A man has told his story of going from living on a council estate to founding one of Britain's largest biotech companies which floated on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange for $2.9bn.
The Welsh scientist’s company - which uses artificial intelligence to cut the time and money being spent on discovering new drugs - has earned him a whopping €470 million, but he says he is nowhere near finished.
Andrew Hopkins grew up on a council estate in the UK but described how he has since swapped that life for one in the prestigious city of Oxford after setting up his company, Exscientia.
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The 50-year-old founder retains 18.6 million shares, giving him a 15.8% stake of the company. On paper, he's worth around €470m since the flotation in October 2021, but in real life, Andrew, or Professor Hopkins as he's known in the field, is only just beginning.
He came up with the idea of using AI to develop drugs in the mid-90s and said he can remember the exact moment the concept popped into his head as he was walking home from the Oxford laboratory where he was working.
It has since revolutionised the field and has generated huge amounts of money in its ten years of existence and breaking boundaries.
Andrew completed his A-levels in a local school before heading to university, and he said he wants to show there are no boundaries to what you can achieve, no matter what your upbringing may be.
After graduate research at Wadham College, Oxford, he attained a doctorate in molecular biophysics in 1998 for his work on anti-HIV drug design and is now one of the most respected scientists in the UK.
Working alongside Sir David Stuart, the world's leading structural biologist, Andrew was at the cutting edge of research on how to design new HIV drugs.
He was always going to be a "biotech entrepreneur", he said. It was during his time at Pfizer, after his doctorate, that he set about learning all the different skills and parts of the business. It was during that period too that he met, and married, his wife Iva Hopkins-Navratilova, who is a leading scientist in her own right.
After a decade with Pfizer, Andrew joined the University of Dundee in 2007, where a new drug discovery unit had been established. His wife moved with him to set up her own lab and at the age of 35, he was one of the youngest professors at the University of Dundee.
Exscientia is a spinout company of the university. Starting with just five scientists in the early days, it now employs 450 people.
It has shown how the first AI systems can improve outcomes in oncology and cancer, and cancer patients can live longer.
The company is expanding as the idea gains traction globally and as well as a growing presence in Dundee, there are offices in Vienna, Miami, Boston, and Osaka in Japan.
"Fundamentally, Exscientia is about how we can use AI to design the best drug and also use AI to select the right patients for those drugs," said Andrew.
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