Best foot forward for resilient biotech star

Published on Friday 11 July 2008 21:28

A WEEK after his company was put into administration, Dr Simon Best chose not to hide himself away. Where others might have put off a long-arranged speaking engagement, Best, founder of the once promising biotech company Ardana, faced his audience.

Most of those attending the exhibition, organised by the Edinburgh Pre-Incubator Scheme for promising start-up companies, were new entrepreneurs or investors themselves.

The overwhelming sense among the 300-odd delegates was admiration. As Best made his way through the stands they were also very keen to meet him.

Ardana might have failed, taking with it a significant chunk of Best's own money along with that of other private and public investors, but as an influencer Best is still unique in the Scottish, if not European, life sciences sector. Many have said his stature is undiminished. And at a still boyish 51, with contacts spanning several continents and several fields of expertise, he is yet expected to do great things.

Perhaps the response to his appearance at the event marks the beginning of a change in culture.

For so long, entrepreneurs, particularly in the riskier end of technology-driven start-ups, bemoaned a pervasive and distinctly British fear of failure. In comparison, the Americans seemed almost to embrace failure, which many suggest is a factor in the US's global dominance of the life sciences industry.

One might think that Raymond Abbott, head of private equity at Alliance Trust, would rather see Best's blood. As a significant investor in the pre-float Ardana, its failure hits his balance sheet. But even Abbott thinks the culture is changing.

"In the UK, never mind Scotland, it has been 'Oh God, you have a mistake in your portfolio, how can we back you?' That is changing though.

"People will not be the happiest about Ardana, but Simon is still very credible.

"If I was doing venture again and Simon came with a life science proposal I would give it serious consideration."

Grahame Bulfield, now head of Edinburgh University's college of science and engineering, says he has "a lot of time for Simon". Bulfield was head of the Roslin Institute where Best, as chief executive of Roslin Biomed, played an instrumental role in commercialising the cloning technology behind Dolly the sheep.

Bulfield, while working with a venture capital bank in the US, recalls how it actively searched for chief executives of companies that had run into trouble.

"We saw these sort of guys coming through all the time and they were on their third or fourth company. Frankly, it is no use having somebody who hasn't had problems. That sort of experience is invaluable," says Bulfield.

"As a community, particularly in Scotland, you can count the people with (Best's] experience on one hand."

The story of Dolly is now a Scottish biotech legend, where one small sheep and the otherwise quiet Roslin campus south of Edinburgh became the focus of the world's attention. Best was responsible for establishing the company that held the intellectual property. Nine months later in 1999 he sold it to Geron Corporation for 50 million, while Roslin retained a 42 per cent stake.

A year after that, when Ardana was founded, the climate for raising money for biotech start-ups had already began to sour. Yet what made Ardana exciting was how it continued to kindle investors. It raised more than 40m from private investors before it led a European fad for biotech flotations when the firm raised a further 18m on the stock exchange in 2005.

Problems set in for Ardana when its chief executive, Maureen Lindsay, left in 2007. By February, the company, which had always been loss-making, warned it was running out of cash and would have to sell up. In such a weakened position, a buyer never materialised.

Administrators Ernst & Young are now looking for buyers for the technologies Ardana had been nursing.

Several people blame the current economic downturn, as investors turn away from risky bets such as biotech securities. But others suggest Ardana's failure may prove a vanguard for a wider malaise affecting the European biotech sector.

According to Aisling Burnand, chief executive of the Bio Industry Association, of which Best was chairman in 2007, the entire industry faces a paradigm shift as the largest companies such as AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline face a "massive patents cliff" that threatens to kill revenues, while smaller companies such as Ardana are starved of necessary investment.

"The market imperfections we are seeing at the moment are beginning to build into market failure," Burnand warns. "Failure is when you see good companies failing for the sake of a small sum of money."

Although Best is a doctor, the title is honorific, bestowed by his alma mater, York University, where he studied music. While it is rare that a non-scientist by training would become so pivotal to the industry, most of his peers say it is immaterial.

"You talk to him and frankly you would think he was a biologist," says Bulfield.

"He is very quick, he picks things up, he understands the nuances of it. It is not a weakness for him."

Following graduation, Best spent a number of years in the music industry, including a stint as a tour manager for electro-pop Sheffield band The Human League.

It was meeting molecular biology PhD students at an Edinburgh nightclub that led to his Damascene conversion to science. Their head of department, Professor Ken Murray, was behind one of Scotland's earliest and most successful spin-out companies, Biomed. Best was hooked.

Perhaps it is the enthusiasm of the auto-didact that makes him both widely knowledgeable of the science and supremely able as a communicator. One of his first major projects was for Zeneca, where he launched the first genetically modified food product to be sold in the UK before fears of "Frankenstein foods" had arrived. The tomato paste was clearly identified as GM and a blurb on the back of the product explained that the process produced a tomato that used less water and created less waste. The product outsold the conventional paste until the BSE crisis made Zeneca end the experiment.

It is his brush with crop science that will probably provide Best's next step. Recently he took the chair of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, a research centre in Hyderabad, India, looking at staple crops for the world's poorest farmers. As climate change widens arid zones across the world, the research is increasingly urgent. And Best will be there to help it happen.

BACKGROUND

SIMON Geoffrey Best, 51, still has several jobs since his main project, the bio-tech firm Ardana, went into administration. A married father of three, Best has interests in a number of companies, including a California-based virtual drug testing company that has the potential to make animal testing for some drugs obsolete.

He still maintains a devotion to music. On 21 September, he will bring his classical adaptation of Eric Dolphy's Gazzelloni to Glasgow jazz club Mono before touring Yorkshire and Italy.

Best was the chairman of the UK BioIndustry Association and a board member of the Bioethics committee from 1998-2005.

He served as a governor of the food and agriculture section of the World Economic Forum from 1994-98.

Best received an MBA from London Business School in 1985 and a degree in music from York University in 1977.