What are the key takeaways from this Beyond Biotech episode?

Key insights include: **Pediatric cancer drug gap:** Only nine cancer drugs received exclusive pediatric approval from the EMA and FDA over the last twenty years, compared to sixty adult indications approved in 2024 alone. Researchers and funders targeting this space should prioritize biology native to child development — fusion proteins, transcription factors — rather than adapting adult mechanisms that rarely translate directly.; **See Further joint venture model:** Cancer Research Horizons, Astellas, LifeArc, and Great Ormond Street Hospital's charity pooled £50M into See Further, a structure covering both child-first and child-only programs. Current programs target Ewing's sarcoma via small molecule and multiple childhood cancers via off-the-shelf cell therapy, with additional programs expected before end of 2024.; **Early investor engagement reduces wasted experiments:** Engaging venture capital and industry partners at the earliest possible stage — before finalizing experimental plans — produces targeted feedback on missing data points. Waiting until results are complete before approaching investors risks being sent back to repeat costly experiments that could have been designed correctly from the outset.

What did Tony Hixson discuss on Beyond Biotech?

Tony Hixson, Chief Business Officer at Cancer Research Horizons, explains how Cancer Research UK's commercial subsidiary bridges early-stage oncology research to market through spinouts, licensing, and the See Further initiative — a £50M multi-charity joint venture targeting childhood cancer medicines neglected by pharmaceutical companies. Key topics include: **Pediatric cancer drug gap:** Only nine cancer drugs received exclusive pediatric approval from the EMA and FDA over the last twenty years, compared to sixty adult indications approved in 2024 alone. Researchers and funders targeting this space should prioritize biology native to child development — fusion proteins, transcription factors — rather than adapting adult mechanisms that rarely translate directly.; **See Further joint venture model:** Cancer Research Horizons, Astellas, LifeArc, and Great Ormond Street Hospital's charity pooled £50M into See Further, a structure covering both child-first and child-only programs. Current programs target Ewing's sarcoma via small molecule and multiple childhood cancers via off-the-shelf cell therapy, with additional programs expected before end of 2024..

How long is this episode of Beyond Biotech?

This episode is 43 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Beyond Biotech

How Cancer Research Horizons is building the future of childhood cancer medicines

August 14, 2026

43 min episode · 2 min read

Tony Hixson

Episode

43 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Remote Work, Relationships, Investing

AI-Generated Summary

Published Aug 14, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Pediatric cancer drug gap: Only nine cancer drugs received exclusive pediatric approval from the EMA and FDA over the last twenty years, compared to sixty adult indications approved in 2024 alone. Researchers and funders targeting this space should prioritize biology native to child development — fusion proteins, transcription factors — rather than adapting adult mechanisms that rarely translate directly.
✓See Further joint venture model: Cancer Research Horizons, Astellas, LifeArc, and Great Ormond Street Hospital's charity pooled £50M into See Further, a structure covering both child-first and child-only programs. Current programs target Ewing's sarcoma via small molecule and multiple childhood cancers via off-the-shelf cell therapy, with additional programs expected before end of 2024.
✓Early investor engagement reduces wasted experiments: Engaging venture capital and industry partners at the earliest possible stage — before finalizing experimental plans — produces targeted feedback on missing data points. Waiting until results are complete before approaching investors risks being sent back to repeat costly experiments that could have been designed correctly from the outset.
✓UK proof-of-concept funding deficit: Stanford University deploys over $20M annually in proof-of-concept funding; Leuven University in Flanders allocates £20–30M for a single region. The UK government's equivalent budget totals £8M distributed across all universities nationally — a structural gap that leaves viable early-stage assets undeveloped and represents the single largest bottleneck in UK translational research.
✓Impact metrics over revenue targets: Cancer Research Horizons tracks 28 million patient doses of drugs it helped advance and over 1.5 million quality-adjusted life years added, with no internal revenue targets. Organizations seeking charity or public-sector research partnerships should align proposals around measurable patient outcomes rather than commercial return projections to match this funding culture.

What It Covers

Tony Hixson, Chief Business Officer at Cancer Research Horizons, explains how Cancer Research UK's commercial subsidiary bridges early-stage oncology research to market through spinouts, licensing, and the See Further initiative — a £50M multi-charity joint venture targeting childhood cancer medicines neglected by pharmaceutical companies.

