King's College London

Tim Witney is Professor of Molecular Imaging at King’s College London. Hot on the heels of his winning the Cancer Research Horizons Entrepreneurial Group Leader of the Year award we talked to him about his latest role as Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Nuclide Therapeutics, the new biotech company recently spun-out from King’s.  

Hi Tim, congratulations on the launch of Nuclide Therapeutics, and thank you for taking time for this In Conversation feature with us. We’d love to know about your career journey from research through to forming a commercial spin-out, how did it all start?

I’ve had a long and winding path to get here, that’s for sure!

I’m a Professor of Molecular Imaging at the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences (BMEIS), where we develop novel radiotheranostic agents to image and treat cancer patients. Previously, I worked at several universities. I started as a biochemistry undergraduate at Warwick University, which sparked my passion for understanding how cells work.

The course included an intercalated year working in industry, and I worked for a company called Amersham Health, which had just been taken over by GE Healthcare, a company that specialised in creating imaging agents using positron emission tomography (PET). It was here that I fell in love with the field of imaging. After completing my final year at Warwick, I was lucky enough to get a PhD position at Cambridge followed by postdocs at Imperial and then Stanford. There I worked under Professor Sanjiv “Sam” Gambhir, who many regard to be one of the pioneers of precision medicine and molecular imaging.

It sounds like the early commercial experience you gained from the industry side of healthcare, combined with the late Prof Gambhir’s ongoing inspiration for those working in precision diagnostics, was a big influence on your own journey from researcher to founder.

When you’ve been in academia for a long time, what you realise is that if you want to make a difference to patients’ lives, you can’t do it in academia alone. There must be a commercial element that will allow you to get your product – and, yes, you have to learn to start thinking of it as a product – to as many people as possible.

That’s the motivation – to help people – and to do that at scale, you have to partner with industry, license out your technology, or, as in our case with Nuclide Therapeutics, create your own company. Creating your own company is particularly enticing as during the early stages you are likely to have a far larger say in the direction the company takes and how the product is developed.

What was the breakthrough that enabled the jump from research to forming a company?

My academic lab has spent the last ten years focused on developing small drug-like molecules that, when tagged with radioactivity, will light up tumours that are resistant to conventional therapies.

If chemotherapy stops working, you want to know as soon as possible so you can explore other treatment options. In the lab, we create molecules that will only bind to resistant tumours and make them visible during an imaging scan.

The breakthrough came when we changed our approach, and the type of radioactivity we used, which allowed us to use these agents not just for identifying resistant tumours in scans but also to use them for targeted therapy. By using this different ‘flavour’ of radioactivity attached to the same precision targeting agent, we can specifically treat just the therapy-resistant cancer. Think of it like a very small bomb that only goes off in treatment-resistant cancer cells and destroy them, leaving healthy tissue untouched.

In other words, we started out with a diagnostics approach trying to find new ways to make chemotherapy-resistant tumours visible earlier in the treatment process, then pivoted when we realised the potential opportunity that these ‘smart’ cancer treatments offered to improve patient outcomes.

One thing that often gets overlooked in conversations about entrepreneurship is that forming a successful company, especially in a complex field like biotechnology, is very much a team venture not a solo activity.

Absolutely, taking academic research to commercial scale is embedded into the mission of our School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences: thinking “from bench to bedside to boardroom” as our Head of School, Prof Sebastien Ourselin, would say.

He sets a high bar for excellence in academic work we’re always encouraged to ask what’s the next stage and how can we benefit patients.

It was when Muhammet Tanc, who is now our company’s CEO, joined the lab that we really started to think about turning the exciting research findings we were seeing in the lab into a company that could create direct patient impact.

I also want to mention Drs Sophia dos Santos and Richard Edwards who were both instrumental to our recent success. They’d both been in the lab for several years and were starting to now think about what was next in their own career. We were lucky that they decided to come onboard at Nuclide Therapeutics and it’s really a journey the four of us have gone on together.

What I would say to anyone aspiring to create their own spin-out is get your founding team nailed down early with excellent people you really trust and admire.

That’s great advice for new founders, thank you. Are there any other insights you can share from across your entrepreneurial journey?

It’s all about understanding that setting up your company, even with amazing data, takes longer than you’d expect.

It takes some time to start seeing yourself as a business and a business person, rather than a pure academic. And then there’s a long road ahead to raise funds to make the business viable, with extended conversations needed with lawyers and administrators to finalise the licencing deal and find the right sort of people to invest in you.

Even with the type of preclinical data and results we had, it took us at two years to get to the position we are now fortunate enough to be in.

And now the real work starts to set up our clinical trial!

We were just about to ask "what comes next?" as our final question. 

We’ve just concluded a £5 million investment round funded by Marathon Beteiligungs AG.

This will fund our first clinical trial, and we have set an ambitious timeline to inject the first patient with our radionuclide therapy by mid-2026 (Q3 in business-speak!).

Then, of course, even while we’re pushing forward on that front, we’re also going right back to the beginning and focusing on research again and what other new therapies we might be able to develop for the future.

That’s the reality of a startup mentality and something I learnt from Sam – ‘what’s next?!’.