Monthly Archives: March 2017

Collaborate, not compete

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my-best-friend-1370977-639x495Collaboration seems to be the last thing on the mind of bioentrepreneurs. This is based on personal experience as well as feedback from my fellow entrepreneur friends. It is quite disappointing and interesting as the same time, as to why most prefer to compete, and not collaborate.

Historically and traditionally, ecosystems can be built and nurtured by collaborating and not by competing. It is human nature to compete, but the urge to win comes along with jealousy and ego. This can hinder progress of a project that is aimed toward a noble and useful cause.

In 2015, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) and Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI) announced a collaboration to advance new small-molecule drugs for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Also recently, 500 Startups, a venture capital seed fund, and Echelon, a global series of tech events by e27, have decided to collaborate to showcase Southeast Asia startup ecosystem to corporates. I think this is a brilliant partnership and will definitely help the startup ecosystem in SE Asia and the rest of the world.

Human culture is to celebrate and elevate an individual; this undermines the value of collaboration. Everyone is in it for the money (a fact of life), but this can also be achieved by effective partnership and working together.

Being a two-time entrepreneur, I am not surprised anymore when collaborations do not go through and the entrepreneur on the other side does not understand what he/she is missing out on. For example, if you are a founder of a biotech startup that works on solutions for diagnosis of cardiac failure and your friend has a social enterprise that works in rural areas to make sure people have a healthy heart, would you collaborate with them? Why would you turn down such a request?

The up side of collaboration is new innovations, new product development, expanding the market, enhancing customer satisfaction and a wider network. Collaboration does have its downsides, such as control issues, insecurities and group dynamics. But looking at the positives, it seems it is more effective and beneficial to collaborate than to do your own thing.

There has been a debate as to whether corporates should collaborate with startups, to scale and succeed together. This equation has many factors to consider, but should work if the vision is similar for both the corporate and the startup. They can learn from each other by working together and creating mutual benefits. Startups always take more risks with disruption, things get done faster due to lenient regulations and they like being associated with big corporates.

Sandhya Sriram

My Biotech Heroes

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A friend asked me recently:  If Gates, Jobs, Bezos and Zuckerberg are among the heroes of the IT revolution, who are the heroes of biotech?

And I responded:

Bob Swanson, who taught us how to dream and how to turn the dream into reality.

George Rathmann, who showed us what it is to have character, how to inspire and empower individuals and how to develop products with a meaningful impact on human health.

Hubert Schoemaker, who never gave up and showed us how to keep overcoming obstacles until we succeed.

Henri Termeer, who showed us how to build a business by treating rare diseases, in the process creating a new pricing paradigm but making sure no patient was left untreated because of financial hardship.

Stan Crooke, who, in creating a new therapeutic modality with antisense oligonucleotides, showed us that great accomplishments require defiance and life-long commitment.

Bill Rastetter, who gave us the first meaningful therapeutic antibody, but after his success, instead of resting on his laurels, kept on creating and contributing.

Art Levinson and Sue Desmond-Hellmann, who showed how scientific leadership can make a difference and built Genentech into the greatest biotech company in the history of the industry.

Fred Frank and Mary Tanner, who taught us how large pharma thought and brought Wall Street legitimacy to the sector by committing the might of legendary Lehman Brothers behind the young companies.

Peter Drake, Linda Miller, Teena Lerner, Denise Gilbert, Monte Pitt and Stu Weisbrod, who taught us how to think about biotech stocks.

Roy Vagelos, who laid the foundations of how an ethical pharmaceutical company should behave and inspired all of us in biotech.

Max Link, the first pharma CEO with a genuine appreciation of biotech, who reached out and sought to access innovation among the young companies in the sector.

Dan Vasella, who took Max’s vision a step further and, in setting up the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, catalyzed the transformation of the Boston area from a biotech hub to the global leader in biopharma research.

Len Schleifer and George Yancopoulos, who showed us how to lead with science and built a great company in their unique and uncompromising way.

Craig Venter, who almost singlehandedly laid the foundation of genomics-based drug discovery by being the driving force behind the sequencing of the human genome.

Marc Levin, who legitimized genomics-based research initiatives by building Millennium into a great biopharma company.

Noubar Afeyan, who has been driving relentlessly the formation of science-driven companies in spite of ever shifting moods and paradigms in the financial community.

John Martin, who showed how scientific judgment and clinical development acumen can create great drugs. He helped turn AIDS into a manageable chronic condition and offered cures for Hep C infection.

Joshua Lederberg, Phil Sharp, Bob Langer, George Church and David Baltimore, who, with their exquisite scientific insights, have founded several outstanding companies and have offered unparalleled wisdom as scientific advisors and board members to small and large companies alike.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who crossed the industry-academia divide better than anyone by focusing on the best parts of each world, all with the common aim of improving the human condition.

Some have been my friends.  All are my heroes.

Ravi, thanks for asking.

Stelios Papadopoulos

The Gene Editing Bazaar

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scissorsOn February 15, 2017, the US patent authorities ended a legal battle over IP rights between University of California at Berkeley and the Boston-based Broad Institute. According to the long awaited decision, Broad keeps its patents allowing them to own the use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technologies in any eukaryotic organisms (including yeast, plants, animals and humans), while Berkeley’s broader patent application, which allows general use of CRISPR-Cas9 in any type of cell (including bacteria), will proceed before the USPTO. Gene editing – the precise and relatively easy deletion, insertion or modification of particular DNA sequences in the genome – is one of the latest innovations aiming to convert genetic engineering into a real engineering discipline. In the past, precise modifications were hard or almost impossible to achieve, frequently leaving genetic marks and requiring rather expensive and time-consuming processes.

The dream of every synthetic biologist, to edit the DNA letters in the genome as if using word processing software, seems not so far fetched anymore. But helping to make genomes easier to engineer is not the only advantage for scientists and the biotech industry. As it turns out, the gene editing process of CRISPR-Cas9 is distinct enough from traditional genetic engineering so that first applications issued in 2016 in the US, like the non-browning mushroom, escape regulations on genetically modified (GM) crops.  In the US, GM red tape does not apply to plants or fungi because CRISPR/Cas9 does not involve genetic elements from plant pathogens, and the modifications are in principle indistinguishable from a naturally occurring mutation. The potential for covering the tracks of gene editing (for example to avoid royalty payments) has recently caught the attention of the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which is currently “seeking information on potential tools and methods to detect organisms that have been modified using genome editing techniques.”

Other countries are also lagging behind with decisions on regulatory status. In Europe we see varying reactions. For example, Sweden decided that non-regulation was “crystal clear,” but Austrian government reps announced that CRISPR/Cas9 will be treated just like GMOs.

European countries, however, will have to wait at least until 2018 before the European Court of Justice will announce a presumably legally binding decision for EU member states. Until then, gene editing in Europe (and elsewhere) is in a legal limbo, giving the US (again) a head start on developing and innovating novel biotech applications.

Still, technical obsolescence could soon render ownership of CRISPR/Cas9 irrelevant, given related techniques, such as the CRISPR-Cpf1 where IP rights seem less complicated. There might even be a much greater number of CRISPR or related tools that work at least as well or better and that could even be open source/open access. We will see what happens to initiatives like the do-it-yourself CRISPR kit from Josiah Zayner. And a group of do-it-yourself biologists from all over Europe will for the first time join the Genome Hacking Retreat, beginning March 12, in Germany to exchange ideas and develop new applications using gene editing. It’s possible that in the next 10 years we’ll witness the coming of age of free and ubiquitous gene editing tools for everyone.

Markus Schmidt