
How to Build a Biotech - apsec112
https://www.celinehh.com/how-to-build-a-biotech
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celinehh94
Hi! I'm Celine - a little embarrassed this is trending because it is very much
still a draft - please forgive any typos!

I hope this is helpful and always happy to chat biotech startups - just email
me - celinehh.com/about

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ccvannorman
Thanks for this great draft resource, Celine! I wonder if you see an
opportunity for a "sell shovels" approach to BioTech -- for example,
visualizations for drug creation, simulation and collaboration?

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entee
Celine Halioua is an incredibly talented founder. We share investors and have
spent a good amount of time together at investor working sessions, and she's
building something really cool. This set of resources is quite valuable and
provides good insight on how tech and biotech are different.

Some of the reasons they're different are real:

In tech you're pretty sure you can build something, you're just not sure if
anyone will buy it. In biotech you're pretty sure people will buy it, just not
sure you can build it.

The challenges are far more complex (biology is a bitch) and require a LOT
more domain specific knowledge to get traction.

It's necessarily highly regulated.

But things like people not giving younger founders a chance, and the
lowballing on valuation don't need to be how things work. Hopefully people
like Celine help turn that around.

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DevX101
> In tech you're pretty sure you can build something, you're just not sure if
> anyone will buy it. In biotech you're pretty sure people will buy it, just
> not sure you can build it.

Beautifully stated. There are countless brilliant founders in biotech who
toiled for 5+ years to only find out their drug which had a credible mechanism
of action failed phase 2 clinicals and now isn't worth a damn. In software,
founders of this caliber would have since pivoted and more than likely created
a product of some value.

In my opinion, the most important driver to unlock a revolution in biotech is
enabling technologies that can create a rapid feedback loop from disease model
-> drug hypothesis -> verification of safety & efficacy in humans. Right now,
this is a 10 year process. Getting this process down to 1 year and <$50M would
be a revolution worthy of several Nobel Prizes.

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echelon
Decelphalized monoclonal humans.

Turn off neural tube development genes so they never develop brains. Grow them
in test tubes, then hook them up to life support.

They can never be conscious beings, so you can do anything with them. They're
essentially large-scale tissue cultures.

You can harvest them for blood and organs, create knockout lines for different
studies, and speed drug development and verification tenfold. Population
studies on everything imaginable becomes tractable.

We have to get out of the biological stone age and develop real automation
primitives. We don't have a real test kit. Decephalized monoclonal humans is
the reverse salient we need.

I hope someone does this. If nobody does it and I wind up becoming a
billionaire, I'll do it. It needs to be done.

~~~
el_oni
From a bio perspective, it sounds like a great idea.

From a squimish perspective... it sounds like something from a horrendous
distopia. I just have visions of rows of human shaped tissue cultures.

A less horrendous version could be cultured cells for each organ, with some
kind of circulation between them which one could test theraputics for
cytotoxicity. I've seen "labs on a chip"[0] for things like PCR, I wonder if
you could do that for drug testing in vitro.

[0]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab-on-a-
chip](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab-on-a-chip)

~~~
blotter_paper
You know how after the last big civilization all-out-war it turned out that
the losers had secretly engaged in gross scientific experiments on humans? I
think it would be naive to imagine that the winners didn't do so as well, they
just didn't have their file cabinets put on display to retroactively justify
the extreme violence that the world had just witnessed. Governments do scary
things in basements, and they keep those basements as secret as possible -- we
only get to see behind the veil when a government falls _and_ an opponent
successfully takes their files/scientists _and_ that opponent has an incentive
to make those files public. Not having brains attached would be a huge
improvement over the current state of the art, in my opinion; I believe that
we're probably already living in a world far more dystopian than the imagined
one being discussed.

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thesausageking
While it's a draft and very cursory, resources like this are sorely needed and
I hope encourages others to post more. Unlike tech, there's few place where
you can learn how to build a biotech. It's a black art that most people still
learn by doing.

