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I’ve neglected to update my latest ramblings! I’ve recorded two new podcasts. Well, both were recorded at least 6 months ago, but one released a year ago now and the other released just in December.

The first is Talk is Biotech with Gugu Singh from Scispot.io — I’ve been using SciSpot ever since I met founder-brothers Guru and Satya Singh in Y Combinator (summer ’21). You can check out the recording and some highlights from the chat here.

The second is a new podcast called The Proteomics Show, hosted by Ben Orsburn and Ben Neely. We get a bit more into the weeds with the proteomics, rather than the business, but as always there’s plenty of hot takes. It’s listed basically everywhere podcasts can be listed.

Last fall, I hosted a panel on startups as part of the US HUPO Early Career Researchers (ECR) organization. This year, the ECR invited me to sit on this panel as a participant!

Here’s the Q&A from that event:

Q1: Starting your journey as an entrepreneur, did you feel the need to undetake any business related courses coming from a Scientific/medical background?

A1: I personally didn’t feel the need to take formal business classes. My co-founder (Alex Federation) and I are both technical founders, but benefitted from many excellent business mentors that we met through

Q2: Do all incubators/accelerators provide the same type of support- or does it vary from institution to institution? What’s the universal support that a start up can count on in any incubator?

A2: I think most incubators/accelerators follow a similar pattern: workshops/courses, 1-1’s or small group “office hours” with mentors, and some kind of “Demo Day” capstone at the end of the program. For a lot of the bio-focused incubators/accelerators, the workshops/courses tend to be about business development. The 1-1’s or small group is an opportunity for you (and your co-founders) to meet with the program mentors — and network with them! Finally, the “Demo Day” is usually a short pitch to an audience of multiple venture capital investors where you get maybe 1-5 minutes to hook investors into scheduling a deeper conversation with you, and hopefully invest!

Here’s a list of bio-focused incubators and accelerators (just off the top of my head, check out others!)
– Your institution/university!
– NSF/NIH iCORPS: https://beta.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/i-corps
– Indie Bio: https://indiebio.co/program/
– Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/biotech/
– Creative Destruction Lab: https://creativedestructionlab.com/
– BioFoundry: https://www.venturelink.org/biofoundry

Q3: To translate your idea into a business product and start up a company, do you first need to patent the idea and register your intellectual property?

A3: While intellectual property (IP) isn’t strictly required to start a company, it’ll probably be tough to secure funding if you don’t have your core idea/technology/method protected. Most investors won’t be interested if someone else could come in and do exactly what you’re proposing! If you’re looking to start more of a contract research organization (CRO)-style company providing services, you may not need to have any IP at all, but you’ll need to convince your customers why your CRO is better/cheaper than other CROs out there.

The recording should be up soon, I’ll update the page with that link when it becomes available!

Check out the podcast here!

I got to hang out, virtually, with Dr Jocelyn Pearl of the Lady Scientist Podcast team. We talked mostly about my career journey, from almost leaving science during a TOEFL teaching stint to South Korea, to founding a biotech company during a pandemic.

I especially liked this theme because it gave me an opportunity to share some of the personal story behind where I am now, which has been anything but a straight shot. At this time 10 years ago, I had just repatriated to the States, moved back in with my parents at the age of 24, and was sending 100s of job applications to any and all research associate positions in the Boston area, desperate to find a job.

It’s okay not to have it all figured out as an undergrad student (or even a grad!) and to take some time to find what it is you love doing — for me, I can’t imagine doing any job other than science, but I certainly didn’t feel that way as a post-bacc until I had tried a few other things.

For most scientists, it seems like our training focuses on just two career paths: tenure-track academics or industry scientists. Sometimes you’ll get a career discussion about patent law, but those two trajectories seem to be all that trainees hear about.

So when Alex Federation asked me if I wanted to help him launch Talus Bio, I absolutely had no idea what I was doing or getting myself into. All I knew was that I loved the science and I loved working with Fed, so we pushed ahead with the shared vision of what we wanted the company/lab to do.

Over the last year with Talus, I’ve had the opportunity to meet a ton of amazing people in the start-up/spin-out world, and I’ve been blown away at the range of career opportunities there are beyond company founders themselves. And also dismayed that I’ve never even heard of most of them because they sound like perfect fits for the skills that a PhD cultivates beyond churning out papers for your boss.

