Building biotech in Australia

Posted on 08 May 2015 by Gayatri Saberwal

Australia has grown a busy biotech sector, but what awaits bioentrepreneurs in this small, geographically isolated country?

The Australian biotech industry was born in the 1980s, after researchers at the Walter and Elisa Hall Institute in Melbourne discovered colony stimulating factors (CSFs). However, that discovery was left unpatented, and it was Amgen that earned billions from drugs based on the technology. This was not the last mistake made by Australia’s biotech sector, but even with the larger issues that plague it today, Australia has a long list of native benefits to offer and one of the world’s more robust biotech sectors. Over a series of blog posts, we’re going to discuss what one should consider before launching a biotech in Australia.

First, the downside

Historically, the mining industry has been an important contributor to Australia’s gross domestic product (20% in 2014), so the country has a long legacy of risky investments. But in biotech’s early years, Australia’s investors often didn’t understand the risks associated with drug development, and many didn’t understand the difference between research and development – putting in just enough money to finish the research, but leaving nothing for development.

Another mistake concerned going public too early. The Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) has a low bar for listing, and thus is amenable to smaller companies. A company with a post-IPO market cap of A$10 million can list, something unseen in the US where a firm needs to be worth $100 million before listing. This sounds like a positive – a more forgiving public market – but Australian firms are forced to go public early because of a weak venture capital (VC) environment in Australia. As of 2014, Australia’s 88 ASX-listed biotechnology companies were valued at more than A$51 billion. Without suitable market caps, many of these companies are unable to raise additional funds.

The VC environment, as a percentage of GDP, is far behind the US. The Australian government is aware that private VC money is inadequate and attempted to fill the financing gap through programs such as the Innovation Investment Fund (IIF), where funding was matched by private investors, and Commercialization Australia. As of February 2014, Commercialisation Australia had invested A$213M in 503 companies, but the program was abolished in May of that year.

This shortage of angel and VC funds means that the early Australian sector is dependent on government tax breaks and R&D grants to help generate funds. That helps, but many firms fail because they lack enough money to reach a critical size, and because of a dearth of experienced managers.

Australia also suffers from too many tiny biotechs. The vast majority of university technologies would be better off licensed out, rather than formed into a start up. These small biotechs are often left floating, poorly capitalized and without strategic direction. Many would benefit from merging, but that’s not as common as it should be, as management often doesn’t have great vision and are more concerned with the continuity of their salaries than the firm itself.

Australian bioetchs often suffer from unfocused development, in that they do not ask the go-or-no-go questions early enough. The reason, it’s been suggested, is that if a CEO doesn’t have shares in a company, he or she won’t have a wholehearted interest in its success, and thus considering shutting down the company simply imperils the CEO’s job. Yet another aspect is that those very small companies are founded on a single invention, which means that ending a project basically ends the company. Furthermore, given the full disclosure requirements of public companies, announcing the stoppage of projects would likely crush a company’s stock price. So companies soldier on and drag out their failure. Millions of dollars have been wasted this way in Australia.

There is another issue: for an industry to be viable long-term, of course, shareholders must make money, but even when this does happen in Australia, there haven’t been enough success stories to encourage reinvestment, so money is rarely recycled. Often, if a company fails, the CEO cannot raise funds for another.

It’s true there are a handful of good firms with nice stories, such as Mesoblast, Sirtex Medical, Impedimed and Clinuvel Pharmaceuticals, but medium-cap Australian stocks have been pounded on the exchange (Table 1), even as stocks in the US have flourished. So while Australia has companies that are providing employment and are profitable, it has room to improve.

Next post: what Australia has done well

Szymon Jarosławski and Gayatri Saberwal

Table 1. Market damage in 2014 (Go here for this article by Mark Pachacz in full; it has been excerpted below.)

Pharmaxis, which at its peak had a market value in excess of $900 million, saw its stock fall by more than 50% in 2014, as the company’s lead product for the treatment of cystic fibrosis failed to gain substantial market traction in Europe.

Acrux’s share price fell by 55% in 2014, amid concerns emerging about the use of testosterone products and the inability of the company’s product to secure a more substantial market share in the US through its partner, Eli Lilly.

QrxPharma received a red light once again from the US Food and Drug Administration for its pain combination therapy. Its share price plummeted by 98%.

Alchemia’s shares fell 85% after its Phase III cancer trial showed no benefit over placebo.

