Exscientia's growth was bolstered by government support: The company didn't take venture funding until 2019. "One of the things that I think causes people to be hesitant about the UK is that there's not a massive venture community," Taylor said. "But what we've been able to find is that actually, between the tax rebates and the support of some of the grants, that was enough for us to get going and really move forward." Exscientia wouldn't be where it was, Taylor said, without the support of the UK higher education system and government funding. "If you don't have that, the idea just falters," he said. "It remains on a cocktail napkin."
Martin Tangney, the chief scientific officer of Edinburgh-based Celtic Renewables, said the £11 million of funding his company received in 2015 from the UK government was "pivotal." The grant "wasn't to do research in the university. It wasn't that kind of funding, which is available," he said. "This was a grant that was transformative for the company to do something commercial."
With the help of government funding, massive shifts in the biosciences sector are possible. Exscientia isn't just competing; it's leading the way.
"We really believe … [that] basically, soon all drugs are going to be created with AI," Taylor said. "It's a fundamentally better way of doing things."
To help support that, in late December 2023 the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) announced its national vision for engineering biology. As part of that strategy, the government will invest more than £2 billion into engineering biology over the next decade, keeping the UK at the cutting edge of the technology.
Renewed passion for renewables
Celtic Renewables also believes it has found a fundamentally better way of doing things. The business aims to re-establish the use of acetone-butane-ethanol (ABE) byproducts as a fuel stock. ABE was used to make acetone for explosives in the First World War, and up until the 1960s was second only to ethanol production as a fermentation industry. However, the rise of fossil fuels, and particularly oil, changed all that.
ABE is the fermentation process used in the production of whisky, which has huge volumes of waste material. Each liter of whiskey produced results in 2.5 kilograms of solid waste byproducts, and 18 liters of liquid byproducts. Nearly 3 billion liters of waste liquids come from malt whiskey production in Scotland every year. "Then you've got Ireland, Japan, America, India, and so on," Tangney said.
But those waste liquids can be turned into a fuel source. "We can still do everything that we currently do, but use the carbon that's above the ground and repurpose it, rather than digging up oil and gas," he said. Tangney set up the Biofuel Research Center at Edinburgh Napier University in December 2007, spinning out Celtic Renewables four years later. "The UK is very good at funding fundamental research, [but] the biggest problem is taking that out of the lab and putting it into factories," he said.
Government backing makes a difference
The government support was useful because of its comparative lack of strings — getting out of the way and allowing the entrepreneur to build his business. Tangney points out that by and large, funding into private enterprises is made in exchange for shares in the company, and once you've sold all of them, you're unable to do anything else. "That's the only currency you have as a startup," he said. The government grant was different. Before, the largest vessel in Celtic Renewables' lab had a capacity of five liters. "We can now run our fermentations in our plant in vessels that hold 100,000 liters of volume, and we have five of these vessels at our plant," Tangney said.
The company has also grown its staff from four to nearly 60. A facility at Grangemouth is producing fuel from waste materials, with plans for more facilities to come.
"There needs to be an awful lot more Celtic Renewables out there at scale around the world," Tangney said. "Then it creates a brand new economy, and it creates skills."
This article was created by Insider Studios with the UK's Department for Business & Trade and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.