Bill's early life and education

Born in the United States, Bill originally intended to become a doctor. But once he got to university he soon realised this was more a dream of his mother and was not really the career path he wanted to follow. He came to this conclusion while taking pre-medical courses at university during which time he realised that what he most enjoyed was the laboratory science rather than the medical side of things. He was also put off doing medicine because it required him studying organic chemistry which he really struggled with.

In the end Bill landed up completing a BSc in molecular biology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. During his degree he did a lot of experiments to understand second messenger signalling in paramecium, a microscopic organism that scientists often use to study different biological functions. Bill then started to work in a laboratory at the university with the aim of getting a doctorate, but ended up leaving with a master’s degree because he was tired of being a poor student and was keen to start earning some money. He had also fallen in love with someone and wanted to be able to move with her to Baltimore in Maryland where she had secured a postdoctoral research position.

Bill's early career

In 1989 Bill began working for Life Technologies, a biotechnology company that specialised in developing and supplying products critical to performing life science research, medical research, human health diagnostics and treatment, biomedical manufacturing and many industrial applications. He was specifically hired to help the company manufacture restriction enzymes, which are DNA cutting enzymes that bacteria produce as part of their defence mechanism to prevent their destruction by viruses. Such enzymes are invaluable tools for scientists because they provide a means to physically splice and paste DNA segments very precisely for different purposes, including genetic engineering. Bill subsequently became involved in manufacturing DNA polymerase, another type of enzyme. Found in all living organisms, DNA polymerase is critical to the replication and repair of DNA as well as its maintenance. In science it is vital to a technique known as PCR (polymerase chain reaction) which makes it possible to make multiple copies of DNA which is needed for many different applications including the genetic identification of fungal, bacterial and viral diseases. Bill was involved in manufacturing one of the early commercial batches of DNA polymerase for PCR, which was just getting off the ground in the late 1980s.

After spending some time working in manufacturing, Bill joined the company’s research team and then went to work for one of its incubator start-up companies. At this point the company was involved in setting up three different incubators, which struck Bill as very novel and exciting. Still under the umbrella of the main company, each incubator was set up in a separate wing of its building with some support in terms of marketing, manufacturing, sales and distribution. Bill was tasked with leading the manufacturing team in the cell biology group. He really enjoyed the work as it gave him a chance to learn the business side of science which was all very new to him. In fact he liked it so much that he decided to go back to university to get a master’s degree in business.

The start of an entrepreneurial journey

One of the reasons Bill wanted to get a business degree was because his work with the incubator inspired him to consider founding and running a company. But this was not something he could achieve without first learning how to speak the language of finance and marketing and also how to read a balance sheet and understand cash flow statements. This was important because his scientific degree had not equipped him to understand such things. Bill took a master’s degree in business at Johns Hopkins, which he did over four years while continuing to work. He found the degree fairly easy but it helped him to understand all the different aspects of running a business.

Once Bill had finished his degree at Johns Hopkins he was given more business-oriented roles within Life Technologies. This included working as a business analyst and then as a programme manager before then going on to start a licensing group for the company. Licensing is a business arrangement whereby one company gives another one temporary permission to help develop, manufacture or sell their products for a specified sum. Bill learnt a lot in this process about intellectual property, patents and contract law. He really enjoyed the work because it gave him a different perspective and a better understanding of how advances in basic research get turned into new treatments and diagnostics for patients.

Bill spent twelve years working with Life Technologies but then decided to leave when the company got taken over by another company. Thereafter he spent ten months working as a consultant helping out on different projects. But he soon realised that he missed working within an organisation and being part of a team so agreed to join GenVec where he ultimately became head of business development. GenVec was a small biotechnology company with about 100 employees developing a platform using a modified adenovirus for delivering gene therapy. The advantage of the platform was that it could be easily adapted for treating many types of diseases as well as for vaccines.

