After two decades in venture capital and business development applying pharmaceutical research, Elaine Jones, executive director of pharmaceutical firm Pfizer’s corporate venturing subsidiary, Pfizer Ventures, will retire at the end of next month.
Jones told Global Corporate Venturing: “Taking my science background and using it as a springboard into the business end of the pharmaceutical industry, first in business development and then in venture investing, I have had three different careers: a bench scientist, a licensing professional and now a venture investor.”
Jones, who holds a bachelor of science from Juniata College and a virology and microbiology doctorate from University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine, added: “The latter two were worlds I did not know existed when I was completing my PhD but am so very grateful to have been given the opportunity to have this unusual career path.”
Pfizer Ventures hired Jones at the end of 2008 to drive deals and manage the unit’s portfolio at the board level, and she has most recently overseen investments in Kymera, Effector and Arrakis.
Jones began her career in corporate finance at pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate venturing unit, SR One, in 1999 as a vice-president, after which she spent five years as a general partner at EuclidSR Partners, a joint venture between SR One and venture capital firm Euclid Partners.
Jones said: “Being part of breakthrough science and aiding – through financing – inventors and their teams in taking these big ideas about mechanisms and disease processes and reducing them to practice by trying to make novel effective medicines.
“This is a common theme for all of my portfolio companies over the years. Some have ended in glory and others in disappointment but the effort to try has been well worth it.”
However, Jones considers the pinnacle of her métier to have been “being part of great teams and creating a network of friends and colleagues that are ready and willing to lend a hand when asked”. Her team includes senior managing partner Barbara Dalton, who received GCV’s Lifetime Achievement Award in January, and principal Nikola Trbovic, who was selected as one of GCV’s Rising Stars this year.
Pursuing corporate venture capital in a pharmaceutical framework, Jones has had to address a number of pain points. “As has been the case for a long time, corporate venture funds continue to face the challenge of demonstrating value to their parent company,” she said.
“We are ‘strategic’ investors – but what does that truly mean? How is that assessed? While returns are easy to measure, they are often not aligned with what corporations want to obtain from a corporate fund that helps to access the innovation ecosystem.
“The corporate goals are new lines of business, novel products or improved technologies to integrate into their existing business. At least in the pharmaceutical industry, it is very challenging to match corporate priorities with financing young companies based on emerging science and so ‘strategic’ value can often be difficult to show or quantitate.”
In addition, the passage of time is measured differently for corporates and their venturing units. Jones said: “The other key issue is the disconnect between time horizons for many parent corporations and their venture teams.
“As an early-stage biotech investor, it often takes four to seven years for a new technology or pathway to be sufficiently developed to show proof of concept. The management of the parent corporation is judged on much shorter time frames, making the alignment between the efforts mismatched.”
Prior to her leap to SR One, Jones was a director of scientific licensing at pharmaceutical firm SmithKline Beecham, before the merger with its peer Glaxo Wellcome in 2000, and a research scientist in SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceutical’s research and development department.
Marking the coda of her involvement in biotechnology, Jones feels optimistic about what is to come and told GCV: “The recent resurgence of interest in neuroscience is very promising. The brain remains a frontier requiring much exploration and so I am excited that companies and investors have returned to this field to help elucidate basic science and disease mechanisms.
“While I expect that failure rates may be high in the short term, understanding neural circuitry will have significant pay-offs in the future, much like the investment in cancer research did decades ago.
“I am also excited about efforts to incorporate technology into the delivery of healthcare to make it more effective and less costly. The power of data analytics has been proven in other industries and so I remain optimistic that its application in drug discovery, development and disease treatment will lead to better health and better healthcare services.
“The number of new ideas worthy of further investigation does not seem to decrease, even in challenging financing times. The demand for innovative new products will also remain high for the foreseeable future.
“Thus, the current models of using smaller companies as well as working more closely with academia to investigate and validate new, high-risk approaches before turning them over to large corporations also seems likely to continue. Thus I predict the biotech industry will remain robust as long as diverse sources of capital remain available to this sector.”
Jones’s speech during Pfizer Women’s Breakfast at financial services firm JP Morgan in January can be accessed here.
Photo of Elaine Jones courtesy of Pfizer.