Acknowledgments

This article is based on interviews with 14 senior people in, or associated with, companies in Australia, whose comments have been edited for clarity and brevity. We are extremely grateful to the interviewees, who gave freely of their time and their insights. This work was supported by a grant to GS from the Institut Merieux, France. SJ was supported by France Volontaires, France. Neither organization played any specific role in this study.

Playing in Paris

Posted on 29 Jan 2015 by Bioentrepreneur

For two years, Nature Biotechnology has supported Index Ventures with the VC firm’s flagship Playground event in London. On February 11, 2015, the event is moving to Paris.

The event should be of interest to those exploring entrepreneurism in the life sciences. This year’s event will feature discussions on entrepreneurship by David Grainger (E3BIO), Xavier Duportet (PhageX), and Bernard Gilly (this video in French). There will also be a panel discussion on the startup scene in France.

These are well planned, well executed events, and a great chance to mingle with like-minded folks, as well as an opportunity to get the ear of Index Ventures partners. A reminder that while Playground is free, space is limited. Register promptly.

More information (and registration) can be found on the web here, and also through the PDF link below.

INDEX-Playground

Mixing Science and Politics

Posted on 12 Jan 2015 by Luiz Antonio Barreto de Castro

AquaBounty’s saga to register its GM salmon at FDA constitutes the longest case in history of a GM organism attempting to be cleared anywhere in the world. The United States has a role as leader in the subject of commercializing Gm plants as food. I wrote a letter to President Obama. Others have, as well. In mine, I basically said that science and politics do not mix.

In the last century Stalin denied the Russian people the right to study in the schools, he denied them the modern genetics of Thomas Hunt Morgan. Morgan won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1933 and established a Division of Biology at Caltech that yielded seven other Nobel Prizes. Russia today imports grain, a lot of it from Brazil, where the genetics of Morgan was — fortunately – widely disseminated amongst our geneticists.

The United States has been a tremendous example to the world in dealing with science independently of politics. However, I smell political influences preventing a decision in the US.

The subject is not complex. I’ve read the AquaBounty proposal. If there are relevant scientific reasons not to register the GM salmon, I have not seen them. Regardless, if reasons exist, FDA must simply deny the registration. This has not happened, and the application has been in the hands of FDA for many years now. President Obama could easily ask for independent advice; he has hundreds of excellent scientists at his disposal in the United States.

Scientists in the US want to know the scientific issues FDA is wrestling with before denying or accepting the registration of Acquavantage. They stated so in a letter, which I also read in Brazil. We are all astonished with AcquaBounty’s struggle to register their GM salmon. A few months ago, we dedicated an entire page to this matter in Jornal do Brasil. When I wrote to President Obama, I did so as a concerned scientist dealing with molecular biology for half a century in my country – this technology could benefit Brazil. But I also wrote as the President of the Brazilian Biotechnology Society. I’ve also blogged about it before, found here.

A few months ago I attended and excellent International Scientific Congress in Brasilia. The subject was animal biotechnology. Aquabounty came up many times, and the general opinion was that politics are staying the FDA’s hand. This will leave a stain on the scientific history of the US. Credibility takes a long time to build but only one small example to be destroyed.

GM technology faces a continuous, political campaign against its use from European NGOs (though it is entirely devoid of fundamental science). Yet after decades of GMO consumption, there is not one example of demonstrated harm. Given the lack of action by FDA, one might wonder if the inhabitants of the White House are listening to the European anti-GMO campaigns.

Luiz Antonio Barreto de Castro

Start-up lessons from a researcher

Posted on 18 Dec 2014 by Bioentrepreneur

My company, Xpressomics, was born a couple of years ago when I was conducting post-doc work on hypoxia research and ran into problems when performing gene expression analysis on my microarray data. I felt that the analytics process involved too many steps, required help from bioinformaticians and was too time-consuming. As a biologist I needed a simple solution with up-to-date annotations and requiring no programming skills. From that came an idea to develop a gene expression analytics solution, which by today has evolved into a gene expression search engine.

Taking an idea from an academic setting and turning it into a business poses challenges, and below I have highlighted some key lessons. While others may have different experiences, these were the ones that, to my mind, are worth sharing.

A first, key aspect for transferring scientific know-how into a business is an intellectually diverse team. At a very early stage I managed to link up with people skilled in software engineering, cloud infrastructure and business development. I felt that complementary mindsets help to sustain progress and creativity. I would recommend the same for any academic start-up.

