How my daughter fired me up to hunt for vital vaccine

Investment queen who’ll sign the taxpayers’ cheque for Covid deals we ALL want reveals...

IT’S hard to believe that Kate Bingham ever questioned whether she could lead the UK’s efforts to find a coronavirus vaccine. Confident and assured, the selfstyled grande dame of British biotech investing and now chair of the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce was only talked into taking the role in May by her daughter.

‘When I told my daughter I wasn’t sure if I could do this, she looked at me and said, “Mum! If I’d said that you’d have given me all this lip about “don’t be underconfident, you’re just putting yourself down!” So I was told off by my 22-year-old,’ she laughs.

Bingham’s brief as chair of the taskforce is to co-ordinate Britain’s vital hunt for a Covid-19 vaccine.

That means securing deals with the pharmaceutical firms that are developing potential vaccines, establishing manufacturing facilities, signing the cheques – with the Prime Minister’s approval first, of course – and making sure the UK is better prepared if we are hit by another pandemic in the future.

She admits she isn’t a ‘complete expert’ in vaccines, but says chairing the Vaccine Taskforce is not so different from her role as managing partner of SV Health Investors, the biotech venture capital firm.

Bingham, who has known the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance for years, says she has brought to her new role the ruthless mindset she applies when picking biotech winners (and losers).

‘Think of me as being a sort of grande dame of the biotech venture community,’ she says. ‘As a venture capitalist, I have to write a personal cheque into every single thing I invest my investors’ money in.’

‘So they want us personally on the hook with skin in the game for everything we do. That sort of approach is actually what you need in this case. It’s Government money, not my money, but the mentality is