Bill joined GenVec just after it became a publicly-traded and owned entity which allowed it to raise capital from the stock market. At that point the company had a couple of projects that were fairly well advanced which it had licensed out to a big pharmaceutical company and one of those had just been returned which Bill was tasked with finding a new partner for. Following this he subsequently wore a lot of different hats within the company which he really enjoyed because it gave him the chance to learn many different skills.

Heading up a company

After six years Bill was head hunted to become the chief executive officer (CEO) of a very small company called Vaxin, subsequently renamed Altimmune. Founded in 1997 as a spin-out from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the company was developing a non-invasive vaccine platform capable of administering vaccines through nasal sprays and skin patches. The new position entailed Bill having to commute two hours by plane at the start and end of the week because his family were unable to move to Alabama.

After two years Bill managed to secure a large bio-defense contract from the US government for the company to work on anthrax vaccines administered via a nasal spray. This gave him scope to move the company to Maryland and secure venture capital investments to really grow the company. He also negotiated for the company to acquire another one based in London that had some interesting peptide technologies targeting infectious diseases.

Bill remained with Altimmune for nearly eleven years. He describes this time as being a bit of a roller coaster ride. He particularly remembers 'everything went to hell in a handbasket' four months after he joined when the financial markets crashed in 2008 and it became very difficult to raise money. For him it felt a bit like 'indoctrination by fire'. When Bill first started at the company it had 15 staff and this went down to about five people before then going up to nearly 60. Eventually in 2017 Bill succeeded in getting the company listed on the stock market, known as a publicly-traded and owned company. By this point the company had two proprietary vaccine platform technologies and three clinical stage product candidates. This included an influenza vaccine administered through a nasal spray and an immunotherapy for patients chronically infected with hepatitis B. Bill decided to leave Altimmune in November 2018 after positive results came in from some of its clinical trials.

Taking a leap across the ocean to lead another company

When Bill left Altimmune he did not know exactly what he wanted to do next so spent some months doing some consultancy work. It did not take long, however, before he was asked to head up Vaccitech, a small company that had been spun out of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Now known as Barinthus Biotherapeutics, the company was launched in 2016 to help advance a novel vaccine platform developed and patented by two of the university’s vaccine scientists Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill. One of the attractions of their platform was that it offered a quick and affordable way to roll out vaccines on an industrial scale that could induce strong and durable T cell responses against diseases for which traditional vaccines, primarily designed to provoke an antibody response, had so far proven ineffective. The platform uses two modified viruses to deliver genetic material to train the body’s immune system to recognise and destroy specific antigens, molecules found on the surface of foreign invaders, such as bacteria, viruses and other pathogens, as well as on mutated cells like precancerous and cancer cells.

Bill learnt that Vaccitech was looking for someone like him after acting as a referee for one of his friends applying to become CEO of another company in Oxford. Interested in finding out more Bill reached out to the founder of the company and decided he would take the plunge and help the company to go public and raise capital on the stock market. At that point the company had a number of interesting vaccines for infectious diseases, including a promising candidate for a universal influenza vaccine and immunotherapies designed to activate T cells against chronic infectious diseases like hepatitis B and cancer cells.

COVID-19 vaccine

Officially joining Vaccitech in August 2019, Bill was regularly commuting across the Atlantic until all planes stopped flying because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Able to continue working with the company online and commuting around lockdowns, Bill soon swung into supporting it to develop a COVID-19 vaccine using its vaccine platform. Initially Bill hesitated about committing to the vaccine because it was unclear how far the new disease would spread and all the company’s resources were committed to getting its universal influenza vaccine off the ground which had just suffered a knock-back and their other product candidates against chronic infections and cancer. But it rapidly became clear that COVID-19 was much more serious than Bill originally understood.

Working in partnership with Oxford University, Vaccitech managed to construct the vaccine very fast. Starting the project in January 2020, they had a vaccine ready for clinical testing in humans within just four months. Getting to this point was all-consuming. It not only involved a lot of basic scientific research, but also organising animal studies and finding a company that would be willing to take over its development to get it approved. In April 2020 the vaccine was licensed over to AstraZeneca to start manufacturing and launch the first clinical trials.

