In this episode of Enterprise Sessions from the University of Bristol, Professor Michele Barbour sits down with Professor Ash Toye and Professor Jan Frayne, two leading biochemists whose long‑standing research partnership has evolved into one of the UK’s most exciting biotechnology spin‑outs: Scarlet Therapeutics.
Together, Ash and Jan share the remarkable journey from academic collaboration to scientific breakthrough — and ultimately to founding a company built on the promise of lab‑grown and engineered red blood cells. What began as a quest to understand red blood cell development became a platform capable of producing universal donor cells, modelling rare diseases, and creating “blood as medicine” through engineered therapeutics.
This episode goes far beyond the science. Ash and Jan discuss the reality of spinning out a wet‑lab biotech, the commercial challenges, the importance of the right CEO, and the dynamics of co‑founding a company with a long‑term academic collaborator. They also speak candidly about funding frustrations, scientific obsession, conflict‑of‑interest tightropes, and the excitement of helping their postdocs become industry scientists.
🔍 In the episode:
- Bristol as the UK’s “red blood cell corner”
- Making red blood cells in the lab: from stem cells to clinical trials
- The origins of Scarlet Therapeutics — and why the first idea “wasn’t enough”
- Immortalised red blood cell lines and the role of CRISPR
- Therapeutic blood: treating metabolic disorders using engineered cells
- How to pick a CEO — and why neither founder wanted to be one
- What happens when a US company beats you to your idea
- The emotional rollercoaster of fundraising and venture capital
- Navigating dual identities as academics and directors
- The power of co‑founding: creativity, challenge and complementary personalities
- What lab‑grown blood means for rare donor groups and transfusion medicine
- How spin‑out life feeds inspiration back into academic research
- Advice for researchers considering commercialisation or co‑founding
Connect with our Guests:
Prof. Michele Barbour – LinkedIn
Chapters:
00:00 – Introductions: Biochemistry, collaboration and accidental co‑founders
01:30 – Jan’s path from reproductive biology to red blood cell science
03:37 – Why Bristol is the ideal environment for red cell research
04:14 – Ash’s journey from Wales to lifelong Bristol biochemist
07:05 – Why spin out? Scientific frustration, fresh challenges & unmet clinical need
09:47 – Jan on being “dragged in” and learning a new language of entrepreneurship
11:13 – First moments of making blood in the lab
12:20 – Why make red blood cells at all? Research drivers and clinical possibilities
13:45 – Rare donors, sickle cell disease and unmet transfusion needs
14:49 – How lab‑grown cells differ from synthetic blood
19:06 – Immortalising erythroid cells and the breakthrough that changed everything
20:25 – CRISPR, disease modelling and engineered therapeutics
22:01 – Putting medicine inside red blood cells
23:16 – How therapeutic blood could treat metabolic disorders
24:04 – Early attempts to spin out — and the one that got away
25:06 – Accelerators, term sheets and learning by doing
26:41 – When investors say no (and why timing matters)
28:09 – Balancing academic life with entrepreneurial ambition
30:46 – Learning business skills as an academic — and enjoying it
32:14 – Modelling collaborative behaviour for early‑career researchers
35:15 – Synthetic vs natural blood: what works, what doesn’t
35:55 – The RESTORE clinical trial: testing lab‑grown red cells in volunteers
36:53 – Scarlet’s focus: therapeutic blood first, universal blood later
38:07 – Internal “competition”: which product gets to clinic first?
39:05 – Finding the right CEO and defining founder roles
42:44 – Values, compromise and letting go of your “baby”
43:55 – Fundraising realities: the treadmill and the truth about VCs
46:32 – Public engagement, trust and talking about blood
52:51 – Co‑founder dynamics: ideas, challenge and mutual support
54:49 – How their partnership shapes research culture
57:22 – Funding a wet‑lab biotech in Bristol’s growing ecosystem
01:04:00 – What would their younger selves think now?
01:07:17 – Would they do it again? (Yes — and there are more companies coming)
Transcript:
00:00:08 Prof Michele Barbour
Welcome to another enterprise session from the University of Bristol.
00:00:11 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m Professor Michelle Barber and today I’m joined by not one but two subjects, interviewees, victims, I don’t know.
00:00:16 Prof Michele Barbour
I have with me Professor Ash Toye and Professor Jan Frayne, both of the School of Biochemistry.
00:00:21 Prof Michele Barbour
Thank you very much for joining me.
00:00:22 Prof Michele Barbour
I know you’re both individually very busy and trying to get you in the same place at the same time.
00:00:26 Prof Michele Barbour
I really appreciate you finding the time.
00:00:27 Prof Michele Barbour
So thank you.
00:00:28 Prof Ash Toye
No problem
00:00:28 Prof Jan Frayne
Thank you for inviting us.
00:00:29 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m really looking forward to hearing your story about your research, your entrepreneurial journey, your spin out, Scarlet Therapeutics.
00:00:37 Prof Michele Barbour
But I also need to point out that usually I interview one person at a time.
00:00:40 Prof Michele Barbour
And I’m really fascinated by what will emerge about the dynamic between the two of you as sort of joint academic founders and colleagues and however you see yourselves.
00:00:48 Prof Michele Barbour
I’d like to have that at the forefront of our discussions as well, because a lot of the people I talk to are solo entrepreneurs and you guys aren’t.
00:00:55 Prof Ash Toye
Kind of strange that people would choose to do it on their own, I think.
00:00:58 Prof Ash Toye
In my head, I thought it was
00:00:59 Prof Ash Toye
It’s actually feels a bit safer.
00:01:01 Prof Michele Barbour
I think sometimes it’s finding someone that actually has enough aligned interests and expertise and aspirations as yourself.
00:01:09 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s why I did it on my own.
00:01:10 Prof Michele Barbour
It wasn’t because I wanted to, it’s because there wasn’t really anyone else around me who was in the right place to come on that journey with me.
00:01:16 Prof Michele Barbour
So it’s a necessity more than anything else.
00:01:18 Prof Ash Toye
You’ve got to have enough enthusiasm for the topic.
00:01:20 Prof Ash Toye
And so the lucky thing is we both work in the same area and we’ve both collaborated, right?
00:01:24 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, I think we were collaborating anyway.
00:01:26 Prof Jan Frayne
We’re working in the same area, but with our own distinctive part of that area.
00:01:29 Prof Jan Frayne
And I think when it came to the company, we just both happened to have something separate that then came together to make the company.
00:01:36 Prof Michele Barbour
Brilliant.
00:01:37 Prof Michele Barbour
Let’s get to that.
00:01:37 Prof Michele Barbour
But let’s do this in a linear form.
00:01:39 Prof Michele Barbour
So let’s rewind, first of all, if we can.
00:01:41 Prof Michele Barbour
You’ve both been here at the University of Bristol for a time, but I’d love to hear a little bit about your background.
00:01:45 Prof Michele Barbour
So you can take that back as far as you like.
00:01:47 Prof Michele Barbour
But what were you doing before you came to Bristol and what brought you here?
00:01:50 Prof Jan Frayne
Gosh, before I came to Bristol, I did my first research job at Cambridge University, stated my degree, and then I was offered a PhD since I came to Bristol.
00:01:59 Prof Jan Frayne
for the PhD and like many people haven’t left Bristol ever since then.
00:02:05 Prof Jan Frayne
My research initially was more in the reproductive area, so I was working sort of on sperm function and then slowly I moved into erythropoiesis.
00:02:12 Prof Ash Toye
The dark side.
00:02:14 Prof Jan Frayne
I was very much helped by a wonderful man, Professor Dave Anstey, who’s not with us anymore.
00:02:19 Prof Jan Frayne
He was at NHS BT, became very much a mentor, and then slowly just immersed myself into the area of erythropoiesis.
00:02:26 Prof Jan Frayne
There are some similarities I can draw.
00:02:28 Prof Michele Barbour
Just before we go into that, what is that word you just said?
00:02:32 Prof Jan Frayne
the development or the creation of the red blood cells in the body.
00:02:36 Prof Jan Frayne
Yes.
00:02:36 Prof Jan Frayne
So we work on the development of red blood cells and red blood cell diseases, how the process of making red blood cells, which take place in your bone marrow, is actually regulated.
00:02:46 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s a very dynamic process.
00:02:47 Prof Jan Frayne
You’re making about a million red blood cells.
00:02:49 Prof Jan Frayne
They’re churning out your bone marrow every second.
00:02:51 Prof Jan Frayne
Wow.
00:02:51 Prof Jan Frayne
Two million.
00:02:52 Prof Jan Frayne
Two million.
00:02:52 Prof Jan Frayne
Sorry, I could ask that.
00:02:53 Prof Jan Frayne
If you were anemic.
00:02:54 Prof Michele Barbour
Two million per second.
00:02:55 Prof Michele Barbour
So I did get the dynamic between the two people.
00:02:57 Prof Michele Barbour
But that’s quite a leap, though, from like sperm function and motility and so on.
00:03:00 Prof Michele Barbour
Was it
00:03:01 Prof Michele Barbour
difficult making that transition.
00:03:02 Prof Jan Frayne
I didn’t want to leave it behind, so it was sort of a gradual merging process along the way.
00:03:07 Prof Jan Frayne
In some ways, studying sperm function is difficult.
00:03:09 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s not an easily fundable area.
00:03:11 Prof Jan Frayne
Things like contraceptions, not massively fundable because you can’t have any side effects, essentially.
00:03:16 Prof Jan Frayne
But when it comes to techniques and you’re thinking about cells without a nucleus or the condensed sperm have a very sort of condensed nucleus, sperm at the end of the day is just this transport system to carry the male DNA to the egg.
00:03:27 Prof Jan Frayne
Red blood cells, in my mind, have some similarity because as they’re
00:03:31 Prof Jan Frayne
developing in your bone marrow from a stem cell, they lose their nucleus.
00:03:34 Prof Jan Frayne
And it’s also a very, very dynamic process.
00:03:36 Prof Jan Frayne
So the techniques, I mean, with lots of research, the techniques you use.
00:03:40 Prof Michele Barbour
Yes, I guess so, lots of transferable skills and insights and so on.
00:03:43 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, okay, I can see the link much more clearly now.
00:03:45 Prof Jan Frayne
And I think also with the red blood cell field in Bristol, we had fantastic people.
00:03:48 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s a great place to be doing this sort of research.
00:03:51 Prof Jan Frayne
And I’ve got Ash here.
00:03:52 Prof Jan Frayne
Ash actually was also linked with NHSBT, as I’m sure he’ll tell us in a minute.
00:03:56 Prof Jan Frayne
But we had a big team up there to work with as well.
00:03:58 Prof Jan Frayne
So of all the places in this country to work, red blood
00:04:01 Prof Jan Frayne
And the environment was.
00:04:03 Prof Michele Barbour
Inspiring as well as the actual subject research.
00:04:06 Prof Ash Toye
Yes, Bristol is the red cell corner of the UK.
00:04:09 Prof Michele Barbour
I mean, Bristol has many epithets.
00:04:11 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s not one I’ve come across before.
00:04:12 Prof Michele Barbour
I shall adopt that.
00:04:13 Prof Michele Barbour
I like that.
00:04:13 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:04:14 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s got one of the biggest.
00:04:15 Prof Ash Toye
So the.
00:04:15 Prof Ash Toye
The blood surface here is one of the biggest in Europe.
00:04:18 Prof Michele Barbour
I knew that, yes.
00:04:19 Prof Michele Barbour
Good point.
00:04:20 Prof Michele Barbour
So what about your background, Ash, before you were in Bristol?
00:04:21 Prof Ash Toye
So born in Wales, and then I came over as an undergrad student to biochemistry, and then they locked me in biochemistry until now.
00:04:30 Prof Ash Toye
So I’ve done the whole pathway.
00:04:32 Prof Ash Toye
So I’ve done undergrad, PhD.
00:04:35 Prof Ash Toye
My PhD was in Alzheimer’s disease.
00:04:37 Prof Ash Toye
postdocs, I got a fellowship, so became self-funded, and then took that forward, become a lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor.
00:04:46 Prof Ash Toye
So I’ve seen the whole thing.
00:04:47 Prof Ash Toye
I’ve seen the school change.
00:04:48 Prof Ash Toye
The whole spectrum.
00:04:49 Prof Michele Barbour
This makes Jan and I, as people who came here for our PhDs, look like new girls, like blow-in.
00:04:54 Prof Ash Toye
Exactly.
00:04:54 Prof Ash Toye
Absolutely.
00:04:55 Prof Ash Toye
Well, I did leave Wales, so that’s…
00:04:57 Prof Ash Toye
Oh, yes, but it wasn’t in my defence.
00:05:00 Prof Ash Toye
At the time, it was really unusual.
00:05:02 Prof Ash Toye
Like, I came back, came from, you know, not a super rich background or anything.
00:05:06 Prof Ash Toye
Nobody had
00:05:07 Prof Ash Toye
I’ve gone to university as far as I’m aware in my family, but I just had this urge to do science.
00:05:13 Prof Ash Toye
I don’t know where it is.
00:05:14 Prof Ash Toye
And I originally I was going to be a farmer.
00:05:15 Prof Michele Barbour
Sorry, farmer with an ER or pharna as in pharmaceutical?
00:05:19 Prof Ash Toye
Farmer as in animals or crops
00:05:21 Prof Jan Frayne
So yeah.
00:05:22 Prof Jan Frayne
Do you know what?
00:05:22 Prof Jan Frayne
I didn’t know that.
00:05:23 Prof Jan Frayne
I mean, another link we have, we’re both Welsh.
00:05:24 Prof Jan Frayne
I’m from Cardiff as well.
00:05:26 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:05:26 Prof Ash Toye
So I’m from Caerphilly.
00:05:27 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah.
00:05:27 Prof Jan Frayne
And I’d always had this decision that maybe by 28, 30, I would become a sheep farmer.
00:05:32 Prof Jan Frayne
Wow.
00:05:33 Prof Michele Barbour
And we’re discovering this life.
00:05:34 Prof Michele Barbour
So I actually worked.
00:05:36 Prof Ash Toye
So I worked.
00:05:37 Prof Ash Toye
Did you farm all through my teenage years?
00:05:39 Prof Ash Toye
So I didn’t know this.
