Hands-on workshop shows Triangle's academic life science innovators how to build their startup in FDA regulated markets - Duke OTC
The event offered a range of activities, including interactive presentations with Q&A, panels, networking, and hands-on, collaborative exercises. Mentors with expertise in startup formation joined groups of participants to help answer questions and ideate.
The week kicked off with an icebreaker. Promising PhD candidates, seasoned physicians, and preeminent professors took turns standing in front of the group to introduce themselves and deliver a one sentence description of the product they hope to develop — the workshop’s opening crack at sharing their pitch. The room was filled with cutting-edge ideas for improving human health. The facilitator, Duke’s Jeff Welch, encouraged and reminded the attendees with, “I love the ideas! We’ll come back to that and get it down to one sentence.”
The pitch, a tidy package that both entices and explains what sets a technology apart, is like a neat bow around the startup planning process, which TUSW jump starts for participants. It’s also emblematic of a key takeaway from the event: start with the end in mind.
Fran Martin, a Mentor-in-Residence with Duke New Ventures and TUSW mentor and speaker, said, “You just need to know where you want to go, and then work backwards from that so that you can figure out the steps and all the disciplines that you need to you know, correlate and intertwine with one another.” She describes this as a “different mindset” than that of academia, “which actually generated this great technology.”
Through this process, founders indeed uncovered what they didn’t know. This is where the workshop’s second theme emerged: you’re only as strong as your team. The many facets of building a business require expertise to get it right, and throughout the workshop, speakers encouraged participants to partner with people who compliment their own knowledge.
“Medical product development is a team sport with highly varied disciplines represented during the financing and executing of a project” said Welch, Director of Duke’s New Venture programs. “For many participants, their everyday environment doesn’t manifest with quite the same depth or spread of disciplines. And so hearing from many different speakers that networking and making ‘friends’ across historically non-academic product development functions, like regulatory or manufacturing, becomes a messaging catalyst that helps new projects get out of the gate with a good foundation of knowledgeable partners in fields that are new the workshop participants.”
The workshop’s 54 participants varied in career stage, exposure to entrepreneurship, and home organization, including UNC, NCSU, RTI, and Duke. Yet they shared common threads of translational and entrepreneurial aspirations for their strong academic research.
Yen Liao, an entrepreneur in the medical device space and TUSW mentor from NCSU, shared that his group of participants with 4 individual projects varied in experience with startups. Even for people with less experience, he thought it was “great to get exposure to the full process, start to finish,” through TUSW.
Throughout the three days, the workshop thrummed with the energy of exciting discourse as leaders and participants exchanged ideas with their end goals in mind. Thirty-three speakers, all leaders in the Triangle biomedical tech scene, guided the crowd through myriad topics from business planning to IP law, regulatory strategy to clinical trials and manufacturing, commercial market investigation, raising investment, and building your team. Panels showcased venture capital investors, business development executives from industry, and academic founders who were once at the same crossroads the participants now stand at.
The sessions unfolded like lessons, and attendees chimed in with questions while fellow leaders interjected with added nuance, bringing ideas to life around the room.
“This workshop provides critical, real-world training for academic innovators who want to commercialize therapeutic and life science breakthroughs,” said Dr. Mireya McKee, Director of KickStart Venture Services at UNC-Chapel Hill. “The collaboration between UNC, Duke, and NC State to deliver this kind of programming is a powerful example of how we can work together to build a vibrant, interconnected life science ecosystem in the Triangle. It’s incredibly impactful—for both the innovators and the future of human health. What makes this workshop especially valuable is the rare access to experts across a wide range of highly specialized topics that are vital to commercializing therapies and medical devices—expertise that’s hard to get in one place,” she concluded.
As the uniting theme for these academic innovators was life science, the end user, whether a provider or patient, was an important topic of conversation and an inspiration for participants’ research and entrepreneurship. Drs. Peter Fecci and Anoop Patel, neurosurgeons and faculty at Duke University, aim to improve outcomes for patients that suffer from brain tumors. “For us, it’s not a technology that we’re trying to find a solution for,” shared Patel. “It’s a problem that we see every day in the clinic that we’re trying to find a solution for.”
This year, the workshop also featured breakout exercises that paired with preceding presentations. These hands-on activities gave participants a chance to apply the sessions’ learnings to the most important case study: their own. While participants focused on their individual project, the exercises were collaborative with peers and mentors around the table exchanging questions and ideas to help each other puzzle out the particulars.
For Alita Miller, a second year PhD candidate at UNC attending the workshop on behalf of her PI Dr. Julianne Nguyen, the exercises were at once difficult and beneficial since their project on an improved probiotic is in its early days. She shared that the exercises are difficult because there are “so many unknowns,” but that, “all the exercises have definitely given a better framework of what the potential future path is.” Throughout the week, Miller also saw how parts of the startup formation process “build on each other.” Like pieces in a puzzle, she could “really see how everything plays a role and depends on each other.”
Once at the final evening of the workshop, participants and leaders gathered for a networking happy hour to forge deeper connections with their fellow innovators.
“We consistently derive great value from participating in initiatives such as this that encourage researchers to venture beyond their conventional boundaries by contemplating the development strategies and regulatory frameworks for their therapeutic or medical technology innovations,” shared Tim Martin, Interim Assistant Vice Chancellor of New Ventures and Investments at NC State University. “The confluence of academics, investors, mentors, advisors, and industry experts constitutes a unique combination that offers specialized training to aspiring entrepreneurs. My team at NC State University regards the Triangle University Startup Workshop as an indispensable component of our comprehensive support system for life science spin-out companies,” said Martin.
Looking to the future of TUSW and supportive translational events, Fran Martin hopes to see translational and commercialization support reach even more people. “There’s probably a lot more tech going on in each respective university that we could tap into,” she said in favor of then connecting those innovators to university services.
Participants left with a clear big picture and more insight into the details, regardless of their stage of career and project development. Alita Miller found the workshop “super informative.” She also shared, “especially for students, if they do get the opportunity to do this, definitely jump on it.”
The workshop was also motivating for many like Dr. Peter Fecci. “I think it’s just getting a fire lit under us,” he said.
As the Triangle Universities Startup Workshop continues to strengthen ties among the region’s peer institutions, biomedical startup community, and individual innovators, there’s a unifying goal to make an impact in possibilities for human health now and in the future.
