In the last week of June I attended a teaching course entitled: “The Business of Managing Science: Entrepreneurial and Organizational skills for professionals working in life sciences” (BMS) organized by Institut Pasteur Korea (IPK) and the international Pasteur Network (PN). As a scientist recently transitioned to bioinformatics and computational biology working on a project using AI methods for drug discovery, the announcement highlighted from our institute’s website by my CI brought together what for me were unrelated elements:: “business” and “life sciences”. Even though I have had some previous experience developing software that transitioned from academia to industry, coming from a pure academic background (BSc, MSc, and PhD) the words “business” and “entrepreneurship” were not something that really interested me. However, given that the course was intended for “professionals working in life sciences” I thought it might be a good opportunity to understand more about the field and to do some networking with other researchers. In the end, the course turned out this and more with interesting content covering various aspects that have otherwise been lacking from my scientific training background. In this short essay I will try to summarize my overall experience while attending the course in loco at IPK.
BMS Course 2022 - Institut Pasteur Korea
The course curriculum covered topics such as Entrepreneurship, Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property and Innovation Management (R). The lecturers were scientific business experts, specialists with long experience in these areas dealing directly with startups in the life sciences for the last 20 years in industry, government, the Institut Pasteur in France and its associate international network. The students had various backgrounds, coming from the life sciences, clinical diagnostics, computer science, finance, business development and management. Lectures were engaging, with topics being animated by interleaving intensive interactive discussions between lecturers and students. The format assured that even dense topics e.g. Intellectual Property and Patents were never dull.
For me especially, the biggest lesson came during the lectures regarding Technology Transfer and Maturation. In a moment, when a slide with the diagram with the entire process of transforming an idea into a product was being displayed (Idea → Discovery → Invention → Application → First Application → Building up Product/Offer) suddenly the term “managing science” from the course title came back to my mind and it opened my eyes to the complexity of science beyond the familiar bounty of research articles. Having an idea that leads to novel knowledge, innovation and a final product that can impact the life of millions of people is a long process with risk involved at every step. Coming from a software background where the timeline from an idea to a product is much shorter when compared to life sciences where the timeline from discovery of a new drug to its useful distribution can take years I realized that understanding the importance of a well conceived maturation process can help accelerate bringing a discovery through development and its distribution as a useful biomedical product to the benefit of public health. Importantly the course also presented an interesting de-risking strategy developed at the Institut Pasteur Paris aimed to alleviate the pressure for entrepreneurs during the maturation process, and helping to establish a more robust approach to bring products successfully to market.
Another interesting part of the course was that the lectures were also juxtapositioned with talks (flagship faculty lectures) by CEOs of biotech startups and/or university professors that closely collaborate with IPK. These talks brought an opportunity to learn a lot of insights from the CEO perspectives regarding the current biotech market and products, their successes and failures, and understanding the management of finances by startups considering their stage and investment history. Regarding the biotech market it was interesting to see the recent success cases while developing antibody therapeutics, an area that is currently close to my research in drug discovery. About success and failure experiences, during the talks, the CEOs were really open about sharing their life backgrounds and not only sharing their success experiences but also the challenges and failures along the way, such as launching startups that failed. Finally, in a market in which the timeline to launch a new product takes years (if passing through all the early drug discovery process and clinical trials), it was possible to observe the importance of having a business plan assuring, for example, not to overspend investment money in the middle of the development process without a plan B or being dependent on a successful new round of investments. It is a difficult reality of this market, but in the first years of startups they are not profitable and compound high risk that can be mitigated by, for example, partnerships with big pharmaceutical companies.
With the end of the lectures and talks, we (students) had the final challenge to prepare a presentation (in one night) with a business/market plan for a new product or service to present to our lecturers. Despite the short preparation time, the presentations had great quality and creativity with topics that ranged from new biotech products, new software-based biotech services, diagnostic kits, and, even, career plans. After the presentation, the panel with the lecturers posed questions as they might for any serious project pitch under real-world conditions aiming to select startups for an incubation program. This round of questions was one of the moments I realized how much I learned during the course. The questions and advice from the lecturers were always really insightful (they could grasp our business plans deeply identifying strengths and weaknesses) coming from years of experience of observing startups that succeeded and failed. To have this kind of feedback and expertise on hand throughout the entire process of going from research in fundamental science through to transferring a discovery into a product that might then reach the market is likely one reason for the high success rate of the startups launched at Institut Pasteur in the recent years.
To conclude this essay, I would like to reinforce that it was a great opportunity to attend the BMS course. I learned from great lecturers, visited state-of-the-art IPK facilities, and met amazing people. Most importantly, I feel that the curriculum delivered in the course, especially the one related to managing science, is very important and can be very helpful to young scientists that like me have a lack of understanding in subjects like technology transfer and intellectual property management strategies. Even with the recent addition of business, social science and economics classes to different technology-related academic curriculum, it is still crucial to deliver effectively how and why we develop science that can generate knowledge, new discoveries and innovation in a way that this knowledge leads to positive impact in the future of our society.