Monthly Archives: August 2013

Entrepreneurial Events

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Places to go and things to do associated with the life sciences.

 

12th Annual BIO Investor Forum
October 8–9, The Palace Hotel, San Francisco
https://www.bio.org/events/conferences/12th-annual-bio-investor-forum

Phoenix 2013: the Medical Device and Diagnostic Conference for Chief Executive Officers
October 10–13, The Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain, Marana, Arizona
https://www.wsgr.com/news/phoenix/index.htm

AUTM 2013 Essentials of Academic Technology Transfer Course
October 23–25, InterContinental Dallas
https://www.autm.net/AUTM_2013_Essentials/11365.htm

15th Annual NIH SBIR/STIR Conference in 2013
October 28–30, University of South Dakota Research Park, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
https://www.sbir.gov/events/15th-annual-nih-sbirsttr-conference-2013-save-date

SciBX Summit on Innovation in Drug Discovery and Development
October 29–30, The Colonnade Boston Hotel
https://www.biocentury.com/conferences/scibxsummit/dates

Choosing Risk

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OGrow up fifteen minutes from Silicon Valley and you will inevitably encounter entrepreneurs and their start-ups. One of my earlier experiences with a biotechnology-themed start-up was having a classmate’s dad stop by our sophomore year biology class to talk about where he worked. With the same classmate’s father, we also took a field trip to the research lab. This was back in 1998, where rather than mulling over the concept of a company built around one or two high-risk, high-payout products, I was instead fascinated with how professional and accurate their pipets were compared to the ones entrusted to us high school students. That company with the impressive set of pipets, Genentech, apparently had a number of other impressive assets: it went on to be acquired by Roche for $47 billion and has more than a dozen drugs approved by the FDA.

Still, even with success stories like that, the life of a bioentrepreneur may not seem as financially attractive as web entrepreneur. Digital startups are easier to create: liquid assets tend to take a secondary seat to free time and a novel idea. Instagram was a 13-man company without a business model, yet it was valued at $1 billion by Facebook, which might lead you to believe the folks at Instragram knew more about business models than they had let on.

I myself found digital startups attractive. In between undergraduate and graduate school, I helped some friends and colleagues build an internet-based music service from the ground up. We all were recent graduates, and other than a few rounds of angel investing to cover the equipment and time, there was no imperative to raise revenue. The original concept behind the company, MixMatchMusic, was to provide a medium for musicians to collaborate online, unhindered by constraints such as time zones and different languages.

When the smartphone, and apps, came along, the company reinvented itself as a readily accessible platform for established musicians to directly communicate new media, concert locations and ideas with their fans. MixMatchMusic didn’t become an instant blockbuster, but changing focuses enabled the company to finally turn a profit. This ability for reinvention is a great asset for digital and biotech companies alike – many pivot in mid-stride, either to keep ahead of markets or because an initial technology failed.

For biotech and pharma companies, it is well known that the likelihood of a single compound reaching market adoption is astronomical. It’s also understood that to get a product into clinical trials, one needs large cash reserves. Acquiring cash has little to do with science; it involves convincing, coercing and placating (not necessarily in that order) new revenue sources. Inevitably, those revenue sources, whether angel investor, VC, NPO or a larger biotech/pharma company, will make demands on anything ranging from primary endpoints and trial locations to document font and logo color. This appeasement of external organizations, while challenging, is a good problem to have. Attaining adequate funding to keep a company operational is one of the greatest challenges for a biotech start-up: where the financial needs are great and the chance of a payoff is slim and far in the future.

So now, 15 years after visiting Genentech and a month after completing my PhD, it’s my turn to take a risk. Recognizing that there is some jeopardy associated with joining a biotech start-up, I’m not inclined to seek employment with the first one that demonstrates cool science or boasts fancy pipettes. Rather, I’d like to take my time to assess the strength of each company. There are more considerations than I would like to admit, or you would care to read about here, but some of the important ones include: do they have adequate cash reserves to cover 1-2 years of operation, are they working toward a clear and evident need (such as Alzheimer’s) or something less critical (another LDL-lowering statin), do they have a single compound that they are focused on or a suitable pipeline to accommodate an initial failure?

I used to think of entrepreneurs as poker players who eagerly wait for their cards to manifest a royal flush. However, a few years of graduate school and a lot of time spent with people who have either started or are starting a biotech company has shown me that while entrepreneurs are not averse to risk, their strategy is to minimize it. They do this through intimately understanding their field of expertise and by recognizing that there are other like-minded entrepreneurs that they can collaborate with.

Keenan Bashour

Decoding Indonesia

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Bird

Many have heard of this country but there’s a good chance most don’t know much about it.  It has impressive inherent characteristics:

  • 4th most populous country in the world, after the U.S.
  • 3rd largest democracy, after India and the U.S.
  • Second largest biodiversity, after the Amazon rainforest
  • It will be a trillion dollar economy by GDP in 2014 or 2015
  • Middle-class population is projected to double by 2020 to 150 million
  • Capital city, Jakarta, is only a 1.5-hour flight from Singapore

 

Up, up and away

So why have you not heard more about the country? Three words: China and India. In the past 15 years or so, when China and India were grabbing economic headlines, Indonesia was struggling politically and economically. It was the country hardest hit by the Asian financial crisis in 1998, so much so that the autocrat that has ruled it for 30 years was kicked out of office and along with him a lot of the political and economic certainties that were taken for granted. Much growth was therefore put on pause. It has remarkably reinvented itself since then, holding 3 successful presidential elections, stabilizing the economy and slowly weaning itself off of an expensive fuel subsidy.