00:05:40 Prof Ash Toye
I thought you were.
00:05:41 Prof Jan Frayne
Natural, natural scientific soulmates all along, yeah.
00:05:44 Prof Ash Toye
But then, luckily, I remember literally being, I think it was a Cardiff University person who came to visit schools, like, you know, Careers Day, and they said, Come and do biochemistry, and I looked up what biochemistry was, and I had a biochemistry biology teacher actually, so we had done biochemistry, and I was like, You know what?
00:05:59 Prof Ash Toye
This sounds just right, because it was like how cells work, all the bits inside a cell, and then I applied, and then I
00:06:07 Prof Ash Toye
I got into Bristol.
00:06:08 Prof Ash Toye
And then it went from there.
00:06:09 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s a little known fact that until about a week before the university application deadline, I was doing biochemistry too.
00:06:14 Prof Michele Barbour
And I pivoted with about 3 days to go to physics.
00:06:17 Prof Michele Barbour
I’d read a book on the discovery of the double helix, which is sort of biochemistry.
00:06:20 Prof Michele Barbour
I read a book because I thought it would be relevant to my university applications.
00:06:23 Prof Michele Barbour
And in it was a little bit about some X-ray crystallography and some techniques they’d used, which were very much physics techniques being applied to biological science systems.
00:06:30 Prof Michele Barbour
And I realized in the entire book, the one bit I could really remember was the physics techniques, not all the biology, chemistry, biochemistry and so on.
00:06:37 Prof Ash Toye
It’s often it goes the other way, is physics people going into.
00:06:41 Prof Michele Barbour
I think that direction is more common, isn’t it?
00:06:43 Prof Michele Barbour
And in some senses I’ve done that.
00:06:45 Prof Jan Frayne
And we need those links so much more now.
00:06:46 Prof Michele Barbour
We do, we do, absolutely.
00:06:54 Prof Michele Barbour
So that’s what brought you to Bristol, brought you to our roles today, and you’re both involved in, I’m not going to try and use the formal word, we’re going to say red blood cell research.
00:07:02 Prof Michele Barbour
This is a great environment, as you said, to do this kind of research.
00:07:05 Prof Michele Barbour
You could quite happily have remained researchers for your whole careers.
00:07:08 Prof Michele Barbour
You didn’t need to go and form a spin-out company, presumably.
00:07:11 Prof Michele Barbour
Was it your aspiration to do something entrepreneurial, or did it arise as a solution to a problem or a challenge you encountered?
00:07:18 Prof Michele Barbour
How did it come about?
00:07:19 Prof Ash Toye
I imagine it’s going to be different for both of us.
00:07:21 Prof Ash Toye
Great, well, let’s start from both, yeah.
00:07:23 Prof Ash Toye
a whole bunch of different things.
00:07:25 Prof Ash Toye
One is having been in Bristol for so long, in the same building, going through the same, we’re not always the same door, but most of the time, it’s kind of looking for something different.
00:07:33 Prof Ash Toye
Like it feels, sometimes academia can feel a bit like, I guess, a hamster wheel, right?
00:07:37 Prof Ash Toye
Because you get funding, you get students coming in and you have postdocs and you work on something exciting for a bit and then you write a paper and then you might carry on or you might go off in a different direction.
00:07:47 Prof Ash Toye
And that’s exciting and really cool.
00:07:49 Prof Ash Toye
But when you’ve done it for a period of time, it’s kind of like, is there something else?
00:07:54 Prof Ash Toye
And you keep hearing on the periphery of people potentially spinning out companies.
00:07:58 Prof Ash Toye
And it’s always something that’s been in my mind.
00:08:00 Prof Ash Toye
But also alongside this, we had a collaboration with the blood service and we were trying to do a clinical trial and it took about 10 years and we’re nearly finishing now.
00:08:09 Prof Ash Toye
And that was on lab grown blood.
00:08:11 Prof Ash Toye
And I realized that there’s no way you can do this in academia.
00:08:14 Prof Ash Toye
You can maybe do one clinical trial, but then
00:08:17 Prof Ash Toye
The sort of funding that universities can attract is not the sort of funding that would be required.
00:08:23 Prof Ash Toye
And the same for Blood Service.
00:08:24 Prof Ash Toye
Blood Service obviously was like, well, we can’t keep funding this forever.
00:08:28 Prof Ash Toye
So at some point you realise, well, if it’s fundable and could potentially be in the company, then we should try and do it.
00:08:34 Prof Ash Toye
And actually I approached a university way before I had that decision about another element.
00:08:39 Prof Ash Toye
And I was like, can we patent this and can we do a spin out company?
00:08:42 Prof Ash Toye
Because I was interested in it.
00:08:43 Prof Ash Toye
And they were like, no.
00:08:44 Prof Ash Toye
So I actually had that from the university originally and put me off.
00:08:47 Prof Ash Toye
And then what really annoyed me and kind of what spurred me on was the company was formed in America on the same idea.
00:08:53 Prof Ash Toye
About six months later, they got a 50 million pound investment and then they got 450 million pounds.
00:09:00 Prof Ash Toye
And then it got floated on the stock exchange in America.
00:09:03 Prof Ash Toye
And then it went up to 2 billion.
00:09:05 Prof Ash Toye
And so that made me think, hang on a minute, I’ll watch this story.
00:09:08 Prof Ash Toye
I literally, as soon as I got the 50 million, I was like, see, this was a good idea.
00:09:12 Prof Ash Toye
And they admitted that they missed something.
00:09:16 Prof Ash Toye
But then I’d never let go of it.
00:09:17 Prof Ash Toye
And sometimes having somebody else with you to go on the journey is also fun as well.
00:09:22 Prof Michele Barbour
We’ll come back to what the company is actually doing, because I really, really want to explore that.
00:09:25 Prof Michele Barbour
But your motivation is a combination of, I’m going to put it in my words, because this is similar to my story actually, is I’ve been doing a similar job for a time now and I actually need something a little bit fresh to infuse it with some energy.
00:09:36 Prof Michele Barbour
But also the wish to move your technology forward and recognizing that there’s only so far I can go in a university setting.
00:09:42 Prof Michele Barbour
You need different forms of money, support and so on.
00:09:44 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, and also there’s kind of a
00:09:46 Prof Ash Toye
And the third element, which is we have really good people come through the lab and you train them up and some stay for quite a long time.
00:09:52 Prof Ash Toye
For them, what do they do?
00:09:53 Prof Ash Toye
And so it was also trying to harness and give another career route for them.
00:09:58 Prof Ash Toye
And then there were some I could always see coming through who had an interest in being an entrepreneur.
00:10:04 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s kind of like seeing another element that could be utilized.
00:10:08 Prof Michele Barbour
I do think that’s so powerful for early career researchers or postgraduates, whatever we’re going to call them, because we often paint academia as the route.
00:10:15 Prof Michele Barbour
And it’s not.
00:10:16 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s one of many routes and it’s not right for everyone and it’s not even the ones that want it won’t all get it.
00:10:21 Prof Michele Barbour
So it’s so important to show that if they can see it, they can be it from your point of view.
00:10:25 Prof Michele Barbour
Jan, then you’ve got different motivations for the cup spinner or different context.
00:10:29 Prof Jan Frayne
I mean, the whole spin out idea, it was Ash’s idea.
00:10:32 Prof Jan Frayne
And he had to drag me in, kicking and screaming.
00:10:34 Prof Ash Toye
But you didn’t resist too hard.
00:10:35 Prof Jan Frayne
No, I didn’t resist too hard.
00:10:37 Prof Jan Frayne
Because I suppose in many ways I’m so immersed in my university academic research, but we had the technology to actually take it out.
00:10:44 Prof Jan Frayne
So it’s been really, really good fun, but a completely different world and language.
00:10:48 Prof Michele Barbour
Jan, Ash was already keen to form a spin out company and so particularly motivated, but you said he had to drag you kicking and screaming.
00:10:55 Prof Michele Barbour
Was it that you were reluctant or just was sort of, well, I’m busy, I’ve got my things to do?
00:11:00 Prof Michele Barbour
I don’t really need another thing.
00:11:00 Prof Michele Barbour
Was there actual reluctance or just?
00:11:02 Prof Michele Barbour
I think just the unknown.
00:11:04 Prof Jan Frayne
I mean, really, really unknown.
00:11:05 Prof Jan Frayne
I mean, Ash had been thinking about this for a while and had done something.
00:11:08 Prof Ash Toye
Slightly obsessed.
00:11:09 Prof Jan Frayne
And that’s an exploration of it thing.
00:11:11 Prof Jan Frayne
So the whole concept was completely new to me.
00:11:13 Prof Jan Frayne
So yes, then we started going to meetings, but it was a completely new world.
00:11:17 Prof Jan Frayne
The language, everything.
00:11:18 Prof Jan Frayne
I knew nothing about it whatsoever.
00:11:20 Prof Jan Frayne
So it was quite a big learning curve, but hugely supported.
00:11:24 Prof Jan Frayne
So it’s been great, but completely different.
00:11:26 Prof Michele Barbour
You say obsession.
00:11:27 Prof Michele Barbour
I mean, we’re researchers.
00:11:27 Prof Michele Barbour
I don’t think you can be a researcher if you’re not obsessed.
00:11:29 Prof Michele Barbour
You should be a bit obsessed with something to be able to probably research it.
00:11:32 Prof Ash Toye
Well, people ask you, right, what is it like being an academic?
00:11:35 Prof Ash Toye
And it’s like, well, doing something you really love for your entire career and going in any direction.
00:11:40 Prof Ash Toye
The only thing you have to do that maybe you might not like as much is sometimes there’s difficult periods when you don’t get funded and things like that, right, or there’s issues with students or whatever.
00:11:48 Prof Ash Toye
But on the whole, it’s exciting.
00:11:50 Prof Ash Toye
And sometimes you’re doing something that nobody’s ever done before, right?
00:11:53 Prof Ash Toye
And when somebody shows you that block or
00:11:55 Prof Ash Toye
I remember literally the first time we produced blood in the lab, we had a tube of blood.
00:11:59 Prof Ash Toye
And I remember the postdoc at the time, Emil, like standing there in the middle of the lab and going, here it is, like some blood.
00:12:05 Prof Ash Toye
It was just in an Eppendorf.
00:12:06 Prof Ash Toye
It was a really small amount.
00:12:07 Prof Ash Toye
But at that moment, I knew that we had something that other people didn’t have.
00:12:12 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s the hair stands on it and sort of moment.
00:12:13 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, it’s like a pivotal moment, I guess.
00:12:16 Prof Ash Toye
And then you’re like, what can we do with that?
00:12:17 Prof Michele Barbour
So tell me, zooming out a little bit, it’s kind of obvious why we might want lab-grown blood, but tell me why did you try and grow lab-grown blood?
00:12:26 Prof Michele Barbour
And how, in the simple terms you can express it, how does one go about that?
00:12:30 Prof Michele Barbour
Because there’s all kinds of factors I would imagine that you need to take into account.
00:12:33 Prof Ash Toye
So similar with academia, right?
00:12:36 Prof Ash Toye
You pick something and you study it.
00:12:37 Prof Ash Toye
So at the time, if I looked at all my career, a lot of my career has been around model systems, right?
00:12:42 Prof Ash Toye
So you like, if you work on Alzheimer’s disease, you need neurons in a test tube to study.
00:12:46 Prof Ash Toye
We wanted to study disease originally.
00:12:49 Prof Ash Toye
So different types of disease that affect red cells.
00:12:51 Prof Ash Toye
But when a red cell is made, it’s made and it’s floating around your body.
00:12:54 Prof Ash Toye
And when you access
00:12:55 Prof Ash Toye
You can’t study anything because it’s just a red cell.
00:12:58 Prof Ash Toye
So we realized that you have to make a red cell to study how it’s made.
00:13:03 Prof Ash Toye
And that’s where then we began to understand how red cells are made.
00:13:07 Prof Ash Toye
And then we realized we can manipulate them and what goes wrong with disease and then study disease.
00:13:11 Prof Ash Toye
And then it’s like, well, actually you can make therapeutics with them.
00:13:13 Prof Michele Barbour
But I love it.
00:13:14 Prof Michele Barbour
So your initial intention wasn’t to make red blood cells to make the blood.
00:13:17 Prof Michele Barbour
It was, but so that you could then use it for research on the actual formation.
00:13:21 Prof Ash Toye
Originally the motivator wasn’t to treat people in the clinic or anything.
00:13:24 Prof Ash Toye
It was to understand
00:13:25 Prof Ash Toye
Eventually, things we studied might have turned into therapeutics, for example.
00:13:29 Prof Ash Toye
But initially, it was just to try and understand things.
00:13:31 Prof Ash Toye
But then the other person that would have been in the room if we could have had them was Dave Anstey, right, that Jana already mentioned.
00:13:37 Prof Ash Toye
And I think he had the bigger picture, which was he was the one who took the biggest risk because he put a lot of money into producing blood at large scale.
00:13:45 Prof Ash Toye
And he was able to do that because he was part of the blood service and had that funding.
00:13:49 Prof Ash Toye
And so the blood service and us went on that journey with him.
00:13:52 Prof Ash Toye
And then we started producing blood at large scale
00:13:55 Prof Ash Toye
lab from stem cells.
00:13:57 Prof Ash Toye
And then from that onwards, we then did a clinical trial.
00:14:00 Prof Ash Toye
And the motivator there was people with rare blood groups who can’t currently have a donor because one doesn’t exist.
00:14:08 Prof Ash Toye
Or for example, people with sickle cell disease or beta thalassemia where they’ve made antibodies in their body against
00:14:15 Prof Ash Toye
blood.
00:14:16 Prof Ash Toye
And so you can’t find blood for them because they’ve got these antibodies.
00:14:19 Prof Ash Toye
And so you have to grow blood to be able to fill that problem, that need, that clinical need.
00:14:24 Prof Michele Barbour
So I think I had assumed in my naivety, I will admit, that this was in some way synthetically derived rather than derived from stem cells.
00:14:32 Prof Michele Barbour
And that’s the tailorability of it, right?
00:14:34 Prof Jan Frayne
They’re normal.
00:14:35 Prof Jan Frayne
And I think this is the word we try to stay away from.
