At Biotech Week Boston we spoke with Lynne Frick, Founder of BioGuides, for BWB TV on why the highly regulated life sciences industry struggles to quickly foster innovation. She was speaking to Cheryl Scott, Senior Technical Editor at BioProcess International.
Cheryl Scott: What's your mission?
Lynne Frick: BioGuides was formed because there's an issue in the industry of technology adoption. So I wanted to work on a way to provide small companies and entrepreneurs with a way to bring their ideas and products to market much more quickly and hopefully get them commercialized without going through the hassles that we all kind of went through in doing this before and learning from that. So it's a way to help people guide them through the process.
CS: Why is developing new technology so important?
LF: Well, all industries innovate, but in our industry which is highly regulated, it's very difficult to have the time to get things tested and actually approved within the process, especially in biomanufacturing and bioprocess. So it's important to foster this innovation, because it's very hard to make a change. And if we don't start helping very small companies, then some very good new ideas get left by the wayside.
CS: Absolutely. So it seems like regulatory issues are the biggest obstacle to adoption and new technology, or is it?
LF: I think it is. One of the big hurdles to adoption is that the job of a pharmaceutical company is to get their drug approved first and foremost and get into the clinic as quickly as possible. So if you look at that, and that's the business model, when does technology evaluation fit in? And many companies are taking steps to try to make this easier. Several big companies have technology adoption groups that try to evaluate across the whole drug discovery and development and manufacturing and then put things into the process when they could be implemented. But still, small companies have trouble making that connection and figuring out what they need to do.
CS: What do you see going on in the market that made you want to start a company focused on innovation?
LF: I've worked with many small and emerging technology companies. And you start to see some similarities as people struggle to gain the support they need in order to bring their innovation forward. So they also have trouble finding financing. So in the current model, a lot of venture capital money doesn't go to technology. And really there's a good reason for that. The returns aren't as great as they are with drugs. And often technologies have to go through a buildup where you're working on the actual hardware, the software, product development. And that costs a lot of money before you actually have something to try. So because of that it takes kind of a pile of money upfront before you actually have something to sell to go through it. Which obviously is the same with drugs. You go through an awful lot before you can sell them. But the multiples on drugs are much higher.
CS: So what are some ways you can sort of accelerate these products into adoption?
LF: Since technology and tool development is so unique, a couple of things that I've done is worked on what I call customer-centric development of a product. And what this simply means is that you bring a product to market or a prototype, even, early than you expect. And you kind of test it in the field. You create and align these customer interactions where it's tested early on, so the entrepreneur has a chance to kind of refine the product and is actually building something to meet the market need.
So often in entrepreneurial companies there's what we call Project Creep where especially a chief technical officer might say, "Oh, but if we add this feature it'll definitely sell." And things get added and added, and that really means more money spent before you have an answer as to whether or not the market really needs it. So it's kind of turning that upside-down a little, going to the customer very early, often before the product is done to try to get some input early on.
CS: We've noticed a lot of these sort of collaborations between companies and between users and suppliers of technology. In the magazine we're getting a lot of articles, actually, that are those sort of collaborative projects and people working together to develop something. So that does seem to be something that's a good trend.
LF: Close collaboration is important. And obviously the big bioprocess suppliers and tool-makers have a part in that. But sometimes with very small companies they can't even get an audience with the big tool suppliers until they're further along and have shown some customer interest or traction within the market.
CS: So what services do you provide them to help them make that happen?
LF: So one of the things I've done is I've co-founded a bio-innovation group here in Cambridge. And it's a group of industry professionals that are working representing themselves to try to advance technology for the greater good. We're actually set it up as a for public benefit company, and we work with small technology companies to try to come up with an idea that will be sell-able to the biopharm marketplace and help partner them with people so that no one large company is locking up a technology or the intellectual property that surrounds it. So this has been a problem whereas if I go to Company X and they're a large company, and it's a new technology, Company X wants to own it. And so we're trying to figure out a way to make it available industry-wide.
CS: That's a challenge.
LF: Yeah, it is. And BioGuides, for services we do pretty much anything that helps with technology adoption and bringing it forward. And one new idea I had is there's been a way within small companies for years where CFOs are part-time individuals. So it's like fractional CFOs. We're doing the same thing with very senior business development people. So we kind of have a very senior resource that a small company might not be able to afford, but one of our consultants will work with many small companies at once to provide the network and the maturity needed to bring it to market quicker.
This interview was filmed as part of BWB TV at Biotech Week Boston in September 2018. Biotech Week Boston 2019 is taking place in Boston, MA on September 9-12, 2019. Find out more here.