Tuesday, January 27, 2015

From Quora: What is it like to work in a biotech venture firm?

The intellectual skills needed in startups are very different than those needed in academia or big pharma.  Academics usually succeed by learning more and more about less and less.  They become the world's leading expert in a very narrowly defined field.  Top-notch scientists, of course, manage to relate this focused domain knowledge to big-picture science as well.  But first you have to truly master a topic, and that means narrowing your focus.

Biotech startups don't have the luxury of focusing on one problem, because there are hundreds that have to be solved in order to demonstrate the feasibility of your technology and bring it to the market.  The company usually has been founded on the basis of one or two academic publications which show some promising result, and has been sold to the investors as a nearly-solved problem requiring just a few million of investment to smooth off a few rough edges and get to the clinic.  As a result, most startups are undercapitalized and the scientists are under tremendous pressure to make the promises of the founders not look like bald-faced lies.

So rather than become experts in one narrow specialty, biotech scientists typically have to acquire many skills, at least to a "good enough" level, because there is simply no one else around to do the job.  In my career, I've had to learn nucleotide and protein modification chemistry, conjugation chemistry, DNA and RNA sequencing and analysis, analytical and preparative HPLC, immunoassay development, in vitro protein synthesis, in vitro transcription, flow cytometry, macromolecular modeling, in vivo imaging, biodistribution and pharmacokinetics, microarray assay development, photochemistry, liposome formulation and a bunch of other things that I have forgotten about.  This is not too unusual.

The other notable aspect of startup life is constant disruption.  Programs are initiated, staffed and then cancelled in short order as priorities change.  You will never be (nor should you be) left alone to work out all the problems that are your responsibility to solve. If you are fortunate enough to work in a company environment that fosters communication and teamwork you will need to bring problems to the attention of your team as soon as possible, so that you can get help in solving them.  If you are working in a company that runs on the star system, bringing up these problems will be seen as an admission of failure, so you need to be prepared to solve them on your own.

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