Venture capitalist and Crick board member Kate Bingham led the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce during the COVID pandemic. She shares lessons from her 30-year career, including her inspirations, her advice on working with government, and building tree houses.
Kate Bingham. Credit: Michael Bowles
A member of the Crick’s board of trustees, Kate Bingham studied biochemistry at Oxford University before embarking on a career developing early‑stage biotech companies.
Since joining SV Health Investors in 1991, she’s helped build numerous start-ups, resulting in the launch of six new drugs for conditions as diverse as inflammatory and autoimmune disease and cancer. Kate spends weekends at her home in Wales.
Back then, I had little interest in either, and the only subject that really captivated me was the environment. When I was at primary school, I even wrote – secretly – to various nature reserves and requested information. Delightfully fat envelopes soon arrived by post. The one thing that has not changed is I am impulsive and just get on with things. Why wait?
As an undergraduate at Oxford, studying biochemical pathways at the time Genentech’s “clot‑busting” tPA drug – one of the first to be produced using recombinant DNA technology – got approved. I remember just thinking, “Wow! You can turn what you learn in lectures into something that can actually help patients.” That was a big deal. I also worked in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, which at that time did not win a race to identify a cystic fibrosis gene. That gave me a glimpse of the tough competition between labs.
I wanted to turn my understanding of science into building businesses, so I applied for business school at Harvard. Then I landed an intern job with Vertex on a complete flyer and it was thrilling because I was only the third business hire. My role was to do whatever it took to stop their senior scientist, an X-ray crystallographer, being distracted with his new invention.
So I had to figure out – pre-internet – whether it was a valuable and patentable invention and how to develop it. The start-up biotech environment was electric – people would work around the clock, share beers on a Friday afternoon and compete in biotech softball leagues. That was the turning point: I realised this is really fun.
We have inadequate growth funding in the UK to support innovative new biotechs taking their drugs into later-stage clinical trials. Right now, the UK is desperately bad at running rapid clinical trials, and it’s not because of the clinical researchers, who are fantastic, it’s because of the UK’s institutional structures. People run clinical trials despite the system – as highlighted nearly three years ago in Lord James O’Shaughnessy’s report on UK commercial clinical trials.
The Crick is doing a great job in translating their science, but they could bring in more entrepreneurs-in-residence to help accelerate the Crick’s scientific discoveries into new companies and medicines even faster.
Lead research nurse Vash Deelchand gives a demonstration of the vaccine trial process as Kate Bingham starts her Novavax trial at the Royal Free Hospital, London in October 2020. Credit: Kirsty O'Connor / PA
The first is a regenerative pathway called Wnt signalling in age-related macular degeneration, a major cause of vision loss. Wnt drives tissue renewal, and at SV we’ve co-founded a company to exploit this by developing a Wnt-based drug to restore the leaky retinal barrier, preventing vascular leakage which causes blindness. We sold the company to Merck for $3 billion in 2024 and they are now in their second pivotal trial.
I am also really interested in tertiary lymphoid structures, TLSs, essentially mini lymph nodes that form in solid tumours. While cancer immunotherapy has focused on checkpoints and rescuing exhausted T cells, TLSs might offer a way to recruit fresh immune cells directly into tumours. One of my companies is developing a bispecific antibody to induce TLSs as a new approach to cancer therapy.
Ultimately, it comes down to the strength of the scientific idea. It must be fundamentally novel and impactful. Brilliant and energetic people can’t compensate for a weak idea. There is a VC mindset: focus on the goal, get through roadblocks, build the best possible team, and manage risk. The most important thing is to work collaboratively with superstar founders and management.
The habit to resist is not to fall in love with your babies. It’s always easier to throw good money after bad when milestones slip than it is to stop funding and turn the lights off. Staying disciplined and focused on the goal is critical.
I got a lot of lip from my husband and daughter who were adamant I should say yes. I thought it was crazy: I’m a drug person; vaccines are entirely different: you give them to healthy people and the effort was more likely to fail than succeed. However, my husband helped me define the conditions on which I would accept the role, including reporting directly to the PM, a six‑month mandate, my own team, and a commitment to make quick decisions with a ring-fenced budget. The government honoured all of that. If I hadn’t agreed those conditions, it could have been a car crash.
The biggest surprise of the pandemic to me was the foresight of the BioIndustry Association (BIA) Bioprocessing group, who’d begun assembling a skeleton supply chain for vaccine manufacturing as early as February 2020. They correctly recognised that if vaccines were proven to work, to be rolled out quickly the UK would need a scaled-up manufacturing capability ready. So they brought together companies and academics, without any contracts, guarantees or government funding and set aside commercial projects to make this happen. That is a massive, massive achievement. I’ve not seen that level of selflessness from industry anywhere else in the world.
In contrast, the government approach, especially the civil service, is all about process rather than outcome. The private sector says: this is what we’re trying to achieve and let’s figure out how to achieve it, yet Whitehall seems focused on following the rules and consensus decision making to avoid criticism. In the pandemic, the government brought in this external group of private sector people, including me to lead the Taskforce, and we were able to cut through the time-consuming bureaucracy.
Whether it’s mountain biking or horse riding or running on the hills, I have to be outdoors somewhere green and get my heart rate up. After that, I’m very happy. It is a habit I learned from my dad, and no matter what he was doing, from being a barrister to a senior judge, he would always would go for long walks and dig the vegetable garden, even in the worst weather.
This is the most exciting time in science. Think of the innovations that we couldn’t even imagine 10 years ago. Billions have now received mRNA vaccines. We’ve got cancer vaccines – even Alzheimer’s vaccines in trials. We have GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) medications that are transforming obesity care and we’ve got dementia drugs now that are starting to work. AI is unquestionably going to accelerate the speed and improve the success of getting new drugs to market. Why wouldn’t you be optimistic?
That is not true. You’re judged by what you do, not your exam results. You’re judged by what you can contribute, not a flawless CV.
She is best known for her X-ray crystallographic work which was central to revealing the structure of DNA. But her contributions went far beyond that. Her structural insights on plant RNA viruses laid the groundwork for understanding the polio virus structure. Her short life combined exquisite science with extraordinary resilience – she refused to be diminished by her detractors. And of course, as you’d expect, my greatest inspirations are my family.
We have a cottage in a deep Welsh valley. I decided that it’d be a great idea to build a tree house at the top of this very, very steep hill and build a 100m zip wire. Everybody thought I was completely crazy, but it has been the best thing ever.
