Nessan Bermingham is the only son of an Irish Army officer and a nurse and grew up on an army base in the Curragh, Co Kildare.
Now he is the head of biotech company Intellia Therapeutics, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company, named "one of the top new biotechs in 2014", is developing an exciting new technology, which could act as a "search and replace" function for the body's genetic structure, reprogramming DNA to edit out bad and/or dysfunctional genes.
Bermingham owes his initial interest in science to his primary and secondary schools – from a primary school teacher who introduced him to how th ear works, to the secondary school science teacher, who helped him enter the Young Scientist Competition at 13. This led him to study biology further.
At 20, he graduated from Queen’s University Belfast, and became a research assistant at Imperial College, London St Mary’s Hospital, which funded his PhD studies. It was then that he first looked at moving to the US where the medical research industry brought far more possibilities: “The approach to science was totally different in Europe versus the US. In Europe we had to think about every penny. For example, we used these plastic tips to transfer liquids from one tube to another. In the UK, we had to wash these and re-stack them, while in the US you trashed them and opened a fresh box.
“In Europe there’s a limitation on resources forcing you to question and justify every experiment. In the US, money wasn’t an issue, which enables you to explore broadly.”
At 23, he moved to Houston, Texas, to work as a Howard Hughes Associate Fellow at Baylor in the Texas Medical Center. The culture shock hit him: "I brought a coat everywhere, even though the temperature rarely dropped below 90 degrees Fahrenheit and it never rained."
On publication of his academic paper in Science, Bermingham realised he did not get a thrill from this and academia was not for him. Meanwhile, a Wall Street firm was looking at candidates in New York for its new research team, and invited Bermingham to meet with their team.
Although he didn’t know anything about Wall Street or equity research, he went as “it was a chance to go to New York on someone else’s dime”.
Despite a disagreement with the head banker, Bermingham was offered a place on the equity research team for the financial giant UBS.
“It was such a great learning environment: a calling card with UBS opened every door and the breadth of science the role covered was great. But I was writing reports, which wasn’t for me, and advising people where to invest, when I’d never even built a company before.”
Following 9/11 he decided life is short and searched for a new challenge. He got a job with Atlas Venture in London. Although it was a junior role with less money, he viewed it as an apprenticeship. He immediately loved the job, which had him constantly evaluating companies and groundbreaking scientific discoveries, and he quickly rose through the ranks becoming a partner.
In 2009, Bermingham started his own investment firm. "Probably the dumbest thing I ever did. I would wake up, read the Wall Street Journal, watch the financial markets collapse and think: 'This is crazy'."
Intellia Therapeutics Last year Bermingham co-founded Intellia Therapeutics – a gene-editing company which utilises a biological tool known as the Crisps/Cas9 system. This is believed to have the potential to permanently edit diseased genes in the human body. This has the potential to cure thousands of genetically based diseases.
“Setting up Intellia involved two years of trying to figure the sector out. There were times when it wasn’t clear if Intellia would happen, and there were many routes we could have taken. One challenge with this technology is how to get it into the cell in a human. It works when it’s in there, but what are the technologies we need to deliver it? That was particularly tricky and challenging.”
For anyone looking to emigrate, he says: “I’m all for it. You just gotta go out and explore. Networking and professional experience is so important, but so is maintaining the balance between your personal and professional life – no one teaches you about that. I turned down a lot of things because it wasn’t a fit for my life and if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have founded Intellia, nor met my wife.”
He says founding a company like Intellia would never have been possible in Ireland, as the $15 million they received straight out of the gate, followed by another $70 million this September, greatly outbids Ireland.
“It’s a shame the biotech scene isn’t greater in Ireland,” he says. “Given the pharmaceutical industry and the tech industry bleeding through into biotech, countries are making that push, but we still haven’t seen that translate in Ireland. And I do want to see Ireland succeed.”