For foreign firms constantly looking for growth in emerging markets, Indonesia is starting to appear on their priority radar screen. This is especially true in healthcare, where the annual spend per capita is expected to increase in the mid- to high-teen percentage and therefore yield tremendous opportunities. Both specialty medicine and generics are expected to expand, the former due to the rapid increase in middle class population, and the latter because of the establishment of a national healthcare insurance expected to go live in January 2014.

Opportunities in biotechnology

Like many countries on the path toward more prosperity, Indonesia is figuring out what it should do to stimulate a local biotech industry. It is in an interesting position because it is a relatively latecomer to the game and therefore is able to learn from other countries’ experience.  A lot of the focus thus far is on leveraging the amazing biodiversity of the country and on manufacturing well-established products (such as vaccines) to the masses.  The government recently established a think-tank for innovation named the National Committee on Innovation (KIN), whose mandate is to advise the president on the process to make a knowledge-based economy.

Within the health sector, the Ministry of Health is also constructing a roadmap for the development of biotechnology-based raw material (in which I act as an advisor).  I believe the most efficient short-term solution is to license-in established technologies and products for local manufacturing, thus short-cutting the upstream development work. This will also emphasize the concept that all research and development must lead to a viable product within a specified period of time.

Once the industry is comfortable with this concept, it can then start licensing less mature technologies for development in the country. This will accustom clinicians and researchers to be more comfortable with the intricacies of product development and, if necessary, clinical studies. Once this is accomplished, basic research should start naturally.

How fast will Indonesia go?

I believe manufacturing of established products in Indonesia is a foregone conclusion: it will happen, perhaps sooner than later. Licensing-in novel products for marketing, development and clinical study will be the next exciting step and is an opportunity the country is constantly pursuing.

As an emerging economy that has a democratic government, Indonesia faces many issues.  It is, however, looking enviously at its fast developing neighbors and I suspect it will institute policies conducive to more technological industries. It is our hope that biotechnology will be a part of it.

Steve Yang

 

An Academic-Industry Sandwich

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Credit: Julia Mirabella

There is a big elephant in the biology room, as evidenced by the DREAM7 challenge: how to encourage collaboration between industry and academia to solve today’s biggest biological problems. Fortunately, the elephant is beginning to receive deserved attention – in places like the University of Oxford, where I am, students are being placed in the interface between industrial and academic partnerships to tackle biological problems using computational methods.

Unlike traditional PhD programmes in which students are simply paired up with academics in the faculty, our programme (SABS-IDC, Oxford) gives us the opportunity to collaborate with industrial supervisors. This combination of academic and industrial viewpoints has broadened my perspective on how to approach today’s research problems. Since our PhD (or what we call a ‘DPhil’ at Oxford) integrates these two ends of the spectrum, I feel that we get the chance to develop elegant solutions toward pertinent problems in today’s biomedical research.

Effectively, because we are given such distinct research questions – such as, “How do we model therapeutic antibodies?” – the major benefit of working with industry has been validation. As a computational biologist, I sometimes get light-hearted criticism from experimentalists who ask, “What’s the point of the model?” or, “How do you know this will be observed in the bench?”

They are correct; my computational models would be useless if they did not agree with experimental data. However, working with industry has validated for me the use of computational methods in biomedical research. With the industry’s emphasis on high-throughput analysis and an increasing trust in computational methods, the problems that I am trying to solve feel just as important as an experimentalist’s research.

Ultimately, industrial collaboration has given me perspective on how to investigate biological problems in novel, unorthodox methods, mainly from a computational view. Moreover, it feels that there is a definite immediate impact in the research that makes the work even more rewarding. I think other students will feel the same, and hopefully, more challenges like DREAM7 will inspire industrialists and budding students alike to cooperate, and develop new (hopefully computational) tools for solving tomorrow’s problems.

Jinwoo Leem

The News Net

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news net2The Net takes a look at what’s new in Scotland and the south of France. And back in the States, the Mayo Clinic serves as a foundation for biotech hopes while an experienced bioentrepreneur is hired in Charlottesville.

 

  • The Scotsman profiles Glasgow University spin-out Virttu Biologics, which is seeking an £8 million infusion to further develop its virus for killing cancer cells. Says new chairman Patrick: “We’ve reached an inflection point with the company. We now need to step up a big gear and have a 24-month plan to do that.” Read it here.
  • Joe Panetta, head of San Diego’s biotech association Biocom, pens his thoughts on a business mission to the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France: Biotech from Nice to Marseille. Read it.
  • Could Rochester, Minnesota, be the next biotech hotspot? The backers of Destination Medical Center hope so. Mayo Clinic Ventures chairman Jim Rogers tell startup business developers that there’s governmental backing and that Rochester “is a good place to start your business, and we’re going to do what we can to make it successful.” More details in the Post-Bulletin.
  • Rochester isn’t the only place looking to build a biotech corridor off the success of Mayo Clinic. A developer plans to buy 225 acres of land near Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix to develop the $1 billion Arizona Biomedical Corridor. Read by clicking.
  • Finally, the University of Virginia’s newest advocate for commercializing its research discoveries brings nearly 30 years of experience in the biotech and pharma industries. UVa alumni Brian Pollok has been named the university’s first entrepreneur-in-residence. He will offer guidance, perspective and a voice on how researchers can amplify their discoveries, working with UVa Innovation and the university’s licensing and ventures group. Find out more.