In with the in crowd
Simon Frantz, formerly of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery and now web editor at The Scientist , sends this report on yesterday's Bioentrepreneur Roundtable:
At the Nature Biotechnology Bioentrepreneur Roundtable on Saturday evening, I heard a rare degree of candidness among the speakers that I thought was worth opening up to discussion here. The roundtable was on funding trends, but as the panel included representatives, investors and entrepreneurs from around the globe, the subject of launching start-ups in areas outside of well-known bioclusters came to the fore. Investors and entrepreneurs agreed that if a start-up company is not within a recognized biocluster, such as Boston, San Francisco and San Diego, it will find it so much more difficult to generate interest and funding, that the advice for budding entrepreneurs was to move to a biocluster. Even creating a subsidiary unit creates enough logistical difficulties to consider moving lock, stock and barrel to a biocluster. The argument from the investors is that it doesn’t just take good science to create a successful company, good experienced managers are as important, if not more so, and investors are more likely to go to where the experience is.
It wasn’t all bad news; Singapore was mentioned as an example of how to build a biocluster from scratch. Nevertheless, this focus on recognized bioclusters surely misses out of a lot of top-notch R&D going on around the globe, and it wasn’t clear whether this investor mindset would change. The general consensus on this issue at the roundtable might make for some uncomfortable reading with many geographical areas attending the conference, but I’d be interested to hear whether this fits in with your experience, and what you think can be done to attract more attention and investment to areas outside of established bioclusters.