00:14:37 Prof Jan Frayne
They’re not synthetic.
00:14:38 Prof Ash Toye
They’re not artificial.
00:14:39 Prof Jan Frayne
They’re not artificial.
00:14:40 Prof Michele Barbour
I think I had assumed they were, because I don’t think in my head I’d made the leap to being able
00:14:45 Prof Michele Barbour
So it creates, what do we call them, natural, real, and at any kind of scale.
00:14:49 Prof Michele Barbour
But that is what you do.
00:14:50 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, I mean, essentially what we’re doing is we’re taking, so your red blood cells are made in your bone marrow and they’re made from a type of stem cell.
00:14:57 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s called a hematopoietic stem cell.
00:14:59 Prof Jan Frayne
It can be all your blood cells.
00:15:00 Prof Jan Frayne
Some of those stem cells come out of your bone marrow and circle it around your body and back to your bone marrow.
00:15:06 Prof Jan Frayne
And you can collect those from your circulation.
00:15:08 Prof Jan Frayne
So when people donate blood, they’re part of the waste product.
00:15:11 Prof Jan Frayne
So we can collect those stem cells and then culture them in the lab and make red blood cells.
00:15:15 Prof Jan Frayne
In the same way.
00:15:16 Prof Ash Toye
The idea is, so for example, if you have some rare donors, there might be one, two, or maybe 10 people in the UK that could provide blood.
00:15:25 Prof Ash Toye
So imagine if you could grow more blood from the blood they provide, and then you’ve got more blood again on top of that.
00:15:30 Prof Ash Toye
So I guess that was the original kind of nub of the idea is, can we produce more blood?
00:15:35 Prof Ash Toye
And then some of the innovations that Jan and Dave had then led us to realise, well, actually we can make blood that’s more universal to go into even more people, and then it kind of like grew from there.
00:15:45 Prof Jan Frayne
I suppose what we should qualify here slightly is when we’re talking about rare blood groups or red blood group donors, most people know about the ABO blood group system, maybe the Rhesus blood group system, that’s two blood group systems.
00:15:56 Prof Jan Frayne
There’s 47 blood group systems, 48 blood group systems now with something like 350 different variants you can have between people.
00:16:04 Prof Jan Frayne
So when you’re talking about a rare blood, we’re not talking about.
00:16:08 Prof Michele Barbour
AB negative or something?
00:16:09 Prof Jan Frayne
We’re talking about a whole sort of, a whole plethora of the differences two people can have between their
00:16:15 Prof Jan Frayne
blood cells.
00:16:16 Prof Michele Barbour
And in certain instances, we have this thing of like the universal donor and the universal recipient, but that’s actually a simplification for a certain people need very specific.
00:16:24 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s true.
00:16:25 Prof Ash Toye
So if you’re in an accident and you got taken into a hospital and you needed blood because you had like, say, a head injury or something, essentially, if they don’t know what your blood type is, you’ll get O negative blood.
00:16:37 Prof Ash Toye
But that’s
00:16:38 Prof Ash Toye
That’s the only stipulation, right?
00:16:40 Prof Ash Toye
And if you need it there and then, that’s what they give you.
00:16:43 Prof Ash Toye
But there’s a chance or a risk that there’s not a matched blood group in there.
00:16:47 Prof Ash Toye
And then if you have more blood at a later date, you’ve made antibodies against it.
00:16:51 Prof Ash Toye
And then you can’t have that.
00:16:52 Prof Ash Toye
You can still have O negative, but you have to have a more matched product.
00:16:56 Prof Ash Toye
Yes, I see.
00:16:56 Prof Ash Toye
So for an initial thing, it’s fine unless you have a very rare blood type where there’s maybe only a few people.
00:17:03 Prof Ash Toye
So one rare blood type is called RHAG null.
00:17:06 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s a protein on the surface of red cells.
00:17:08 Prof Ash Toye
So all blood groups are proteins or sugars that are on the surface of red cell.
00:17:12 Prof Ash Toye
And these people lack it completely.
00:17:14 Prof Ash Toye
And there’s maybe 8 in the world.
00:17:16 Prof Ash Toye
Wow.
00:17:17 Prof Ash Toye
And they actually are more universal.
00:17:19 Prof Ash Toye
If they were O negative and they have this RH, AG missing, they’re more universal for everybody else.
00:17:26 Prof Ash Toye
But unfortunately, there’s not many other people to give back to them.
00:17:29 Prof Ash Toye
Do you see what I mean?
00:17:30 Prof Ash Toye
So quite often, so for them, they would have their blood frozen.
00:17:33 Prof Ash Toye
For example, there’s a frozen blood bank in Liverpool.
00:17:36 Prof Ash Toye
But in the end,
00:17:37 Prof Ash Toye
And hopefully you would grow more blood for them eventually when you can get that scale.
00:17:41 Prof Jan Frayne
And then the other one is people with red blood cell diseases like sickle cell disease.
00:17:45 Prof Jan Frayne
I think a lot of people have heard of maybe bitothalassemia.
00:17:48 Prof Jan Frayne
But some of these patients, some cancer patients have to have blood transfusions every three weeks.
00:17:53 Prof Jan Frayne
And therefore, they get blood from different donors.
00:17:55 Prof Jan Frayne
So it’s going to be lots and lots of different mismatches.
00:17:58 Prof Jan Frayne
And they’ll keep generating antibodies to the different donor blood until eventually you get to the situation you can’t actually.
00:18:04 Prof Michele Barbour
No.
00:18:04 Prof Michele Barbour
And these people are already sick.
00:18:05 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s why they need the, so the last thing they need is this additional challenge.
00:18:09 Prof Ash Toye
But a sickle cell person would have 12 pints of blood if they’re having an exchange, right?
00:18:13 Prof Ash Toye
So the chances of a mismatch is quite high.
00:18:16 Prof Ash Toye
Although now they’re able using new technology to sequence donors so they can match really well.
00:18:21 Prof Ash Toye
So that in going forward.
00:18:23 Prof Ash Toye
less people have blood that’s not matched.
00:18:26 Prof Michele Barbour
But it’s still dependent on finding the matches in among who’s donated blood within a reasonable period of time, I’d imagine.
00:18:31 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:18:31 Prof Ash Toye
I think in sickle cell disease, about 30% of the people who have sickle cell disease will make an antibody against the blood that they’ve been transfused with.
00:18:39 Prof Ash Toye
And quite often they’ll have at least two or three antibodies, which then makes them impossible to transfuse.
00:18:45 Prof Ash Toye
We can grow blood in the lab from stem cells, but there was two other pieces of innovation that in the meantime, you have this new company that’s in the States.
00:18:53 Prof Ash Toye
We can talk about what that is later, but we have to have something that distinguishes us away from that, have an advantage, otherwise you’re not going to beat this company that’s super well funded.
00:19:02 Prof Ash Toye
But we realized that they have a few problems, which we had the solutions for.
00:19:07 Prof Jan Frayne
And they wanted our solutions.
00:19:09 Prof Jan Frayne
And they tried to talk, they talked to us many, many times and wined and dined us for our solutions.
00:19:13 Prof Ash Toye
But we doggedly didn’t give anything away.
00:19:16 Prof Ash Toye
So one of the key ones was what Jan and Dave developed.
00:19:20 Prof Jan Frayne
So the issue was, it’s all very wonderful.
00:19:22 Prof Jan Frayne
We can get those stem cells.
00:19:23 Prof Jan Frayne
We can put them in a lovely culture system in the lab to make the red blood cells.
00:19:27 Prof Jan Frayne
But these stem cells are so keen to mature or turn into red blood cells.
00:19:32 Prof Jan Frayne
You can only make a finite number of red blood cells from every collection of stem cells.
00:19:37 Prof Jan Frayne
The cells will divide sort of a certain number of times on the way through, but then they’re going through this dynamic change in process, they’re spitting out the nucleus to become the red blood cell at the end.
00:19:46 Prof Jan Frayne
So then you’ve got to go back and get more stem cells.
00:19:48 Prof Jan Frayne
And if you do enough from a rare donor, that’s really, really limited.
00:19:51 Prof Jan Frayne
So what we did, we took those stem cells, we pushed them, matured them to the very early immature red blood cell stage, and then we immortalized them.
00:20:00 Prof Jan Frayne
And so they keep going forever.
00:20:02 Prof Jan Frayne
And then when you want to, you can take away the agent that keeps them immortalized and they trundle down and become the red blood cells.
00:20:09 Prof Michele Barbour
But you’ve got control over that rather than we’ve got control over this, yeah.
00:20:12 Prof Jan Frayne
And then the other cool thing is CRISPR came along, that lovely gene.
00:20:16 Prof Jan Frayne
editing technique, which just opened up a whole range of sort of possibilities for us.
00:20:20 Prof Jan Frayne
So now we can CRISPR edit those cells.
00:20:23 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, so for years there was ways of gene editing cells, but they were all either impossible to work out, which was TALONs.
00:20:30 Prof Ash Toye
And then there was another one called zinc fingers.
00:20:32 Prof Ash Toye
And again, that wasn’t that accessible.
00:20:34 Prof Ash Toye
And then CRISPR came along and I was like, I understand this.
00:20:37 Prof Ash Toye
So I was like, say to Jan, we’ve got to do this.
00:20:39 Prof Ash Toye
We’ve got to try and remove some blood groups.
00:20:41 Prof Ash Toye
And eventually then also Jan’s lab started making cell lines and things from them as well.
00:20:46 Prof Ash Toye
with for sickle cell disease and things like that to try and study that process.
00:20:50 Prof Ash Toye
But sometimes it’s like having a technology that then suddenly opens up tons of doors into new areas and new possibilities.
00:20:58 Prof Jan Frayne
So it did.
00:20:59 Prof Jan Frayne
So basically, because what you can do then, so you just have the immortalized, we call them erythroid cells for the immature blood cells, just banged in, you know, frozen down and kept, you can thaw them out when you need them.
00:21:10 Prof Jan Frayne
And then we can just spread them.
00:21:11 Prof Jan Frayne
So yes, we removed five of those problematic blood groups, a proof of principle of a much more universal
00:21:16 Prof Jan Frayne
blood project.
00:21:17 Prof Jan Frayne
The one thing my lab is doing now, as Ash mentioned very much, is studying red blood cell diseases, and there are a lot of red blood cell diseases.
00:21:23 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s very difficult.
00:21:24 Prof Jan Frayne
You can’t get the material from patients that are anaemic, so they’re hard to study.
00:21:27 Prof Jan Frayne
But now what we can do, we can introduce those disease-causing mutations into our erythroid cell line, which you can create the disease in the lab, and then you can study the disease and you can screen drugs.
00:21:39 Prof Michele Barbour
Brilliant.
00:21:39 Prof Jan Frayne
So that was, that’s where my lab’s gone.
00:21:41 Prof Jan Frayne
That’s an angle.
00:21:41 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s not quite scarlet.
00:21:43 Prof Michele Barbour
No, but it’s complementary, I guess, isn’t it?
00:21:45 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah.
00:21:46 Prof Ash Toye
thing that was kind of the other extra thing was that moment when we held blood in our head and like literally in our hands, in a tube.
00:21:52 Prof Ash Toye
And then later when we started, just before the clinical trial, we were doing larger volumes and you could see this large, it’s a mini dose, right?
00:21:59 Prof Ash Toye
Enough for a baby, not for an adult, but still a significant, like billions and billions of red cells.
00:22:04 Prof Ash Toye
So I guess my eureka moment was we need to put things inside the red cells because they’re designed to travel around the body.
00:22:10 Prof Ash Toye
And that’s what I tried to sell to the university originally when I wanted to set up a company.
00:22:14 Prof Ash Toye
And that’s what the new company in the States
00:22:16 Prof Ash Toye
kind of did.
00:22:17 Prof Ash Toye
What I realised was they hadn’t, after talking to this company, they hadn’t really thought of all the problems, but we had solutions because we’d studied disease and understood the process.
00:22:26 Prof Ash Toye
And so that’s where we started then expressing proteins inside red cells to make a red cell with something inside, which is a therapeutic red cell.
00:22:33 Prof Michele Barbour
Okay, because my question was going to be to what ends, because having disclosed I nearly studied biochemistry, I definitely didn’t.
00:22:38 Prof Ash Toye
So imagine the simplest is you imagine you’ve got a disease which is missing an enzyme, right?
00:22:44 Prof Ash Toye
And so the simplest thing is what Scarlet.
00:22:46 Prof Ash Toye
that’s going for at the moment.
00:22:47 Prof Ash Toye
There’s one called hyperammonia, which is essentially really high levels of ammonia, right?
00:22:52 Prof Ash Toye
So that’s toxic to the brain, causes lots of problems.
00:22:56 Prof Ash Toye
People are really, really ill with it.
00:22:57 Prof Ash Toye
You get it with liver disease, for example, and also some urea cycle disorders.
00:23:01 Prof Ash Toye
And so what we can do is, and what Scholar’s working on is producing a red cell with enzymes inside, which can metabolize away that ammonia.
00:23:11 Prof Ash Toye
And then you don’t have the problem anymore.
00:23:13 Prof Michele Barbour
So the blood is medicine.
00:23:14 Prof Ash Toye
Literally, that’s literally our strap line I think for Scarlet is we produce a new type of medicine using blood as a vehicle and we hide the medicine inside the blood cells.
00:23:26 Prof Ash Toye
It’s not recognised by the immune system because it’s hidden inside.
00:23:29 Prof Michele Barbour
And because it is compatible with that individual’s blood, so the immune system just sees it as more blood.
00:23:34 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, so yeah.
00:23:35 Prof Ash Toye
And if you’ve got cell lines and a more universal cell type, you can give it to more people.
00:23:41 Prof Michele Barbour
So it’s not the case of you are a patient with a blood disease and we will use your stem cells to create blood for you.
00:23:48 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s more that the blood you’re creating is compatible with the wide range of blood types and individuals.
00:23:53 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, okay, brilliant.
00:23:55 Prof Michele Barbour
Having put those pits of the puzzle together, the point at which the university says, actually, yes, we will support you to make this company, what did you do?
00:24:01 Prof Michele Barbour
How did it go?
00:24:02 Prof Michele Barbour
Did you seek investment funding?
