In Profile with H.E.L Group’s Paul Orange & Joe Willmot

EPM sits down with Paul Orange, chief marketing officer at H.E.L Group & Joe Willmot, application leader at H.E.L Group to discuss the company’s customer legacy and how the pharma market has changed since its formation over 30 years ago.

What’s the biggest change you’ve experienced in pharma since the formation of H.E.L?

As H.E.L has been in business for over 30 years, picking just one change is a tough question. However, we have seen the rise of biotherapeutics from an almost zero base. What is an interesting observation, is that the predicted death of small molecule drugs has not taken place. Instead, we see that biopharmaceuticals are finding their own therapeutic niches. These niches are evolving alongside the continued growth of small molecule therapies.

And how have changing trends in the industry impacted H.E.L as a company?

Taking our customer base as a whole, 30 years ago we could not have predicted the importance and speed of battery technology development that we see today. Nor could we have predicted the level of activity in the white biotechnology sector - in particular trying to solve some of the more challenging climate change issues that we face. For us, these changes have meant that our product portfolio has continuously developed to support the changing market.

Thinking specifically about changes in the pharmaceutical industry, we see that R&D is significantly pared down compared to when we started as a business. Commensurately, the use of automation has become incredibly important to maintain the productivity of those R&D departments. Therefore, ensuring that we are fully compatible with automation approaches is something that we have to guarantee.

What’s the uptake of automated solutions been like in pharma and biotech?

As per the previous response, the uptake of automation has been huge in the pharma industry. Although the profile of how automation is applied has changed over time, we believe we will see the continued evolution of what automation is used for and how it is applied.

It's fair to say that automation continues to evolve beyond the simple act of putting a robotics platform into a laboratory and doing the physical experimentation through that mechanism. The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence-like approaches are themselves driving the creation and design of those experiments.

Looking into the crystal ball, the future of automation will rely ever more on this interface between robotics, that can do very accurate or difficult experiments with high accuracy, and systematised data collection and interrogation. We also see that this data interrogation is able to pose questions and find patterns in data that humans cannot realistically do.

Thinking specifically about the biotech segment for a moment. There is a significant proportion of biotech companies that have started due to the fact that the founders were working for a pharmaceutical company which either closed, or downsized, the R&D department where they were working. This push caused the founders to think about starting up their own business, quite often buying the automation systems from the pharmaceutical company at a very attractive price. This means at the heart of a great number of biotech companies is a very solid technology platform, and that technology platform is quite often heavily reliant upon automation. We therefore see a very synergistic relationship between intelligent, accessible automation and the growth of the biotech industry over the past few years.

How do you expand as a company whilst safeguarding H.E.L’s legacy and existing customer base?

The important part of this question is about supporting our customer base.  As a company that has put significant focus historically into developing custom solutions for our customers, we are in the position of having strong customer connection and focus as part of our DNA and our operating system. We fully intend to maintain that strong customer connection as a business and use that as a mechanism to expand.

The bottom line is if you understand the problems your customers are trying to solve, and you think a little bit beyond those immediate needs to see how they fit into the wider market needs and trends, then that gives you the platform to grow as a business.

We also look at expansion of our business in a very considered and logical manner. We see the gaps in our operations where we feel we can add additional resources that will allow us to better support our customers. Ultimately, this gives us the basis to grow and scale as a business.

Do you think R&D in the UK and Europe has enough support via government schemes and funding?

Unfortunately, our answer is inherently no. We don't believe that this is just the UK and Europe either - I would extend that to the US as well. Many of our staff come from either scientific backgrounds or have worked in scientific companies, so we feel very passionately about the positive impact that science and engineering can have on society as a whole. At an almost instinctive level, we would all like to see more of our public funding go to R&D.

Historically, the UK has been very good at punching above its weight in terms of R&D and innovation, and this is clearly a national skill set that we could expand and exploit more if there were more resources put into it. For the UK in particular, there is a lot of uncertainty about how funding will continue to be provided once the UK fully leaves the European Union. If Brexit leads to a decrease in the amount of funding for R&D, it could have a very significant effect on the innovation output from the UK.

Clearly one huge uncertainty that we all face at the moment is the Covid-19 pandemic. It is difficult to fully comprehend what impact this will have on our R&D funding in the future.  On one hand, we may see greater willingness from governments to fund R&D that will helpful for future pandemics.

However, on the flipside, given the massive public spending that is taking place to prop up economies during the crisis, we find ourselves in uncharted territory in understanding what that means for public spending once this crisis is over.