BioCentury
ARTICLE | Management Tracks

Remembering David Leathers: master dealmaker was ‘charm personified’ 

Rothschild, Abingworth investor cut trail for early biotech investors

January 25, 2022 4:54 AM UTC
BioCentury & Getty Images

David Leathers, the pioneering U.K. investor who backed some of biotech’s biggest names in their early days, passed away peacefully on Jan. 17 at age 79.

Leathers first made his mark in the 1980s scouring the U.S. West Coast for deals, building syndicates to back early-stage innovators and assembling a network of biotech executives second to none. 

He counted Amgen Inc. (NASDAQ:AMGN), Genzyme Corp. and Gilead Sciences Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD) among his early investments, and was renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of who’s who among the leaders of a sector just beginning to blossom.

Leathers began his professional life in the late 1960s as a chartered accountant before joining the investment unit of N M Rothschild & Sons, and later Rothschild Asset Management where he would become a director. He helped establish and manage Rothschild’s Biotechnology Investments Ltd., which nurtured early-stage companies that would go on to leave a lasting mark on the industry, including Amgen Inc. (NASDAQ:AMGN), Genzyme Corp. and Immunex Corp.

At the $50 million fund, Leathers consulted closely with Sydney Brenner, the South African Nobel Prize winner, as well as Jim Blair, the firm’s primary U.S. adviser who would go on to lead Domain Associates.

Brenner was the impetus behind the launch of the fund — which was the first fund dedicated solely to biotech, according to Blair — and brought the deep scientific experience to the team. Blair, a longtime tech investor, delivered the VC chops, and Leathers the background in portfolio management. 

Industry deal flow in 1981 was about 10, with BIL in about four of the transactions, Blair told BioCentury, who recalled the trio investing in the “spectacular” teams that built the industry’s science-driven, first-generation companies. 

Although Leathers did not come from a scientific background, he had no trouble connecting with scientists.

“You couldn’t have had a better champion for the cause, in terms of how the scientists felt about the investment side, than David Leathers,” Blair said.

Leathers made his name on those early Rothschild investments, and by 1987, London stockbrokers Peter Dicks and Anthony Montagu invited him to join Abingworth, a U.K. investment firm founded in 1973. 

Although Leathers could not bring Brenner along with him, he did want to bring Stephen Bunting, a colleague whom he had invited to join Rothschild some years prior. But there was a catch.

“We don’t hire people with beards,.” Montagu informed Leathers after Bunting’s interview.

“That’s not how it works in biotech,” Leathers responded quickly. He then rattled off the names of half a dozen bewhiskered biotechers, among them George Rathmann, founding CEO of Amgen, and Applied Biosystems Inc.’s Sam Eletr, both legends in their own right.

Leathers and Bunting would lead a $50 million fund for their new firm, with Gilead and Idec Pharmaceuticals Corp. among the many emerging companies Leathers invested in and supported while at Abingworth.

Bunting’s favorite memory of that time was visiting California’s biotechs with Leathers, which he called “an incredibly free and exciting time.” 

Leathers’ commitment to visiting the West Coast biotechs in person was “pretty unusual” for a European biotech investor at the time, according to Genghis Lloyd-Harris, who would become a colleague at Abingworth in the 2000s.

“They were West Coast VCs who happened to be headquartered in London,” Lloyd-Harris told BioCentury.

“Contacts, information and deal-flow are the lifeblood of this business, making sure you see the good deal,” Leathers told Stephanie Jones for her book The Biotechnologists. “You’ll never build up a portfolio if you don’t see the deals, so I go out and I shake every tree I can find, and hope something falls off.”

By his own admission, Leathers didn’t have an investment “checklist,” rather his investment style was “pragmatic and intuitive.”

“I make it my business to know every deal that’s going on, good or bad. For instance, I still comb through the recruitment ads in the main scientific journals looking for names of new companies as they always need to hire people,” he told Jones. “I’m really interested in getting in very early into start-ups, straight off the drawing board. We prefer the really early-stage deals. That’s where the risk is greatest, but we think that hopefully we can filter out some of that risk, because of our perspective on the industry as a whole and our ability to evaluate deals.”

“He was somebody who absolutely got the big picture,” Lloyd-Harris said. “You’d never catch David at a spreadsheet.”

Leathers also got people.

“Along with David, I learned a lot about the science and scientists from Sydney. But I learned quite a bit about the leadership qualities of our companies from David,” Blair told BioCentury. “His portfolio management skills had been well-developed at Rothschild Asset Management. For example, David was a big fan of Henri Termeer from the beginning, and explained why he wanted to invest in Genzyme, even though I was less supportive. David’s people instincts were well honed in BIL’s early years, and it served all of us very well over time.”

Leathers’ magnetic charisma, passion and indefatigable optimism were also hallmarks of his style, according to Bunting, and those traits created opportunities for Abingworth. “He got into deals because people liked working with him,” said Bunting.

“He always had a sparkle in his eyes,” Lloyd-Harris said. “He always had a good anecdote to tell, and he had a fantastic memory for people, and their history and their background.”

Leathers’ steady stream of 5-7x returns certainly kept his LPs happy, Lloyd-Harris said. 

Within a few years, biotech would come to dominate Abingworth’s holdings, Bunting said, after which it became a life sciences firm.

‘The consummate gentleman’

Leathers was at his happiest at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference each January, when he could catch up with contacts and swap stories, Bunting told BioCentury.

Abingworth Chairman and Managing Partner Tim Haines got to see this firsthand, during his own first trip to J.P. Morgan.

“He had brought with him every British Sunday paper (a huge pile) and proceeded to read every single one from cover to cover, which partly explains his ability to engage on pretty much any topic with insight and intelligence,” Haines told BioCentury via email of his flight with Leathers to San Francisco. “We then got off the plane to go to the JPMorgan opening evening at which David chaperoned me around the wine event and introduced me to all (and I mean all!) of the players in the Life Sciences venture industry, every one of them delighted to see him.”

And, in an anecdote that will not surprise anyone who knew Leathers, Haines added: ‘In spite of having travelled all day from the U.K. he remembered every single person’s name and affiliation perfectly and always had a small anecdote about them. Charm personified!”

BioCentury Chairman Karen Bernstein recalled Leathers as “kind, thoughtful, wise, the consummate gentleman, but also one with a hilariously biting wit and no tolerance for fools.” 

Leathers was an early supporter of BioCentury.

“David welcomed us into the industry and helped us in so many tangible ways, as a member of BioCentury’s original advisory board and by backing Bio€quity Europe from the very beginning in 2000,” BioCentury President and CEO David Flores said. “But Karen Bernstein and I most cherish the intangible part of our friendship. David always treated us like regular people, which is all we have ever aspired to be.”

When he wasn’t scouring for deals — something he continued to do well into retirement, according to Bunting — Leathers enjoyed playing tennis and attending Wimbledon, as well as collecting art. 

Leathers is survived by his wife, Amanda, sons Andrew and Jonathan and five grandchildren.

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