Novartis buys Myricx Bio for up to $1.5 billion, and Britain is left to weigh what “success” means

When a Swiss pharmaceutical giant agrees to pay up to $1.5 billion for a British biotech that is not yet selling a single medicine, the first instinct in London is to reach for a celebratory narrative. Here is proof, ministers and investors like to say, that the country’s universities can still spin world class science into companies that matter. Here is evidence that capital will follow ideas, that the City can play its part, and that the life sciences can offer a growth story sturdier than the latest fintech fashion. The difficulty is that the same deal can be read, with equal plausibility, as an elegant reminder of Britain’s chronic problem: it remains exceptionally good at invention, sporadically good at early building, and far less reliable at keeping hold of the value it creates.

Novartis’s target is Myricx Bio, a London based company founded in 2019 and spun out of Imperial College London and the Francis Crick Institute. Novartis has agreed to pay $1.1 billion upfront and a further $400 million in milestone payments that would take the total consideration to $1.5 billion. It is, on its face, a striking number for a business still in the pre clinical phase, and it speaks to the intensity of competition in oncology, where the large drugmakers increasingly shop for novel platforms rather than single assets. It also points to the premium being placed on a particular corner of cancer medicine: antibody drug conjugates, the targeted payloads that promise to deliver toxic chemotherapy where it is needed, and nowhere else.

The deal is expected to deliver a personal windfall to Myricx’s academic founders and early operators. Ed Tate, the company’s former chief scientific officer and now chairman of its scientific advisory board, Roberto Solari, its former chief executive from foundation until August 2022, and Andrew Bell, a chemistry consultant at Myricx, remain shareholders. An analysis of Companies House filings suggests they retain stakes of about 2 per cent, 1.3 per cent and 0.5 per cent respectively. These are small fractions in an age of venture financing, but in a transaction measured in billions, small fractions still resolve into sums that will be discussed in laboratories for years.

Myricx’s current chief executive, Mohit Rawat, described the acquisition as recognition of the transformative promise of the platform, a line that reads like standard deal language until one considers what the platform is actually trying to do. Antibody drug conjugates, or ADCs, are often described in popular shorthand as smart bombs, though the metaphor is never exact and rarely helpful. At heart, they are a delivery system: an antibody engineered to seek out a target associated with a tumour is chemically linked to a potent drug, the payload, which is then released once the antibody binds and is taken up by cells. The ambition is to concentrate lethality inside the cancer and spare healthy tissue, shifting the balance between efficacy and side effects that has defined chemotherapy since the middle of the last century.

ADCs have moved from niche to centre stage in modern oncology, helped by improved linkers, more precise targeting and an expanding menu of payload chemistries. Yet their limitations are increasingly visible as more patients receive them. Some tumours become resistant. Toxicity remains a stubborn constraint, sometimes forcing doses below those clinicians would ideally give. The reuse of the same payload class can lead to poor outcomes, not because the concept is flawed, but because biology adapts and because the payloads themselves carry a cost. That context matters, because Myricx is not being bought simply for being “in ADCs” but for claiming to have a new set of warheads, and a new way to think about them.

The company’s focus is the discovery and development of novel payloads for next generation ADCs, and at the centre of its story is an enzyme with a technical name and broad implications: N myristoyltransferase, usually shortened to NMT. NMT is responsible for adding a specific lipid to proteins, a modification that can be crucial for their function. In cancer cells, certain proteins that support survival and proliferation depend on this process. Myricx has developed an NMT inhibitor platform that, in principle, can undermine those survival pathways. In the ADC context, the attraction is that an NMT inhibitor payload could offer a different mechanism of action from established payload classes, potentially helping clinicians outmanoeuvre resistance while aiming for a better tolerability profile.

For Novartis, the appeal is twofold. First, it is a bet that this particular payload concept will work in humans and can be delivered safely enough to become a product. Second, it is a bet that the wider platform will generate more than one programme, allowing a pipeline to be built rather than a single asset to be acquired. Big pharma increasingly wants optionality, and it is willing to pay for it early, particularly in oncology where late stage failures are expensive and first mover advantages can be decisive. An upfront payment of $1.1 billion, with milestones on top, signals that Novartis views Myricx not as a speculative punt but as a strategic addition.

The investor list tells its own story about how such platforms are financed in Britain, and what it takes to keep them alive long enough to attract a bidder of Novartis’s scale. Myricx was backed early by Cancer Research UK and received seed investment from Brandon Capital and Sofinnova Partners. Two years ago, it raised £90 million in a series A round led by Novo Holdings, the controlling shareholder of Novo Nordisk, and Abingworth, a life sciences investment firm. The round also included the British Business Bank, Cancer Research Horizons, Eli Lilly and existing investors. This is a hybrid coalition: philanthropy linked capital, specialist venture money, a state backed institution and a global drugmaker participating early, either as strategic insurance or as a marker that the science is being watched.