Key Questions Answered

•Pediatric cancer drug gap: Only nine cancer drugs received exclusive pediatric approval from the EMA and FDA over the last twenty years, compared to sixty adult indications approved in 2024 alone. Researchers and funders targeting this space should prioritize biology native to child development — fusion proteins, transcription factors — rather than adapting adult mechanisms that rarely translate directly.
•See Further joint venture model: Cancer Research Horizons, Astellas, LifeArc, and Great Ormond Street Hospital's charity pooled £50M into See Further, a structure covering both child-first and child-only programs. Current programs target Ewing's sarcoma via small molecule and multiple childhood cancers via off-the-shelf cell therapy, with additional programs expected before end of 2024.
•Early investor engagement reduces wasted experiments: Engaging venture capital and industry partners at the earliest possible stage — before finalizing experimental plans — produces targeted feedback on missing data points. Waiting until results are complete before approaching investors risks being sent back to repeat costly experiments that could have been designed correctly from the outset.
•UK proof-of-concept funding deficit: Stanford University deploys over $20M annually in proof-of-concept funding; Leuven University in Flanders allocates £20–30M for a single region. The UK government's equivalent budget totals £8M distributed across all universities nationally — a structural gap that leaves viable early-stage assets undeveloped and represents the single largest bottleneck in UK translational research.
•Impact metrics over revenue targets: Cancer Research Horizons tracks 28 million patient doses of drugs it helped advance and over 1.5 million quality-adjusted life years added, with no internal revenue targets. Organizations seeking charity or public-sector research partnerships should align proposals around measurable patient outcomes rather than commercial return projections to match this funding culture.

Notable Moment

Hixson notes that pharmaceutical companies acting rationally — prioritizing shareholder returns — will structurally avoid rare pediatric cancers with no adult follow-on indication. This means some childhood cancer medicines may need to reach patients entirely without industry involvement, requiring entirely new funding and development models.

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Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from La BioTech. I'm Dylan Khesain, and this is episode 210 for the podcast. Cancer is still the leading cause of death by disease in children and young people. Yet in the last twenty years, only a handful of drugs have been approved specifically to treat it. Most pediatric cancer treatments are simply adult drugs repurposed and often at real long term cost to the children who survive. Today's test is working to change that and much more besides. Tony Hixson is chief business officer for Cancer Research Horizons, the Cancer Research UK Charities innovation engine, responsible for turning early stage science into new treatments, diagnostics, and start up companies. Tony's career spans big pharma, university tech transfer, and now the translational front line of cancer research, and he's helped build dozens of spinouts along the way. We'll talk about why Charity and Pharma need each other more than ever and about See Further, a bold new push to finally build medicines made for children, not borrowed from adults. I hope you enjoy my discussion with Tony Hixson. Tony, welcome to Beyond Biotech. Hi, Dylan. Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Tony, you've had a career that that's been in all parts of the industry, big pharma, tech transfer, and now you're at a a cancer charity's commercial arm. How do you draw a path like that together? Where did you get started? Well, I started out in the pharmaceutical industry. I worked for Wellcome as it was back then, that later became Glaxo Wellcome then GlaxoSmithKline. And I worked in the labs, and it was a great start to my career. It gave me a sort of structure. It put me through training, gave me exposure to biology and all the things I wanted to do. So it was a brilliant place to start, and a great social life as it turned out. And then I moved to a start up company, which was was really interesting because you went from a sort of 100,000 persons of organization to a tiny little start up where I was the, you know, the in front of the first 10 into the company. And, and that was really great. You you become much bigger cog in in a smaller wheel. You get involved in so much more. It really exposed me to venture capital and the sort of roller coaster of raising money. And I think we should give you a little bit of empathy when you're sort of involved with those companies later on as to what they're going through. And then, I left duty to work for a tech transfer organization, Imperial College, and that was fantastic to to work there. I worked for Imperial Innovations. And with hindsight, there was some serendipity involved. You know, I joined, again, an organization that was just about to embark on a really exciting journey of of raising one of the first …

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