very interesting interview
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Kate Bingham: Why the UK strategy on Covid vaccines has been a great success
www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/02/07/news/kate_bingham_interview_vaccines_covid_astrazeneca_uk_coronavirus_johnson-286384093/
La Repubblica and Die Welt: Kate Bingham, how did you achieve this successful vaccine program? How did you know which of the vaccines to pick?
Bingham: “The instruction I was given by the Prime Minister was to save lives as soon as possible, so we had a very clear goal. We had a very clear focus on being quick and securing the most promising vaccines for the UK as soon as possible. That was my number one priority and what we did. I’m a venture capitalist in my whole job, I've spent all my life building companies, developing new pharmaceuticals. So my whole job has always been: look at science, look at data, and then decide what the risks are. And if, from my perspective, it's an attractive investment or whether or not we should be building a company around that area of science.”
“So the concept of looking at data and establishing what the different strengths of the different data packages were is something that I'm familiar with. But also the team that I put together is familiar with. So the first thing we did was basically to narrow down the landscape to those [vaccines] that could enter the clinic in 2020. So that was our first cut off, because if they couldn't get into the clinic in 2020, that means they were going to be probably next generation vaccine – and too late for the immediate pandemic.”
“Therefore, we focused, first of all, on what could get into clinic first and then we looked at the data. Now, of course, all the different companies have different types of data. None of the models were comparable and that reduced the list probably to 20. Then we probably did really deep diligence on a dozen, maybe something like that. And then we had to make decisions. That was the basis, the judgment of the team that not only what was the immunogenicity and safety data like, but just as importantly, what was the ability to supply like?"
“Did we actually have confidence that they would be able to scale and generate the numbers of doses we wanted in time? So that's why we've been quite public about it. That was the reason we chose BioNTech over Moderna. Both of them have good data, but the BioNTech supply chain was clearly far advanced for European supply ahead of Moderna who had prioritised supply in the US ahead of Europe. Everyone thinks it was sort of amazing. It wasn't. It's what we do.”