Secondly, there’s the vision. You should have a gut feeling of the problem awaiting a solution, and how you are going to do it. In our case, we noted that the process of collecting samples, processing microarrays and analyzing the data was very slow. This would normally take a couple of months. What if somebody had already performed an experiment answering my question and I’m not aware of it?

Our vision was that we felt the data analysis process could be significantly shortened. Considering the accelerating growth of genetic information, we reckoned that an optimal solution would enable individual researchers to tackle big data problems on their own while requiring little computer science skills and on-site hardware. After all, it’s the person who designed the experiment who has the most insight into the problem. In our vision, an easy-to-use application should be able to turn differential expression analysis of microarrays or RNA-seq into something as easy as performing a t-test or ANOVA in a typical data analysis package. Such an aim is fully compliant with the advances of cloud computing, as it is now possible to deliver results from high-performance computation to every laptop running a web browser.

Looking back, it’s interesting to see how the product has evolved over time. Initially the idea was to provide a highly customizable tool for life scientists to analyze their data via a visual programming interface. Yet, after testing it a little while we understood that the product would have to be made simpler to reach a wider audience of researchers. It was a key lesson: the end user perspective of the product is radically different from the developer’s. Next, we understood that performing differential expression analysis was not going to cut it alone. Similar desktop solutions already existed and we had to up the ante, and it was not certain that providing the service solely in the cloud was a strong selling point.

Instead, we took a more general approach and identified the interpretation of data as a major bottleneck. Comparing new data to previously published experiments is probably the most pervasive pattern in the scientific methodology. We started with a pilot study indexing differential expression profiles from around 20,000 microarrays in a multi-arm toxicogenomic study (the Japanese Toxicogenomic Project). Today, we provide a gene expression search engine that allows the querying of genes for differential expression in public data sets. We have specialists curating experimental factors in the meta data followed by differential expression analysis starting from the raw data. Over a thousand experiments have been analyzed, producing more than 25,000 transcriptome-wide gene expression profiles. Experiments are sorted by relevance in response to the query, so that the user can easily identify factors that have most effect on the genes of interest. We expect that the query engine will facilitate new discoveries and provide better overview of gene function by highlighting conditions that affect its expression most. For the sake of simplicity, you can perform the search just by entering one or more gene symbols as the query. And the power of the search engine is growing rapidly as we index new profiles each month.

Here is the third takeaway: get feedback early. The pivots we’ve made have been our way of responding to the comments we have received. This poses a question: do you embrace customer feedback and pivot to new products, or stick with the vision and carry on? It’s difficult to know, but I recommend keeping an open mind and follow one’s gut feeling – this is about as scientific as that process can be made.

And fourth, it is important to remain agile. With only a handful of people we have not had the luxury of spending too much time and resources on development and commercialization. Actually this has been a good thing as it has kept our venture lean and focused. And it will serve us well as we develop our solutions for the future.

Hendrik Luuk

A Canadian (un)Curriculum

Posted on 02 Dec 2014 by Bioentrepreneur

Canada is known for its hockey, maple syrup, the beaver, Canadian goose and apologetic nature (sorry). But our list of accomplishments doesn’t end there. Canadians are also tenacious innovators in the fields of biomedical science and biotechnology. Trailblazing Nobel Prize winners like Michael Smith (Site Directed Mutagenesis) and Sir Banting and Best (insulin) paved the way for our current luminaries like Tak Mak (T-cell receptor), Eric Brown and Gerry Wright (antibiotic discovery). These avant-gardists have two characteristics in common: creativity and acumen.

In today’s “entrepreneurial university” setting, how do we go about teaching our future graduates these characteristics? How do we bottle biomedical discovery and commercialize it? Curriculum design dictates the establishment of a planned, rigid structure of a program intent on teaching (at) students the wonderful accomplishments of our innovators. This would be wrapped up in a nice, neat package presented at students in the comfort of a classroom. The end product would be a graduate full of fancy knowledge with no creativity, tenacity or grit.

And so we threw out the curriculum design process and set out to create our own (un)curriculum. This was a real, in-your-face, intensive one day think-tank bringing together our stakeholders: the Triple Helix (government, academia, industry) and students. We asked them two questions: What skills do you need to succeed? How can we make it happen?

