Craig Shimasaki, the president and CEO of BioSource Consulting, once wrote an article for our Building a Business section of Nature Biotechnology. The piece went through the steps needed to officially and legally start a biotech company, and it can be found here. Read more
On January 1, 2014, I sent a tweet that changed my professional life. I wasn’t soliciting investors, but rather chiming in on a fleeting conversation about orphan diseases, like I’d done for months before on a range of topics that interested me. Little did I know at the time that that Twitter exchange would lead to an email exchange, which would lead to a face-to-face pitch at the annual JP Morgan biotech meeting in San Francisco in mid-January, which in turn would lead to a signed term sheet a month later. Perlstein Lab PBC was born. Read more
As of this writing, I can report that I’ve been academically sober for one year, six months and two weeks. Before I departed academia, I was like many of my Gen Y and Millennial contemporaries: dreaming of a tenured professorship since my first summer internship as a high school student in a biological research lab; working as a grad student seven days a week for five years on a small stipend but with big hopes; postdoc-ing for another five years to prove my mettle in a new subfield and to gird my CV for the assistant professor job search. Read more
Creating a biotechnology company in Chile is bound to be a bittersweet experience. On one hand, we’ve recently become an entrepreneurial paradise, ranking 20 in Entrepreneur’s “World’s hottest startup scenes,” and thus making us the only country in Latin America to actually be featured in the ranking. Pretty impressive for a country that has one of the lowest investment in research and development and innovation (R+D+I) in the region, if you ask me. On the other hand, this entrepreneurial paradise tends to welcome only fast-working projects, also known as apps, and biotech gets pushed into the background. Biotechnology is not even featured in the country’s strong research and development thematic categories for this year. Knowing this, does creating a biotechnology-based company even make sense in Chile? Read more
With academia and industry now sharing closer ties than ever before, young scientists may dream of turning their research into startups. But what should motivate these entrepreneurial aspirations? Read more
I sat down with David Rabuka at the recent IBC Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics conference and discussed his entrepreneurial path. David is the founder and chief scientific officer of Redwood Bioscience, a startup company focused on antibody-drug conjugates and other semi-synthetic therapeutics. David started the company as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in chemistry with professor Carolyn Bertozzi. Read more
Jason Yonehiro is a co-founder of CombImmune, a Stanford University startup that hopes to develop immunotherapies and diagnostics for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Jason comes from a sales and marketing background, with prior experience at Amgen, Celgene, Boehringer Ingelheim, and more. I spoke with him about his experiences as a first-time biotech entrepreneur. Read more
It has been three-and-a-half years since I moved to Bogota as a faculty member at University of los Andes. I remember that when I first started here, almost everybody said my ideas about fabricating microsystems and electronics for biochemical applications were sci-fi, and that there was little hope about their feasibility. Nowadays, we are a successful research team at the microelectronics research center (CMUA) called biomicrosystems, and one of the pioneer groups focused on innovation and entrepreneurship in Colombia. Read more
Man can also be a dog’s best friend. Read more
About a year ago, Index Ventures hosted its first “Playground” event in London. (Nature Biotechnology played a supporting role in this endeavor, though Index did most of the heavy lifting.) … Read more
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