Bill is very proud of what he and the company achieved with the COVID-19 vaccine. By the end of its first year the vaccine had been delivered to more than 3 billion people and saved more than 6 million lives worldwide. Such success is very rare in the biomedical industry. As he points out 'many people spend their careers in biotech and never get a product to market.' This is because only one of ten drugs that get developed ever make it to market. The vaccine also really helped put Vaccitech on the map which proved invaluable when the company put forward its initial public offering on the stock market in April 2021.

The public offering raised $110.5 million for the company. This provided crucial funding for the company to continue its work on immunotherapies to treat infections caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and human papillomavirus (HPV). Both of these viruses are highly contagious and cause significant illness and mortality worldwide especially in low- and middle-income countries.

One of the major challenges with HBV and HPV is they are essentially silent killers. Most people who get infected do not know they have the virus because they experience no symptoms. Usually the immune system will clear the virus without a person knowing they ever had it, but in some people it never clears and they become a long-term carrier. Those who carry the virus might not only transmit the virus to others, but face the potential risk of developing fatal complications in later life. In 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated there to be 296 million HBV carriers, 1.5 million new infections and approximately 820,000 deaths each year (mostly caused by liver cancer, cirrhosis, and liver failure). HPV is the most common cause of cervical cancer which is the fourth most frequent cancer in women worldwide. According to the WHO in 2020 there were approximately 604,000 new cases of cervical cancer globally and 342,000 deaths.

'Selling a promise' - fundraising skills

A great deal of Bill’s time is spent fundraising. Getting investors to put money into a biotechnology company is never easy because there is no guarantee of success and it can take many years before any revenue gets generated. Like other CEOs, Bill spends a lot of his time giving brief presentations to different people. Bill describes the process as 'basically selling a promise' to investors. This involves highlighting the potential value of the company’s technology and getting investors to understand the exciting benefits it could bring to patients further down the line.

Bill’s scientific background is helpful when it comes to selling the story of his company. But he points out, this is not essential. Some of the skills he now uses for fundraising he learnt from his business degree, but a lot of them he picked up through training on the job. For him the important characteristic is being able to communicate clearly and show investors where they have the potential to make money. This is particularly difficult in the early stages of a company which has yet to make its mark. At this stage Bill’s aim is to persuade investors that by making an early investment they stand to gain a large payout in the long-run. Getting investors on board becomes easier once positive clinical results roll in because this helps to increase the value of the company.

The excitement of being a CEO

What Bill particularly loves about his job is the potential benefits it can bring to patients’ lives. One of the highlights of his career was helping to get the COVID-19 vaccine developed. But the company has many other projects that if successful could be equally important and address unmet needs. He highlights, for example, the one the company is in the process of developing to help people with Coeliac disease, a devastating condition which at the moment can only be managed by sticking to a restrictive non-gluten diet. For Bill the excitement comes not only from the potential to improve human health, but also being able to build out teams and a company which in turn helps move people’s careers forward.

Tips for others considering a career in the biomedical industry

When considering what tips to give to others considering a career in the biomedical industry, Bill highlights the importance of determination and willingness to take a risk. As he says when he first started he did not have a clear vision of what his career path would be. The key thing that he believes helped propel him forward was his willingness to try new things and go with his gut instinct. Each time he has taken on a new job he did not know what he was doing at the start. What helped him was having confidence in his own abilities and determination to overcome obstacles. One of the ways he copes with setbacks is to make sure to celebrate successes along the way.

Bill stresses that a career in the biomedical industry is not all about science in a laboratory. As he discovered, it is as much about learning about business and having the right communication tools to get a message across. This means there is plenty of scope for people without a scientific degree to get involved. For example, for someone who studied English they might like to explore the avenues open for medical writing which range from writing up clinical protocols all the way to marketing. Or for someone who likes maths, there are opportunities to help out in the data management side of the industry and to join the development of artificial intelligence for drug discovery.

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This article was written by Dr Lara Marks based on an interview with Bill Enright on 11th July 2023.