Bringing Science to Society with Molly Stevens

[00:00:05] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Oxford+, the podcast series that takes you deep into the myths and truths of the Oxford investing landscape. I'm your host, Susannah de Jager and I've spent over 16 years in UK asset management. Today, I'm joined by Professor Dame Molly Stevens in her offices in Oxford. Molly is the John Black Professor of Bionanoscience at the University of Oxford and a part time professor at Imperial College London and the Karolinska Institute.

[00:00:33] Molly Stevens: All of our work is around the interface of different disciplines. So designing materials to interact with biology, essentially. But that needs a lot of people with different backgrounds. So even within my own team, I would have engineers, chemists, surgeons, physicists, computer scientists, cell biologists from many, many different countries. I think we are from 27 different countries, something like that and that's within my own immediate team. But then what's brilliant about moving to Oxford is that I'm now part of the Kavli Institute. So that's all under one roof, within a brand new building and we have, within that institute, the absolute privilege of having people that come from the medical sciences, but also that come from engineering, physics, chemistry and other places too, all together to work on really important solutions to clinical problems.

[00:01:22] Susannah de Jager: Molly's multidisciplinary research balances the investigation of fundamental science with the development of technology to address some of the major healthcare challenges. that the world faces today. She's a serial entrepreneur and the founder of several companies in diagnostics, advanced therapeutics, and regenerative medicine fields. Her work has been instrumental in furthering biomaterial interfaces. Molly holds numerous leadership positions. Deputy Director of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, Deputy Director of the UK Quantum Biomedical Sensing Research Hub, and Scientist Trustee of the National Gallery. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK and a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Engineering in the USA, an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was recognised with the 2023 Nova Nordisk Award prize and the 2024 Royal Society Armourers and Braziers Company Prize, among many, many other accolades.

[00:02:24] Molly has recently moved to Oxford University, bringing with her a research team of just under a hundred people. Her knowledge of founding businesses and her newly inducted perspective on Oxford give her a unique window into what Oxford offers academics and founders, as well as what we can refine to make us optimally and internationally competitive for translational science.

[00:02:44] Molly, thank you so much for joining today in your offices. You haven't been here for terribly long. Can you tell those listening how long you have been here and what first attracted you to Oxford?

[00:02:54] Molly Stevens: I joined Oxford in April 2024 as a full time professor. I was a 10 percent professor before that for a year, just while we sorted out all the logistics of a really big move, actually, from Imperial College to Oxford. I had been at Imperial College for 20 years and was running a really good group there, really good interdisciplinary group and it felt like the right time to move to Oxford to a new environment, new opportunities to take our research to the next steps.

[00:03:27] So it was a big move in terms of moving a really big team, about 87 of us, and people from lots of different backgrounds as well and from lots of different countries and we all moved together over a two week packing period, two week move period and two week unpacking period. So it was very efficient, actually.

[00:03:45] Susannah de Jager: Sounds it, wow! And the group that you're talking about, the Stevens Group, you do so much varied research. Tell us a little bit about some of the main areas that you're working on now as a wider group.

[00:03:59] Molly Stevens: We're really excited about how you can use materials for biomedical applications, so that might be designing materials to implant in the body, for example, in the area of regenerative medicine. It might be designing new drug delivery vectors and systems that can release mRNA, for example, or other kinds of molecules and we also have a big area around biosensing, so new types of nanoparticles that can enable better detection of disease, earlier detection of disease and then we also invent some of our own scientific instruments.

[00:04:32] Susannah de Jager: Wow, it's very impressive.

[00:04:33] So Molly, give me a bit of a rundown on something you're working on at the moment.

[00:04:38] Molly Stevens: Well, we've recently invented a new technology that is the first one in the world that can capture individual nanoparticles and measure their chemistry. That's called SPARTA, Single Particle Automated Raman Trapping Analysis. It'll enable you to understand the composition of new gene therapy materials, for example, or new vaccines. You can understand how much of your cargo is loaded, you can understand how it degrades, you can understand how proteins bind on it, that's going to tell you potentially about circulation efficiency within the body. We invented this, we published this in a journal called Nature Communications, and we patented it at the time and then we spun that into a company that's doing really well called Spot by Discovery. We did a big partnership investment with Sartorius, which is obviously a very large company and over the last year and a bit, we've achieved CE mark approval for the instrument now. It's used by tens of pharma companies. All of our early access programme instruments have sold out and we're making the next batch and it's really exciting to now see that on the market. I think it's going to really revolutionise the way that people can characterise new types of nanomedicines.

