Forging a Career in Bioinnovation: Ripe Opportunities?
On 25th March, CUVCPES and CUTEC organised a panel discussion, ‘Forging a Career in Bioinnovation’, featuring panel speakers Miranda Weston-Smith (Business Development Consultant & Founder of BioBeat), Michael Anstey (Partner at Cambridge Innovation Capital), and Susan Hill (CEO at Mestag Therapeutics & Venture Partner at SV Health Ventures). Here are some thoughts inspired by the panel discussion.
The philosopher Karl Popper reminds us in Unended Quest that:
“I regarded (and I still regard) the degree of corroboration of a theory as a critical report on the quality of past performance: it could not be used to predict future performance.”
We often take it for granted that the longevity of a scientific theory is inherently a measure of its truthiness, but as Popper reminds us this is logically impossible — theories can only be disproven, and the longevity of one only hints at its explanatory power in the face of current evidence. There could always be one black swan out there ready to disprove our notion that all swans are white.
I was reminded of Popper during the panel discussion, because like scientific discovery, the success of innovative firms up to the present in no way necessarily predicts future outcomes. Bioinnovation in particular can be a tricky beast as the translation from laboratory discovery to marketable product is often not very straightforward. This is why the speakers stressed the importance of working at a large firm, either via the consulting or pharmaceutical route, before trying your hand at start-ups. At face value, this makes sense; start-ups have a low chance to succeed, and one can gain much career capital by finding out how innovation is done in large companies.
The natural question to then ask is: what is the scope of innovation in biology? In contrast to fields such as physics (and even computing), our advances in biology are very new. And there are still many things left to discover. Consider the fact that in 2016 researchers found that ~1/3 of the essential genes required for life in the simplest bacteria have unknown function. That is a lot that we don’t know about even basic metabolism in the “simplest” cell.
I think it would surprise many people to find out that there are so many unknowns in our knowledge of biology — it certainly surprised me, and maybe that is because there is a certain truthiness in the belief that we should know more than we do. It’s been known for years that innovation in science has decreased over the last few decades. Scientists are less productive at generating new knowledge for every research dollar spent. Some would claim this indicates that perhaps we are at the limit of our ability to find new things out about Nature. Considering the relative young age of molecular biology , I find this hard to believe. Bioinnovation, then, should be a ripe hunting ground for new developments.
The major bottleneck in innovation is the production of new paradigms. We need major breakthroughs. As eluded to by Popper earlier, we don’t know which areas of biology will yield the biggest returns in innovation, and past performance areas of innovation won’t predict future ones, so the best strategy would be to try and find out as many unknowns as possible. But that doesn’t seem to have happened.
There is a common perception that most labs around the world have shifted to “safe” science, in which common research areas known to yield publications are exhaustively investigated. This has led to large gaps in our basic biological knowledge. Hyper-competition in science seems to be the main culprit; researchers are forced to compete for a shrinking number of grants, which favour documented evidence that the proposed research will work. This, of course, massively disincentivises risk taking.
In my research for this article, I found an interesting idea: that of combining Open Science with product development. This model is particularly primed for radical innovation. This is most relevant to bioinnovation, where start-ups and established companies can collaborate with academic partners in publishing high-quality research. Instead of hindering product marketability, such Open Science allows for other researchers around the world to contribute to the problem, pushing a more innovative product than had the results been kept secret.
As the speakers emphasized, Cambridge is one of the best places in the world for bioinnovation. The MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit is one such example of fostering a culture of Open Science. To date, they have created several innovative products for the public good. For example, they have developed the ‘Neuropage’ system for sending task reminders to patients with memory problems. Now is our chance to foster a culture of industry collaboration with Open Science to promote radical bioinnovation.
