Mark Barrett. Image: APC and VLE Therapeutics
APC co-founder Mark Barrett discusses Ireland’s pharma landscape, the speed at which medicines are now moving and why it’s so hard for life science companies to get started.
Ireland is a significant powerhouse when it comes to the pharma industry. According to IDA Ireland statistics, it’s the third largest exporter of pharmaceuticals globally, with nine of the top 10 of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies established in Ireland – and many more major players in the life sciences industry.
Ahead of his appearance at the Amplify Summit on 26 September, SiliconRepublic.com spoke to Mark Barrett, co-founder and group CEO of APC and VLE Therapeutics, a group of Irish multinational companies that specialise in the research, digitalisation and manufacture of medicines. He said the country has built up huge credibility in the manufacturing and development of medicines.
“Obviously, there’s the underlying tax efficiency, but I think that has dissipated. I think that the prevalent reason they come is for the value chain that Ireland has created, and that’s found in talent,” he said.
“I think being on the doorstep of Europe [helps], but also being accessible to the US and Asia, all within a working day is very favourable too so I think Ireland is doing very well.”
A global ambition with Irish science
APC was formed in 2011, born out of a friendship between Barrett and his chemical engineering professor Brian Glennon.
“We were very passionate about how to design medicines for manufacture and how to accelerate that through innovation. And I guess Brian and I had a passion of bringing Irish research around the world and we felt we could have global ambition with Irish science,” said Barrett.
While many have been touched by serious illness and will know that they need to be treated by life-saving therapies, Barrett said the chemistry, complex science and processes behind creating those medicines is some of the most difficult work faced by scientists around the world.
“What we’ve discovered and figured out how to do is to design those processes with brilliant chemistry and brilliant biology, but to do that in a very accelerated fashion,” he said.
“We saw during Covid, it was possible to develop a product and get it to the world within a very short period of time. So, everyone now has this aspiration of game-changing the time it takes to invent these molecules or medicines and getting them to people around the world. But behind that is some of the hardest science in the world and that’s the playground we play in.”
In 2020, VLE Therapeutics spun out from APC to act as a ‘medicine accelerator’, focusing on the manufacture of vaccines and advanced therapeutics including cell and gene therapies.
APC and VLE Therapeutics has been based at Cherrywood since the campus opened in late 2022. At the beginning of 2024, the biotech and pharma group announced a €100m expansion to its headquarters with plans to create 300 new roles and build a new R&D centre.
The company has everything from roles in chemistry and bioprocess engineering all the way up to analytical and forensic science, along with digital roles and product development, sales and marketing. It also has manufacturing roles including regulatory compliance and QA and QC roles.
Barrett said this investment is focusing on three areas: breakthrough science, which is a core element of the business; digitalisation, AI and neural networks; and advancements in manufacturing. “The plans have been put together for the campus, which we’re constructing, the diggers are on site and the company is scaling as planned.”
Trends and challenges
Covid-19 changed a lot about the pharmaceutical industry, and not just in the advancements of mRNA research and drug storage.
Barrett said it’s now common for people to think that medicines can be developed and accessed extremely quickly – a goal for which the industry is striving.
“I think time from invention to patients has never been more prevalent or more important. So that’s a huge trend that I would see in our sector. The other is probably on the regulatory side. The regulators are asking the pharmaceutical companies to conduct more research and provide more detail,” he said.
“It’s an interesting dynamic. In one instance, the pharmaceutical sector is trying to move at a pace it has never moved really before, while also being burdened with the fact that they have to do more from a regulatory perspective.”
But while this is a delicate balance for established companies to find, other challenges can present for life science companies much earlier on the road and can even create barriers to get off the ground.
Barrett said that while consultancy businesses or tech companies can often only need office space and computers, life science companies and others working in the medical R&D space will often need much larger physical spaces, including labs, which brings with it a much higher cost.
For APC, which started in the teeth of the last financial recession, getting funding was a major challenge. “It was just hard to get the idea going, to the extent that we asked our customers for the initial money to start the company, we asked them, would they help us get it going, because obviously it’s very expensive to do this type of research,” he said.
“What was amazing is we met some people around the world, our early-stage customers that held company going.”
While the company is now successfully expanding and is trending towards more than €100m in assets, Barrett said this is a pretty unique story and that is inherently difficult to get things going for companies in that industry. “Obviously, Enterprise Ireland are outstanding in that category, but if you don’t meet their criteria, there’s not very many alternatives,” he said.
“I think the tech side of the sector probably has [taken over] because it’s not so capital intensive, whereas if we want to do more life science companies, it does take physical space and money and I think that still needs to be cracked.”
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