[00:05:52] Susannah de Jager: And that sounds like people are using it in all different settings. So you haven't had to narrow the focus because as you were describing the user cases there, I was thinking how on earth are you going to decide which one to major on?

[00:06:04] Molly Stevens: We have demonstrated that we can use that for very small nanoparticles. So think of the size of the sun, shrink it to a football, shrink it by the same amount again. That's the kind of size we're talking about. We've shown that we can use it on particles made from lipids, made from polymers, on viral vectors, on very small vesicles that are released from cells that can tell us about cancer status, for example and we've been looking at patient samples and using that technology to tell us if they have cancer or not. but also to inform how we might design better medicines.

[00:06:37] Susannah de Jager: Fascinating. You've spoken about some of the projects you're focused on but you've also mentioned to me a number of interdisciplinary work that you're focused on here with other departments, charities. Tell us a little bit more about the opportunities at Oxford for that.

[00:06:52] Molly Stevens: All of our work is around the interface of different disciplines. So designing materials to interact with biology, essentially. But that needs a lot of people with different backgrounds. So even within my own team, I would have engineers, chemists, surgeons, physicists, computer scientists, cell biologists from many, many different countries. I think we are from 27 different countries, something like that and that's within my own immediate team. But then what's brilliant about moving to Oxford is that I'm now part of the Kavli Institute. So that's all under one roof, within a brand new building and we have, within that institute, the absolute privilege of having people that come from the medical sciences, but also that come from engineering, physics, all under one roof and it's really around promoting the next level of interdisciplinary research on top of what we already have within our existing research teams and then we also have just been funded from the British Heart Foundation for a Centre of Excellence and again, that's going to bring people from medicine, from engineering, from chemistry and other places too, all together to work on really important solutions to clinical problems.

[00:08:01] I'd also like to mention the new Pandemic Sciences Institute that we have at the Oxford. As, you know, Oxford's been really trailblazing during the COVID pandemic in terms of some of the interventions they've made around vaccines, but also some of the clinical trial work and other things too and there's now this Pandemic Sciences Institute that's been created that I'm hoping to work very closely alongside and will co lead the diagnostics stream of that new institute as well.

[00:08:27] Susannah de Jager: Have there been any surprises in Oxford since you've arrived?

[00:08:32] Molly Stevens: Well, there's been good surprises. I think, the community has been, so friendly. You know, I had brilliant colleagues at Imperial College. I had a really good 20 years there, so it's hard to leave, all your friends, so to speak, but it's been very, very welcoming. I've had so many people reach out to welcome me. Everybody that I reach out to, to have a sort of chat, to meet them, have a coffee, always absolutely warm. The other thing that's, it's not surprising because you'd expect it, but I still feel like even though I've been here now over six months, I'm still every single day discovering about a whole new bit of Oxford that I didn't know existed. You know, it's kind of crazy. I was at a dinner last night and somebody was talking about, you know, some new centre, and did I know about this? And they're doing all this cool stuff and I said, oh God, I don't know about that yet. You know, yet something else to discover and that seems to happen every single day almost. There's just so much going on here. I mean, it's a treasure trove of science and innovation and I'm just so excited to be here.

[00:09:38] Susannah de Jager: So there's an awful lot going on there and you're obviously in a seat of academic excellence within which to grow these ideas, develop them and work with multiple different teams, which is hugely exciting.

[00:09:49] So Molly, we've spoken a lot about Oxford. It'd be wonderful to hear work that you have that's more outward looking and perhaps more UK wide.

