Trade Secrets will be taking a winter break over the end of December and into the New Year. For those of us in our New York or London offices, it can be a period of cold weather, dark days, and snow. Perhaps it’s the same for you.
Until 2015…
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.
We asked Relecura, which has a web-based IP analytics platform for analyzing and commercializing patents and patent portfolios, to examine patent information on life sciences in 2013, using keywords and patent classification codes. The result: Relecura found 265 life science patent transactions from universities to corporate entities.* Click on the LS data2 link below to see Relecura’s list of the universities most active at assigning patents to corporate entities (Table 1), and the corporations that acquired the most life science patents (Table 2). Relecura also broke out the results by country (Fig. 1)
Relecura points out that while US universities top the list, academic institutions from other geographies, especially those from Japan, were active with patent re-assignments to US corporations. Also, the relatively low number of reassignments could indicate the possibility of corporations accepting licenses instead of insisting that patents be assigned to them. Regardless, New York University, Florida Atlantic University and Ordway Research Institute were quite active in 2013, and the corporate entities list is topped by Sythezyme. The US is far and ahead the leader in life science patent transactions, but Japan is very solidly second.
The hard data behind the tables and figure can be found here.
*A few caveats: This analysis was restricted to US patent applications where assignment transfer records are available at the USPTO, and the information was taken from the public domain. It also should be noted that many IP licensing deals are not published or recorded through reassignments, and thus are not included in these data.
Train trestle above a park outside the University of Pennsylvania’s tech transfer office.
The December issue of Nature Biotechnology contains a feature article on the shifting nature of US university technology transfer. It can be found here.
I’ve already posted about Wake Forest’s initiatives, and also the University of South Dakota’s. Much of the article focused on the University of Pennsylvania’s mission to expand and rebrand from the Univeristy of Pennsylvania Tech Transfer Office to the Penn Center for Innovation. The initiative involves a new Pennovation Center and a more open structure to invite participation with industry.
Penn’s story is fleshed out in the article, but here are some additional photos that did not run with the piece. (Photography by Travis Huggett.)
Penn President Amy Gutmann in conversation with Walter Isaacson on Penn’s South Bank campus, Oct. 31, 2014.
The new Pennovation Center on the University of Pennsylvania’s South Bank.
What’s happening? This: Novo breaks ground in Denmark, German biotech bought by AstraZeneca, the Life Sciences Innovation Center is founded in Chile.
And more. From December issue of Nature Biotechnology. (click to enlarge)
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.