In the industry’s quieter corners, this kind of mix is sometimes described as the European way: strong science paired with patient capital from a small circle of specialist funds and public bodies, then accelerated by an American or multinational partner once the data begins to look credible. It is not necessarily a weakness, but it does reflect the structural difference between Europe and the United States, where deeper pools of later stage capital have historically allowed more companies to stay independent for longer. When a British biotech sells at the pre clinical stage, supporters describe a rational outcome: a platform gets the resources of a global company to reach patients, and the founders and investors are rewarded. Critics see a loss of sovereignty over the fruits of publicly supported research.

Neither reading is fully adequate. Drug development is not a patriotic pageant, and the ethics of ownership sit uneasily beside the reality that only a handful of companies on the planet can fund global phase 3 trials and navigate worldwide regulatory systems at scale. If Myricx’s platform is genuinely promising, a deal with Novartis could, in practical terms, increase the chances that the science makes it to a clinic. Yet it would be complacent to ignore what the transaction implies about the domestic ecosystem. If Britain wants to “retain” life sciences value, it needs not only the capacity to invent but the capacity to finance, manufacture and commercialise in a way that keeps headquarters, talent and decision making power anchored here.

That is why the political subtext around this acquisition matters. Across Europe, policymakers and industry leaders have been trying to direct more investment to life sciences, arguing that the continent has world class academic science and entrepreneurial talent but struggles to scale and retain innovation. The United States remains the benchmark for venture depth and the ability to support biotechs through late stage clinical trials. China has, in different ways, expanded its capabilities and appetite, building clusters that combine manufacturing, clinical research capacity and a growing home market. Europe risks becoming an exporter of intellectual property, selling early and buying back later in the form of expensive medicines.

This concern has pushed investors to organise as well as lobby. Novo Holdings and Sofinnova were among those that joined a European Life Sciences Coalition in February, intended to mobilise more capital and prevent the sector from stagnating. The language used in such initiatives can veer towards melodrama, but the underlying anxiety is real. Biotech is an industry of long timelines and uneven returns. When capital is scarce, companies are forced into early exits. When exits become the norm, the region loses the experience and infrastructure that only comes from taking products all the way to market.

Seen in that light, the sale of Myricx can be framed as a success story and a warning at the same time. It shows that Britain’s laboratories and translational institutions can still generate technology attractive to the most sophisticated pharmaceutical buyers. It shows that early stage funding can be assembled, even at meaningful scale, with the help of a state backed lender and a handful of European funds. It also shows, quietly, how difficult it remains to build a large independent life sciences company in Britain without being absorbed. Myricx’s £90 million series A was substantial by European standards, but it is not the kind of capital base that allows a platform company to run multiple clinical programmes to late stage without returning repeatedly to the market.

Novartis will be comfortable with that, because it is precisely where it sees its comparative advantage. Large drugmakers have, in recent years, retooled their R and D models towards external innovation, buying capabilities rather than trying to generate every breakthrough in house. For oncology, this has meant a steady appetite for cell therapies, radioligand treatments, targeted protein degraders and ADCs. Paying for platforms that can yield multiple drugs is a hedge against scientific uncertainty. If one programme fails, others may survive. If the platform works, the buyer captures a whole stream of future candidates. For the seller, especially one still pre revenue, the certainty of a transaction can outweigh the ambition of independence.

There is also a human dimension that is often lost in the macro arguments. Biotech founders are not merely chasing valuation; they are trying to navigate a punishing scientific and regulatory landscape, hire scarce talent, and sustain morale through years of experiments that often do not work. A buyout by Novartis offers not only money but infrastructure, clinical development expertise and a global route to market. For many scientists, that is the point of the exercise: to see a mechanism become a medicine. From that perspective, an early sale is not surrender but pragmatism.

Still, the British state has a legitimate interest in what happens next. The country subsidises the upstream science through public funding and charitable research. It nurtures spin outs through technology transfer offices and incubators. It supplies early funding through vehicles such as the British Business Bank. If the downstream value is consistently realised elsewhere, Britain’s role becomes that of a laboratory service provider to global capital. The answer is not to block acquisitions, which would be self defeating, but to create conditions in which selling early is one option among many rather than the default outcome.

That means a deeper domestic pool of later stage capital, regulatory and procurement policies that reward innovation, and a manufacturing strategy that treats advanced therapeutics as industrial capability rather than a nice to have. It also means accepting that “retention” cannot be reduced to whether a company keeps a London postcode. If Novartis expands research activity, clinical trial presence or manufacturing partnerships in Britain as part of integrating Myricx, the practical benefits may be substantial even if the corporate parent sits in Basel. The challenge is that such benefits are not automatic; they must be negotiated, incentivised and sustained.

For now, the science will do what it always does, indifferent to politics. Myricx’s NMT inhibitor payloads will have to demonstrate, in the unromantic arithmetic of toxicology and early phase trials, that they can be delivered safely and that they do what the models predict. Novartis will have to decide how aggressively to scale the platform, which tumour types to prioritise, and how to position any resulting drugs in an oncology market that is already crowded with competing technologies. The next headlines will not be about valuations but about data, dosing and whether patients can tolerate the promise that looked so compelling on a deal announcement day.