[00:09:56] Molly Stevens: I can tell you about a couple of things there. Obviously, everything we do is quite international looking. I've been serving for the last 10 years or so as the Director of the UK Programme for Smart Materials in Regenerative Medicine that was pulling together eleven different universities across the UK and very recently, in fact, it's due to start this December, we have just been awarded as a consortium a 24 million grant for the UK's first quantum sensing hub dedicated to biomedical application and that's really exciting because it's going to bring together the best in quantum sensors, with a lot of hospitals and clinical partners, as well as 17 industrial partners and regulatory advice and really bring together that community towards really exciting applications in quantum for biomedical and I'll be serving as deputy director for that hub.

[00:10:51] Susannah de Jager: So that sounds extraordinarily interesting, but for those of us at home who aren't in the domain, what kind of area of medicine will that likely impact?

[00:10:59] Molly Stevens: It's potentially really broad in application. We are going to be exploring applications both in early disease detection and also potentially in treatment.

[00:11:08] Susannah de Jager: Molly, you also have had a number of successful spin outs before and it would be great to hear, having been both in the academic and the entrepreneurial side of things, What was unexpected when you went from one to the other and what you think you bring back into your academic research now?

[00:11:25] Molly Stevens: Well, standard academic research, if there is such a thing, there probably isn't such a thing, but academic research can obviously be very curiosity driven or it can be more applied. I would say we have a bit of a mix of both of those within my academic group and very often the curiosity led research can lead actually to great discoveries that then lead to application. However, when you have a company, I think it's, very, very important to already have sight of what the end application will be and even to go as far as thinking and mapping out what will the market be for the innovation that you're making. So that's very, very different to the motivation that might be behind some of the things you might do in a purely academic lab.

[00:12:10] Susannah de Jager: I've heard you speak about that curiosity side of things and how important it is to keep both alive because of course applied you're aiming for something but as we know some of the great scientific discoveries of the 20th and 21st century were accidents that came out of somebody just being. Kind of going off over here. So as a percentage of the Stevens Group focus, how much would you say you're splitting those two out?

[00:12:35] Molly Stevens: The overall focus before anything else is on the highest quality of research. So making sure that research is really high quality, really robust, really innovative and then within that, there might be some very fundamental questions that we're addressing, and that can be extremely exciting.

[00:12:55] I would say, though, that for all the data that comes out from those fundamental questions, I'll always have at the back of my mind how we might use that in other ways too. I'll give you an example. We had a paper in science a few years ago, looking at the sort of nanostructure of bone and elucidating that in ways that people hadn't previously been able to and that's obviously a really big advance in that kind of fundamental science field, but it also really got me thinking about how can we use that information to then design better biomaterials, for example, for regenerating bone. So it's not necessarily that when you set out on that study, you have that in mind, but having gathered that information, it's always interesting to think about where it might take you.

[00:13:36] Susannah de Jager: Going away for a moment from some of the specifics of your study, I'd love to hear a little bit from your perspective about the process of spinning out a company, how you have found it in different settings and what you think the key elements are for success, both from the university and from the ideas side of things.

[00:13:55] Molly Stevens: Well, the first thing that we would always do is a fair bit of due diligence around making sure that we've got something, that's going to be able to be patented and robust and where we'll have it. a unique scientific and innovative angle and then very importantly, making sure that there is going to be an end market for that, and that market actually might change over time. It's not uncommon for companies to pivot, you know, and we've certainly seen that in some of our companies and that's all part of the process, but you at least need to be starting with a fair idea of what you think could be commercially attractable and then the team obviously is going to be absolutely key, making sure you've got, in my case, it's often people from my own academic group that will go and become co founders with me, and then we'll help with running the company and we'll bring external people on as well and then obviously, the fundraising, process can be pretty time consuming as well, depending on the individual company circumstances. So all of those things have to come together and getting good mentorship as well, actually, bringing people into your network that have done it before, that can help advise you on that, you're going to make lots of mistakes, but don't try and make the most mistakes possible, right? Try and get as much help as you can as well to avoid some of the mistakes that you could avoid.

[00:15:15] Susannah de Jager: All sounds very obvious when you say it, but that doesn't mean everyone's doing it and you've obviously had experience of Imperial, now you're operating within the Oxford ecosystem. Do you see any fundamental differences with the interaction with the university there on these kind of processes and how they work?