That’s why I organized the latest Career Explorations panel for US HUPO’s Early Career Researcher group and focused on some of these jobs. I invited four panelists, ranging from startup founders to tech transfer officers to due diligence scientists:

Emily: https://linkedin.com/in/emily-hartman-guthrie-0b013437/
Susan: https://linkedin.com/in/susanmockus/
Marco: https://linkedin.com/in/marco-lobba/
Steve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-ouellette-b93b1561/

During the 1-hour conversation, we touched on many aspects of spin-outs and start-ups. Of course there was plenty of interest in how to launch a startup company from a university research project, but there was also discussion about how exactly patenting and IP plays into startup companies, how tech transfer and commercialization are handled from the university or research institute, and how funding is secured from venture capital and investment firms.

I’ve compiled four main highlights from our discussion, but US HUPO will be sharing the recording of the panel shortly, so check there for the full conversation!

Q1: How do you build non-lab skills, like management, leadership, etc, during your academic training?
(1) Read books on management and leadership skills (*see recommended reading below)
(2) Take courses from your university’s MBA program, both to expand your knowledge but also to meet people (potential co-founders) with complementary business skills
(3) Look for incubators or entrepreneur support programs at your university, which typically include workshops on leadership, management, and business development
(4) Internships at VC firms (commonly posted on LinkedIn, so have your LinkedIn profile up to date!)

Q2: How do you get started with a potential spin off?
(1) iCORPS program is a great place to start and will give you opportunities to practice business development
(2) Find product market fit through “user/customer” interviews (something that iCORPS will also help you with)
(3) Report all your inventions/discoveries to university patent/IP office BEFORE publishing a paper or sharing at a conference — having intellectual property will make it easier to fundraise for your company
(4) Draft a commercialization/business plan (again, something that iCORPS can help you with)
(5) Read Jared Friedman’s How to spin your scientific research out of a university and into a startup

Q3: Investment in proteomics is booming — pros and cons?
(Pro) Proteomics can solve problems that genomics couldn’t; next generation sequencing is cheap now so there’s more investment opportunities for proteomics; there’s more mainstream interest in proteomics these days
(Con) hard to explain proteomics and especially mass spectrometry; orthogonal validation for proteomics is tough; there’s a history of failed companies and overpromised/underdelivered projects; hard to define a proteomics product (methods and software patents are trickier than a product or chemical/compound, for example)

Q4: What business models seem to work for proteomics?
Hybrid platform/fee-for-service + internal therapeutics dev is a popular model now with early stage venture capital. However, it’s tough to stay lean and hard to stay focused when you’re essentially trying to run two businesses: one as a CRO and one as a pharmaceutical. In the future, maybe there will be more proteomics-based diagnostics companies?

* Recommended reading from the panelists:
– Managing Up: How to Forge an Effective Relationship With Those Above You, Book by Roger Gittines and Rosanne Badowski
– Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, Book by Kim Scott
– Biotechnology Entrepreneurship: Starting, Managing, and Leading Biotech Companies, Editor: Craig D. Shimasaki
– Bio Design: Nature, Science, Creativity, Book by William Myers

A few weeks ago, I had the absolute pleasure of catching up with Jacob Schreiber on his podcast, The Bioinformatics Chat. Jacob and I met as grad students in Bill Noble’s lab at UW. Chronologically, we were in the same cohort (started grad school in 2014) but he was in the Computer Science and Engineering program and I was in the Genome Sciences program.

From day one, he absolutely blew me away with his knowledge and as a baby bioinformatician, I was so intimidated! For a few years, I barely understood what, exactly, he did. All I knew was that you should always add MORE LAYERS to your neural net. It turned out he, too, barely understood what, exactly, I did. Imposter syndrome is a hell of a drug.

Anyway, you can catch our episode on signal calibration, what it means to be “quantitative”, and whether numbers are even real on Apple, Google, or Spotify now!

UPDATE: I learned that Searle et al 2020 includes a tutorial in the Supplementary Note 1!

Click here to go to my version of the tutorial

Unsurprisingly, my most common approach to proteome abundance measurements by mass spectrometry is data independent acquisition (DIA). Specifically I’ve been using the chromatogram library approach (Searle et al 2018) because, compared to spectral library-based approaches, it doesn’t take a lot of extra work. I just prepare my samples as usual, then pool a few uL of each sample into a “library” or consensus sample. I queue up my single-shot experimental samples, then I acquire the pooled library sample with multiple injections, each time spanning a 100 m/z range (gas phase fractionation, GPF) with very narrow isolation windows.

The next step up is to search the narrow window, GPF multi-injections against a spectral library. Recently, a team of researchers released “Prosit”, a tool to predict spectral libraries. Using Prosit predicted spectral libraries to search GPF chromatogram libraries gives detection numbers a boost (Searle et al 2020). Because it’s so easy to use predicted spectral libraries, I’ve been doing it for all my projects.

The tutorial above is a work in progress, so let me know if you have questions or suggestions to improve it!