Decades ago, tech was like this and then Paul Graham, Venture Hacks, Fred
Wilson, etc. started a movement to democratize startups and VC. It would be
wonderful if the same thing happened with biotech.

~~~
cat199
Not sure what else is out there, but the TMCx accelerator program is
specifically designed around biotech startups and was created to build up the
(bio)tech startup ecosystem around the texas medical center (largest medical
center worldwide)

[https://www.tmc.edu/innovation/innovation-
programs/tmcx/](https://www.tmc.edu/innovation/innovation-programs/tmcx/)

~~~
jfarlow
There are a number of other incubators that are serving some of that role. The
community is growing, but it's still fairly small.

In the biotech space part of that incubation/culture can come in the form of
shared lab space. Here are a few (in the Bay Area):

\- MBC (née QB3) [https://mbcbiolabs.com/](https://mbcbiolabs.com/)

\- JLabs [https://jlabs.jnjinnovation.com/](https://jlabs.jnjinnovation.com/)

\- StartX [https://startx.com/med](https://startx.com/med)

\- IndieBio [https://indiebio.co/](https://indiebio.co/)

\- Bonneville Labs [https://bonnevillelabs.com/](https://bonnevillelabs.com/)

There are a number of other governments and entities that are trying to
replicate and improve on the model.

Portland has OTRADI [https://www.otradi.org/](https://www.otradi.org/)

(help add to the list?)

~~~
cat199
cheers, good to know.

to note, TMCx is also a JLabs site, fwiw

[https://jlabs.jnjinnovation.com/locations/jlabs-
tmc](https://jlabs.jnjinnovation.com/locations/jlabs-tmc)

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jfarlow
It looks like there's still a lot in a draft form here, but the kind (and
honestly, the _breadth_ ) of information here is difficult to come by outside
of experience. And it is really valuable to have some of those bullet points
articulated in one place.

Small community around here too - there's a lot we can learn from each other.

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ware_am_i
Completely agree, and feeling most of these pain points in the medical device
/ diagnostics industry as well. There are so many black boxes and unknown-
unknowns in this space, especially when it comes to developing indications and
navigating regulatory interactions. That's a main driver of why we built
Essenvia ([https://www.essenvia.com/#/](https://www.essenvia.com/#/)), which
automates the creation and submission of all regulatory docs required for
medical device approval. We're expanding next into other aspects of the
industry (complaint handling, compliance testing) as well as adjacent
industries (environmental, pharma, etc.).

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donclark
I too see there is still a lot in draft form, but it states that "this is
currently a draft and will launch formally Jan 2019." So its over a year and a
half old and lots left to fill in. Maybe they should update that line to
address that issue? Its a good start for resources.

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bserge
I was going to make a "I'd like one Biotech, please" joke, but this is
actually an interesting website! All the images are a bit confusing, but the
information is great.

Edit: yeaaaah, enable JavaScript if you have NoScript, the website looks and
works much better.

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jontro
Does biotech only have to do with drug development? What about other areas
like water cleaning etc, wouldn't that be considered biotech as well?

~~~
jfarlow
One thing I have noticed and felt is that there is a _very_ steep energy well
that slides you into drug development if your technology is anywhere even near
- as drug development has financial returns that are an order of magnitude (or
two or three) greater than almost any other problem that bio-technology can be
utilized for (right now).

I predict that as the value of those other projects rise, and as the capital
required to produce a drug decreases, that those other projects will really
start to blossom. And I look forward to it.

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kkotak
Wow! There's a lot of amazing stuff here. I think a lot of it can be
abstracted to apply to any field really.

~~~
gumby
Having founded and run businesses in software, hardware, and small molecule
pharma, I have to say that the life sciences are a completely different
universe and that the differences can trip you up. Sure, there are
commonalities, just as both baseball basketball are played with a spherical
ball.

So a resource like this can be quite valuable. But if it’s good it will have
less to say about, say, SAAS startup than you might think.

