Starting young with business mentoring!

Many of our assignments at Ithaka over the years have included coaching & mentoring of senior-level management teams within large & small Life Science Companies. Our external perspective plus our few (!) grey hairs of wisdom has provided expertise ranging from organisational structure & strategic focus through to intellectual property management & access to debt & equity finance.

Clearly, the earlier practical experience can be gained, the better it is for successful technology commercialisation. To this end, the Biotechnology Young Entrepreneurs Scheme (Biotechnology YES) was set up as an innovative competition to encourage entrepreneurial culture by young researchers. For over 5 years, Ithaka has provided mentors to support this UK-wide programme & the following are some glimpses from the recent Biomedical YES workshop held at the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst for Open Innovation.

The Biomedical workshop ran over three days in October. In the mornings of the first two days, eighteen teams with five members in each, attended presentations on technology transfer and the commercialisation of ideas.  In the afternoons each team started to build a business plan for their hypothetical start-up company. Mentors were on hand to give advice, answer questions, and provide a focus for the team’s ideas.

On the final day the participants made an oral presentation of their business plan before a panel taking the role of equity investors. Two teams were selected to progress through to the National Final in December where they compete against winners from the other six themed workshops.

As a mentor on the first afternoon, I met with six of the teams for approximately 30 minutes each. The sessions run back-to-back so there is no time to rest! A wide range of biomedical business ideas were pitched from novel diagnostics through to intriguing medical devices and innovative therapeutics. The first requirement was to quickly understand a team’s business concept and then to help them mould it into shape. There tend to be strong and quiet voices and the mentor assists in drawing out ideas from everyone and building real consensus.

A common issue at this (early) stage is for teams to agree what the business model will actually be e.g. are they a technology developer planning to license to a Corporate or a Company with manufacturing and distribution selling to end-users. They need to base their ideas on science that is realistic but currently hypothetical; often a cause for much discussion!

Since the ultimate aim is to convince the panel to invest in their idea, company and team, the mentor helps them to ‘get into the mind’ of an investor and emphasise the importance of reducing business risk and achieving a successful exit. Each team member has to assume a different management role within the company and the mentor helps teams to tease out what skills are required.

My colleague from Ithaka, Paula Wittels, joined the sessions on the second afternoon and mentored five teams all developing business plans for exciting new technologies.  They all showed a high level of enthusiasm and commitment and had made an enormous amount of progress in a very short time. Just as in the real world they were facing problems of regulatory approvals, identifying subcontractors, finding commercial partners and working out just how much money they should ask for to support their new businesses.   Most of the individuals were undertaking PhDs but they all said to Paula that the programme had opened their eyes to new careers that they hadn’t previously considered. 

In conclusion, all the teams demonstrated a huge amount of enthusiasm, ability and of course youthful creativity and energy. If all of the ninety young delegates come away recognising that business success is not just about having a novel technology, it will have been a success!

For more information on this innovative competition see: www.biotechnologyyes.co.uk

Smart healthcare

There is a lot of excitement around the potential benefits arising from the convergence of information and communications technology with healthcare. Two recent announcements illustrate the impact that this trend may deliver.

First is the use of smartphones as “pocket doctors”, diagnosing Parkinson’s and other degenerative diseases with astonishing accuracy on the basis of users’ movements and voice. The recent British Science Festival in Birmingham heard that large-scale trials of the technique are getting under way with up to 3,000 patients, after smaller lab-based studies showed that it could pick out people with Parkinson’s – a disease that is notoriously hard to diagnose definitively – with up to 99% accuracy.

Max Little of Aston University, who is working on the technology with colleagues at Oxford University and funding from the charity Parkinson’s UK, said it could be used both to diagnose Parkinson’s in people showing possible symptoms ­­and to monitor the progress of known patients.

Modern smartphones can record speech patterns with great precision, revealing small variations in voice. They also contain accelerometers, which can reveal abnormalities in the user’s movements. The combination of changes in voice and movement, analysed by computer algorithm, can show early signs of Parkinson’s.

One study is taking place at 11 hospitals in the Thames valley, where 900 patients have already been recruited. The smartphone technology will be included in a more extensive investigation of ways to diagnose Parkinson’s before overt symptoms appear – which can be 10 to 15 years after the onset of subtle changes in the brain.

Paul Wicks, a research neuropsychologist who collaborated with Dr Little, is now vice-president of innovation at PatientsLikeMe, a Boston company planning to commercialise smartphone health information by providing a better, more effective way for individual patients to share their real-world health experiences in order to help themselves, other patients like them and organizations that focus on their conditions.

Claire Bale, of Parkinson’s UK, responded enthusiastically to the research. “Smartphones offer huge potential as they continuously capture information and can monitor subtle changes, such as an increase or decrease in someone’s tremor,” she said. “Arming doctors and people with Parkinson’s with this technology could revolutionise the way the condition is managed.”

Second is the recent announcement that social media, app and smartphones are going to be used in a revolutionary European project to find new ways of gathering information on suspected adverse drug reactions. The project, to be called WEB-RADR, is to be funded through the Innovative Medicines Initiative, which is a public private partnership between the European Commission and European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.  

The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) will lead a consortium of different organisations across Europe that include the European medicines regulators, academics and the pharmaceutical industry in a project that is looking to develop a mobile app for healthcare professionals and public to report any suspected adverse reactions to treatments directly to national EU regulators. The group are also exploring how they can use publicly available social media data that is identifying potential drug safety issues. The consortium has also been quick to stress that any data from social media used in the project will be made anonymous to protect data privacy.

As well as reporting suspected adverse reactions, the app could be also developed to send accurate, timely and up to date medicines information to patients, clinicians and care givers. WEB-RADR will also examine the value of these new tools for monitoring drug safety. It will help to develop recommendations for medicines regulators and the pharmaceutical industry internationally on how these should be used alongside existing systems.

Mick Foy, Group Manager in the MHRA’s Vigilance and Risk Management of Medicines division said:

“The growing use of smartphones and tablets by patients and healthcare professionals creates a need for reporting forms to be provided on these platforms to ensure regulators receive ADR reports that are easy to access and complete.“

“Additionally the recent growth of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and the many specialist sites and blogs has given rise to many people sharing their medical experiences publicly on the internet.”

“Such data sharing, if properly harnessed, could provide an extremely valuable source of information the monitoring the safety of medicines after they have been licensed. WEB-RADR will deliver recommendations for international drug safety monitoring as to how these resources should be used ethically and scientifically.”

On a more mundane level the use of simple communications tools such as teleconferencing can have a positive impact on healthcare. Just this week the Financial Times reported that my local hospital, Airedale General Hospital, is using teleconferencing to treat a small number of its patients at home. Not only can this cut hospital use by more than a third, but it is also a far more compassionate way of caring for people with difficult conditions. Treatment at home is particularly beneficial for elderly patients; it is worth noting that the NHS spends about seven times as much on an 80-year-old person as on a 30-year old and coming years will see a rapid rise in the elderly share of the population. This may be a small step towards plugging an NHS funding gap that is forecast to reach £30bn by 2021 but, as one of our leading supermarket chains used to say “every little helps”.