Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2018: Francesca Wuttke

William Taranto, president of US-based drugs company Merck & Co’s Global Health Innovation (GHI) Fund and number 13 on GCV’s 2017 Powerlist, said he hired Francesca Wuttke in May 2016 because the current rate of innovation across the continent merited a deeper, more strategic focus.

As a managing director based in Barcelona, Spain, Wuttke was tasked with providing that focus. She brings an impressive pedigree to the role with expertise in drug development and healthcare gained in both the US and Europe and more than 20 years of clinical, commercial, strategic and transactional experience.

She holds a PhD in pharmacology from Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences and joined GHI from pharmaceutical company Almirall, where she led its corporate development strategy team. Prior to that she worked as global director of strategy for Novartis’ cell and gene therapy unit.

One of Wuttke’s first tasks was to develop an investment thesis and she came up with a two-pronged approach. The first was to leverage the success GHI has had in the US. In the year she joined the firm, GHI completed three new deals – Liveongo, Arcadia and Navigating Cancer – and 11 follow-on investments – Preventice, Opgen, Patientsafe, Healthsense, Electrocore, WiserTogether, Caresync, Genome DX, Aventura, Wisertogether and Daktari. She planned to find complementary investment opportunities to augment GHI’s North American portfolio companies.

The second area Wuttke wanted to look at was digital clinical trial management, a new one for the fund. She told GCV in an April 2017 interview: “Efficiency in clinical trial management, both from the perspective of cost and time, can be a valuable competitive asset for the pharmaceutical industry. Clinical trial delays can cost pharma companies up to $8m per day. Digital clinical trial management can enable trials that are smaller, shorter, less expensive and more powerful.

“The clinical trial management ecosystem in Europe is undergoing change, resulting from demands for increased relevance and transparency of results, requiring better data quality and study efficiency from contract research organisations.

“Digital technology has the potential to help us meet these demands and create new disruptive opportunities. Clinical trial processes are not yet fully leveraging advances in technology and the increasing democratisation of clinical trials.”

Regulatory change also played a role in the choice to focus on this area as the European Medicines Agency has made it a requirement that clinical trials are digitised. Wuttke said this had created an environment ripe for growth.

“Companies that capitalise on these trends and anticipate future changes by improving subject recruitment and retention, and making data capture, integration and analysis more accurate and robust, will present attractive investment opportunities,” she said.

Wuttke’s first investment for the fund targeted this new area. In September, GHI led an $11m round for UK-based Antidote Technologies, which has created a clinical trial matching platform to reduce the number of trials that are closed or suspended because of a lack of suitable patients.

However, even with her investment thesis in place, Wuttke still faced challenges in the role. A key difficulty in her first year and a half in the job has been finding deals of sufficient size and scope to align with GHI’s investment criteria as growth investors. When comparing the market with the US, the differences are notable.

“The most obvious difference is the financing gap in Europe compared with the US, but with European companies increasingly receiving international attention, that chasm is narrowing,” Wuttke said. “The biggest difference is perhaps the disconnect between strong early companies making the leap to mid-sized companies with international reach.

“Few EU-based companies have been successful doing so, except perhaps those that are family owned, which are a bit more patient and interested in having the company serve as an investment tool where the company growth is used to pass wealth on to future generations. Perhaps it is a lack of patient capital as the pharma timelines are long, and investors new to the space may tire during that interval.”

Despite the challenges investing in Europe provides, Wuttke was excited for the future due to the unique resources available to a corporate venturing fund. Set up to act independently, GHI can operate at venture speed while still providing strategic benefits to startup partners not available to traditional VCs. She said: “We typically invest for a three- to five-year timeframe, but as we do not have a fund life to worry about we have a great deal of flexibility.”