How Drayson made his millions

Paul Drayson's career has been packed with drama during the relatively short time it has taken him to acquire a paper fortune of £87million.

The Sunday Times lists him as the 676th richest person in the country. The 41-year-old entrepreneur owes much of his success to his own glittering academic background. But he is also indebted to the marriage which propelled him into the higher echelons of Oxford academe.

After leaving Aston University with a BSc and PhD in robotics, the young engineering doctor with an inventive urge, first went to Rover Cars where he worked in product development and marketing. From there he moved to Lambourne Foods, a biscuit-making offshoot of sweets company Trebor. And it was there he helped to give birth to a crispy snack called the Scoople - described by the few who remember it as a curly Ryvita.

"It was a shaped crispbread product," he recalls. "We identified a technology relating to the biscuit extrusion process, which allowed you to shape the product. In a way, we broke the mould."

After leading a management buy-out when Trebor was taken over by Cadbury-Schweppes, Dr Drayson cashed in by selling the company on in 1991. He pocketed his first quarter of a million.

Two years later, the young businessman walked into a science laboratory in Oxford and fell in love with Elspeth Bellhouse, the mother of his four children and the woman who, through her brilliant physicist father Brian, offered him the gateway to major riches in the pharmaceutical world.

Elspeth Drayson has since been pivotal to her husband's career. He describes her as a "very constructively critical" shareholder in his company and credits her with " looking after" the family finances.

He has joked about a photograph taken of Elspeth after the birth of their first child - it features her in the maternity suite doing the PowderJect payroll on her bed.

The couple live in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire. Dr Drayson lists his hobbies as fencing and playing with his children. He says his commitment to developing drugs stems from his having suffered with asthma as a child. He once faced derision from analysts for including an impassioned account of his own health problems in a set of disappointing financial results. He says he also wants to help to improve the NHS where he can, and in 1999 he gave £1.2 million to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, shocked at the dilapidated state of the facilities where his wife gave birth to their third child.

Dr Drayson, as chairman and chief executive of the biggest firm of its kind in Britain, now makes many of the vaccines taken by children across Britain. Among the products of its Evans Vaccines subsidiary, based in Speke, Liverpool, are jabs for tetanus, flu, hepatitis B and the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis.

Vaccines were thrust into the limelight after the 11 September attacks, when fears of anthrax and smallpox swept the western world. Governments who felt their countries were in the front line automatically scurried to find protection. Tony Blair chose

Dr Drayson to do the job. It only emerged subsequently that the contract had been awarded to a major political donor.

Dr Drayson maintains he never anticipated running a mass-manufacturing business. He says he co-founded Powderject with Oxford don Bellingham to sell a needle-free injection system, which fires powder through the skin at supersonic speeds.

The gun-like device developed by Professor Bellingham, head of Oxford's Medical Engineering Unit, was considered particularly promising for dental anaesthetics, patients with needle phobia or for administering vaccines to children.

Dr Drayson provided the funding for Powderject to commercialise the idea, and the company was floated in 1997 with a £50 million market value.

Progress on the device has been much slower than expected, however. Facing the harsh reality of City expectations, Powderject two years ago bought Evans Vaccines, a profitable, mature business, to use as a cash cow. Vaccines are now the core of the company and Powderject was one of the first to offer its services in September when there were calls for a stockpile of vaccines to counteract bio-terrorism. The firm has restarted production of an old smallpox antidote and ratcheted up output of an anti-anthrax product.

"We have a responsibility to respond to a national emergency," says Dr Drayson. Critics, however, point out that Powderject is still making a profit on the vaccines, rather than selling them at cost price.