DR GREG WINTER

TUESDAY 19 NOVEMBER 2002

  580. Do you feel it has been a great success for you personally?
  (Dr Winter) By any absolute standards it is a success. I was looking at the Nottingham Business School report which was referred to by the last gentleman, and the total income attained by all UK universities by their licensing activities last year—so that does not include the Medical Research Council—was £16 million. In the same year we made £18 million from two patents. In fact that is most of the Medical Research Council income from this kind of source, it is based on those two patents. In that sense it has been a success. But when you think about it personally, you think about the wear and tear on your life, your high blood pressure, your stress, your ulcer, it has been a mixed blessing. I have enough money to be comfortable and people think I am quite good at doing this kind of thing (which is all very nice), but actually I think a lot of things we could have done better and I think it takes a tremendous wear and tear on you.

  581. What are the factors that you believe led to this great success?
  (Dr Winter) I would say limited success. I think the first is the field. So if we look at the field I think the choice of antibodies was decisive. When we started it we did not actually know that therapeutic antibodies were going to be all the rage in the year 2000. This was 1984 when I was doing this work, so I think it was quite perceptive. On the other hand, I suppose we all knew I was working with César Milstein who had developed the original mouse monoclonal antibodies and we just generally knew that one day they were going to come good. We did not know whether it was going to be five years or 20 years or whatever, but we knew that one day it would come good. Antibodies are so flexible, they are part of a natural defence mechanism, you can always make an antibody to an antigen; it is just such a wonderful molecule that if you can solve the problems of it being human then in fact it was going to be great for certain fields. I think the most important thing was the lucky choice of the field, but perhaps it was somewhat of an informed choice. The second was the science. Again, I did not come to this from a kind of conventional point of view. I came to it with a fresh mind from another discipline. I was interested in early evolution. If I had been interested in making therapeutic antibodies I never would have dreamt of the way of making antibodies that in the end I did. So I think the science was innovative; it was interdisciplinary. I think that has some messages. I think when you have several disciplines and they come together, at that interface you have the potential to create some interesting commercial opportunities. Something else was location. I was lucky I was embedded in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and also the Centre for Protein Engineering. I have not mentioned that so far, but the Centre for Protein Engineering was an inter-disciplinary research centre set up in 1990 by the Tory government to promote inter-disciplinary research for commercial ends. In fact, one of the real problems I had in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology was space. There was a lot of willingness from management, Aaron Klug was the director and César Milstein who was my immediate boss. There was a lot of sympathy but they did not have the space for me to be able to expand my activities. With the Centre for Protein Engineering I was able to expand my group from about six people to over 20 people. It has collapsed subsequently because at that point the field was expanding rapidly, we needed a lot of people very quickly, so that gave us the fire power. That went along hand in hand with Cambridge Antibody Technology as it so happened, although Cambridge Antibody slightly predates it. In fact a lot of the fundamental technology was developed in the Centre for Protein Engineering as a result of that. There was perhaps luck in that. Again, that is something one needs to think about. If you make an invention with great impact, often people want to come and work with you so that you can get the salaries for free; what you really want is the space to put them in and the equipment to get on with it. You may only want to have that for a few years, perhaps three or four years is enough. I think you need space flexibility. I think the fourth thing was probably the exploitation strategy. I have sort of described that. Our strategy which I think led to the success was not by directly saying that we were in this to make money. It was not. I think we focussed on the right thing when we said that it was for the benefit of patients and if it works we will make money. In a way we were focussing on a greater truth than money. It is really good. I remember Aaron Klug saying that the best thing about good moral decisions is that they are good economic decisions as well. We always felt very warm about that afterwards. I think the other thing about the laboratory as a whole is that—this is perhaps something with their exploitation strategy or perhaps their attitude towards people—instead of saying "Oh well, you should go into industry," they said, "Well, you should really stay here and you will get some reward for your patents" (which I have) "and we will let you hold an equity stake in a company, not too much, but you can have enough to be comfortable". In that way I think they have sort of fostered probably this quite rare breed that I am, which is that of someone in the public sector but with private sector knowledge. I have no wish to leave the public sector; I have no wish to leave the MRC. But, on the other hand, I do not really see why I should take a vow of poverty which would be what would happen if I were stuck on MRC pay scales all my life. Aaron Klug used to call this a mixed economy and I think this is one way of exploiting science. Those are what I regard as the key things that helped me in this rather kind of unusual path towards exploitation.

