“In 2010 Simon Ward, an associate director in the neuroscience division at the pharmaceutical firm Glaxo-Smith Kline (GSK), was fired, along with the rest of the division. At the time, the guillotining of neuroscience was part of a global move in big pharma to back away from brain research, deemed too difficult and risky. Determined to help fill that void, Dr Ward secured £14m ($19m) from the Wellcome Trust, a charity, the Medical Research Council and others to launch a new institute focused on turning discoveries in neuroscience into medicines. And so the Medicines Discovery Institute (MDI) began.
On June 18th the institute spun out its first biotech firm, Draig Therapeutics, specialising in precision neuroscience, specifically in the treatment of depression. It launches with £107m of funding, mostly from venture capital. Draig, Welsh for dragon, will be based in Cardiff alongside the MDI. But why Cardiff?
The MDI’s decision to base itself in the Welsh capital demonstrates the benefits of leveraging a region’s niche advantage. Major British scientific institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London and University College London, actively courted the MDI and its funding to come to their “golden triangle”. It felt like “football transfer season”, recalls Dr Ward.
However, he struggled to see any strategic alignment between these established centres and his own vision. The big universities also brought notable drawbacks, he says, including a surfeit of internal politics, less willingness to invest and hubris. One institution conveyed the sense that if he came to that place he “should be grateful”.
Cardiff University and the Welsh government took a different approach. They emphasised the area’s global leadership in psychiatry genetics as well as its world-class brain-imaging centres, robust NHS Wales record-keeping and the availability of financial support. Recognising the university’s existing edge in psychiatry, the suitors chose to invest strategically in this area—and offered £15m.
Many people warned Dr Ward that fundraising at this scale would need a biotech firm to be based somewhere like Boston, Oxford or San Francisco—all options which he explored. Even locally, he repeatedly detected “a real lack of confidence” in Cardiff’s ability to attract this kind of cash. But having conducted trials there, and developed the foundational science and expertise in the city, it made sense to stay.
Strikingly, investors seemed not at all put off by this decision. Dame Kate Bingham, managing partner of SV Health Investors, a venture-capital firm based in London and an early seed financier in Draig, says: “Investors don’t care where the science comes from. If you have good people and good ideas we’ll go wherever.”
The enthusiasm for companies like Draig differs markedly from the culling era over a decade ago. In a twist, Patrick Vallance, the GSK executive responsible for firing Dr Ward, is now the science minister in charge of ensuring firms like Draig thrive and grow in Britain. Draig’s success in raising money does not mean that drug development in neuroscience is no longer risky—the brain is still something of a mystery. But recent advances give renewed hope, particularly for hard-to-treat depression, says Dame Kate. As with all drug development, it will take time and patience to find out whether this dragon will turn its ideas into a hoard of gold.” [1]
1. Enter the dragon. The Economist; London Vol. 455, Iss. 9453, (Jun 21, 2025): 23.
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