00:24:05 Prof Michele Barbour
Like, what was that initial stage like?
00:24:07 Prof Ash Toye
So we were thinking about it, and then at the time you were thinking, how do you go about this?
00:24:11 Prof Ash Toye
So initially I started talking to Harry Dequire and Science Create, and then started talking to some VCs, and then actually got approached by a VC when we published some of our papers, and then Jan and I
00:24:25 Prof Ash Toye
I, plus the other people in the team in our labs, certain ones came in who were interested in doing a spin-out company.
00:24:31 Prof Ash Toye
And then we work with this VC with the idea that it was going to be quite a lot of money.
00:24:35 Prof Ash Toye
So this is the hard bit.
00:24:36 Prof Ash Toye
So we worked for nine months on a venture build with them, but we kind of didn’t agree on certain things and then it fell apart.
00:24:44 Prof Ash Toye
And then actually at the same time in parallel, another
00:24:47 Prof Ash Toye
That one was going on, and that got funded, right?
00:24:49 Prof Ash Toye
So, we saw that one get funded, and Miles didn’t, and so, at that point, you questioned, Should I bother going any further, right.
00:24:55 Prof Michele Barbour
I feel like I’ve tried this twice now, yeah, but.
00:24:57 Prof Ash Toye
Then actually I was like, Nope, right?
00:24:59 Prof Ash Toye
This time…
00:25:01 Prof Ash Toye
we’re going to just do just a couple of us and we’re going to just really push through this.
00:25:04 Prof Ash Toye
So we did two things.
00:25:05 Prof Ash Toye
One was we started talking to Science Creates again and some of the other VCs.
00:25:10 Prof Ash Toye
And then separately, we approached an accelerator in Cambridge.
00:25:13 Prof Ash Toye
And this was the idea of the university commercial team.
00:25:16 Prof Ash Toye
They were like, try an accelerator, see if you can get, because often with accelerators, at the end of an accelerator, you have VCs and investors that come in to listen to some of the ideas.
00:25:26 Prof Ash Toye
Sometimes you might fund something.
00:25:28 Prof Ash Toye
And so we got accepted onto the
00:25:31 Prof Ash Toye
accelerator, which was really exciting, and we were going to join the boot camp.
00:25:34 Prof Ash Toye
We almost signed the term sheet because there’s some equity you have to give with some accelerators.
00:25:39 Prof Ash Toye
And then separately, then Science Grace said, we will do a deal with you.
00:25:43 Prof Ash Toye
Sign this.
00:25:44 Prof Ash Toye
term sheet.
00:25:45 Prof Ash Toye
And then we also got another investor, which is the Abcam millionaire investor, Jonathan Miller.
00:25:49 Prof Ash Toye
And then that’s how it all happened.
00:25:51 Prof Jan Frayne
And I guess with the accelerator, it did transpire we were already a bit too advanced.
00:25:55 Prof Jan Frayne
They were a bit surprised, actually.
00:25:57 Prof Jan Frayne
Normally they have people who have ideas, but haven’t actually put them into place.
00:26:01 Prof Jan Frayne
So I think we’re a bit unusual.
00:26:02 Prof Ash Toye
We’ve gone through that process with the first VC of coming up with some ideas of what we would treat and also like programs.
00:26:10 Prof Ash Toye
And so we got quite advanced.
00:26:11 Prof Jan Frayne
And we had the technologies as well, though, rather than just an idea.
00:26:14 Prof Michele Barbour
But if it simply allowed you to confirm your initial thinking and be even more confident in what it wants to do, then I guess it still has some utility.
00:26:23 Prof Jan Frayne
And it’s exposure to the actual field sort of thing or into the area of entrepreneurship.
00:26:28 Prof Jan Frayne
I mean, they were great.
00:26:29 Prof Ash Toye
I think one of the key things you have to remember when you do this stuff is it’s all a journey, right?
00:26:34 Prof Ash Toye
So actually, one of the reasons why we didn’t progress with the original VC was because we had a disagreement around certain things.
00:26:41 Prof Ash Toye
And then as you go on, you realize that what they were saying was right is not always the truth, that sometimes you’re right.
00:26:47 Prof Ash Toye
But in this case, we accepted that they were right, but it was too late, right?
00:26:51 Prof Ash Toye
The door was still open, and maybe one day they will invest with us.
00:26:54 Prof Ash Toye
But sometimes you have to come to your own, you have to accept it, because it was too early to accept it, because…
00:27:00 Prof Ash Toye
You didn’t want to put everything into one basket.
00:27:03 Prof Michele Barbour
I completely get that.
00:27:04 Prof Michele Barbour
And I do think as a founder, as an academic founder, there’s this real balance between humility, sometimes someone else, in this case an investor, actually might know what’s the best route and maybe I don’t because I haven’t done this before and it’s new to me.
00:27:16 Prof Michele Barbour
There’s other times when, and I can think of examples in my own journey, where I had a set to with somebody, might have been an investor, might have been a colleague, whatever, and I look back and go, no, I was right.
00:27:25 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s like, I stuck to my guns, even though I felt out of my depth and I was right.
00:27:28 Prof Michele Barbour
So there is a balance between the humility of knowing that you don’t know much about this world, but actually the confidence to nevertheless, yeah, and say, well, this is my innovation and I am going to drive it.
00:27:38 Prof Michele Barbour
Or also you just.
00:27:39 Prof Ash Toye
Need to get more evidence, right?
00:27:41 Prof Ash Toye
That’s the other thing.
00:27:41 Prof Ash Toye
So if the timing is not quite right, you don’t have all the evidence, sometimes it’s hard to make that leap.
00:27:46 Prof Ash Toye
And I guess going backwards, I wish I had a long time ago, just backed myself.
00:27:52 Prof Ash Toye
When I reflect, I kind of realized that I should have.
00:27:55 Prof Ash Toye
I should have just gone
00:27:55 Prof Ash Toye
for it.
00:27:56 Prof Ash Toye
But then I would have maybe had a different career and all sorts of things.
00:27:59 Prof Ash Toye
I think you have to come, when you come to Spinout, I don’t know if you thought this, Jan, but you kind of have to feel comfortable in your skin.
00:28:07 Prof Ash Toye
This is what you want to do now.
00:28:08 Prof Ash Toye
And you can’t write more.
00:28:10 Prof Ash Toye
Well, actually, Jan still writes millions of grants, but I find I want to do something well and I really want to take this to the clinic.
00:28:16 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s a real focus of mine.
00:28:17 Prof Ash Toye
And so I can’t apply for all the grants that I want to.
00:28:20 Prof Ash Toye
So the lab suffers.
00:28:22 Prof Ash Toye
But the way I think of it is, well, I’ll do this for now and then I’ll change it later.
00:28:27 Prof Ash Toye
But you’re at the next bit when I’m ready.
00:28:29 Prof Ash Toye
And actually, you just go on a different journey.
00:28:31 Prof Ash Toye
And it’s amazing that as an academic, you can choose that journey, right?
00:28:35 Prof Ash Toye
You’re in charge of it.
00:28:36 Prof Ash Toye
Okay, you’ve got, Nigel will be listening to this now, right?
00:28:39 Prof Ash Toye
You’ll be like, you need grads and everything else and overheads and everything else.
00:28:43 Prof Ash Toye
That’s completely right.
00:28:44 Prof Ash Toye
And I completely agree with that.
00:28:45 Prof Ash Toye
But also, I think it’s also about yourself and what you personally feel comfortable with, what you’re excited by.
00:28:50 Prof Ash Toye
Because if it was all grands, grands, grands.
00:28:52 Prof Ash Toye
I think I would just do a different job.
00:28:54 Prof Jan Frayne
I think also, though, that exposing yourself to the different world also gives you ideas for grants, because you’re exposed to different ideas, different ways of thinking, and most of our funding nowadays really has to have some sort of ultimate purpose.
00:29:09 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, So it kind of exposes you to that and gives you a different way of thinking and you’ll probably come up with a grant you wouldn’t have come up with beforehand.
00:29:18 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s a really interesting you bring that up because it’s quite a recurring theme in these interviews and other people.
00:29:22 Prof Michele Barbour
the people I speak with is you go down a commercial route in whatever that means to you in your field, but there’s quite often a sort of feedback loop back into your research or into your colleagues’ research if you’ve actually left the academic environment.
00:29:34 Prof Michele Barbour
So it can be quite a, almost like a virtual circle, it can feed back into the research.
00:29:37 Prof Jan Frayne
Because a company can’t do everything, but you can take an eye with your foot and if the company then wants to license it, that’s good as well.
00:29:43 Prof Ash Toye
But sometimes the frustration with companies is something happens and you know there’s something academically interesting there, but the company won’t do it.
00:29:53 Prof Ash Toye
Because they only have so much money to do what they said they did.
00:29:57 Prof Ash Toye
And so you can only pick so many of those ideas up as well, right?
00:30:01 Prof Ash Toye
So that’s the other thing is something, oh, this is really cool.
00:30:03 Prof Ash Toye
And if as an academic, it’s like you’ve got to be really careful where you don’t ultra focus on the thing that’s academically interested and lose sight of what the business is, right?
00:30:11 Prof Ash Toye
So that’s something that we’ve learned as well.
00:30:20 Prof Michele Barbour
You use the word learn a lot and you use it with glee, all the things you’ve learned.
00:30:25 Prof Michele Barbour
I think there’s also a courage required of academics.
00:30:28 Prof Michele Barbour
Let’s call us career academics, experienced academics.
00:30:32 Prof Michele Barbour
We’re none of us straight out of our PhDs, right?
00:30:33 Prof Michele Barbour
There’s a courage to move into a space, entrepreneurship in this example, where you know you’ve got a huge amount to learn, where you know you’re not an expert.
00:30:41 Prof Michele Barbour
We trade on our expertise.
00:30:42 Prof Michele Barbour
Those are our laurels.
00:30:43 Prof Michele Barbour
Those are what we’re known by as what we know a huge amount about.
00:30:47 Prof Michele Barbour
And to take a step into a commercialization pathway, unless you’re doing
00:30:50 Prof Michele Barbour
it for the second or third time, but chances are you don’t know a lot about it.
00:30:53 Prof Michele Barbour
So you seem to talk about it with Glee, but has that been hard?
00:30:56 Prof Michele Barbour
Have you struggled with that?
00:30:58 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m not an expert in this and I’m going to show it.
00:31:00 Prof Jan Frayne
Oh, no, I’m not bothered about that.
00:31:01 Prof Jan Frayne
But I think we did have support.
00:31:04 Prof Jan Frayne
I mean, we did have, was it something with a name?
00:31:06 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, Laura Newell.
00:31:08 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, so initially we had somebody in the commercial team, commercialised team to hold our hands a little bit, and that was really helpful.
00:31:15 Prof Ash Toye
And now we have other people who help us with, you know, new developments.
00:31:19 Prof Jan Frayne
Andrew Wilson.
00:31:20 Prof Ash Toye
The job itself, academia itself, is a sense you pick an area you don’t know much about, right?
00:31:25 Prof Ash Toye
And then you go and explore it.
00:31:26 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s just actually just a different type of…
00:31:29 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s just as scary, going to conferences in America.
00:31:32 Prof Ash Toye
There’s elements you don’t like.
00:31:34 Prof Ash Toye
I don’t like being wrong, right?
00:31:35 Prof Ash Toye
That’s kind of like if you’re in a company or if you’re an academic, you never want to be wrong.
00:31:39 Prof Ash Toye
But actually what my mindset is, sometimes I am wrong, I accept that.
00:31:43 Prof Ash Toye
But actually when you learn now you’re wrong, you’ve learned something, right?
00:31:46 Prof Ash Toye
So this is probably why we like learning is because you will make mistakes.
00:31:50 Prof Ash Toye
So if you run a company, it’d be amazing if you did everything the way you planned.
00:31:55 Prof Michele Barbour
And almost impossible as well.
00:31:56 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, but hindsight’s a great thing though, isn’t it?
00:31:59 Prof Jan Frayne
Because you don’t know until you’ve tried something.
00:32:01 Prof Michele Barbour
Absolutely.
00:32:01 Prof Ash Toye
But actually what’s cool now is you can bring stuff in from what you’ve learned from going down the commercial route and take it entrepreneurship, and then you can bring it back to the students.
00:32:13 Prof Ash Toye
So quite often now,
00:32:15 Prof Ash Toye
I’m asked to give talks to explain it and try and infuse them and see if they want to go on this journey.
00:32:22 Prof Ash Toye
And that’s kind of interesting.
00:32:24 Prof Ash Toye
It’s really interesting because everybody likes talking about themselves, right?
00:32:27 Prof Ash Toye
It’s easy.
00:32:28 Prof Ash Toye
Absolutely.
00:32:29 Prof Ash Toye
And so you just have to stand up in front of students and talk about a journey and what you’ve done in your life.
00:32:34 Prof Michele Barbour
And let them see your enthusiasm.
00:32:36 Prof Michele Barbour
But I mean, we do a lot with students to try and expose them to different career paths and options and so on.
00:32:41 Prof Michele Barbour
But the difference is this is
00:32:43 Prof Michele Barbour
you’re their academic, you’re their lecturer, they might have seen you giving the year one tutorials, whatever.
00:32:48 Prof Michele Barbour
So they see someone that they already respect in their discipline as having a different dimension.
00:32:54 Prof Michele Barbour
And that I think can be, well, it’s a different kind of powerful than bringing in someone who is just a commercial person, you know?
00:32:59 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s more accessible to them.
00:33:00 Prof Jan Frayne
You can see accessible route.
00:33:02 Prof Jan Frayne
I think the good thing about our field as well is red blood cells, people understand what they are.
00:33:06 Prof Michele Barbour
Yes, that is also good.
00:33:07 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s a good bus stop conversation starter, you know?
00:33:09 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, and everybody’s carved themselves on source and blood.
00:33:13 Prof Ash Toye
People might know somebody who’s had a transfusion or had an issue.
00:33:16 Prof Jan Frayne
They understand it, which makes it much easier to talk about to people and to students.
00:33:20 Prof Ash Toye
And that’s why the media, like quite often the media gets really interested in this stuff.
00:33:24 Prof Ash Toye
So, you know, as long as you’ve got something interesting, as I say, quite often it gets picked up with the media.