The outcome was humbling. Our stakeholders exploded with opinions and ideas. The think-tank was abuzz with dialogue and reflection. Amidst the seemingly chaotic milieu, a schema emerged. Dubbed the (un)curriculum, this plan became the backbone of our new Biomedical Discovery and Commercialization (BDC) program.

Pioneering pedagogical learning styles lie at the heart of this (un)curriculum. Our stakeholders identified key skills that make up the ideal graduate students. Among the usual suspects of laboratory and business experience lie surprising gems like learning-to-learn, persistence, grit, optimism, creativity and tacit knowledge transfer. These non-cognitive factors have become the platform on which our courses are built.

Our BDC program is a combined undergraduate Bachelor of Health Sciences program that begins in level III, followed by a fifth year in which candidates complete a non-thesis course-based Master’s degree in Biomedical Discovery and Commercialization. Focus is placed on the “entrepreneurial graduate” by immersing students in biomedical enterprise: from bench to bedside and beyond. The BDC program acts as a hub for collaborative dialogues between the Faculties of Science, Health Science, DeGroote School of Business, industry and community stakeholders. The aim of the BDC program is to produce research-focused graduates with the combined strength of discovery research skills and business acumen.

To celebrate our BDC students’ achievements we will utilize a virtual platform, BDC Dialogues, designed to engage community of practice exchange of ideas. BDC Dialogues is a virtual learning collaborative intended to actively engage undergraduate and graduate BDC students with their community mentors throughout their BDC journey. The community includes faculty members from various faculties (health science, science, business, and engineering), industry stakeholders, clinicians, etc. Tentatively, the BDC Dialogues website will feature: blog sites allowing for open reflection and discussion; learner-team project showcase; award/competition opportunities that will be sponsored by industry partners; general discussion board and feedback surveys. A yearly summit – BDC ENGAGE – will bring together BDC students with their mentors in a day-long event featuring multiple communication networks designed to celebrate and enhance engagement, while initiating new interfaces with the global community. Our long-term goal is to transcend the BDC community of practice into a global network intent on biomedical discovery and commercialization.

We are very proud of our BDC program. These are simple words, but they are honest and heartfelt. And so, we leave you with one parting thought. When you think of Canada, think of Biomedical Discovery and Commercialization … and Canadian bacon, eh?

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Felicia Vulcu

Michelle MacDonald

The E is silent

Posted on 26 Nov 2014 by Brady Huggett

I’ve already mentioned Wake Forest and tech transfer, but the picture above was shot on the University of South Dakota campus here in the US. The university, which has the state’s only medical school and an overall enrollment of more than 10,000, is located in Vermillion, SD. The official mascot is a coyote — though pronounciation of the word in South Dakota drops the long “E” at the end, so it rhymes with “oat.” This is common in western parts of the US, and thus, when rooting on the local team in The Dakota Dome, the correct phrase is “Go Yotes.”

USD is in the beginning stages of a long-term, collaborative project between the neighboring city Sioux Falls, the school and the private sector. It has secured 80 acres of land just outside Sioux Falls and is planning a massive, mixed use academic and residential research park, to be completed over the next 20 years. This is covered in greater detail in the Bioentrepreneur feature article, now live the December issue of Nature Biotechnology, but the school’s expansion is just one part of its attempts to ramp up tech transfer. USD is also in the midst of a $250 million fundraising campaign called Onward. It has already raised more than half of that and is earmarking at least $97 million for future student financial aid.

I visited the campus on a gray, fall day, just before USD’s 2014 Homecoming weekend. The red-stone buildings and long stretches of green grass made the campus seem like some sort of scholarly oasis situated just north of Main Street.

Photographer for these shots is Travis Huggett — his website is here. (Full disclosure: he’s my cousin.)

Brady Huggett

On the USD campus.

The beginnings of the University of South Dakota Research Park, in Sioux Falls, SD.

Richard Naser, president of University of South Dakota Resarch Park Inc, examines plans for the completed project.

Changes in University Tech Transfer

Posted on 17 Nov 2014 by Brady Huggett

The Bailey Power Plant incorporated into the Innovation Quarter in Winston-Salem, NC. (Source: Wake Forest University)

The December issue of Nature Biotechnology includes a BioE feature article investigating changes in university tech transfer in the US. We started thinking about this topic early in 2014 and spent about six months reporting on it, before taking all that information and trying to mold it into publishable form. The result is that we have more than we were able to fit into the article, and I wanted to pass along some tidbits on Trade Secrets.

