We're drawn to the end of a great three days. I don't know about you, but my corner of the auditorium is getting a bit hot, so I hope you forgive me.
Take my jacket off as before. I wish we could wander off the ball.
But that's not possible. So I'd like to welcome back in person.
Professor Charles Bouncier CBE, the Centre for Innovation here at Oxford.
Who's going to wrap up the conference for us? Thank you very much off your chest.
Well, colleagues, thank you very much and thank you fell. Please don't take any more clothes off, Phil.
But many, many thanks to all of you. I mean, this has really been wonderful.
I've very much enjoyed Nick and Brian's presentations on Wednesday.
And Phil, thanks for sort of sharing that. And then, of course, autoline and massive day yesterday with Joe sharing.
And Robin Jarod's as presentations today, I thought were awesome.
And Thomas, thanks for doing all of that. I have to say I thought.
I'd love to see some of those slides, I don't know if the slides are going to be made available,
I'd love to look at them and sort of reflect on them a little bit more on my own,
actually, but many thanks to all of the speakers and the chairs,
and thanks to all of you for sort of spending time with us and all the organisers and the backstage team.
It's an amazing job. I mean, we've talked a lot about how could we speed things up?
How can we encourage more international collaboration? How can we focus on big problems?
So what I'll do is I'll just share with you a few reflections and maybe touch on a few things that maybe haven't been given so much emphasis,
maybe this afternoon. I think we're all agreed that.
We have to work together to create solutions to some of the biggest problems facing us, and we need to do that quickly with a real sense of urgency.
So I'll maybe make four points. One is around pooling.
Secondly around prioritising. Thirdly, around people.
And fourthly, around culture. So pooling, first of all, we absolutely have to pool our resources wherever we can.
Our infrastructure is our expertise because there is no one university or no
one company or no one country that can tackle these problems on their own.
We have to work together. I mean, I talked earlier about sort of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine.
I mean, that vaccine would not have gone into the arms of people if the university tried to do it on their own.
You know, it was successful because we worked with we access expertise and resources that we didn't have, but that existed inside AstraZeneca.
We worked with colleagues in government and funders and regulators, et cetera.
And that's why it's been such an amazing success.
I think related to that, I would say, I mean, we all like to talk about our strengths, and that's fantastic.
Of course, we like to build on our strengths. But I think we have to be honest about our weaknesses,
and we need to identify partners who can help fill those gaps and so that we
can create complementary partnerships that we can create Win-Win solutions.
The second comments around prioritising, you know, there are so many problems facing us.
I mean, in the space I work in, in sort of health care,
I could rattle off about mental health or dementia or rare disease or cancer or diabetes or AMR or pandemics or whatever.
But. And then you've got climate change. And you know, there you're talking about pollution, energy, water, food.
And you know, as Malcolm kept emphasising this afternoon, the climate health problem is ten times the size, maybe even bigger than the problem.
We've been dealing with their own sort of dementia or mental health or whatever, et cetera.
But there are so many problems, and the fact is no funding.
No government has got enough money to do it on their own, and we have to prioritise.
We have to focus.
And I think each of these problems are not going to get solved by putting five million or 10 million, even a few hundred million isn't going to do it.
Many of these problems are going to require billions of pounds and tens of billions of pounds.
I mean, the vaccine, I don't know how many low billions AstraZeneca will have invested in that vaccine.
It's not hundreds of millions, it's billions. So we need that scale of funding.
And of course, you know,
you could argue that the reason the world was successful last year in developing a number of vaccines was partly because funding was not limiting.
You know, governments, funders, philanthropists, everybody was throwing money at the COVID 19 vaccine problem.
And it was interesting. Middle of last year,
many leading scientists thought that what they were worried we wouldn't get a vaccine to COVID because we don't have a vaccine for HIV.
The fortunate lead turned out at the end of the year. We've got quite a few of them.
And it's worth saying that sort of, you know, AML or anti-microbial resistance or dementia.
You know, Saudi Davies has been talking about AML for a decade.
Jim O'Neill did that big report three or four years ago.
Dementia, you know, collectively across the world, we've we've been spending tens of billions and we don't have treatments for these.
I'm not convinced that the reason Biogen approved drug is effective, but the jury's out.
I hope it will be. But we don't have drugs at the moment to slow down the progression of Alzheimer's.
So it's it's not always about just throwing money at it.
I think we have to be joined up and we have to minimise duplication and monama the great
points in a discussion I was in this afternoon that I think often funding is reactive.
And of course, it certainly was with COVID, it was reactive and it would.
I think if we put that sort of scale of funding into EMR, we would have sorted it out by now.
So I think it's also worth saying that funders can accelerate innovation and impact.
And you know, we academics will go where the money is.
