Tony Baxter has more than 28 years of experience in management and research in drug discovery, medicinal chemistry services, biomolecule detection instrumentation, and ADMET contract research organisations. He started his career at Glaxo Group Research (now GSK) and Ciba Central Research (now Novartis).
In addition to heading Cyprotex, Baxter is currently Non-Executive Chairman of Equinox Pharma, a spin-out from Imperial College, London focused on the development of ‘machine learning’ for iterative and multi-parametric drug discovery projects. He is also Non-Executive Chairman of Glythera, a Newcastle-upon-Tyne-based spin-out from the University of Bath, which has novel protein glycosylation techniques as its technology base.
Baxter is proud of the fact that he’s never been unemployed. ‘I’ve always managed to find work,’ he says. ‘I’m a chemist by training and the management and business skills that I have learned have been transportable from job to job. I wasn’t bothered that Cyprotex was out of my comfort zone when I became CEO – there were people in the company who had the expertise to tell me what I needed to know.’
He is also proud that he has worked on many drug discovery programmes, of which five resulted in a drug being brought to market, including Everidge, a treatment for basal cell carcinoma.
When Cyprotex was founded in 1999, 40% of all drugs were failing in human clinical trials because of ADME failures. As clinical trials are the most expensive part of bringing a new drug to market, this made ADME the single largest cause of inefficiency in drug development. Founder David Leahy’s dream for Cyprotex was two-fold: to eliminate this waste by predicting the ADME properties of any drug candidate molecule without having to put that molecule into a human or animal; and to become the world’s largest contract research organisation (CRO) specialising in ADMET.
Although Baxter says the company is still far from realising the first goal, it has made ‘great progress’.
Today, only 5% of drugs fail in clinical trials due to ADME reasons. Sadly, the percentage of drugs failing in clinical trials remains at 80%, as other reasons for failure have grown. Among these is toxicity, and the science needed to address this is similar to, yet more complex than that used to solve the ADME problem. Hence, the ADME field has grown to include toxicity.
As for becoming the world’s largest ADMET specialist CRO, Baxter says Cyprotex realised this dream in August 2010 when it acquired Apredica, a US-based ADME Tox provider with an extensive portfolio of in vitro toxicology assays, including advanced, proprietary High Content Toxicology technology that it had purchased from Cellumen.
‘As soon as we purchased Apredica, we got more work. Apredica was three years ahead, so we were buying a technology platform and a market presence in Boston, Massachusetts. With the deal we doubled the size of our operation.’
Cyprotex now employs 14 people in the US and plans to increase this to 20 this year. There are 75 staff in the UK.
The ADME market is more competitive in the US than in Europe – mainly because ADME companies were historically US-based
‘The US will be our main driver of growth, but the ADME market is more competitive in the US than in Europe – mainly because ADME companies were historically US-based,’ Baxter says.
The company acquired 156 new customers last year, with a 19% increase in revenue generated from existing and new clients, including Pfizer (CellCiphr), Sirius Analytical Instruments, Sigma Life Science and InSphero.
Although the company saw a decline in toxicology contracts in 2011 and had to improve the assays acquired through the Apredica deal, Baxter says it is now back on track for 2013. ‘Toxicology evaluation as a whole is the biggest driver of growth in our business.’
The firm’s largest market, accounting for 40% of turnover, is the US, followed by mainland Europe (35%), the UK (20%) and the Rest of the World (5%), where growth has come in particular from Japan and Korea.
The retrenchment of Big Pharma onto fewer sites researching fewer therapeutic disease areas seen in recent years continued into 2012, with the consequence that there were fewer opportunities for strategic outsourcing, particularly in drug discovery programmes and in ADMET screening. But as this begins to settle, Cyprotex is starting to see more opportunities and in recent months has been ‘more successful than ever before in bidding for and securing larger contracts’.
‘We believe the R&D investment made in both ADME and Tox assays and operational changes made over the past four years are beginning to bear fruit. The business is poised for growth in 2013 and beyond, from what is a now a stable and technically advanced business,’ says Baxter.
We’re finding out the liabilities earlier and the whole science of toxicology has taken a leap forward
Cyprotex invests significantly to meet the highest standards demanded by its customers and installed new Waters Xevo triple quadrupole mass spectrometers last year, which are ‘more powerful, faster and more efficient’. The company also added a new robotic screening platform to handle more contracts for high throughput ADME assays. ‘We had seen a move away from high-volume to customised, bespoke contracts, but now there is a swing back to high-throughput work to more exacting standards.’
Baxter believes Cyprotex stands out from competitors because of the quality and range of its work and because it does not do any tests on animals.
He says the biggest sea change in the industry over the past 25 years is that toxicology testing is being done earlier in the process. ‘We’re finding out the liabilities earlier and the whole science of toxicology has taken a leap forward.’
