Sir John Bell

So, you know, Oxford does lots of little startup companies in the biotech space and all the rest of it.

But we never scale any of these companies because there isn't the depth of capital for scaling capital to get these things scaled.

And so in a way, what we're trying to do here at Ellison

actually avoids that problem because you know larry knows how to scale companies and we've got the financial support now if we have things that are really successful we can build the full stack solution to some of these problems so i think the university is really intrigued as to how we might do that

We're going to have to bring some people in that know how to do that and build billion-dollar companies, but it's sufficiently attractive.

We've already started to recruit some really outstanding people.

So as a way to change the UK system broadly, it's actually quite a good disruptive influence on the way the thing works to try and fix some of the fundamental problems.

Yeah, so, you know, if you turn the clock back 20 years or actually study more than 25 years ago, it was clear that genomics was going to have a play.

And I think many of us believed that there was going to be a genetic element to most of the major common disease turn out to be true.

But at the time, there were a few skeptics.

But, you know, it seemed to us that there was going to be a genetic story that underpinned an awful lot of

human disease and medicine.

And we were fortunate because in Oxford, as you know, one of my predecessors in the Regis job was Richard Dahl.

And he built up this fantastic epidemiology capability in Oxford around Richard Peto, Rory Collins, and those folks.

And they really knew how to do large-scale epidemiology.

And one of the things that they'd observed, which turns out to be true with genetics as well, is a lot of the effects are relatively small, but they're still quite significant.

So you do need large-scale cohorts to understand what you're doing.

And it was really Richard that pioneered the whole thinking behind that.

When we had another element in the formula, which was the ability to detect genetic variation and put that into the formula, it seemed to me that we could move into an era where you could set up, again, large cohorts, but build into the ability to have DNA, interrogate the DNA, and also ultimately interrogate things like proteomics and metabonomics, which were just in their infancy at that stage.

So very early on, I got together, because I was at that stage the Nuffield Chair of Medicine, and I got together Rory and Richard and a couple of others, and we talked a little bit about what it would look like.