How would Simon prepare himself for the world of science start-ups when his main area of expertise was music? “One skill I took from the music world into the science world was managing challenging people” he says. “The music industry is full of very creative people with very big egos and the entrepreneurial world is also filled with similar types.
“Early on I learnt how to keep highly creative people motivated, because if you try to tie them down they lose motivation. The trick is how to keep them motivated but deliver to deadlines, because investors wants to see results
“At a nightclub in Edinburgh I got talking to two of the regulars who turned out to be molecular biology post-docs”
and are understandably looking for progress and you have to make that happen without making creative types feel like you are telling them what to do. I learnt a lot about that on the road and in the recording studio in the late 70s and early 80s.”
Today, Simon has worked in almost every sector of the Biotech industry, with 25 years’ experience of being an entrepreneur and starting up, evolving and selling large companies. His latest project, Aquapharm, is an innovative drug research and discovery company developing breakthrough products by exploring the vast, untapped diversity of marine micro-organisms. Simon is CEO of the company and describes the organisation’s day-to-day processes. “We start up with a rich and very unusual pool of living things, which are microorganisms from the sea. We have a collection in Scotland of over 10,000 microorganisms collected from all over the world. About half are from European waters and the rest are from everywhere else, as far south as Antarctica and as far north as the Arctic.
“We find them on beaches, at the bottom of the sea, in fishes, on seaweed, in mud on the ocean-floor - you name it we’ve got it. Nobody else has got a collection like ours ready for industrial use that offers a snapshot of everything that’s out there in the world’s oceans all in one place. Even well-regarded academic institutions near the Great Barrier Reef or in Japan or California do not have such a diverse collection of microorganisms.
“Until only recently scientific wisdom said that the sea was microbiologically sterile. Everyone knew about fish and bigger sea creatures but nothing about its smallest inhabitants. We now know that every cubic centimetre of sea water contains millions of bacteria, fungi and yeast. What’s more, they have been evolving seven times longer than anything that has been evolving on the land.
Professor Best receiving his OBE 10 entrepreneurcountry
“We then look at these microorganisms and at the biochemical’s they make and what we find is that many of them are helpful to our health. We take tiny samples of sea water and with a lot of expertise we grow pure cultures of specific microorganisms and feed them so that they become larger cultures. Because we are dealing with a pool of life that has been evolving for so long, there’s such a richness of
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