One of the schools we looked at is Wake Forest University, located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (Full disclosure: I went to Wake Forest for my undergraduate degree.) The school landed in our list of “top 20” schools due to its gross licensing revenue over 2009-2013. As part of reshaping its tech transfer methods, Wake Forest set up an Innovation Quarter downtown, which includes the Wake Forest Biotech Place. Besides being a home for academic research and corporate offices, the Innovation Quarter now holds events. There is a lot of talk about collaboration between arts and sciences in the corporate world today, and lots of assumptions being made about the amazing things that will happen when various groups mingle. Time will tell how that plays out, but either way, the Merge event discussion between a dermatologist and a “tattoo historian” being held at the Innovation Quarter sounds fascinating.

I’ll put up other images from our reporting, and other interesting bits of information from the various schools mentioned in the piece, over the coming days. Article will be out in early December.

Brady Huggett

Estonia’s Biotech

Posted on 10 Sep 2014 by Indrek Vainu

Tallinn, Estonia

Tucked away in the northeast of Europe, Estonia has been at the forefront of developing digital services for many years. In a country of 1.3 million people, paying for parking spaces with mobile phones has become commonplace, and around 95% of Estonians file their annual tax returns online in 10 minutes.

Healthcare has also gone digital. Patient records are stored ‘in the cloud’ and obtaining prescriptions from the pharmacy requires no handwritten notes or papers from the doctor. A state-issued ID card is all one needs for healthcare and several other services, such as electronic banking, signing documents and voting. Later this year non-resident ‘satellite Estonians’ will be able to apply for the ID card as well as send encrypted e-mail and prove their identity to web-service providers who accept government-issued identities, allowing them to do business with governments in the EU.

Twenty years ago the country had few legacy technologies, but this means the country had the opportunity to start fresh and jump-start the economy. Even more so, there was little ‘legacy thinking,’ and it was easy to put together pieces that fit best. Having few legacy systems meant that the country could choose the latest technology platforms and skip some of the analogue and paper-based systems that were the inheritance of the ’80s era in other countries. Most of the infrastructure systems in Estonia today were created from scratch; the country’s new systems were designed to be more forward-looking, rather than past-compliant.

When it comes to biotechnology, the main areas of competence in Estonia are genomics, immunology, the central nervous system and cancer research. The Estonian Genome Center was founded in 2001 specifically to study the genealogy of Estonians. The first samples were collected a year later and today the gene bank contains samples from 52,000 donors, which represents 5% of the Estonian population. This database will provide valuable information for researchers searching for links between genes, the environment and common diseases such as cancer and diabetes. In industrial biotechnology the strength lies in functional food development especially in the areas of probiotic dairy products.

There are a couple dozen biotech companies in Estonia, and bulk of the biotech-related research activities are centered around Tartu University. In addition there are research centers such as Estonian Biocenter, Competence Center for Cancer Research and the brand new Center of Translational and Clinical Research, which has a mission to develop and study advanced chronic disease models with pharmaceutical companies. Biotech spin-outs are usually associated with academic centers in Tartu and Tallinn. The most common financing mechanisms are government grants for research and development, and seed financing from local venture funds. In order to scale the business, heftier amounts of capital are required, and at that stage entrepreneurs turn to foreign funds.

Biotechnology plays an important role in Estonia’s innovation strategy and, with investments into infrastructure already made, the industry is warmly welcoming cooperation with foreign organizations.

Indrek Vainu

The birth of a cluster

Posted on 05 Sep 2014 by Emilia Díaz

Hopefully you read my latest post, and how I practically demanded the appearance of local clusters of biotechnology, with research and innovation throughout the world. There’s a first effort in my country that is proving to be a great framework for this: Redbionova.

This platform, founded and managed by Chilean scientists, aims to bring together students, researchers and entrepreneurs in all the areas of biotechnology. They have more than 10,000 visits per month, which may not sound like much until you learn that their impact indicators are almost 5 times better than any other website of similar niche in our country.

The great thing about Redbionova is the exposure of national biotechnology it provides. It’s very easy to go through your biotech career in Chile without ever knowing there are exciting projects being developed one door down from where you stand, and this can be both discouraging and generally mind-numbing. You end up thinking that your work won’t amount to much after all, because, Who are you? Just a student in a tiny, remote country subject to the tyranny of distance. You end up thinking, Of course nothing interesting will come out of here, because nothing is happening right now.