And so I think it is possible for the funders to influence.
But one example I'd like to share, maybe just for all of you to reflect on.
This is a project I think David Cameron started, this was the Dementia Discovery Fund four or five years ago,
managed now by Kate Fingar that basically that the UK government put some money in.
This was for Alzheimer's.
Obviously, the UK government put some money in Alzheimer's Society, Alzheimer's Research UK and then I think five or six farmers.
They created an aggregate pulse of about 100 million, just over 100 million.
And it was to focus on creating new companies devoted to sort of coming up with new targets for Alzheimer's, et cetera.
Now, Kate, with our amazing leadership, has grown that partner to, I think,
250 million with some pension money from the U.S. Gates Foundation and maybe some other farmers, etc. I think that's been a great success.
It's got government charities, industry working together with lots of academic groups all over the world,
got pension funds involved, gates involved, et cetera.
And I think it was a genius move to have an investor like Kate Bingham, A.D. Life Sciences, managing it.
And I think, of course, these investors are very much focussed on an output, very much focussed in terms of milestones, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think that's a good model. I think maybe we should do that in other areas.
The third thing I'd like to say is around people.
I hope I don't offend people then sort of, you know, to to tackle some of these problems, we need great leaders.
We need great innovators and we need great entrepreneurs. And I absolutely believe that all researchers or in fact, few researchers are leaders.
Few researchers are innovators and few researchers are entrepreneurs.
And it's these people we need because these are the individuals that really make things happen.
They develop new technologies and processes. They will not take no for an answer.
They harness resources and expertise. They create that single vision.
They're flexible. They're agile. They're creative. They have a sense of urgency.
They inspire people. They bring people along, etc. That's what we need to tackle these big problems.
The full thing about culture. I think we should applaud great people and great companies.
So let me just give you an example. I mean, Pascal Soriot, the CEO of AstraZeneca,
I think what he did was a very brave thing last year to say that he's going to work with the University of Oxford to produce a vaccine for the world,
and he's going to distribute that vaccine three billion samples at cost.
So AstraZeneca is not going to make any profit out of it. Now, of course, you know, they are talking about a global pharma company.
Other companies today are making tens of billions to their vaccines, and AstraZeneca are not.
I think we need to applaud people like Pascal and companies like A-Z.
And I think what they've done is amazing. And frankly, I think Pascal deserves a Nobel prise.
The second thing around culture is I think we need to help and support each other.
And I think we've talked about it collaborating and not competing.
Now, of course, that's not I mean, it's it's hard if you're working in a company, I think I think last year is towards us.
Even countries compete, unfortunately, and we need to sort that out.
But I think in universities, we should be able to collaborate more easily and they should be less competition.
And Alice Frost, who is chairing a wonderful session yesterday that I was in when she started this thing, called the Connecting Capability Fund.
It's about three years ago, which is very much about trying to get universities to work together, to work with industry,
to work with funders, to work with patient groups, et cetera, et cetera, to try and create impact through knowledge exchange.
I think that's been an awesome project.
But even there, I mean, I've noticed that there's still this tendency for universities to compete with each other.
I thought Rob's presentation this afternoon, I thought, was absolutely awesome.
Rob, I'd love to come and visit your institute.
I mean, I love the comments about breaking down silos and having people who are comfortable working in an academic and an industrial environment.
The only one slight thing, I think I slightly. I'm not saying I disagree with Rob on, but I need to reflect on it.
I mean, Rob was very much focussed on objectives and wanted to do away with milestones and deliverables.
I certainly think we need milestones so that we can sort of track progress.
So just a few reflections. I think it's largely just reiterating what some colleagues have already said.
But Autoline, I thought, you know, yesterday in one of the slides I see, she put in a very much focus around people,
around ideas, around infrastructures, around connectivity and targeting.
And I think I've probably said those five things using my own words.
So, Autoline, thanks for that presentation.
Yesterday was superb. Just to finish off. I mean, Malcolm Scheindlin and I used to work with a.
Great individual named Tashi Ahmad, I think he's one of the greatest scientific leaders I've met.
And he always used to say. Patients are waiting.
And and of course, that's working inside a pharmaceutical company, so that makes eminent sense.
But I think today, I think we all recognise that, you know, there are sort of health challenges that we all have societies all over the world.
But climate health. Is a massive problem, if climate health fails, then all of us have finished,
and so maybe I would just change tack Xi's comments instead of patients awaiting, I would say, patients and future generations awaiting that.
I think they are looking to us to work together to come up with solutions to some of these problems.
So on that note, thank you very much. And I should just remind you all Phil has promised you all a drink next year, so please hold him to it.
So thank you and all the very best to. Thank you, Charles.
Future generations are waiting, I think that's that's a great note to leave on.