Is your biotech based startup really unique?

So far I talked about and classified the major “jobs to be done” in the Healthcare and Agriculture startup world. This time, I want to talk about the biotech world and what the major jobs are.

But as a refresher, the 13 categories all startups fall into include: Healthcare, Agriculture, Biotech, Clean Tech, Food/drinks, Transportation, Productivity, Manufacturing, Financial Tech, Education, Advertising, Security, and Entertainment.

So without further ado, what is the biotech startup world really like?

Biotechnology

Image taken from Google Images

In biotech, there are fundamentally 4 jobs that must be done. They are:

1. Drug discovery

2. Diagnostics

3. Ailment specific cure

4. Research development tools

1. The job to be done when referring to “drug discovery,” in essence, has to do with the timely and costly process of developing new drugs for people. Overall from the conception of the drug, to the initial synthesis of the drug, to the initial testing of the drug on animal subjects, the probability of any drug candidate “succeeding” and passing those stages is minimal. Furthermore, after the initial tests, the drug has to be approved by the FDA by going through 4 clinical stages. Again, that process is both time consuming and expensive. Because of the said issue, novel drugs tend to have small deviations from already existing drugs or repurposing of old drugs for new purposes. The goal of drug discovery is to simplify and resolve the issue of this field by making the effort, time, and cost to developing a new drug cheaper and more efficient.
2. While drug discovery refers to the development of new drugs, many a times, the drugs do not help because they were too late to be used. Refer to the article another author on Startup Review wrote. Therefore, another goal in the biotech startup industry is to resolve this issue of having safer, quicker, and more reliable diagnostic tools to help people in the prevention or the remedy for the ailment they have or will develop. For more ideas on what diagnostics tools are being developed for the cancer field, these two articles are quite informative. The Future of Cancer Diagnostics vol. 1, vol. 2, and vol. 3.
3. Aside from helping the general process of drug discovery or even helping with diagnostics, some biotech startups aim to solve very specific problems. These problems are people who have very specific ailments. Others also try to create novel methods of solving ailments, such as using ISPs (stem cells), or RNA drugs.
4. Finally, in the biotech field, aside from improving the quality of people’s lives by developing new technologies, some problems lie in the development of these solutions. Many a times, the initial seed needed for the development of these startups come from University Research. And because it is University Research, the process is long, and unsettling prone to errors. Therefore the problem to be solved is to reduce this lengthy and error prone process into one that is not. To do that some startups have “in built laboratories” to help provide the necessary materials these researcher’s need for them to develop novel knowledge.

To see a further breakdown of what the biotech field is like, check out: tacosushi.github.io for visual depiction of the startup field.

To check out our previous post, click this link: Agriculture

To check out the next post, click this link: CleanTech