"Our approach enables our scientists to interact with our customers, resulting in a flexible work environment, to provide them with the array tools that they require."

Mike Evans, CEO, Oxford Gene Technology (OGT) Mike joined OGT from GE Healthcare (formerly Amersham), where he worked for 15 years initially in the R&D labs and then moving into marketing, business development and corporate management. Mike joined OGT in March of this year. What attracted you to OGT? What was interesting about OGT was great science, a very good intellectual property position and a very interesting portfolio of opportunities. OGT has got 4 different business opportunities that it is currently developing, ranging from a services business supplying array based services, a licensing business, and then it has got 2 early stage technology areas; one in the area of mass spectrometry, (Tridend) and the other in the area of novel methods for making arrays, (Oxamer). One of the things that really attracted me to OGT was that there is a whole range of different opportunities in one relatively small company. What intellectual property was the company founded around? Originally it was intellectual property for making nucleic acid arrays; Ed Southern was the inventor of some of the fundamental intellectual property in that particular area. This has been licensed fairly widely now throughout the industry. More recently the company has developed intellectual property to back up our other two business units. Within our Tridend Business unit we have a lot of intellectual property on what are called mass tags. These are chemical ways of getting more information out of a mass spectrometry run whether you are doing it for DNA or for proteins. We also have intellectual property that underpins Oxamer. This is in the area of novel methods for making arrays, not just nucleic acid arrays but potentially other arrays as well. This intellectual property is based on electrochemistry where you use electrodes rather than other devices for making arrays. Originally the business model was to non-exclusively license these pieces of intellectual property to various companies and institutes throughout the world. This has been very successful. Why was OGT Services founded? Many companies, particularly in the array market have now been granted licenses to OGT patents. We have also seen an opportunity to build, not only the licensing business which is very important to us, but also a products and services business for the life science market. So we have a combined business model where we will continue with our licensing activities that have been very successful over the last few years, and also to build business based on products and services. How popular has your licensing business been? It has been very good, especially in the array area. The intellectual property has been seen as fundamental to the array market. The companies that are typically taking OGT licenses are making arrays for their customers. There is quite a range of products and services that these companies are offering; some offer standard arrays, human genome arrays for example direct to their customers and others provide customized arrays. Other companies are providing services based on arrays. It is fair to say that this licensing activity has very much underpinned the development and growth of the array market within the life sciences. We are very interested in accessing this market through OGT. One of the things that we have been doing recently is developing our services business. If one of our customers is interested in a particular application of arrays and needs something a bit special, we can take them through all the stages from designing the array in the first instance, providing them with a custom set of arrays and we can help them interpret the data they get as well. We have developed some great informatics tools that will help our customers interpret the data that they get. Over the last 12-18 months we have built up a services business that prides itself on being very flexible and very responsive to our customers. Our scientist will talk to our customer's scientist and we will work very flexibly to provide them with the array tools that they require. So you can work with your customers throughout their project, from start to finish? Yes, very much so. I think that is one of the things that differentiates us from other companies in the area; we are very willing to have scientist to scientist discussions where we try to understand the special needs of our customers, and respond accordingly. If you have a special requirement as a customer and you find a company that treats you as an individual and will meet your requirements in a very responsive way, you tend to feel very good about dealing with that company. This is what we aim to do for our customers. What is your novel method for making arrays? It is a method based on electrochemical synthesis of oligonucleotides on arrays, which is a very novel way of making arrays. The advantage of this is that you get very good feature size, so you get very small spots on the array; you can also make arrays very flexibly. Another key advantage is that if you need to make a customized array very quickly, the turnaround time is extremely fast compared with some other array based methods. This is still a very early stage technology that we are developing, but we are very pleased with the progress so far. Shortly we will be publicizing the methodology more widely, so you will be seeing us at some of the upcoming life sciences conferences talking about Oxamer technology. With respect to Oxamer I have spoken about the genomics and proteomics market, but another market that is up and coming at the moment is the nanotechnology area. Oxamer fits in with nanotechnology and the way that that market is progressing, so we will be looking for opportunities in