Wrong.

There are amazing Chilean projects generating an impact worldwide. Through Redbionova I have been able to interact with teams that are creating crowdsourcing platforms for biotechnology (Dodo Crowdfunding), producing modified bacteriophages for cattle (Phage Technologies), designing probiotics for lactose intolerance (Novalact), creating new cancer therapies (Andes Biotechnologies), designing new medical devices that diminish the need for incisions (Levita Magnetics), and inventing new stem cell-based therapies for neurodegenerative diseases (Cell for Cells). Plus my two personal favorites: Kaitek Labs, which develops microbiological sensors for marine biotoxins; and Lab4u, which develops technologies to use mobile devices as science instruments for education and was the winner of the Latin American version of Intel Challenge.

These projects are finally being recognized, or at least known, within the community. Redbionova organizes meetups, known as “Biotech Tonics,” throughout the year, bringing together researchers and innovators to share their ideas and visions on biotechnology. We even had an associated TV program (Todo x la ciencia, or Anything for Science) specialized in showcasing research advances all across the country, driving science and technology closer to everyone in Chile.

This visibility is paving the road for new teams, new people and new projects. One can only hope that the projects showcased today will be the inspiration of great discoveries tomorrow. Hopefully more communities like Redbionova will sprout up throughout non-clustered countries, finally creating a better, more robust and more complete network of biotechnology innovators.

Emilia Díaz

Southern Science

Posted on 27 Aug 2014 by Emilia Díaz

I recently had the pleasure of attending an international summit for young bio-leaders of the future. My fellow attendees (including 4 Chileans out of a total of a 100 guests picked worldwide – a fact that admittedly filled me with pride) formed a diverse, rowdy and interesting crowd. The speaker selection was more conservative and homogeneous. A very wide range of biotechnology-related topics were discussed, from anti-aging techniques to patent managing to sustainability, but even with such a wide spectrum of talks, I saw a pattern emerging.

Every story the speakers (deans, professors, C-ranked executives) told happened in Europe or the US, in the biotechnology clusters located there. When they talked about developing countries, they were referring to China and India, who have a pretty comfortable advantage over my home country, as they are placed second and tenth in the UN’s list of countries by GDP for 2012. (Chile ranked 36 and we should have probably thrown a party.) Over the course of the summit, the talks focused on the EU or US and China and India for the “exotic” factor; the rest of the world was not mentioned.

This meant that the problems discussed did not stray beyond those borders, either. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that excellence clusters statistically produce the vast majority of advances in biotechnology, and things like age-preventing technologies are always interesting from the biological perspective. But aging is not an issue in the vast majority of the world. “Not aging” would describe it better.

If biotechnology developments continually come out of First World clusters, we will come up with solutions for only First World problems. Of course, there are always philanthropists that will direct their research towards the Third World, but that’s not enough, and more importantly, that’s not the point.

We do have great scientists over here. We can do great things, too. Southern science, or Third World biology, can be just as great as northern or First World science. The distribution of talent does not favor anyone in particular (not even in the clusters: a considerable amount of their scientists come from abroad), it’s the economic factors that drive talents away from their native countries and off to the traditional, renowned clusters. We need to figure out a way to reverse that. The reason is that while you can explain your particular problems to others, you are actually the person most qualified to solve them. In this regard, we need southern scientists that will tackle issues of water purification in remote areas, and Third World scientists battling child mortality.

To attack our own problems, we need to form new clusters with new priorities, new goals, new areas of action and expertise. I know that my current best option as a student, or as a biotechnologist, would be to flee my native Chile and try my luck in a traditional excellence cluster. But that’s not what I want. I want Chile to be a cluster, too, with its own local problems, goals and priorities, and I want it tackling those problems through international interaction. Local development is, in my opinion, key to broadening the scope and impact of our technologies.

Instead of putting down people who stay in their home country (hopefully this issue is limited to Chile, where local talent used to fly under the radar unless it literally flew over our borders) and insisting everyone leave for big clusters, we should start pursuing excellence locally. Showcase local talent. Drive efforts towards local issues. This way we could finally form an international net of clusters, each one tackling their own problems, and collaborating to make “the bigger picture” better. Science can’t – and I think, shouldn’t – be confined to certain borders. Let’s be broader. Let’s move forward.