If you could hit every strain of a virus with one vaccine, wouldn’t that be something? GEP were instrumental in bringing this truly ground-breaking science to market.
Immune Targeting Systems – bringing the holy grail of vaccines to market
Immune Targeting Systems (ITS) is a London-based healthcare company, a spin-off from the London School of Pharmacy. They develop vaccines – but not using the traditional science where you need to almost start again every time a virus mutates.
ITS synthetic vaccines hit the amino acid chains, the virus building blocks. So the one vaccine hits all the various strains and every sub-type. This means a single vaccine for all seasonal and pandemic flu strains. And it’s a candidate for HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis-C vaccines.
A world where the vaccines are ready and waiting
No more manufacturing bottlenecks… stock on the shelf ready for any strain of flu epidemic or pandemic… the ability to start treatment immediately. Its amazing science with huge commercial potential, but that doesn’t automatically make it a successful international business. Making that leap takes management and marketing development and serious R&D, and it isn’t always easy to find investors who can visualise the returns from specialised technologies like these.
Unless you talk to GEP.
Beating the competition
The company CEO, Carlton Brown, took ITS to an investment forum run by the Babrahim Trust, an educational charity specialising in biomedical research and training. At the forum Toby Wilson Waterworth, GEP dealmaker, runs a competition – looking at the companies and taking the three best prospects to a huge investment forum in Boston, USA. ITS was a winner in 2006.
So Carlton went through the door that GEP had opened, to Massachusetts with his dealmaker. There he pitched to the top team at the Novartis Venture Fund, one of the world’s major healthcare and life science investors. As Toby says, “Most people would bite your hand off to get in front of Novartis, especially at such an early stage.” Novartis loved the company and became its cornerstone investor, swiftly followed by investors from Stockholm and Paris.
Bringing the pieces together
Not only were GEP instrumental in securing £3.5 million in funding for ITS, they also helped bring extra strength onto the board, in the shape of investment stakeholders and a couple of the world’s top bio-entrepreneurs.
Toby Wilson Waterworth says, “What I’m doing is matching world-class science with global entrepreneurs and investors, to create world-class opportunities and find the components to make the project work. I think that’s the key. You have to search globally for the right opportunities and the right assets,” says Wilson Waterworth.
“It’s a global environment.”
Everybody wins
ITS is on the road to global success, with the investment it needed and the right people to make it happen. The investors are delighted because they’re involved with world-class science in an area with huge growth potential. Toby Wilson Waterworth is happy too.
“In the current climate it was a fantastic result,” he says. “The key was getting Novartis involved because the rest followed on from there. And the calibre of the non-executives who came with the funding has really helped strengthen the package.”