In the business of life science today, it seems that everyone is searching for that elusive buzzword that not only helps to best define what they do, but simultaneously separates them out from the herd while underlining their uniqueness in the ecosystem. And as soon as someone finds the right one, well, everyone else tends to jump on board, at best, and/or maybe even copies them, at worst. It's rather hard to be uniquely individual, it seems.
One word which has been building momentum for some time has been "innovate" or "innovation" - both of which were quite liberally plastered on pavilion boards, placards and promotional material for various and varying organizations at the recent BIO meeting in Philadelphia. In fact, as noted in my last post, BIO itself now stands for the Biotechnology Innovation Convention. As trendy as it sounds, I personally find it somewhat redundant, particularly as it implies that something has changed.
Maybe it has, and maybe it hasn't, as Ray McCooney would say! I think the word is (or should be) actually interlaced into the letters comprising biotechnology themselves, and biotechnology was always meant to be innovative, and less risk averse, than the purportedly much more conservative occupiers of the corridors of power at big pharma. They were classically the ones with the massive funds needed to take safer (a relative word!) bets through the clinic, while the much tighter budgets of biotech meant putting all your eggs in one (or two) baskets, taking a deep breath, and diving into the fray.
Being truly innovative is an extremely risky business, and one rarely has any degree of job security beyond where the last milestone payment stretches to, so it's quite a stressful endeavour also. I remember reading somewhere that in the early 2000s, Quebec had some 133 biotech-type companies, and after the economic crash in late 2008 and 2009, there were maybe a handful left. I lived that life and that particular rollercoaster, and while one can look back at it today as an irrational and passionate yet well-educated form of madness, it's probably true that I wouldn't change a thing either.
But you know, as much as all of us probably remain convinced that we were all being incredibly creative and innovative, even back then, I think the problem is that we were (believe it or not!) ahead of our time. Biotech was being firmly innovative, but the problem was that until recently, big pharma was not! I lost count of the number of times we (or others I heard of) got criticised for not doing things the way pharma did, and occasionally facing outright refusal to even discuss exciting data because screening approaches or target identification-validation were not typically "pharma".
There was a most definite disconnect between true innovation and old school traditional drug development ways of thinking. In many ways, innovation was the problem, in contrast to the glamorous bait being offered on the hook today. Why? Well, it seems to me that the disappointments that were the outcome of the huge initial promise in combinatorial chemistry and high throughput screening, and of the rather underwhelming (in terms of new drug discoveries) output of the sequencing of the human genome, actually were necessary to changing thinking at big pharma. The running dry of pipelines at major global pharma caused a crisis of such tsunami-level magnitude that a paradigm shift was bound to happen. As it did.
Lo and behold, and today pharma are reaching back further than they ever have before into the marbled hallways of the ivory towers of academia, searching for raw talent who very closely align with "innovation" - there's that word again! - those who are identifying and validating targets that have eluded big pharma. I think the point might be that while innovation was always there, previously the innovation that was being nurtured in academia (or even biotech) was not innovation tailored to the needs of pharma, and today there has been a significant migration between both ends of the spectrum - towards each other.
It feels like there is more in common than ever before, and perhaps both groups have reached a degree of compromise in their singleminded pursuit of that innovation, with more fundamental researchers being willing to conduct research more fully focused on big pharma needs, and correspondingly, big pharma being willing to accept the usually less business-minded and more artistic idiosyncrasies of a star scientist who discovered a killer target or small molecule. Both parties have found a way to do business together, and perhaps that is the most innovative aspect of the current prominence of the word "innovation" in our business.
So, as far as Quebec goes, nothing much has changed in terms of the province always having been a key strategic life science cluster and east coast biotech hub, but, probably more than ever, we are striving to conduct life science research that does have a significant socioeconomic and commercial impact for essentially everyone. Our job at AmorChem is to incubate truly innovative life science technologies in primarily academic institutions, and nurture-develop them in a fashion that directly feeds the interest and needs of large biotech and pharma with whom we converse. This venture capital conduit is designed to get risky opportunities across the valley of death and into the experienced hands of those who are the experts in preclinical and clinical development, and hopefully some make it beyond that to the marketplace.
It's a very exciting time, and yes, unquestionably, innovation remains as important as ever, notwithstanding its newfound prominence in everyday life and work here in the province. While we still have a way to go, the burgeoning innovation that has always been at the heart of the province's life science research is re-nourishing the ecosystem; I think we can say that the phoenix has risen from the ashes, once again, and the future is looking very bright indeed. If we remain determined to focus on the truly innovative, then I think we will all be flying high again in the not too distant future.
But right now? It's time for a mug of that equally innovative Emperor's Excellence Espresso from Ethiopia, reclining outside on a chaise longue on the sunny terrace!
No comments:
Post a Comment