A potential new market for Cyprotex is biologicals – 40% of all new drugs are biologics. Toxicology tests are relevant because some biologics have caused skin irritability and inflammation, which could have been spotted earlier in the drug discovery process.
‘There are also fewer regulatory issues with biologics, compared with using human tissue for testing purposes,’ says Baxter. ‘The whole area of biosimilars and biobetters is really exciting. I think these drugs and antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) are the way forward for the industry.’
Over the next five years, Baxter would like to increase revenue dramatically through organic growth or further acquisitions.
The whole area of biosimilars and biobetters is really exciting. I think these drugs and antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) are the way forward for the industry
Originally Cyprotex supplied services almost entirely to pharmaceutical companies, then to biotechs. Since then, owing to regulatory changes and its marketing strategy, the company has moved into other sectors, such as cosmetics, where the main driver for growth has been the ban on testing cosmetics on animals. Other new areas are aerospace, where Cyprotex has been using its assays to test the paints used in aircraft cockpits, and the tobacco industry as it has moved away from ‘smoking Beagles’ to in vitro testing.
These three new areas currently account for 15% of turnover, which rose by 5.3% to £8.3m to December 2012. Operating profit was £0.33m.
‘I hope in five years’ time to be CEO of a bigger and better company, which has the discovery of more effective medicines at its heart,’ says Baxter. ‘We want to be pushing boundaries back and the quality of science will improve.’
As a child Baxter loved nature and chemistry – ‘they were the only subjects I was good at’ – and so he has never found it a chore to go to work. ‘We have fun and life’s too short not to have fun. I’m a chemist, but I enjoy biology. In a sense biology is more satisfying than chemistry because you get to see the effect of what you’ve made.’
These days, he’s also a salesman. ‘I have to sell what we do to the industry.’ Baxter says Ed Moses, currently CEO of Belgian firm Ablynx, taught him how to sell and how to handle people, as well as the tricks of the trade. ‘Sales is a different world from chemistry and gives me a different buzz,’ he says.
The issue should be how much are people prepared to pay, rather than what does it cost to produce
The industry’s greatest challenge going forward, Baxter believes, is how to develop safe and effective medicines that people are prepared to pay for. ‘The issue should be how much are people prepared to pay, rather than what does it cost to produce.
‘The challenge is to have fewer failures and to have medicines that are cheaper to prescribe, then the drugs will get better, as will the patient. Medicines shouldn’t be available only to the wealthy.’
He suggests that the industry needs to change its business models and work more with charities and public organisations, in addition to universities, in its early stage research. He would also like to see the re-evaluation of older medicines with biological markers so that new treatments could be developed for other indications.
After recently facing a near-death experience when he was given five different antibiotics for pneumonia until the doctors found one that worked, Baxter believes research into new antibiotics is absolutely essential for the future of human life, because without antibiotics we face a problem that could be as threatening as terrorism, global famine and climate change.
He would also like to see more research into finding cures for diseases of poverty such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, infections and diarrhoea.
Tony Baxter obviously loves his subject and despairs that universities ‘don’t teach proper science any more’. He thinks the old-fashioned standard of quality of research has gone at the price of expediency. ‘Practical skills have been lost – partly through automation, but also because many chemistry professors don’t seem interested in keeping them up.’
He thinks the UK industry should be incentivised to expand, train and teach young people to ensure that the brightest and best continue to work in UK pharmaceutical companies.
We must be doing something right, so why isn’t someone helping us to do even better?
‘Cyprotex has reported five years of profit but we haven’t had any pats on the back from government. We must be doing something right, so why isn’t someone helping us to do even better?’
In his spare time, Baxter gets back to nature by growing vegetables on his allotment in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire. He is an avid collector of meteorites (particularly carbonaceous chrondrites, which contain a high proportion of water and organic matter in the form of amino acids) and U-boat memorabilia. He also has a 1966 2+2 E-type Jaguar in British Racing Green.
He certainly has enthusiasm and charm in abundance and a scientific curiosity, which is probably why he is in the right job and an asset to the industry.
| CV | |
| 2008 to present | Chief Executive Officer, Cyprotex |
| 2005 to present | Non-Executive Chairman, Glythera |
| 2008 to present | Non-Executive Chairman, Equinox Pharma |
| 2005 to 2008 | Chief Executive, deltaDOT |
| 2000 to 2004 | Chief Executive, Argenta Discovery |
| 1995 to 2000 | Chief Scientific Officer, Oxford Asymmetry International |
| 1990 to 1994 | Research Manager, Ciba Central Research |
| 1983 to 1990 | Senior and Principal Chemist, Glaxo Group Research |
