The decrease in productivity from pharmaceutical industry, ever growing need for new medicines for the treatment of many serious human diseases, and increasing demand by the US law makers and the general public for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to invest more funding into translational research have created a favorable climate for entrepreneurs to create new start-up companies to translate academic discoveries into potential new medicines. However, in the past few years, venture capital funding in the USA for new biotechnology start-ups with early-stage products has experienced a significant decline, making it exceedingly difficult to raise the capital needed domestically. On the other hand, the rapid growth in wealth in emerging markets has opened up exciting new opportunities for entrepreneurs to start global start-ups with cutting-edge technologies licensed from American universities and funding from other countries. However, to make such a global start-up a success, there are many old and new challenges one has to carefully manage and overcome. In this talk, I will share my experience in building a global start-up with the goal to translate our laboratory discoveries into new cancer therapeutics.

Global start-up: A new model to translate academic discoveries into new medicines

245th National Meeting (2013)

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