[00:15:31] Molly Stevens: So far, we've interacted quite a bit actually with OUI since joining. We found them really efficient in the first sort of patent filings that we've gone forward with, and that's been really great to see. For example, we were heading to a conference and wanted to present some of the work and they very efficiently brought on the lawyers, patented that before we publicly disclosed it, as you would hope they would, and that was a very nice interaction and then we haven't spun anything out with them yet, but we certainly will. There's so many exciting things coming through the lab, we will be creating more companies. I think what I'm quite excited about is the potential for the express license route that you have at Oxford because, you know, speed is really, really important when you're thinking about creating companies, particularly if you're working in a very fast moving area, which some of our work would definitely be classed as fast moving areas. Actually every month or week that you lose in the negotiation process of spinning out is a really big loss and so the faster you can spin out on sort of equitable terms, the better.

[00:16:37] Susannah de Jager: And coming to terms a little bit, because you and I have discussed this, it's very much been in the spotlight recently, the difference, or the perceived difference, I might say, between US and UK terms and what those different pools of investors are used to. You've had experience of both Do you have a view on that at all?

[00:16:56] Molly Stevens: I mean, there's always going to be differences and sorts of approaches investors like, you know, whether they prefer non dilute or dilutive conditions and things like that. My view is it's still a very changing landscape. I think what we have right now as terms across the UK is unlikely to stay exactly as it is. I know these are things that have been very carefully considered across different universities, there's lots of discussions ongoing with this, lots of discussions also with government. I think it's a changing landscape. So where we are now is probably not where we will be in a year or two years.

[00:17:33] Susannah de Jager: That makes perfect sense. And in terms of the pathway that you see, you spoke about the fundraising part of that. In your experience to date and when you plan for things, how do you see the pool of capital available in the UK? At what point do you tend to think we're going to have to look further afield? What are the forces that you're taking into account?

[00:17:53] Molly Stevens: I think, you know, we would talk to investors in the UK, in Europe, also in the US. I'm also, venture partner with Catalio, which is a big US fund, but I do a lot of work also advising UK venture funds. It's again going to be quite dependent on the particular company and the particular market opportunity. Some markets are going to be most suitable for Europe or UK and others, you may want to launch first in the States, for example. So there's certainly more capital in the States, but that's not to say that discerning investors won't invest here, because of course they will. So, I think having those conversations with investors, wherever they are internationally, is what we would tend to do.

[00:18:38] Susannah de Jager: And just to draw you out a little bit more on that, because it's something that at the moment, it's getting a lot of focus with Rachel Reeves having her speech about consolidating local government pension schemes, which I'm fully in support of and that's looking at the scale up capital gap in the UK, as is quite well understood. But sometimes when I read the coverage on it, I think, well, that's one side of the occasion, but you've touched upon the other, which is, it's not just capital that makes companies move, it's the domestic market and the opportunity. Can you give some specific examples of areas that you're looking into where the US market just would be the most natural place to go and scale something?

[00:19:19] Molly Stevens: Well, I had a conversation actually earlier today where someone was talking about how digital patient pathways might be better to launch first in the US, for example, whereas a company, you know, as we have at the moment that is more around protein design and AI would be potentially quite well suited to be within a UK, Europe market because actually there's a brilliant talent base as well, you know to feed, into that company. So I do think it's field dependent. I do also think it'd be great if there was more capital here. So I would certainly encourage any decision makers and government to increase the capital pool over here, because of course, that's going to help strengthen the whole ecosystem.

[00:20:01] Susannah de Jager: Molly, in the previous companies that you've spun out, I'd love to hear a bit more of the specifics of how it worked, how involved you were, and at what point you exited or kind of moved back more into the Stevens Group.

[00:20:13] Molly Stevens: if technology is invented in my lab and coming out of my lab, I'll be very involved in thinking about what the opportunity might be, also writing the business case, the slide decks, the pitches, to raise the funding and so on and then more often than not I would say I would join as a director of the company and then I'll normally chair the scientific advisory board as well. I won't do the day to day running of the company because I have a day job already, but I'm pretty involved and many of our companies we will have joint research projects with. So, for example, these might be funded by Innovate UK or directly from the company or other sort of contracts we might get in place and in that sense, we stay often quite involved in developing next generations of the science and things like that.