00:33:28 Prof Ash Toye
For sure.
00:33:28 Prof Ash Toye
And there’s a lot of people around the world work, because blood is so accessible.
00:33:32 Prof Ash Toye
There’s a lot of labs trying to do various things.
00:33:34 Prof Ash Toye
There’s not…
00:33:35 Prof Ash Toye
just what we’re trying to do, which is growing blood, but there’s also creating artificial blood, true artificial blood, which is essentially proteins that are in blood cells surrounded by an artificial liposome or some other cage, and try and make that work inside the body.
00:33:49 Prof Michele Barbour
And what’s your position on that?
00:33:50 Prof Michele Barbour
Because that’s not the approach you’ve taken.
00:33:52 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you think it has utility?
00:33:54 Prof Ash Toye
Do you think?
00:33:54 Prof Ash Toye
It’s already used.
00:33:55 Prof Jan Frayne
In an emergency.
00:33:57 Prof Jan Frayne
An absolute emergency, but it’s not going to last for long.
00:33:59 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, OK.
00:34:00 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:34:01 Prof Ash Toye
It doesn’t last.
00:34:02 Prof Ash Toye
Literally a few weeks ago, another announcement from another group this time.
00:34:05 Prof Ash Toye
in Japan that they were, they had purple blood.
00:34:08 Prof Ash Toye
So they had, they altered, so haemoglobin is what blood is.
00:34:13 Prof Ash Toye
It’s the red of blood, right?
00:34:15 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s the thing that carries oxygen.
00:34:16 Prof Ash Toye
And they’d converted haemoglobin.
00:34:19 Prof Ash Toye
They’ve banged something to the outside of haemoglobin and then we’re using that as an artificial blood type.
00:34:24 Prof Ash Toye
But the thing they banged caused the haemoglobin to go purple.
00:34:28 Prof Michele Barbour
So it’s still haemoglobin and they haven’t.
00:34:30 Prof Ash Toye
Oh, apparently, yeah.
00:34:30 Prof Ash Toye
I don’t know enough about it, but interestingly, it might work.
00:34:35 Prof Ash Toye
So we just
00:34:35 Prof Ash Toye
have to wait and see what happens with it.
00:34:39 Prof Ash Toye
So, people have to try stuff, I guess, and then the thing that works the best will be selected.
00:34:43 Prof Jan Frayne
At the end of the day, though, you kind of think our bodies are pretty spectacular, and creating something completely artificial that works as well is going to be a massive challenge.
00:34:55 Prof Jan Frayne
Whereas actually making red blood cells in the lab, they’re the same as our normal red blood cells, and they last.
00:35:00 Prof Ash Toye
Yes, it was kind of like a no-brainer.
00:35:02 Prof Ash Toye
If you can make enough blood cells.
00:35:04 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s like natural medicine.
00:35:07 Prof Ash Toye
It should last, if it’s identical, it should last as long as normal blood cells last, which is 120 days.
00:35:13 Prof Michele Barbour
And do you know how long it lasts yet?
00:35:16 Prof Ash Toye
We’re literally doing the RESTORE trial now, which has, it’s a clinical assessment of lab-grown blood versus the same, so lab-grown blood grown from stem cells.
00:35:27 Prof Ash Toye
So from a donor going into
00:35:30 Prof Ash Toye
a participant or volunteer who is not related to that donor.
00:35:34 Prof Ash Toye
So like a normal donation, essentially going into somebody who needs the blood.
00:35:38 Prof Ash Toye
In this case, a volunteer, they didn’t need it, but they’re doing it to help science.
00:35:41 Prof Ash Toye
And then we take the same donor’s own red cells, and then they’re being compared to the lab-grown blood in terms of how long they circulate the body.
00:35:48 Prof Ash Toye
I’ve been saying this for several years now.
00:35:51 Prof Ash Toye
We will know soon what the result is, but because we set out and it was completely blinded, we don’t, we even know we’ve nearly finished, we still don’t know what the result is.
00:36:00 Prof Ash Toye
So my guess is they’re going to be equivalent because there were some animal studies that we have not I have done but other people have done and that suggests they are equivalent or maybe even possibly better.
00:36:12 Prof Jan Frayne
I’m hoping they last a bit longer because they’re all new.
00:36:14 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, I guess so.
00:36:15 Prof Jan Frayne
When you get a bag of blood.
00:36:16 Prof Jan Frayne
A lot of them are, those set red lead gels are destroyed immediately because they’re aged.
00:36:19 Prof Michele Barbour
Some old ones, some young ones, some middle-aged ones, yeah.
00:36:22 Prof Jan Frayne
Precisely.
00:36:22 Prof Jan Frayne
But these ones should all be nice and new and fresh.
00:36:25 Prof Michele Barbour
So hoping they’re going to last longer.
00:36:27 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah.
00:36:27 Prof Michele Barbour
So is that the main priority for Scarlet at the moment?
00:36:31 Prof Michele Barbour
So what’s Scarlet’s sort of main to-dos at the moment?
00:36:33 Prof Ash Toye
So the thing is at the moment.
00:36:35 Prof Ash Toye
I guess one of the things we had to accept was we’re not going to be just making unmodified blood because at the moment the money is not there.
00:36:44 Prof Ash Toye
I can take blood out of your arm and it goes into the NHS via the blood service and the NHS pays 130 pound.
00:36:51 Prof Ash Toye
That’s not enough for an expensive self.
00:36:54 Prof Michele Barbour
No, I see it can’t just top up supplies because it’s too easily available from normal humans.
00:36:58 Prof Ash Toye
The driver for me is to produce blood that can go into anybody, but at the moment it’s therapeutic blood.
00:37:05 Prof Ash Toye
where we can generate enough money and then get economies of scale and other things, which then will allow us to then take unmodified blood into the clinic.
00:37:13 Prof Michele Barbour
And produce it much more cheaply because you’re doing it at scale.
00:37:16 Prof Ash Toye
So the more expensive medicine blood becomes the driver for then unmodified blood to make that effect.
00:37:24 Prof Michele Barbour
Are there particular targets then for the medicine blood?
00:37:27 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, so we’ve picked indications.
00:37:28 Prof Ash Toye
You do a study, so that’s on the Scarlet website, so people can look at that if they want to, but there’s a whole list of things you could potentially
00:37:35 Prof Ash Toye
actually do lots and lots of metabolic diseases.
00:37:37 Prof Michele Barbour
But that’s, from my experience at least, yeah, from my experience at least in the spin-out, that’s part of the difficulty.
00:37:42 Prof Michele Barbour
We’re researchers who want to investigate all kinds of different things, but you’ve got to focus.
00:37:46 Prof Ash Toye
You have a program, a product.
00:37:47 Prof Ash Toye
I’m not going to say what the products are exactly, but the program is pushing forward a whole bunch.
00:37:52 Prof Ash Toye
It’s like a competition, right?
00:37:53 Prof Ash Toye
We’ve got an internal competition to get the first one to the point where it could potentially go in to somebody, right?
00:38:00 Prof Ash Toye
So
00:38:00 Prof Ash Toye
They’re all competing.
00:38:02 Prof Ash Toye
There’s not a massive team.
00:38:03 Prof Ash Toye
There’s about seven people in Scarlett, right?
00:38:05 Prof Ash Toye
But essentially they have multiple products.
00:38:08 Prof Ash Toye
And then one of those products is going to be the first one that will hopefully go into a clinical.
00:38:12 Prof Jan Frayne
Trial.
00:38:13 Prof Jan Frayne
Some of them are super exciting though.
00:38:14 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s another thing that you’re working on at the minute.
00:38:17 Prof Michele Barbour
And yeah.
00:38:17 Prof Ash Toye
And the super cool thing is, by being in the company, it’s ultra focused on that thing, not trying to generate a paper, not trying to get a grant.
00:38:26 Prof Ash Toye
Well, actually, if we got a grant, great.
00:38:27 Prof Ash Toye
And Scarlett has got innovate.
00:38:30 Prof Ash Toye
But the thing is, that tunnel vision of we have to get to, for Scarlett to survive and be investable, it has to have a product which could be taken forward.
00:38:40 Prof Ash Toye
So it has to be a competition internally.
00:38:43 Prof Ash Toye
And the best one with the most activity is the one that’s going to go forward.
00:38:47 Prof Michele Barbour
So we’ll go forward first.
00:38:48 Prof Ash Toye
But I can’t tell you where it’s.
00:38:49 Prof Jan Frayne
But also an area where there’s a clinical need.
00:38:51 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, for sure.
00:38:52 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m assuming all of your candidates have a clinical.
00:38:55 Prof Jan Frayne
Need, but yeah, where there isn’t any treatment at all, or the treatment is inadequate or yeah.
00:39:00 Prof Ash Toye
So everything.
00:39:00 Prof Ash Toye
will be weighed up, and then the final result will then lead to that clinical candidate.
00:39:05 Prof Michele Barbour
I’ll need to interview you again then, then, because I want to know.
00:39:08 Prof Jan Frayne
It moves quite faster, doesn’t it?
00:39:09 Prof Jan Frayne
You’ve got a great CEO, actually, who’s good at driving us.
00:39:12 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s a great area to explore, because…
00:39:15 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m always interested in the decisions academics have to make when they decide to.
00:39:18 Prof Michele Barbour
Having decided to found a company, so that decision’s made, there’s then a myriad of small decisions need to be made, and including what role you take.
00:39:26 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you leave your academic job and become the C something, oh, the COO, the CEO, CEO, whatever?
00:39:31 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you do both?
00:39:33 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you actually just spend half a day a month attending discussion, you know, strategy meetings and otherwise stay in your academic?
00:39:39 Prof Michele Barbour
Whatever decision you make, there will always be other skills that you need.
00:39:42 Prof Michele Barbour
You’ll always need somebody to do something that you just can’t
00:39:45 Prof Michele Barbour
or I’m not interested in learning about.
00:39:46 Prof Michele Barbour
And I think identifying a CEO with the right skills and the right alignment with you as academics is one of the most difficult.
00:39:55 Prof Michele Barbour
There are great people out there, but that alignment’s got to be great.
00:39:58 Prof Michele Barbour
Well, how did you…
00:39:59 Prof Michele Barbour
Well, yes, lucky, but…
00:40:01 Prof Ash Toye
You go with a gut feel, right?
00:40:02 Prof Ash Toye
But I don’t know for Jan or what she felt, but I knew I didn’t want to be a CEO.
00:40:08 Prof Ash Toye
I would have liked to have been one, but I didn’t want to give up my academic job.
00:40:10 Prof Michele Barbour
Okay, so it was more that you wanted to…
00:40:12 Prof Ash Toye
And it wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the idea.
00:40:14 Prof Ash Toye
I just thought…
00:40:15 Prof Ash Toye
I don’t think I’m the right person.
00:40:17 Prof Ash Toye
Like I can write a leader team, that’s no problem.
00:40:19 Prof Ash Toye
And I can do that in the company, that’s no problem either.
00:40:22 Prof Ash Toye
I think what you need is somebody who’s good at business.
00:40:25 Prof Ash Toye
And academics are not necessarily good at business, right?
00:40:27 Prof Ash Toye
So if you’ve got a business head, great.
00:40:29 Prof Ash Toye
Obviously you can come up with, oh yeah, there’s indications to target and things like that.
00:40:33 Prof Ash Toye
But really what you want is somebody who’s experience in business.
00:40:37 Prof Ash Toye
And I think the quicker you come to that decision, the better.
00:40:39 Prof Michele Barbour
But coming to that decision, then finding the right person.
00:40:41 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, so we had a competition.
00:40:43 Prof Michele Barbour
You had a competition.
00:40:44 Prof Michele Barbour
You like a competition, don’t you?
00:40:45 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, so I love a competition.
00:40:46 Prof Ash Toye
So it was partly around, so I didn’t, nobody would explain to me what was in a…
00:40:51 Prof Ash Toye
when you write your business plan, right?
00:40:54 Prof Ash Toye
So it was kind of annoying because they’re going to rip up the business plan anyway within however much time.
00:40:59 Prof Ash Toye
And everybody is constantly going on about business plans.
00:41:01 Prof Ash Toye
And I was like, what does one look like?
00:41:03 Prof Ash Toye
Now you can just go on ChatGPT and just write a business plan really quick.
00:41:07 Prof Ash Toye
But then remember, you’re giving your ideas away.
00:41:09 Prof Ash Toye
So you have to be really careful.
00:41:10 Prof Ash Toye
Just ask it to do bananas or something like that.
00:41:12 Prof Ash Toye
But that’s what I do.
00:41:13 Prof Ash Toye
But anyway, I just did it for a test to see if it’s possible.
00:41:16 Prof Ash Toye
I wrote one in 30 seconds, right?
00:41:19 Prof Ash Toye
So they kept going on about it.
00:41:20 Prof Ash Toye
Nobody could really
00:41:21 Prof Ash Toye
explained to me what’s supposed to be in a business plan.
00:41:23 Prof Ash Toye
And there’s nothing online really other than some things saying, yeah, you need to put a few things in a business plan, but it’s no.
00:41:30 Prof Ash Toye
As an academic, you need an example.
00:41:32 Prof Ash Toye
Because you do for a grant, you know, you want somebody who’s been successful, so you can compare it.
00:41:37 Prof Ash Toye
But nobody gives you a business plan.
00:41:38 Prof Ash Toye
So I was like, right, well, so then you definitely need somebody to help you do a business plan.
00:41:43 Prof Ash Toye
So actually what we did in the end was, and then this was with the commercialization team, is we found some people who potentially could be CEOs.
00:41:50 Prof Ash Toye
We had a
00:41:51 Prof Ash Toye
friendly enterprise entrepreneur who suggested some names who had just been filtered for another company.
00:41:57 Prof Ash Toye
And Alistair Irvine, who’s our CEO now, was one of those names.
00:42:02 Prof Ash Toye
And we work with them to come up with a business plan and also work out where did Scarlett want to be and all this other stuff.
00:42:08 Prof Ash Toye
And in that process, we did our selection.
00:42:11 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s who can you work with?
00:42:12 Prof Michele Barbour
So we started with three.
00:42:16 Prof Ash Toye
One got jettisoned quite quick and not for personal reasons or anything, just
00:42:21 Prof Ash Toye
what happened.
