Academic-Innovation

It is entrepreneurship week, and I thought I’d open-up and share my own experience as an Academic Founder…. 

Driven by the question of what molecular parameters drive a protein to fold into specific 3-dimensional structures, Alberto Saiani and I started a blue-sky research project with a PhD student and some start-up funds from the University. Over the following 20 years we founded, grew and exited a start-up company, Manchester BIOGEL Ltd. Excitingly, our technology is now being sold globally through Cell Guidance Systems.

My experience has taught me invaluable lessons in leadership, business development, and the importance of passion-driven purpose. This week I thought to share some of these, to hopefully inspire others to think about generating impact from their own research, and go on to build social or commercial enterprises.

Here are my top 6 (I could write 60…!)

1. Understand and communicate your ‘WHY’. Having a vision and passion driven purpose for our business was key in not only winning investment and grant funding, but also when recruiting and retaining our team. It also gave me the determination to push through tough moments as we shaped company growth.
2. Leave your academic ego at the front door. It took me ~4 weeks into a 10 week accelerator programme to accept that I didn’t know what I was doing!  My business pitch at week 1 talked about solving the world’s health problems in cancer, heart disease, osteoarthritis etc. By week 10 we had identified our customer segments, their no.1 problem and were selling an animal free cell culture scaffold as a materials consumable. Worlds apart! 
3. Surround yourself with a dedicated and skilled team, with complementary skills to yourself. I made a couple of mistakes with recruitment, where I hired people like me. This would work in academia, but not when you are building a diverse company that needs to deliver on R&D, manufacturing, regulatory compliance, sales and marketing. I learnt the hard way.
4. Do your own due diligence on your investors, just as they do to you. Don’t always accept your first offer of investment. Check out the competition, and also any annual service charge. Make sure your investors really understand your business, alongside timelines and pathways to their ROI and your exit plan.
5. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Be humble, own them. Listen (and really listen) to feedback, from your board, your customers and your team. Make sure you learn from them, pivot your thinking and keep going. You need flexibility, agility and perseverance in scaling a startup and growing as a founder. 
6. Work on being comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. The buck stops with you as CEO (if you are). That means all H&S, finance, HR, hiring (& firing!) decisions stop with you. I felt very isolated sometimes when taking decisions, in particular, when Covid hit and we essentially had to close shop. However, this is also where your personal growth comes from! 

More about Manchester BIOGEL and our hydrogel technology…

The technology developed in Manchester is based on understanding and controlling the self-assembly of small peptides across the length scales, to design bespoke hydrogel materials. We switched from proteins to peptides to give us reproducibility in self-assembling pathway and our tool-box is the pool of 20 natural amino acids that make up natural proteins. We combine these amino acids in different sequences dialling in electrostatic, hydrogen, hydrophobic, pi-pi stacking and van der Walls interactions and over the years have developed a platform technology where we can control material property and function by simply by designing the peptide molecule primary sequence. 

The platform allows the engineering of ethical, animal free materials with properties that can be tailored to mimic the 3-dimensional micro-environment, cell niche, in which cells live. Cells have very different requirements depending on their origin, nature and function, and this technology enables the design of scaffolds with properties and functionality customised to each cell type needs. Consequently, this work opens-up new possibilities in the biomedical field: these novel materials can provide biocompatible, injectable, and translatable scaffolds for in-vivo applications such as drug and/or cell delivery for tissue repair and regeneration; or fully synthetic and controlled micro-environments for in vitro applications such as growth of multi-cellular organoids for disease modelling and drug toxicity and efficacy testing.

Demand for these hydrogel materials from colalborators led to the company Manchester BIOGEL (formerly PeptiGel Design) being formed in 2013. Over the years I led the company as CEO and raised £4M+ in investment from Innovate UK, Venture Capital, Private and Catapult Venture Funds, grew to a team of 10, scaled-up hydrogel manufacture and the company became revenue generating. This led to Manchester BIOGEL being listed as one of the Top 10 BioTech Start-Ups in Europe by Start-Up City in 2021, winning Best New Life Science Product 2021 and I navigated a successful exit, with the company technology being sold onto Cell Guidance Systems in 2023.

Who knew when we started our blue skies project, that it would lead us on a journey towards commercialisation. Although the project didn’t enable us to move to a desert island (we made too many mistakes!), I have personally learned so much about myself, about others and about the do’s and don’t’s of innovation, which I am continuing to use on a daily basis. More of that to come….