  582. You almost jokingly said that you had the benefit of no technology transfer institute. Do you think for others there is a way of supporting what you went through and spreading it?
  (Dr Winter) I had the advantage that there was not an established technology transfer group. Now there are a lot of them; they are multiplying at a huge rate. So every university knows it is important to have a technology transfer group. You are getting lots of minor bureaucrats appearing. I think that actually that is likely to choke the entrepreneur and I think it is a waste of money. I actually believe that there would be a case either for slashing them generally or for removing their monopolies. In other words, I think it would be possible to have several competing technology transfer organisations in the United Kingdom for dealing with all university stuff. I do not want to go back to the situation of when we had the NRDC which was a monopoly power and everyone had to go through that. But if you had a series of organisations—and the Medical Research Council has been quite good in the kind of deals that have been done and you could well imagine that that could become privatised, which would mean they could pay their people a decent rate, you could get more investment expertise in—the inventor in the public sector would have a choice of who he went to. All of the organisations would be approved, they would cut appropriate kinds of deals. If you give the inventor or the local institution a choice of the organisation they work with, I think this would remove a lot of petty bureaucracy and I think it would be a cheaper way of doing it as well.

  583. The description of the kind of journey that you made has been quite fascinating. Could I ask you about some of the areas where there have been problems along the way, particularly in relation to IP. The LMB has been involved in a number of legal battles, including some you have developed yourself. Are there any lessons out of that? Are there any isolated incidents? Is that kind of problem inevitably going to come along?
  (Dr Winter) I think the LMB has not been directly involved in any legal battles so far. It relates to patents that were the basis of making the human antibodies and those are patents which are co-owned or exclusively licensed to Cambridge Antibody Technology. Cambridge Antibody Technology has been enforcing those patents against, in particular a German company called Morphosys which has essentially been using them. Morphosys has been retaliating by trying to knock the patents out. Obviously the MRC in being co-owner or being the owner of the patents and giving exclusive licences is mentioned in despatches, but actually all of that has been taken care of by Cambridge Antibody Technology. I have had to go and be deposed by US attorneys acting for Morphosys where they try to catch you out and get you to say something which would undermine your invention. I think that the interest of the MRC has been to keep out of legal disputes and that is one advantage of the startup route, that you do not have to get directly involved in such patent battles. I think where we may end up facing a battle is in our humanised antibodies because we are the owner and we are the person who licenses this patent. We have made £31 million to date. We could, one day, face a challenge to that. As the royalty income builds up and the amount of money the drug companies have to pay out to the Medical Research Council for the use of that patent, then of course you are increasing the chance that they actually may go for our throat. So we may one day, I think, have to face a battle on that. We have to keep some of our money in reserve to fight that.

  584. Do you have any thoughts about that, apart from keeping some money in a war chest, about how you would prepare for that?
  (Dr Winter) Frankly, I think we should be able to keep all the money. So far we have kept the money by, I understand it, agreement with the Treasury. I think that there might be commercial ways of dealing with it. It might be possible to come to a deal with some of the other major companies in the field, but this is not something we have discussed at the moment. We will try to work out what to do if and when we get a challenge to it.

  585. As well as the specific case, the issue that you may see on the horizon as far as you are concerned, are there any more general lessons for other companies round IP and avoiding those kind of problems?
  (Dr Winter) Other companies or academic institutions?

  586. Academic institutions.
  (Dr Winter) I generally favour, if possible, a spin off route. Although we have been very successful with our non-exclusive licensing it is rare that you can take the technology far enough in a university setting, that you can licence a mature technology to people, and the advantage of going the startup route is—if you can meet all those conditions—that they can, first of all, be more efficient in drafting a patent. Academic scientists tend to think that a patent is their claim to fame; it is like a scientific paper. But a company realises—certainly the companies I have been associated with realise—a patent is a commercial instrument and therefore you need to know what your business plan is in order to write your patent in such a way that you can protect the most important angles. Therefore, if you are just sitting in isolation in your academic ivory tower writing a patent to cover certain angles, you are not necessarily aware of the commercial realities, and you are not even doing it according to some fixed business plan. Therefore I think that a company is in a much better position to write a useful commercial instrument. Academics can do things and be very logical and rigorous, but we may end up protecting things which do not need to be protected, or forgetting some angles which are very important once you start considering "I am going to use this technology; I am going to use it to make some product and I am then going to put that product into another country". All of those issues you may wish to address claims around your plan for exploitation and really a university office simply does not have the perspective to do that.

  Chairman: Thank you very much Dr Winter. That has covered all the areas we had thought of and a few more have emerged as well.