00:42:21 Prof Ash Toye
And then the other two we worked with.
00:42:23 Prof Ash Toye
And then we basically went with Alistair.
00:42:25 Prof Michele Barbour
So it didn’t seem a hard choice.
00:42:28 Prof Ash Toye
No, I know it’s kind of what you’re looking for is I think somebody who’s as enthusiastic as you about doing it.
00:42:34 Prof Ash Toye
And that was part of the test as well.
00:42:36 Prof Ash Toye
So in my mind, I was looking for somebody who wanted to make this successful and take it to the clinic, who had a brain that was business and also was a negotiator because there was some IP that we needed to negotiate.
00:42:49 Prof Ash Toye
So we were looking for that.
00:42:50 Prof Ash Toye
And I kind of like
00:42:51 Prof Ash Toye
I had this tick box in my, like a list with tick boxes in my head and Alistair ticked all of those and I’m sure that was the same for Jan.
00:42:58 Prof Ash Toye
I don’t think we even discussed it, we just said.
00:43:01 Prof Jan Frayne
We discussed ones we didn’t like or didn’t want.
00:43:03 Prof Ash Toye
By any end.
00:43:04 Prof Jan Frayne
But also Alistair has, luckily for us, a scientific background as well.
00:43:08 Prof Jan Frayne
So he’s involved in discussing the research as well.
00:43:12 Prof Ash Toye
And he’s really good at saying no.
00:43:13 Prof Jan Frayne
Oh, yes.
00:43:14 Prof Michele Barbour
The enthusiasm and enough scientific backgrounds to be able to have proper scientific conversations, but the differentiation from you
00:43:21 Prof Michele Barbour
you and him or the CEO in general will be the more commercial mindsets, the more negotiation.
00:43:25 Prof Jan Frayne
And that’s kind of developed, isn’t it as well?
00:43:27 Prof Jan Frayne
I mean, it’s shifted.
00:43:29 Prof Michele Barbour
What about values?
00:43:30 Prof Michele Barbour
So sometimes when I’ve observed conflicts between the academic founders and other people they bring in is if they’re equally enthusiastic to get that innovation to the market, whatever that is, but if they have different underlying reasons for wanting that or different systems of values that inform that, I’ve seen that go quite spectacularly.
00:43:49 Prof Ash Toye
I think that’s where you go, except.
00:43:52 Prof Ash Toye
that in the end your baby might get sold or floated on the stock market or wherever, right?
00:43:56 Prof Ash Toye
So, or actually it might be bought up by somebody else and taken apart.
00:44:00 Prof Ash Toye
And I think…
00:44:01 Prof Ash Toye
You have to come to that quite quickly.
00:44:03 Prof Ash Toye
If not, you need to run the company yourself, right?
00:44:05 Prof Ash Toye
But then will you ever make a success of it?
00:44:08 Prof Ash Toye
I don’t know.
00:44:08 Prof Jan Frayne
I think that’d be difficult.
00:44:09 Prof Jan Frayne
But even if we lost Alistair, we had a different CEO and it could change, it’d be like, oh, you don’t want that particularly either.
00:44:16 Prof Ash Toye
There’s compromises that you make as you go along because you realise that it has to be a business, right?
00:44:22 Prof Ash Toye
So, and it can’t be academic and it’s continual that you make these compromises, but you come to an agreement and an understanding of those people.
00:44:30 Prof Ash Toye
And I have a respect
00:44:31 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, I think that as well.
00:44:33 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s all sort of stepped in that he does know a lot that we don’t know.
00:44:37 Prof Ash Toye
But I know that he will work for the good of the company rather than the good of me, right?
00:44:41 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, which is, well, that’s their responsibilities right there, but it is also, trust me when I say some people find that harder to get their heads around the house.
00:44:48 Prof Michele Barbour
You guys have, and that’s great.
00:44:49 Prof Ash Toye
But it’s not universe.
00:44:50 Prof Ash Toye
It took a bit of time.
00:44:52 Prof Ash Toye
And also when I think the thing that I found a little bit crushing at the start was when
00:44:58 Prof Ash Toye
I had a target group of like a disease that I wanted to do first, but it wasn’t big enough.
00:45:05 Prof Ash Toye
And there’s no money in it.
00:45:06 Prof Ash Toye
And then there’s the issue that actually, and I never knew this, but like if you start out with that really small group of people, you’ve got to be able to give them that drug, but then they’ve been treated by other people.
00:45:16 Prof Ash Toye
So like the chances of finding somebody who can take your drug is minimal.
00:45:20 Prof Ash Toye
But then if they do take it, you have to give them that drug for as long as like it becomes available until it becomes widely available, right?
00:45:27 Prof Ash Toye
But then if it’s not a very
00:45:28 Prof Ash Toye
big market, it’s never going to pay for itself, which is really crushing for that disease.
00:45:34 Prof Ash Toye
When I realized that, I was just like crushed about it.
00:45:37 Prof Ash Toye
But then that’s what made me think about other options.
00:45:40 Prof Michele Barbour
Other ways to get this underway and then address some of the more tricky ones.
00:45:43 Prof Jan Frayne
But the pattern started with that particular one.
00:45:46 Prof Michele Barbour
That was the start of the journey.
00:45:47 Prof Jan Frayne
It had a role.
00:45:48 Prof Michele Barbour
So tell me a bit more about your respective roles.
00:45:52 Prof Michele Barbour
with Scarlett now.
00:45:53 Prof Michele Barbour
So Ash, you didn’t want to be the CEO, but you were the one really pushing the formation of a company.
00:45:58 Prof Michele Barbour
Jan, you were the person he talked into coming along on the journey.
00:46:02 Prof Michele Barbour
So maybe we’ll start with you.
00:46:04 Prof Michele Barbour
Like what roles do you play and what do you get from it?
00:46:07 Prof Michele Barbour
What do you do?
00:46:07 Prof Jan Frayne
Got a consultancy.
00:46:08 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah.
00:46:09 Prof Jan Frayne
Agreement with them.
00:46:10 Prof Michele Barbour
And what does that amount to in real terms?
00:46:11 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you sort of provide like scientific advice?
00:46:14 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, at the moment we have a management meeting once a week.
00:46:17 Prof Jan Frayne
We have an R&D meeting we go to once a week.
00:46:20 Prof Jan Frayne
We feed into the science, we go through the data.
00:46:22 Prof Jan Frayne
So very much, it’s not so unlike being in my academic land.
00:46:26 Prof Michele Barbour
I think it sounds like a research group meeting.
00:46:28 Prof Michele Barbour
So is it like that, but then there are some different boundary conditions because this is a company, not a research group.
00:46:33 Prof Michele Barbour
Well, does it actually feel quite similar?
00:46:35 Prof Jan Frayne
At the moment, the R&D meetings seem quite similar sort of thing.
00:46:37 Prof Jan Frayne
It is really sort of the biggest thing is the conflict of interest between the two and keeping your research, because we are in the same area here, but wanting to feed into the company.
00:46:46 Prof Jan Frayne
And then I suppose the other meetings, more on the management side, are the ones that are more alien, really.
00:46:53 Prof Jan Frayne
There’s a lot of fundraising sort of thing.
00:46:55 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you get involved with that fundraising?
00:46:57 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:46:58 Prof Jan Frayne
Alistair is also hugely leading.
00:47:01 Prof Jan Frayne
on this, fortunately.
00:47:02 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s fun at the moment.
00:47:03 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s good fun, and I suppose that’s what drives it.
00:47:06 Prof Jan Frayne
And we know, I mean, two people from 2 postdocs from my lab have joined, 2 postdocs from Ash’s lab have joined, and we’ve had new people.
00:47:13 Prof Jan Frayne
So we know the people down there.
00:47:14 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s a bit of an extension of what we were before, really.
00:47:17 Prof Jan Frayne
And as it’s close by in Bristol, you know, it’s not like it’s far away to go there, really.
00:47:22 Prof Ash Toye
And over time, it becomes like you’re more advising.
00:47:27 Prof Ash Toye
So initially, you’re driving because there’s nobody, right?
00:47:29 Prof Ash Toye
So you’re starting from nothing.
00:47:31 Prof Ash Toye
You’ve got to pick the people, but if you’ve already had some of them in your lab, then great.
00:47:35 Prof Ash Toye
If you know this, you’ve.
00:47:36 Prof Jan Frayne
Done a three-year interview, and they have the experience.
00:47:39 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, doing what we need to do.
00:47:40 Prof Ash Toye
And so you can trust them to do stuff, and if they say they’re going to do it, they’ll do it.
00:47:43 Prof Michele Barbour
And you know the things that they haven’t got experience of, so well, you’ll need to allow extra time for upskilling and so on.
00:47:48 Prof Ash Toye
One of the key things you have, like Jan mentioned, the conflict of interest, you have to really, really be aware of it.
00:47:54 Prof Ash Toye
And it’s so easy to just, you could just keep handing your company stuff.
00:47:58 Prof Ash Toye
So at some point, some elements of knowledge transfer occurs, but then you’ve got to have
00:48:01 Prof Ash Toye
You have to wear hats, right?
00:48:03 Prof Ash Toye
So I’m like, which hats am I wearing today?
00:48:06 Prof Ash Toye
And you have to be challenged by your head of school and other people.
00:48:10 Prof Ash Toye
Are you thinking from your company side of things or are you thinking from an academic side of things?
00:48:15 Prof Ash Toye
And so, yeah.
00:48:17 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s your similar arrangement.
00:48:18 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you act as a sort of consultant?
00:48:21 Prof Ash Toye
So we’re both directors for the company.
00:48:23 Prof Ash Toye
We’ve been a part of the management side of things.
00:48:25 Prof Ash Toye
And I imagine over time, we’ll become less and less involved in that side.
00:48:30 Prof Ash Toye
We’ll almost certainly be involved in
00:48:32 Prof Ash Toye
advising the science.
00:48:33 Prof Ash Toye
It’s kind of weird because I didn’t, when I first it out, I didn’t know how long the relationship would occur.
00:48:40 Prof Ash Toye
I wanted it.
00:48:40 Prof Ash Toye
Like, you want to be involved all the time, right?
00:48:42 Prof Ash Toye
But realistically, you can’t because you’ve got a job here and you want to get back into that and do other exciting things as well, right?
00:48:49 Prof Ash Toye
So kind of get in a balance between the two things.
00:48:52 Prof Ash Toye
You do a lot of outside work, like so outside the normal academic job, which has no hours when.
00:48:58 Prof Michele Barbour
You think about it.
00:48:59 Prof Ash Toye
Nobody ever tells you that.
00:49:00 Prof Ash Toye
There’s not a fairly
00:49:01 Prof Ash Toye
five-hour week is way beyond that sometimes, right?
00:49:04 Prof Ash Toye
Especially for you.
00:49:06 Prof Ash Toye
Channel will work many hours.
00:49:08 Prof Jan Frayne
I can’t imagine letting go of the company or not being involved.
00:49:11 Prof Jan Frayne
Because it is like a little bit.
00:49:12 Prof Jan Frayne
I won’t even think about that actually.
00:49:20 Prof Michele Barbour
So one of the things I said earlier on, I was keen to explore and we started it, is the fact that you’re academic co-founders.
00:49:26 Prof Michele Barbour
Your research seems to be quite, in adjacent areas, quite closely aligned.
00:49:31 Prof Michele Barbour
You both have bags of enthusiasm, bags of thoughts on this.
00:49:34 Prof Michele Barbour
What is your relationship?
00:49:36 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you always agree?
00:49:37 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you challenge each other?
00:49:39 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you take each other out in discussion?
00:49:41 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you sort of…
00:49:41 Prof Ash Toye
Well, we’re both wrong sometimes.
00:49:42 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you joust in these research meetings in the company?
00:49:45 Prof Michele Barbour
Like, how does that work?
00:49:46 Prof Jan Frayne
I think we bounce off each other, but we definitely disagree.
00:49:51 Prof Jan Frayne
Ash has the most mad ideas you’ve ever come across a lot of the time.
00:49:53 Prof Jan Frayne
He has really blue science sort of ideas.
00:49:56 Prof Jan Frayne
But also, it’s wonderful because I can go with something I’m not sure about and talk to Ash about it.
00:50:03 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s that counterweight a little bit when he’s got a mad idea that you think is too mad for mad.
00:50:08 Prof Jan Frayne
But yeah, but my back, it’s completely got my back completely.
00:50:12 Prof Jan Frayne
So it’s always like, I know whatever it is, I can phone Asha, talk about it.
00:50:15 Prof Jan Frayne
If I’m worried about something, I can go and talk to him.
00:50:17 Prof Jan Frayne
If I don’t understand something, I can go and talk to him.
00:50:20 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s having that nice.
00:50:22 Prof Ash Toye
It’s kind of like, and Jan is a real people person as well, right?
00:50:26 Prof Ash Toye
And I lean on that.
00:50:28 Prof Ash Toye
quite a lot because I’m just excited about lots of things.
00:50:31 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s kind of like sometimes you need somebody like you’re a realist as well.
00:50:35 Prof Ash Toye
I think that’s really like maybe more touching the ground.
00:50:38 Prof Jan Frayne
Definitely realist compared to you.
00:50:39 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah.
00:50:41 Prof Ash Toye
I’d rather not be confined.
00:50:42 Prof Ash Toye
So I would try and do things that some people might think are impossible, but I’m like 1/2 glass full rather than that.
00:50:49 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, but that’s where the ideas then come from, don’t they?
00:50:52 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, but then sometimes it doesn’t work and I’m wrong, right?
00:50:54 Prof Ash Toye
But then you’ve learned something as you go along.
00:50:55 Prof Ash Toye
I think that’s part of the excitement.
00:50:57 Prof Michele Barbour
And you both have that willingness, it seems to me, to put those ideas out there to each other, which can be exposing.
00:51:03 Prof Michele Barbour
If you’ve got an idea and you think, I don’t know if this is going to work.
00:51:06 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, it doesn’t feel like that though.
00:51:08 Prof Jan Frayne
I mean, maybe like with somebody else, it would.
00:51:10 Prof Jan Frayne
I could feel inadequate if I suppose if I came up with a mad idea.
00:51:13 Prof Ash Toye
All ideas are good ideas.