[00:21:00] Susannah de Jager: So earlier you mentioned mentorship and how important that is for founding teams, you've also just brought up there being on the scientific advisory board, often chairing. How does that role work and what is it that you bring to the companies that you're advising?

[00:21:14] Molly Stevens: Well, there's the companies that I've founded that I'm obviously extremely involved in. I'm also a involved as an advisor to quite a number of other companies as well. So typically they might, the founders of those other companies might contact me because they want to build external expertise in a particular area, to help them with advice. It can be on all sorts of things. It can be on their R&D programme, it can be on how are they going to build the team, it can be on what's their best route towards the next fundraise. All those sort of questions that new teams that are forming would be interested in. I really love working with new teams of founders, particularly, founders that are really eager to sort of learn and get involved and create great new companies, and I'm, have been really blessed to be able to advise a reasonably large portfolio of companies at different stages of their journeys,

[00:22:11] some within the advanced therapeutic space, some within the sort of artificial meat space, actually, and others in more diagnostic type area.

[00:22:21] Susannah de Jager: It sounds absolutely fascinating and I can see how that also has the sort of the feedback loop on everything you're working on looking at. I don't know how you have the hours in the day!

[00:22:29] Molly Stevens: Well, also working with venture capital companies as an advisor has been something I've done because it's interesting, but also because it's helped me to really understand more what investors are looking for when they want to invest in companies and that I think has been helpful in enabling me to make better pitches for companies that I would be launching.

[00:22:55] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, which makes perfect sense. I think so often, and you touched upon it earlier on the academic entrepreneurialism side of things. It can be easy to be too much of a purist and not understand, and vice versa, by the way, so that makes a lot of sense. You have another role here at Oxford, so you're the Champion for Women and Diversity in Entrepreneurship. Can you talk a little bit about what that role means to you, why it's been set up?

[00:23:22] Molly Stevens: Yes. So I believe in diverse teams in general, in every sense of the word diverse, having people from diverse backgrounds, diverse genders, diverse ethnicities, just brings diversity of thinking and I think that makes teams a lot stronger and certainly in my academic group, we have an incredibly diverse team, and I think an incredibly strong team. Yet, if you look at a lot of the teams that are founded and funded as founders, they're a lot less diverse than you would want them to be. And that's been shown out, not just across Oxford, if anything, it's across the entire sector, that there really is a lack of diversity at the moment in founding teams and female founder teams will attract significantly less venture capital money and so on and so we need to do something to make the system a little bit more equal.

[00:24:19] Susannah de Jager: And how are you starting that? Are you starting from an academic perspective to look at studying why you perceive that to be, or do you feel that those issues are quite well understood already.

[00:24:30] Molly Stevens: Well, you can't really understand issues until you have data and so one of the things that Oxford's been doing, and they started this before I joined as the champion, and this was done while Kylie Vincent was the academic champion for women in entrepreneurship, is collecting data about all the spin outs that have come through the Oxford ecosystem and understanding, you know, who has been in those pool of founders, etc, etc. So step one is getting all that data and then there's also a whole program then around supporting people. It started off as gender, but it's really going to be rolled out as much broader than that as it should be and supporting people to access as much mentoring and kind of supportive ecosystem as possible. It's just really important that we consider diversity when we're building teams and that we acknowledge that teams often aren't diverse enough and being aware of that and trying to think about making sure that we're making decisions for the fairest reasons, you know, and in very transparent way, is really important.

[00:25:38] Susannah de Jager: And I think it can be very interesting because often when people hear these subjects, their default response will be, well, I always would make a decision based on the right principles and often it's putting processes around those things that can make sure that is the case because nobody normally, hopefully, is intentionally bringing bias into a room, but it is part of the human condition that we often prefer people that are like ourselves.

[00:26:04] Molly Stevens: I think unconscious biases, we all have it, right? Myself included.

[00:26:09] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, you've got the data, hopefully, we'll see it at some point. Can you talk about some of the actionable kind of programs that you've got running?

