M2M ENCORE: Founding and Selling Three Bio CDMOs

Raman Sehgal (0:09)

Hey, guys and girls, welcome back to Molecule to Market, where we go inside the outsourcing space of pharma and biopharma services, covering every stage of the global drug development and commercialization lifecycle. I am your host, Raman Sehgal, and in today's episode, I'll be speaking about the pharma and biopharma ecosystem with Mark Bamforth OBE. Mark is currently the CEO at DysAMR and is also a serial entrepreneur, investor and mentor. This is a re-release episode that we've actually had on in the past, and I'll tell you why we are re-releasing this episode today. Look, over the last couple of years, we've been so fortunate that the following one, Molecule to Market, you guys that listen to the show every week and recommend it to other colleagues and associates in the industry, has allowed us to really grow the kind of profile and listenership of the whole podcast. And one of the things that happens quite often is people reach out to me and say, hey, like you should have so and so on the podcast. And I often say, oh, actually, I had them on like five years ago or whatever, because we've done nearly 300 episodes, been going for six years. There's a lot of content and a lot of fantastic guests that we've had on the podcast. So what we thought might be quite fun was to kind of go back kind of into the vault of some of the most popular episodes we've ever had on the podcast. And this is the first of the M2M Encore kind of series where we're going to kind of delve into the back catalog and bring some guests that you may have missed previously and you don't want to scroll back and go through and find them. But also I'd say I'm hand selecting ones that really kind of took the podcast to a new level, but also I learned lots from them and they're just incredible guests. And Mark very much fits that profile. And let me tell you a bit about Mark. As mentioned, he's now an OBE, which is an incredible achievement, being effectively recognized by the Roth family in the UK, which is fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur, mentor to CEOs, and as I mentioned, he's now currently CEO at DIS AMR, whose mission to accelerate scientific, financial and policy solutions to protect modern medicine from antimicrobial resistance infections. It's worth saying, actually, when we recorded this podcast, Mark was kind of, he was doing a lot of board roles and things like that, but he wasn't kind of back as a CEO. And so it's interesting, you know, fast forwarding a couple of years, and he's kind of gone back in to the CEO seat, which is fantastic given the amount of success that he's had in the sector. In addition to that, he's also the executive board chair of Kincellis, who we've actually also had on the podcast, an advanced therapies CDMO, general partner of the Kineticos AMR Accelerator Fund, and serves on the board of Entobiotix, Continuus Pharma, and the Saltire Foundation USA. Previously, Mark had founded and built and sold three PE-backed biotech CDMOs, Gallus Biopharmaceuticals, Brammer Bio, and Arranta Bio over a 12-year period.

For a combined value of just a smooth 2.5 billion US dollars. Before becoming such a fantastic entrepreneur, and I have to say one of the nicest people I've ever met in the sector, Mark spent 22 years at Genzyme in the UK and US, latterly running a global manufacturing operation, spanning 12 sites in nine countries, and producing more than 20 commercial products. He began his career as a petroleum engineer, exploring the North Sea, oil and Britoil before moving into the whiskey industry as a chemical engineer with Whitbread. Mark holds a BS in chemical engineering from Strathclyde University and an MBA from Henley Management College. He was an appointed the officer of the Order of British Empire OBE, which is a massive deal by the way, for services to the biotech industry and UK-US business relations. I think it was last year that that happened. An incredible guest.

Let me tell you a quick story about Mark. When I moved to Boston years ago, I didn't know anyone and we had an office in Cambridge at the time. I reached out to a bunch of people locally that might be connected to the kind of pharma services, CDMO, CRO sector. As you can imagine, a lot of these people didn't respond.

I was new to the area. I was trying to make connections. It turns out Mark was at Brammer at the time running that business. He was just down the road from me.

He sent me a lovely email back just saying, hey, let's come and have a coffee whenever you want. A couple of days later, I went down the road to Brammer's office and had a coffee, met Mark, and he was so unbelievably helpful and so supportive of my own entrepreneurial journey, which I was just astonished by. Two weeks later, I didn't use that Brammer. It sold for, I think it was 1.4 billion or something like that. He obviously was in the midst of that deal closing whilst he made time for me, which just tells you the type of person he is. I'll be forever grateful for him making that time for me.