The QuantuMDx Story So Far - PART I

So here it goes, my first blog of the new era of QuantuMDx Group. What better way to start, than to give you a brief history of me and the story of how the company started.

Lewes Old Grammar School
www.oldgrammar.e-sussex.sch.uk/

I guess the journey began back in 1991 at Lewes Old Grammar School, when at 16 years old, my wonderful Biology teacher (Dr Bishop) got hold of some Drosophila melanogaster strains from her daughter who was studying them in Cambridge at the time. Up until that point I was mildly interested with my studies and far more interested in playing football and spending hours making sure my hair was specifically arranged to ensure it looked like I had just got out of bed so that the girls I was chasing would be impressed that I didn’t care.

By the time the F2 progeny popped out of their eggs and I had counted the ratio of red, apricot, brown, carnation, and purple eyes I was hooked on genetics, partially because it demonstrated that I was red/green colour-blind, but mainly because that genetics experiment blew my mind.

My undergraduate university

After high school I enrolled in a one of the only straight genetics MSc programs in the country and fell in love with evolutionary theory, taught to me by the late John Maynard-Smith (He was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution and theorized on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signaling theory), developmental genetics, bioinformatics and ultimately genomics. As a third year project I met Dr Janet Collet who took me under her wing and gave me the best education I could have ever hoped for. She showed me how to write, present, edit, design experiments, deal with politics, to fight for what I believed in and she even picked up the fact that I was dyslexic. Much of where I am and who I am today is down to Janet and I will be forever grateful to her.

It was Janet who invited me to spend the summer with her at Harvard University in 1997 and this eventually led to me spending a good number of years (1997-2001) at Harvard, during one of the most exciting periods in Genomics (the announcement of the sequencing of the first draft of the human genome) and also in the internet (the birth of Facebook). It was during a talk by Craig Venter in 1998 that I realized that I wanted to get into industry and set up my own company, one that could help humanity leverage the stunning work carried out by private and public efforts during the Human Genome Project.

Nuffield Hospital Tunbridge Wells

My one issue with making this dream a reality was that I knew a lot about fruit flies, but little about humans. So when I returned to the UK I took a technical role in a multidisciplinary pathology lab and set myself to learn as much as I could about the industry, diagnostics and business in general. I built labs and services for Immunology and Allergy and made that very successful, even winning an NHS contract. Then I set myself to doing the same for Molecular Diagnostics.

During the time I was helping John Roberts (the pathology laboratory manager who taught me so much about the industry & dealing with upper management – softly, softly, catchy monkey was his mantra to me) to set up the molecular diagnostics service, I was struck by how bad the technology was. I assume this was merely a function of its embryonic state, but it still bothered me that it was so fragmented and not pathology friendly. It was also apparent that people in healthcare really didn’t understand molecular biology and that there was significant opportunity to develop a service model to introduce for novel and new molecular assays.

I tried to get my superiors at the hospital group I was working at to buy into the idea, but as anyone who has worked for a big corporate machine knows, getting buy in for radical new ideas is a slow and frustrating process. I decided therefore to go it alone and began writing a business plan for a molecular laboratory with the husband (James Macrill) of one of my colleagues at the hospital group. James really challenged me and taught me a lot of what I needed to learn in terms of setting up a company.

My first letter to Elaine & my
first venture into entraprenuership

With business plan in hand, we set off to the city to do the usual rounds of VC and angel meetings. During one of these meetings, in a hotel in Tunbridge Wells, UK, we pitched our idea to Elaine Warburton, a director of The London Clinic on Harley Street, London (recently famous for treating Prince Phillip). The meeting went well and we all seemed to be on the same page with our vision for the future of Genetics and molecular diagnostics.

Unfortunately as time went on and the investors kept telling us we were too early, or too late, or not experienced enough, etc, etc and James had to make the hard decision to take work elsewhere and move on. This set back only served to push me on harder and when Elaine contacted me again to say she was putting together a company to provide Genetic Medicine services and clinics for early disease detection, surveillance and prevention and wanted me to join forces with her, I jumped at the opportunity.

Elaine & my first company together

Elaine had put together a very strong team and I took on the role of Bioscience Director – a novel role in which I advised on all aspects of the genetic and molecular testing, as well as searching the globe for new tests and technologies to bring into the company for us to distribute. We negotiated an exclusive license to distribute the Agendia portfolio of tests (including their MammaPrint breast cancer recurrence microarray), signed deals to operate clinics out of a number hospitals and off we went. Over the years I spent a lot of time traversing the globe meeting very smart people with amazing assays and technologies, both in academia and industry. It was the ultimate education in the global pipeline for molecular and genetic technology.

Unfortunately a combination of being too innovative, too early and differences of opinion regarding strategy at the board and investor level meant that the company was destined to fail. Close to the end Elaine and I resigned our positions as it was apparent that the company was not going down the route we wanted (it hadn’t invested in labs, technology and was purely providing low cost consultations and referring all tests to third parties – frankly impossible to make any money or investment returns of note).

After some time licking our wounds and learning the lessons that you can only get from business failure, we devised and incorporated our next company, QuantuMDx Group on 4^th March 2008 …..

These are the personal words and opinions of Jonathon O’Halloran and do not reflect the opinion of QuantuMDx Group Limited.