[00:26:18] Molly Stevens: Some of the things that IDEA has been working on, so it stands for Increasing Diversity in Enterprising Activity, so IDEA, has been working on a number of different strands, including for example, a peer mentoring programme, they have book club events, they have a dedicated Wonder Woman entrepreneur sort of showcase. They have a yearly women's dinners and really it's about getting the community to be aware of the other people within that community, to build some bonds, to share experiences and also to access as much support as possible.

[00:26:51] Susannah de Jager: I think it sounds very positive. In a completely different sphere, I interviewed Dame Helena Morrissey the other day, who's been doing a lot of pathways projects in financial services and she was saying one of the most positive things that had come out of those was the peer group and that's not even just the mentoring, although very important, but that sense of community, where perhaps there were just one or two people from their particular group or gender in a company, but then when you got to pull them together, they felt that real connection and support.

[00:27:24] Molly Stevens: Yes, and I think the peer group's so hugely important because it gives people some affirmation that they're right to be doing what they're pursuing because they can see other people from similar backgrounds that are doing the same thing.

[00:27:38] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, because it can be quite lonely if you don't see anyone like you. So I think that's fantastic. So Molly, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the Kavli Institute?

[00:27:47] Molly Stevens: So the Kavli Institute has a Director, Professor Dame Carol Robinson and I'm a Deputy Director, along with another Deputy Director, and it's very exciting because it provides an endowment to the Institute from the Kavli Foundation. Now, Kavli Foundation have founded a number of these different institutes worldwide, so in the US, in Europe and in various places, and they are on very specific topics, so there's some on astrophysics, some on neuroscience and some on nanoscience. Ours is around nanoscience, specifically nanoscience applied to the cell and biology and they funded 19 worldwide and we were number 20 and we'll probably be the last one and so that's been wonderful and what that funding enables us to do is actually to catalyse new collaborations around this theme of research. So for example, what we will do is pump prime projects, but they have to be from the ground up. So some of our early career researchers like postdocs or PhD students from different groups will get together, propose a new idea and write a proposal around that and we're not going to fund them if they're just continuing and doing the same research they're already doing, it needs to be new ideas that are really cross disciplinary and bring in different fields together.

[00:29:07] Susannah de Jager: I love that. So it's really forcing the gamut on kind of pushing people together.

[00:29:11] Molly Stevens: Yeah, yeah. There's nothing like a bit of, nothing like a bit of pump priming money to get people talking.

[00:29:16] Susannah de Jager: You get it, but only if you do something different and together. I love that.

[00:29:20] Molly Stevens: And also we have, you know, coffee mornings that every week are on different floors of the Institute and fun fact, I will say, is we are the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery and if you look at the beginning of those letters, it spells KIND, because we want to have a philosophy of having a very kind, collaborative environment as well.

[00:29:42] Susannah de Jager: And I think that really comes through in everything that you're focusing on and clearly the way you've built your own team, is that you really are holding at your core, the principles that you are expanding here. That diversity, for its own sake, but also for a good cultural working environment, and outputs clearly, it's going to make a better team, it's culturally going to make a happy team and the outputs will be that much more innovative because you have different perspectives.

[00:30:12] Molly Stevens: And it's so much more fun as well!

[00:30:13] Susannah de Jager: And it's much more fun, I'm so with you. We're in kind of rigorous agreement and I think what really strikes me and sounds like you came up with it first, but if you've read Matti Saad's Rebel Ideas, he talks about recombinant thinking, which is exactly what you're talking about having built here and just the power of bashing together different ideas from different places that you'll come up with something different, but also, and this is an interesting, because it slightly opposes what you've just said about more fun, which I agree with, that sometimes working with people very like you can be more harmonious and have less friction because you're more likely to agree, but ultimately that the outputs tend to be less successful.

[00:30:55] Wonderful. Molly, thank you so much.

[00:30:57] Molly Stevens: Thank you very much.

[00:30:59] Susannah de Jager: Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford+ presented by me, Susannah de Jager. If you want to stay up to date with all things Oxford+, please visit our website, OxfordPlus. co. uk and sign up for our newsletter so you never miss an update. Oxford+ was made in partnership with Mishcon de Reya and is produced and edited by Story Ninety-Four.