Capital Cell's effort might be the beginning of a viable alternative to VC funding for budding biotech companies.

David Chiswell has worked tirelessly to build up the British biotech industry for over 30 years. Now, as CEO of Kymab, he is looking to the future of the industry and how to find the stars of the future.

Though it has left behind the “industrialized” R&D approaches from the 1990s, Glaxo thinks its R&D revolution has produced strong growth that will get it back into major markets and maintain an output of three to five significant drug approvals per year. With that progress in sight, the firm is ready to transform its manufacturing and commercial model in the same way it recreated R&D.

At the forefront of radical R&D reorganization, GlaxoSmithKline continues to evolve its model, characterized to date by the breaking up of R&D into small, biotech-like drug performance units (DPUs). These units are about to undergo the latest round of change: closer integration with the downstream medicines development centers in their respective therapeutic areas. The move makes sense given industry's growing recognition of the need for payor and regulator requirements to inform even early-stage discovery and development.