Fresh from a long flight back from Seattle (and running on little more than jetlag and coffee), Relation co-founder Jake P. Taylor-King sat down with us for an impressively candid conversation.
In it, the mathematician-turned-tech-bio founder opened up about Relation’s mission to bring confidence to biology, the realities of building within the “golden triangle” of innovation, and the delicate balancing act between leading a fast-growing business and staying close to the science that inspired it.
Jake, congratulations on Relation’s place in the Brain Belt 50! For someone completely unfamiliar, could you briefly outline Relation’s core mission?
At Relation, we believe modern technology (whether that’s machine learning, AI, genomics, genetics, single-cell or spatial technologies) can dramatically reduce the high attrition rate we see in phase II clinical trials.
Drug discovery has produced some amazing therapies, but the industry still struggles at that critical point where efficacy is tested for the first time.
By the time you’ve poured huge amounts of money and effort into preclinical and phase I studies, you’re still only guessing at how the drug will perform in real patients. Around 70% of phase II trials fail – all of that effort is essentially wasted.
We think there hasn’t been enough focus on using genomic technologies and AI together to both analyse primary human tissue but also refine experimental design to test hypotheses. Our goal is to build greater confidence before you ever enter phase II. Put simply, we like to think of ourselves as a “confidence in biology” company.
Could you share a little about your personal background – any pivotal moments that shaped your journey into biotech?
Historically, I was a mathematician. I enrolled on a PhD programme assuming I’d spend my life as a professor somewhere. But I took funding from the Medical Research Council, which came with a catch: you had to do something medically relevant. It’s a poor return on investment for the government to fund pure maths PhDs (most of us end up as accountants or academics!) so the deal was: work on medical research and they’ll fund your PhD.
After a year or two I had enough material to graduate but needed to meet the medical component. I was desperately looking for a quick paper topic. I had three supervisors: one in network theory, one in differential equations, and a third external advisor who studied bone biology. So I literally googled “bone network equation” and stumbled on the osteocyte – a force-sensing cell within bone responsible for remodeling.
I found it fascinating. If you bash your arm, osteocytes trigger bone remodeling. I wrote a couple of papers on mathematical models of bone formation and got hooked. From that point I was doing biology. But I realised I didn’t know it well enough to contribute meaningfully, so I did a postdoc at ETH Zurich to learn it from hands-on academics working at the bleeding edge of genomics research.
After that came a string of experiences: a business degree, setting up a company that failed, establishing a bioinformatics group for another startup, a stint at an longevity-focused investment group to eventually co-founding Relation.
You’ve studied at Oxford and Cambridge and established Relation in London. How has that Brain Belt ecosystem shaped your work?
Relation isn’t a standard UK biotech spinning out intellectual property from a university. We’ve developed our IP as we’ve built the company. While many of our people have spent time at Oxford, Cambridge or London, we’re actually quite international, with team members from across Europe, the U.S. and Canada.
That said, the “golden triangle” has some unique advantages. Cambridge has an incredible concentration of genomics research; Oxford has its strengths too; London is a fantastic hub for machine learning. Those ecosystems blend here in a way that’s rare globally.
If you look worldwide, there are maybe ten cities where you can realistically start a biotech: London, Zurich, Basel, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Singapore, and parts of Japan or China. There aren’t many. You pick one and build there.
Competition is good; it pushes everyone to be better.
Does being in such a competitive region make hiring harder, or is it simply necessary to be there?
Competition is definitely higher. Salaries in London outstrip equivalent jobs at science parks outside Oxford or Cambridge. Standards are higher too. But I think the competition is good; it pushes everyone to be better.
London also gives us practical advantages. For instance, we need access to human tissue at scale. We work with about 15 hospitals across the city to obtain tissue – biopsies or surgical waste. Doing that at scale would be far harder in a smaller city.
So yes, competition is fierce, but the benefits outweigh it.
How do you see Relation’s work impacting patients over the next five-to-ten years?
Healthcare is moving toward precision medicine. Our ability to record and understand patient trajectories is getting stronger with electronic medical records and other tools. But most drugs don’t work for every patient – they work for a subset. The challenge is matching the right drug to the right person at the right time.
At Relation, it’s not just about finding drug targets quickly. It’s about understanding the context of those targets within the patient journey… how they may change lives. We’re not rushing to clinical trials for speed’s sake. We’re focusing on the crucial part: which patient will benefit from a given drug. That’s where our tissue profiling comes in, giving molecular insight into who these patients are.
What leadership qualities are most important for running a biotech today, and how do you embody them?
One of the biggest differences between pharma and a biotech start-up is scale. In pharma you have entire units that can execute functions independently – drugging a specific protein, running a clinical trial, whatever it is. In a small biotech you don’t. It may just be you and one other person.
That’s why I think two leadership qualities are essential. First, building and hiring for deep expertise combined with genuine interdisciplinarity – people who are comfortable moving across fields with little friction. Second, exercising sound judgment about when to do something yourself versus when to outsource. Always doing it yourself leads to bottlenecks; always outsourcing raises the question of why you’re needed at all.
Honestly, I’ve learned this the hard way! As we’ve grown it’s become easier to find the right internal expert when I hit my limits. That’s one of the many perks of growth.
Building partnerships is crucial. Not just for the funding, but for what you learn.
The biotech market is tough. What strategies have helped you steer through difficult times?
Building partnerships is crucial. Not just for the funding, but for what you learn. Working with GSK has been fantastic.
We’re also strategic about disease areas. There are too many oncology companies chasing mechanisms with weak evidence. We focus on areas where we can leverage expertise and expand outward. For example, we’re doing osteoporosis internally and osteoarthritis with GSK – two conditions sharing cell types and mechanisms. There are many other bone diseases we haven’t tackled yet but will be well-positioned for.
We also have completely different programmes in dermatology. Sometimes you take nearby steps, sometimes you branch out, but you can’t do everything (liver, kidney, neuro, cancer, immunology etc) without losing depth.
If you reflect on your journey so far, what’s been the biggest barrier to translating science into real-world application?
There are always barriers, whether that’s technical, regulatory, or logistical.
But for me, the biggest ongoing challenge is exactly that translation: taking complex, cutting-edge science and making it robust and reproducible enough to matter in the clinic. It’s a work in progress, but that’s what makes it exciting.
I like to have at least one project where I get my hands dirty. It keeps me satisfied and connected to the science.
And finally, how do you personally balance leadership demands with your curiosity and passion for the science?
With difficulty! But blocking out time to contribute directly helps. We’ve set up an innovation group where I’m much more hands-on. I even still do a little coding occasionally, although it’s not my forte.
I like to have at least one project where I get my hands dirty. It keeps me satisfied and connected to the science. Without that, it’s easy to lose touch with why you started in the first place.
Jake and Relation Therapeutics were recently spotlighted in our Brain Belt 50 report, featuring the most innovative and exciting startups across the UK’s Brain Belt region.