00:51:15 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, no, that it does, yeah, we don’t have to feel, so I wouldn’t.
00:51:17 Prof Jan Frayne
So, yes, maybe that is a different relationship to other colleagues.
00:51:20 Prof Ash Toye
But I should say as well, because there are some researcher co-founders in Scala as well, and I guess they’re more realist.
00:51:28 Prof Ash Toye
So they quite, at least one of them is, and so quite often used to counterbalance my mad ideas.
00:51:33 Prof Jan Frayne
Despite branding, yeah.
00:51:35 Prof Jan Frayne
But they’re great as well.
00:51:36 Prof Jan Frayne
So I think we’ve all worked together for a while, so we’re all really good friends.
00:51:40 Prof Ash Toye
And it makes it fun.
00:51:41 Prof Jan Frayne
Which is nice, yeah.
00:51:42 Prof Michele Barbour
You mentioned, if I understood you right, Jan, you do your university research group meetings jointly as well.
00:51:46 Prof Michele Barbour
Is that what you said?
00:51:47 Prof Michele Barbour
That strikes me, it’s quite an important thing to model to your PGRs and your postdocs, because if you’re able to challenge each other or pull each other down or push each other up in terms of like, that’s a silly idea.
00:51:57 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, that’s a brilliant idea, whatever it might be.
00:51:59 Prof Michele Barbour
You’re modelling that kind of collaborative, trusting, be able to say what you like and not be worried if somebody thinks it’s silly.
00:52:07 Prof Michele Barbour
You’re showing that, you’re living that, rather than saying to them, you should do this, you’re literally doing it in front of them every week.
00:52:12 Prof Michele Barbour
And that, I think, is quite powerful.
00:52:13 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s not something that would have happened when we were PGRs, I don’t say.
00:52:16 Prof Ash Toye
It’s kind of respecting somebody else’s idea.
00:52:19 Prof Ash Toye
I think hopefully most academics would respect somebody’s coming.
00:52:23 Prof Ash Toye
Like, they might be wrong, but then you kind of could just say, let’s think about that a bit more.
00:52:26 Prof Ash Toye
You could do it in a way that’s
00:52:28 Prof Ash Toye
It’s not disruptive.
00:52:29 Prof Ash Toye
So there’s some that mean academics around, right?
00:52:31 Prof Ash Toye
I’ve seen.
00:52:32 Prof Michele Barbour
Well, there’s mean of every profession, aren’t there?
00:52:34 Prof Michele Barbour
But I suppose what I’m saying is I think we’d all we’d all agree with the principle, but modelling it week in, week out in front of your research group is something that not as many people would do.
00:52:44 Prof Michele Barbour
They might say, this is what we should do, but actually literally doing it live is quite powerful.
00:52:49 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, but it’s all quite happy and jolly.
00:52:52 Prof Ash Toye
I guess it’s not a conscious thing.
00:52:53 Prof Ash Toye
It’s kind of just actually, if you do this job on your own, it’s kind of it could be.
00:52:57 Prof Ash Toye
you kind and lonely, right?
00:52:59 Prof Ash Toye
Even though you’ve got people working around you and they’re doing your favorite thing and there’s nothing better than somebody coming in and going, look, I’ve got this and nobody’s ever seen that ever, right?
00:53:07 Prof Ash Toye
But then actually if you can share it with somebody and then also come up with new ideas together and go off in new directions that maybe you never thought of because there’s two of you, then it opens up a vista, right?
00:53:18 Prof Michele Barbour
And I think, I shouldn’t lead the witness, but I think this is kind of what I’m trying to drive at is from a sort of, let’s call it a research culture point of view, the traditional model is more of the
00:53:28 Prof Michele Barbour
group lead and their people and then down the corridor there’s another group lead and their people.
00:53:32 Prof Michele Barbour
And I know that’s not always how it happens, but going back, that was certainly the more common model.
00:53:37 Prof Michele Barbour
By modelling that partnership, discussing, having ideas, just being really open, you’re setting that as the norm for the next generation of researchers that are coming through.
00:53:49 Prof Michele Barbour
Jan’s idea might be something that one of Ash’s students works on or vice versa, that openness, that sharing are not competitive with one another, but rather collaborative.
00:53:56 Prof Jan Frayne
It also increases our productivity.
00:53:58 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, and then you get instant feedback, right?
00:54:02 Prof Ash Toye
So, whereas you might have worked on something for ages, when actually, if you just get the idea out there, but actually in the building, we’re not next to each other.
00:54:10 Prof Ash Toye
Like, it would make sense for us both to be in the same different floors.
00:54:13 Prof Ash Toye
We’re actually on different floors.
00:54:15 Prof Jan Frayne
So, it’ll often be somebody in the lab, which is on Ash’s lab, I think, really, but it’s great for them because they’ve got an extended team of people, essentially.
00:54:23 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s not just one in my lab, one in Ash’s lab.
00:54:26 Prof Jan Frayne
They kind of know if they want something.
00:54:28 Prof Jan Frayne
If we run out of something, we run on down.
00:54:30 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah.
00:54:31 Prof Jan Frayne
But it’s a norm to them as well, though.
00:54:33 Prof Michele Barbour
And that’s exactly what I’m saying, because they will then perpetuate that if they have their own research groups going forward, I would hope.
00:54:38 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:54:39 Prof Ash Toye
But otherwise it’s kind of lonely, like I said, I think.
00:54:41 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s kind of isolating.
00:54:44 Prof Michele Barbour
For sure.
00:54:44 Prof Michele Barbour
Funding a small and growing company is challenging for the best of times.
00:54:49 Prof Michele Barbour
But you’re a wet lab company, you’re a biologics company, I guess.
00:54:53 Prof Michele Barbour
So that’s one of the hardest challenges because it costs a lot of money.
00:54:57 Prof Michele Barbour
How have you funded the company to date and how have you found it?
00:55:02 Prof Ash Toye
So when we set out, we had that first instance where we were potentially going to get a lot of money.
00:55:08 Prof Ash Toye
And that’s the gutting
00:55:09 Prof Ash Toye
interesting thing, right?
00:55:09 Prof Ash Toye
When you go from a lot of money on the table to less money.
00:55:12 Prof Ash Toye
But actually what happened was when you go through that process, you realize what you can do with kind of a certain amount of money, how much progress you can.
00:55:20 Prof Ash Toye
Essentially, you have to get to an inflection point, right?
00:55:22 Prof Ash Toye
That’s what every investor wants you to hear.
00:55:25 Prof Ash Toye
And as you go along, this is why the business plan sometimes gets ripped up a little bit.
00:55:28 Prof Ash Toye
But actually, to be honest, ours hasn’t yet so far.
00:55:31 Prof Ash Toye
Probably because I didn’t write it.
00:55:33 Prof Ash Toye
But yeah, I inputted into it, but I didn’t write it.
00:55:36 Prof Ash Toye
But essentially, you have to kind of think, what can you
00:55:39 Prof Ash Toye
Get the minimum done, but gets you to the closest to an inflection point, and then that’s what the investors buy into, and so I worked out that we needed about 2 million pounds, probably get away with 1 1/2.
00:55:51 Prof Ash Toye
But if somebody had given me quarter of a million, I would have still set up the company.
00:55:54 Prof Ash Toye
But you wouldn’t have managed to do, you can’t do any therapeutics with quarter of a million.
00:55:59 Prof Ash Toye
Absolutely.
00:55:59 Prof Ash Toye
So you have to be realistic.
00:56:00 Prof Ash Toye
So I thought 2 million would give us probably a runway of a year and a half to two years.
00:56:05 Prof Ash Toye
And we also had a little bit of income around the cell lines as well.
00:56:08 Prof Ash Toye
So there was a little bit of cash coming in.
00:56:10 Prof Ash Toye
So initially we got investment from Science Creates Ventures and then also Jonathan Milner’s vehicle, which is called Melwind.
00:56:17 Prof Ash Toye
And then I guess the whole process, what I didn’t realize is you’re instantly
00:56:21 Prof Ash Toye
now thinking, where’s your next lot of money coming from, which I didn’t realise.
00:56:25 Prof Ash Toye
It was like, oh, it’s like when you get a grant at eczema, you’re like, yay, I’ve got, especially if it’s a five-year grant, you can like just go.
00:56:32 Prof Jan Frayne
So yes, we got the money and initially we didn’t have a premises.
00:56:36 Prof Jan Frayne
So we were sort of doing the work in our labs and that is really expensive.
00:56:41 Prof Jan Frayne
Even though you managed to agree not to go in more than 100% sort of overhead, so much of the money was actually just disappearing.
00:56:49 Prof Jan Frayne
And by moving out to actually…
00:56:51 Prof Ash Toye
Actually, we become more credible when you move out, which you don’t realise.
00:56:55 Prof Michele Barbour
I think so.
00:56:56 Prof Michele Barbour
And then the provision of lab space for small but growing companies in Bristol is so different now than it was 5 and 10 years ago.
00:57:03 Prof Ash Toye
That was another bitter for me when I was thinking about it.
00:57:06 Prof Ash Toye
Where do I go?
00:57:07 Prof Ash Toye
Where do you go?
00:57:08 Prof Ash Toye
Actually now with what Science Creates and other like SET Squared and Engine Shed, there’s lots of places.
00:57:13 Prof Jan Frayne
But the fact we could stay in Bristol as well.
00:57:15 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, which is practical for you, but also from my point of view, I want to keep our small companies in Bristol.
00:57:20 Prof Michele Barbour
They’re reporting our.
00:57:21 Prof Michele Barbour
graduates and collaborating with our researchers.
00:57:24 Prof Ash Toye
But it’s also close to where your labs are, right?
00:57:26 Prof Ash Toye
So some other developments might then feed in, assuming there’s no conflict of interest or anything, but essentially realized that we would save a lot of money just going out into science creates incubators, but there are other places you could go.
00:57:40 Prof Ash Toye
But for us, it was perfect location.
00:57:42 Prof Ash Toye
They were building it at the time, and then we had to move in.
00:57:45 Prof Ash Toye
We bought all the equipment, and that was still way cheaper than working in the university, which you never really think about.
00:57:51 Prof Ash Toye
So
00:57:51 Prof Ash Toye
And that was a real moment where it all crystallized.
00:57:54 Prof Ash Toye
And then in, like I was saying, suddenly you realize you’ve got to keep raising.
00:57:58 Prof Ash Toye
You need to have conversation.
00:57:59 Prof Ash Toye
Initially, it’s conversation with VCs to gauge interest.
00:58:02 Prof Ash Toye
And then it’s kind of like you’re up against a situation where actually a lot of VCs don’t have any money, which has been a bit of a shock.
00:58:09 Prof Michele Barbour
So they could be as interested as their life.
00:58:10 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, so they’re like, oh, we haven’t got the money at the moment or the timing’s wrong or the tax timing is wrong, which I never realized.
00:58:18 Prof Ash Toye
So as we’ve gone along,
00:58:20 Prof Ash Toye
I’ve realized how complicated it is, but you collect a group of interested VCs and then you essentially then you decide on the next part of your business plan, what inflection points you’re going to.
00:58:31 Prof Ash Toye
And then it’s like, how much do you need to raise?
00:58:33 Prof Ash Toye
And you kind of scale it depending on the interest and what’s potentially possible.
00:58:38 Prof Ash Toye
So you have a minimum and currently was, oh, we’re funded with like 2 million.
00:58:43 Prof Ash Toye
We had a bit of an investment with Innovate Grants and a joint investment with Innovate Grant with Investor.
00:58:49 Prof Ash Toye
And then going forward,
00:58:50 Prof Ash Toye
Now we’re looking at 3 to 5 million investments at the next stage.
00:58:55 Prof Ash Toye
And then beyond that, it’s probably, I think we’re looking for like 20 million or something like that.
00:59:00 Prof Ash Toye
So when you’re at the series A, it’s at 20 to 30 million.
00:59:04 Prof Michele Barbour
It does feel like a bit of a treadmill sometimes, doesn’t it?
00:59:05 Prof Michele Barbour
Always looking at the next chance of investment.
00:59:08 Prof Ash Toye
And it’s like shocking when you talk to investors and they can say something to your face and then you find out like you think they’re really interested.
00:59:15 Prof Ash Toye
And it’s crushing later on that actually that’s the face.
00:59:20 Prof Michele Barbour
Honest and preferably reasoned no is so much better than a polite maybe, which they don’t actually.
00:59:27 Prof Ash Toye
Any investor whoever listens to this, just be really honest straight away, don’t waste people’s time, but also give feedback.
00:59:33 Prof Michele Barbour
Absolutely no.
00:59:34 Prof Ash Toye
Because of course.
00:59:34 Prof Ash Toye
If you’re a good investor, if you give feedback, you can adjust.
00:59:38 Prof Michele Barbour
Exactly.
00:59:39 Prof Michele Barbour
Or you can target a different type of investor if it’s no because, and it’s a reason that it’s not surmountable for that type of investor.
00:59:44 Prof Ash Toye
So my favorite thing is, I hate to know, obviously anybody, everybody hates knows, but if you get an investor who’s
00:59:50 Prof Ash Toye
If they’re a really good investor, they’ll say no, but I know this group interested in this and they have some funding and they should introduce you to somebody.
00:59:57 Prof Ash Toye
If they’re a good investor, that’s what they should do.
00:59:59 Prof Ash Toye
They should facilitate, right?
01:00:01 Prof Ash Toye
So that’s all this stuff is kind of fascinating because it’s not what we see on the academic side because you just apply for grants.
01:00:07 Prof Ash Toye
You never, but there’s a process in grants, right?
01:00:09 Prof Ash Toye
Reviewers and.
01:00:11 Prof Ash Toye
panels and everything else, but this is completely different.
01:00:13 Prof Michele Barbour
Actually, I’d argue the academic process is quite a lot more transparent.
01:00:17 Prof Michele Barbour
You know, they say this would be the process and this would be the process.
01:00:19 Prof Michele Barbour
You can look up who’s on the panel, so it’s easier to navigate.
01:00:22 Prof Jan Frayne
And also a lot of the investors come across don’t know any about science, you know, so you’re trying to present something to people who don’t really, yeah, are not in that area.
