The art of
partnerships

How did you end up managing strategic partnerships? It has been a bit of a logical progression, I guess. I started out studying biological sciences in the UK, then got a research post before moving to Australia to do a PhD.

That sounds like an enterprising thing to do? I've always loved travel and am actually dual British-Australian nationality. I was applying to some UK universities to do a PhD when this opportunity came up.

There was absolutely no way I wasn’t going. I took the kids who were four and six at the time and we just went. Being in the tropics was so exciting as was the science I was doing, researching autoimmunity, infectious and inflammatory diseases.

The one downside was that I was spending a lot of time in the lab and after a while I realised I wanted to get out and interact with the world.

I joined the committee of the Australian Society for Immunology, organising lots of events and public engagement activities across Australia and New Zealand. I loved it, having an input into the sector, being part of the bigger picture - and making new connections.

Living in Australia was amazing but I wanted to bring my girls back to the UK for their secondary education. When I saw a role advertised for an Immunology Co-ordinator at Cambridge, I jumped at the chance.

I was working with Professor Ken Smith in the School of Clinical Medicine, coordinating Cambridge Immunology. Soon after I started, he asked me to help him set up a new institute, the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease. This involved building a new home for the Institute, in the Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.

It was a huge project. I hadn't done anything like it before and I wasn't sure I was going to pull it off. When I came in there was a very small team in place, under time pressure to get it done.

How did you set about such a daunting task? My approach is always to look at the bigger picture and then break it down into manageable chunks. The target that we were aiming for – an institute with lots of different components - needed lots of working groups to make sure we had all bases covered.

I chose experts from each area, covering everything from proteomics to office furniture, put them in working groups, then sat in each group and progressed things that way.

Making that happen is one of the things I'm most proud of in my career to date.

And that led to a role in partnership management? After that, I moved over to manage Cambridge Cardiovascular, one of the University's Interdisciplinary Research Centres. This role involved much more interaction with industry partners and then I was offered the chance to become the University's relationship manager for one of its most important industry partners, GSK.

As part of my role in immunology, I had already worked on a number of successful projects with GSK so it made sense for me to be brought in to manage the whole partnership.

Working with GSK made me realise the scale of opportunity we have for partnerships in the life sciences and healthcare sectors. The University has fantastic expertise in many of the areas that companies are focused on. We are particularly strong in clinical sciences, genomics and data science and there are many areas for potential collaboration.

What is your role now? I'm the Sector Lead for Life Sciences and Healthcare, based in the Strategic Partnerships Office. I look after partnerships that span multiple disciplines and projects and my role is to help them grow and deliver value for both sides.

But it's important to acknowledge that I don't do any of this on my own. By definition, partnership management is a very collaborative activity.

As well as working closely with our partners, there are lots of University people involved, all of whom are vital to a successful outcome: researchers, knowledge exchange professionals and the contracts team in the University's Research Operations Office.

What is it like working with industry partners? Fantastic but hard work and time-consuming! For example, the £50 million collaboration we recently announced with GSK took more than two years to come to fruition and involves hundreds of people from across the partner organisations, all of whom need to agree on the direction of travel and then play their part in making it happen.

In order to make it work, you need a huge degree of trust and goodwill between both organisations. In particular, you need to have a really strong relationship with your opposite number so that together you can iron out problems as they arise.

Why do you think you are so effective at it? Is there a secret sauce? I'm good at spotting and bringing on board other people who like to make things happen.

This was essential for the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease project and it's the same with strategic partnerships. I find the industry and academic experts and put them in teams which are then able to work productively towards a shared goal.

I haven’t made an antibody or a hearing device or anything like that but there are lots of people like me working in universities doing innovative things.

I look at something, and work out how we can adapt it into something that industry would be interested in.

Ultimately, I think it's because I push, push, push. I always try to stay open to new ideas and different ways of doing things.

What are the main challenges you are up against? The fact that industry and universities have very different ways of working. Cambridge is a huge and complex organisation with an 800-year history. We have certain ways of doing things, which can take time. And individual researchers, rightly, all have their own priorities.

When companies come with their objectives and targets and timelines, it can be difficult to bridge the gap. This is where we come in, helping both sides navigate through the complexity so that everyone emerges with something useful - and we all make progress.

You have to keep in mind that people often change roles in industry and that companies change their strategies. You have to be ready to adapt to new priorities and be able to read people and situations.

How do you deal with setbacks? Things are always going wrong! You can be working on a project for years, and suddenly your industry partner changes the target. You have to reassess, regroup and keep on going.

What spurs you on? The opportunity to make things happen, things which have a tangible benefit to people's health.

There are scientists all round the world having similar ideas, doing similar experiments. Most of them never see the light of day.

Translating fundamental science into new treatments is so important. To do that you need people like me, who can both see the potential and understand which routes are most likely to succeed.