An Entrepreneur's Guide to Drug Development
Today I want to discuss a new project. When I started out with Courier Therapeutics and Resonant Therapeutics, I thought I understood the basics of both startups and drug development. Plus, I was working with a great team of experienced investors, executives, and scientific founders. I quickly found out that there was a whole lot that I just did not know.
Now helping to launch the new Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics, I find myself in the position of walking aspiring entrepreneurs and scientific founders through the process of starting a company, starting with actually deciding to do it. This is an overlooked aspect of startups, especially in deep tech, which involves weighing the pros and cons that making the decision to commit to building something versus trying to find a partner for your technology. But that's a post for a different day.
What I have found in these experiences is that while there is a wealth of information related to startups, there is very little material as relates to starting a biotech company or developing a therapeutic product. Where there is material, it is often highly technical, meant for the aspiring protein engineer or regulatory specialist. Much of the remaining material is woefully shallow. Some of it is just plain wrong, wrongly applying advice cribbed from tech startups.
Now, part of this is the fact that actually starting a company is the only way to really learn what that experience is like. Pithily I'd call it the hard knocks MBA, but in reality it's just the granularity of detail from lived experiences. But there is value in hearing the stories of others' paths and pattern matching to best practices.
Biotech is a substantively different industry than tech, and it needs its own high-level framework.
I've tentatively titled this project The Entrepreneur's Guide to Drug Development. Essentially, the goal is to capture best practices and common patterns that work regardless of the scientific peculiarities of a particular project. In the same way that Paul Graham, Lean Startup, and others have codified best practices for tech startups across applications, I want to capture the process of launching an early stage drug development project with an eye towards the key decision points an entrepreneur will need to understand rather than in-depth technical detail.
This will be a living guidebook, incorporating mine and others' experiences. Biotech is changing very rapidly right now, so the idea of publishing yet another $369 book on the topic that will be rapidly outdated is a nonstarter.
And I'm still learning myself. This medium allows me to update posts as I learn new information. Note that this will all be in addition to the pithy technology explainers and industry insights promised. So if you're just here for the geek takes, I'm still here for you.
Most importantly - if this is a project you'd like to be involved in, I'd love to hear from you. Please hit me up on Twitter or via email: sarah@benchtobiotech.com