01:00:31 Prof Jan Frayne
And one thing we did learn is when you’re sort of sending something to an investor, make sure it’s really short and really brief, because they’ve got so many coming in, they’re not going to.
01:00:39 Prof Ash Toye
Turn a page over.
01:00:41 Prof Michele Barbour
It needs to really grasp it.
01:00:43 Prof Michele Barbour
But that’s a really nice segue though, because there’s an importance there about the clarity and simplicity of your message.
01:00:48 Prof Michele Barbour
And you mentioned earlier, it’s nice to work on blood and blood cells because literally everybody knows what they are.
01:00:53 Prof Michele Barbour
Everyone’s got them.
01:00:54 Prof Michele Barbour
Has the company or just as yourselves been involved in quite a lot of public events, you’ve been interviewed in the press, you’ve spoken to a general audience, not an academic audience.
01:01:04 Prof Michele Barbour
Is that something that you kind of set out to do with an agenda?
01:01:07 Prof Michele Barbour
I want to do this to help my company succeed, to help my research, or is that something you just enjoy doing?
01:01:11 Prof Michele Barbour
doing it and do it for the fun of it.
01:01:12 Prof Jan Frayne
I particularly for either of those two reasons initially.
01:01:15 Prof Jan Frayne
It was just to share with people because you’re excited about it.
01:01:18 Prof Jan Frayne
You want to share it with other people actually.
01:01:20 Prof Jan Frayne
And as I said, because it’s blood, it’s not a difficult thing for people to understand at different levels really.
01:01:26 Prof Jan Frayne
So I think it’s just the fun of it.
01:01:28 Prof Jan Frayne
as much as anything else, yeah.
01:01:30 Prof Ash Toye
And to tell people how cool it is.
01:01:32 Prof Ash Toye
Not the company side of things, just the idea of growing blood and potentially altering it and manipulating it.
01:01:38 Prof Jan Frayne
And the fun of research.
01:01:39 Prof Ash Toye
And actually when synthetic biology came out, because that’s where a lot of the research that went into Scarlet came from, is the investment the government made in synthetic biology, which is now called engineering biology.
01:01:49 Prof Ash Toye
there was a worry that the public wouldn’t trust it.
01:01:52 Prof Ash Toye
And so actually we did active, we did active engagement to try and explain what we’re trying to do and the reasons.
01:01:59 Prof Ash Toye
And I think actually when you’re talking about therapeutics, I think people just get it.
01:02:02 Prof Ash Toye
That’s for the common good.
01:02:04 Prof Ash Toye
And I remember asking like a group of public people, like random ages, random people, and I was like, what do you think?
01:02:11 Prof Ash Toye
They were like, we trust you to do the right thing, which actually was really fascinating.
01:02:14 Prof Michele Barbour
Wow.
01:02:16 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s not the evil scientists in the corner.
01:02:18 Prof Ash Toye
It was more that they.
01:02:19 Prof Ash Toye
trust that you have ethics and values, which mean that you’re trying to do the right thing for people.
01:02:24 Prof Jan Frayne
We do have, as part of the BTIU, there was a patient, people attending meetings.
01:02:30 Prof Jan Frayne
They’ve been great.
01:02:30 Prof Jan Frayne
I mean, so they come along because they’ve got the disease that maybe you’re trying to make the blood for.
01:02:34 Prof Jan Frayne
And they’re really interested and really keen.
01:02:36 Prof Jan Frayne
So in some ways, explaining it to them and getting them to understand has been fantastic because you know you’re getting it over.
01:02:42 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, and the questions they ask, you can then hone how you explain it to try and answer those questions.
01:02:47 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, absolutely.
01:02:48 Prof Ash Toye
a public advisory group that we have that’s linked to part of the unit that we have, which is called the BTIU.
01:02:54 Prof Ash Toye
But one of the hard things is, because it sounds so cool, but everything takes time, right?
01:02:59 Prof Ash Toye
So it’s also trying.
01:03:01 Prof Ash Toye
So the worry with the media and interaction with media especially is that you say we can grow blood, but obviously there’s a load of processes to go through before we can actually go into people.
01:03:12 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah,
01:03:12 Prof Ash Toye
But they want to just say we don’t need blood from people anymore, right?
01:03:16 Prof Ash Toye
But that’s not true.
01:03:17 Prof Ash Toye
Like absolutely go and donate as much as you can because it’s needed.
01:03:21 Prof Ash Toye
And actually you get a real, I think I donate blood and it’s nowadays you get a text telling you that actually this blood went into a baby or this blood went to somebody else or your plasma was used.
01:03:32 Prof Ash Toye
And so you get told where it gets utilized.
01:03:34 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s a really good my experience.
01:03:36 Prof Ash Toye
I love that.
01:03:36 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, so I think it really helped.
01:03:38 Prof Ash Toye
But there’s an altruistic, I think British people are quite altruistic and they want to help out.
01:03:44 Prof Ash Toye
That’s what amazed me when we set out to do the clinical trial for Restore.
01:03:47 Prof Ash Toye
I was like, will we convince people to volunteer to take this blood?
01:03:52 Prof Ash Toye
When we injected the first two people, originally volunteers, one was called Yvonne, and she came onto the BBC with me and I talked to her and I had a chance to ask her why she did it and things like that.
01:04:04 Prof Ash Toye
And that was really fascinating.
01:04:05 Prof Ash Toye
She had suffered breast cancer and she got treated.
01:04:09 Prof Ash Toye
and she wanted to give something back.
01:04:11 Prof Ash Toye
So that’s her motivation.
01:04:13 Prof Ash Toye
And that’s just one person and there’s probably a lot of stories within the group of people.
01:04:19 Prof Michele Barbour
I have a final question for you, each of you or sort of cluster of questions.
01:04:22 Prof Michele Barbour
I started by asking you, where did you come from?
01:04:24 Prof Michele Barbour
What did you do before this?
01:04:25 Prof Michele Barbour
And you both started at your undergraduate days.
01:04:27 Prof Michele Barbour
If that Jan could sort of have a little window through time and see what you’re doing now, what would she think?
01:04:33 Prof Michele Barbour
What would she say?
01:04:34 Prof Jan Frayne
She would be very, very surprised, actually, yes.
01:04:37 Prof Jan Frayne
This will come from a sort
01:04:39 Prof Jan Frayne
of a maybe not a classical academic background as well.
01:04:43 Prof Jan Frayne
And the school I went to doesn’t actually exist anymore because it wasn’t the greatest school.
01:04:48 Prof Jan Frayne
So yes, I would have been very surprised.
01:04:50 Prof Jan Frayne
But I think I just, my whole life has just been taking opportunities.
01:04:53 Prof Jan Frayne
I’ve not planned my life.
01:04:54 Prof Jan Frayne
I’ve not planned to go to this research lab or work my way through.
01:04:58 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s been very much, this is what I fancy doing at this moment, so I’ll apply for these jobs and go through.
01:05:04 Prof Jan Frayne
So yes, it’s
01:05:05 Prof Jan Frayne
I couldn’t talk to an undergraduate and say, This is how you plan your career.
01:05:08 Prof Jan Frayne
It’s been very much like…
01:05:09 Prof Michele Barbour
You say that they’re probably fibbing anyway, to be perfectly honest.
01:05:12 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah.
01:05:12 Prof Jan Frayne
So it’s been very much, oh, this is an opportunity.
01:05:14 Prof Jan Frayne
I’ll go with that and throw myself into it.
01:05:17 Prof Michele Barbour
So how would I guess 18, 20 year old Jan feel about you modelling your career like that?
01:05:21 Prof Michele Barbour
Would you find that surprising?
01:05:22 Prof Michele Barbour
Or would that sound…
01:05:23 Prof Jan Frayne
Wouldn’t have understood how to model a career like that at all, really, or even known the possibilities, really.
01:05:29 Prof Jan Frayne
And I think that’s an important one for school pupils in maybe less privileged areas.
01:05:35 Prof Jan Frayne
to know that what the opportunities are and that they can do it.
01:05:38 Prof Jan Frayne
you can do it.
01:05:39 Prof Jan Frayne
You don’t have to.
01:05:40 Prof Michele Barbour
You don’t necessarily need a plan.
01:05:41 Prof Jan Frayne
You don’t need to have a plan.
01:05:42 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s great.
01:05:43 Prof Michele Barbour
You don’t have to.
01:05:43 Prof Jan Frayne
Yeah, your plan will change though.
01:05:44 Prof Jan Frayne
I think if you have too strict a plan and it goes wrong, it can really knock you back.
01:05:49 Prof Jan Frayne
So I think just being open to the opportunities and taking them and to believe you can do it as much as the next person.
01:05:55 Prof Michele Barbour
And Ash, same question to you, whether it’s schoolboy Ash in South Wales, whether it’s undergraduate Ash here in Bristol.
01:06:00 Prof Ash Toye
I think they’d look and go, I can’t believe he got to there, right?
01:06:03 Prof Ash Toye
So hopefully they’d be really, like I would be really proud if it was me.
01:06:07 Prof Ash Toye
But also I think they’d be like, how did you get to that?
01:06:11 Prof Ash Toye
point from just going to university and then going on.
01:06:14 Prof Ash Toye
And with Jan, it’s just going from opportunity to opportunity and having the drive to do it.
01:06:19 Prof Ash Toye
And I think the key thing is to take your risks.
01:06:22 Prof Ash Toye
And I think that’s the same for entrepreneurship as well, is you have to take risks with science to do new things and try things out.
01:06:28 Prof Ash Toye
But also you need the right people around you.
01:06:31 Prof Ash Toye
So academics don’t do this on their own, right?
01:06:33 Prof Ash Toye
Well, actually what I realized was I’m a zookeeper.
01:06:37 Prof Ash Toye
So I’m in the zoo and all these people come in, all these amazing
01:06:41 Prof Ash Toye
different people with different abilities and they’ve all got different qualities.
01:06:45 Prof Ash Toye
And my job is to corral them and get useful things out of them.
01:06:50 Prof Ash Toye
And because I’ve always wondered, like, I actually am quite intimidated at how amazingly smart people are when they come to university and they’re even better and better as you go on.
01:06:59 Prof Ash Toye
So my job is to see what somebody could do, know that they could be pushed a bit more and encouraged and enthusiasm, and then they’ll get to something that they never thought they’d reach.
01:07:10 Prof Michele Barbour
Brilliant.
01:07:11 Prof Ash Toye
And then I think that’s kind of what happened to me, right?
01:07:14 Prof Ash Toye
So like I went from, not great background, like I was fine, but it was never privileged.
01:07:21 Prof Ash Toye
And now I guess I’m middle class.
01:07:23 Prof Ash Toye
I don’t know what I am, but I’ve come from somewhere and gone somewhere and I’m proud of my roots, but I’m also now a Bristolian because I’ve been here for 34 years or something.
01:07:36 Prof Michele Barbour
And with your Scarlet journey, you know, it’s been not always what you initially planned.
01:07:40 Prof Michele Barbour
You’ve had setbacks.
01:07:41 Prof Michele Barbour
You’ve had challenges, but all said and done, would you do it again?
01:07:44 Prof Ash Toye
Oh yeah, definitely.
01:07:45 Prof Ash Toye
Instantly.
01:07:46 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah, it’s good fun.
01:07:47 Prof Ash Toye
So I am going to do it again.
01:07:49 Prof Ash Toye
So probably I’ve got, I’ve always jokingly said I’ve got three companies in me.
01:07:54 Prof Michele Barbour
Okay.
01:07:54 Prof Ash Toye
Because that’s as far as my brain will stretch.
01:07:56 Prof Ash Toye
But like there is one that’s been set up in Berlin and that’s on a white blood cell company.
01:08:02 Prof Ash Toye
And that idea has not been taken by me.
01:08:05 Prof Ash Toye
The idea was formed together with another academic and that academic is set up in Berlin and they’re going to run
01:08:11 Prof Ash Toye
With it, with my blessing, because I realized I couldn’t do everything, and I will help wherever I can, and then I think I’ve got another one in me, which we’re sort of exploring at the moment, and this is why I’ve got my Enterprise Fellowship, because…
01:08:24 Prof Ash Toye
I’m kind of like, I’ve got a new thing that I want to kind of explore over the next year or so.
01:08:29 Prof Michele Barbour
Fantastic.
01:08:30 Prof Michele Barbour
Exciting.
01:08:30 Prof Michele Barbour
We don’t have a huge portfolio of serial entrepreneurs in our academic staff base.
01:08:36 Prof Michele Barbour
So I’m looking forward to utilizing you as my poster child in the year.
01:08:40 Prof Ash Toye
I’m not trying to be serial.
01:08:41 Prof Ash Toye
Like, just kind of like one thing leads to the next thing, right?
01:08:43 Prof Ash Toye
So, and now I know, yeah, well, you kind of know the process.
01:08:49 Prof Ash Toye
Once you know the process, so one thing is,
01:08:52 Prof Ash Toye
seek out people who’ve done this before to find out what, so that I’ve really been blessed by the people around us, this ecosystem is in Bristol, because you can go and find other finders and ask them questions.
01:09:03 Prof Ash Toye
And most people will tell you, know, they might not tell you all their secrets, but they will give you advice.
01:09:07 Prof Ash Toye
And we did that right.
01:09:08 Prof Ash Toye
We sought that out.
01:09:09 Prof Ash Toye
And my job now is to help other people do that as well is what I see.
01:09:13 Prof Ash Toye
And I’m sure Jen would see the same if somebody came and asked if you had a student asked or if it’s another academic.
01:09:19 Prof Ash Toye
So come and see us if you want to have a chat about it.
01:09:22 Prof Jan Frayne
The whole thing does seem more accessible now than at the beginning.
01:09:25 Prof Ash Toye
Yeah.
01:09:26 Prof Michele Barbour
I love that.
01:09:26 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s a good call to action.
01:09:27 Prof Michele Barbour
I hope you don’t get inundated.
01:09:28 Prof Michele Barbour
Thank you both so much, Professor Jan Frank, First Rash Toy.
01:09:31 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you.
01:09:33 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m really grateful for your time.
01:09:34 Prof Ash Toye
Thank you.
01:09:34 Prof Ash Toye
It’s been a joy.
01:09:35 Prof Ash Toye
Thank you.
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