this area. Are you looking to develop any other technology or are you just concentrating on what you have got at the moment? At the moment we have the Oxamer and the Tridend technologies, and we have a lot of technology for making arrays within our services business. We want to move forward by identifying the best market opportunities for the technologies that we have. Alongside this, if we see technologies available elsewhere that match up well with the technologies that we have in-house, then we would like to access those technologies, bring them into OGT. The technologies that we have now, within the next two to three years we expect to be much more fully developed. We also expect to have some other technologies within the company as well. Are you doing a lot of R&D at the moment? There are approximately 40 people in the company in total. We have a very strong science base of highly skilled R&D people, and they range from very good molecular biologists to people who are expert in micro-fabrication to people who are really great chemists. So we have a really strong multi-disciplinary team in the company. You mentioned the marketplace, where do you see the company positioned within this market? Clearly we are not a huge supplier at the moment, so what we will be really positioning ourselves as is a targeted company in particular areas. We would like to enable people to understand the basis of disease. If you are an academic researcher you will want to understand medical problems and the basis of disease, and we can help you to do that. Equally if you are a pharmaceutical researcher trying to discover and develop new drugs, we will aim to provide the technologies to assist in this research as well. Within the Tridend business unit you have developed a new reagent for peptide mass fingerprinting. Can you tell us about this? Proteomics is a big growth market at the moment and given that there are over 100,000 proteins there is a lot of complexity in proteomics research. We believe that the proteomics market will continue to grow for many years to come. One of the key technologies in proteomics to help identify proteins and characterize proteins of course is mass spectrometry. The Tridend technology aims to increase the amount of data that you can get out of each mass spec experiment. We have technology that we believe will improve the level of sensitivity of mass spectrometry experiments i.e. you can actually see more signal on the mass spec using our chemistry, plus we hope to have technology that will allow you to get more information about the individual protein that is being studied, and that will allow customers to more easily identify proteins of interest. The technology itself is based on what's known as trityl chemistry. We have applied this technology to enhancing mass spectrometry, and again we have got a lot of intellectual property that underpins this technology. How popular do you think this technology will be? It's hard to say at the moment. We feel that it is very exciting, and we have really concentrated on developing the technology internally. We are excited about the progress of getting this particular technology externally validated and where it could take the company. We do currently have some early stage collaborators. One of the things we will be doing is validating it against a range of mass spectrometers. We believe this technology addresses the growth market in proteomics. It also has applications within genomics, genotyping for example. OGT has a very broad intellectual property, was that the reasoning behind splitting it up into separate business units? The real reason OGT has separate business units is to enable us to provide the right level of resources to each of the technologies that we were developing. With any company that has a portfolio such as we have, the problem isn't that we don't have enough to work on; it's choosing what the priorities are. So the reason why we have Tridend, Oxamer and Services was really to allocate the right level of resources to each of those businesses. It is also motivating I think, to be in a particular business and try to develop that as well as you possibly can. What would you say OGT's main successes have been since it was launched? We are hoping there are a lot more to come. I would say that one of the major successes has definitely been the fact that we have been able to provide access to Ed Southern's invention to a large number of companies and research groups worldwide. It is quite unusual for a company to adopt such an open licensing policy, as OGT has. Also I will point out, in more recent years we have been able to start up several businesses, and it is quite unusual for a small company to be that entrepreneurial. We have set up, in the last couple of years; the Services business, the Oxamer business and the Tridend business. For a company of 40 people, that is unusual. Where would you hope to see the company in 5 years time? We hope to be better known and seen as a company that has a very important licensing business, (I would like to emphasize that we are going to carry on doing the licensing), but also as a company that has built a products and services business that it is supplying directly to the life sciences market. I would hope that the OGT brand was better known in the marketplace a few years from now, not just as a licensing and intellectual property operation, but also as a commercial company. We are a very rich company, both in intellectual property and in the very strong science skills that we have within the company. What we see now as the key challenge is to commercialize those technologies, and I am hoping that the experience that I have had in my career will help with the commercializing activities; developing technologies and then marketing them into the life science market.

Further Information: http://www.ogt.co.uk