In the past few years the news around biology has been getting more exciting and frequent, between CRISPR and biotech firms working on niche drugs. I'm really interested in learning more about the skills needed to start a biotech company, but I'm lacking the masters degree in biology. What skills are actually needed to get into the field and does anyone know any good resources to learn them?
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If you have strong CS skills then you should:
1) Focus on bioinformatics. You will immediately be of use as far as making your own product/service or working for a startup if you apply your skills there. Most bio specialists are incredibly weak at data analysis and/or any type of computing. Pretty much all the important problems in bio are computational in nature. The "impressive" bio researchers/scientists have the data science skills of a sub-par / average data scientist / CS grad.
2) Create a home lab or find one / start one locally. Look up the odin project. Work on DIY genetic engineering and you can even take classes from that site. If you just get to this point and stop you will literally have more practical skill and knowledge than the vast majority of graduates with bio degrees.
3) Lots of biohackers experiment with themselves for clout/hype/attention. It never ends well. There are plenty of lab organisms that you can easily source and ethically experiment with.
4) Don't listen to anyone that tells you that you can't do something because you don't have a PhD. Those are the same type of people that missed out on the computing and internet revolutions because they were busy doing trivial academic work.
PhD process is only one path, but it has a number of useful attributes, such as being very close to the active state of the art research, feedback from experts in the field, handholding through the paper and grant process, and introduction to a large social network. Those are all very hard to do with home labs and biohacking. Things like journal clubs with other grad students often help people learn how to evaluate the literature with the appropriate context. Independent work is important, but teamwork and learning from others is far more important.
I've worked with some very smart people (famous software engineers with long track records of innovation) that wanted to help with bioinformatics, and they did do some cool things, but their lack of deep context (the sort of thing you can get from a PhD program or working in the field for many years) ultimately led to problems such as premature optimization for the wrong distribution of data.
Nonetheless, I have see independents who came to the field with no background, absorbed the ground knowledge, and made major contributions, but that's absurdly rare compared to PhDs.
The person you are replying to did not say that.
2) Having hands-on experience in wet labs is useful and relatively easy to learn. People can learn wet lab skills sufficient to carry out experiments (i.e. pipetting stuff together) in under a year. This is not what research is about though.
3) True
4) You don't need a PhD. But to truly succeed in biology, you need to learn things from the ground up, which takes years of studying. If you just read a few books, you will be able to understand certain parts of it, but as a founder of a biotech startup, you will be the equivalent of a tech startup founder blindly following buzzwords such as "blockchain".
Isn't that what books are for? To compile, document and share knowledge some people spent years to figure out?
FWIW, the OP didn't specifically say ze wanted to do "biomedical". Biotech is bigger than just medical applications. Biotech could skew more towards materials science, or environmental engineering, or any number of areas besides "treatment for diseases in humans" or whatever.
Safety is an obvious benefit to this approach, but it also allows you get exposure to more interesting and complex experiments that are more cutting edge and comparable to the kinds of work you'd actually do at a company. These labs have access to equipment and reagents that you cant get anywhere else. From what Ive seen the at home stuff you can do is incredibly limited
This approach also gives you exposure to proper experimental design and technique, which is really hard to learn on your own because biology experiments take so long. Biology experiments take long enough even if you know how to do them
>Don't listen to anyone that tells you that you can't do something because you don't have a PhD.
I definitely don't think getting a PhD automatically makes you some super genius. I've also worked with a fair number of grad students get their PhD that probably shouldn't have just because they'd been in their program long enough and basically got "pushed" out. That said, if OP is coming at the perspective of starting a business and presumably needing to convince investors/clients that he knows what he's doing, it's kind of silly to suggest he doesn't need any PhD's working for him.
Even if whatever job they're doing doesn't really require "PhD-level expertise", hiring a PhD is a fairly easy way to lend yourself some credibility, particularly towards non-technical people who probably put more weight on having a higher degree.
A practical way to do this is to invest in biotech stocks. This will expose you to clinical data, the regulatory process, and how value is created and destroyed. Evaluating clinical data and unmet medical needs is the core skillset in evaluating market potential of a drug, device, diagnostic or patient-facing software
Having skin in the game will help you focus your learning. But only invest as much as you can afford to lose, treat it like tuition.
This is precisely the failure of every academic ever. We can examine this through the Theil-lens where they're trying to create a narrative of uniqueness where their research applies + revolutionizes everything ( when it does not ).
But everyone knows this is not the case. This is the central plague of all academic research, that its the pursuit of novel understanding before useful application.
I would argue that this is more a defining characteristic of the current academic pyramid scheme than biotech startups.
Biotech startups dont go out for VC unless they HAVE a market.
Biotech phds go to the NIH regardless of whether theres a market.
Even if you end up managing a lab rather than working in one, you need to develop a sense for how a lab works and what it's like to do an experiment.
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"I'm planning to participate in Olympic games against the best athletes of the planet. I plan to buy a few used sneakers of a similar size than my feet and a second hand tennis racket that is not too worned out. I plan to win against people with brand new and tailor-made equipment".
In short. Don't do it unless you know what you are buying. If you know what you are buying, don't do it if you can afford doing otherwise.
In most cases used equipment will be sold because either the lab had been crushed by better equipped competitors, or is obsolete.
really idiots ? I'd be shocked if PhD were really lacking intelligence that much (even if you used the term as an hyperbole)
Get the notion that "biology is a computer that we can fundamentally and totally understand at the level that we understand Church-Turing" out of your head as soon as possible because it is incorrect. Biological systems are complex, they are deeply nonlinear, we do not even come close to understanding the functional behavior of their components (or, indeed, what those components even ARE) the way we can understand transistors or chips or API specs, etc.
The sooner you get used to believing that "I can't prove anything, but we have a pile of mostly not contradictory evidence that suggests that most of the time this idea is a pretty good heuristic and our error bars are reasonable", the better you'll do and the saner you'll remain.
Some recommended worldview reading for you:
The Andy Grove Fallacy: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and...
Can A Biologist Fix A Radio: https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/pdf/S1535-6108(02)00133-2.p...
Can A Neuroscientist Understand A Microprocessor https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
And if you like, I can provide a basically endless stream of papers of the form "we thought X did Y and we knew what X was; it turns out that X actually does Q, it also turns out we don't know why X does anything at all, but when we do X we sometimes get Y so we've been confused for the past 50 years"
Therefore you can't really go and design things form the first principles, since first principles are not really that well known. Of course you can try, and get some successes but that is rare. Add extremely complicated AND nonlinear dependences between the systems you are working with and you may get idea why we still don't have cure for most cancers yet.
When I did lab work, results pretty much always had to be viewed through the lense of "Did my technique screw up the data?" before you can even start thinking about the research implications.
I think it's a great misconception to think that people who work with computers work things out from first principles. Dealing with complex systems that they don't understand, and repeatedly plunging into new areas, is exactly why computer people think they can handle things like biology.
It also seems illogical to say "nobody understands biology, therefore you cannot hope to". If nobody understands much, that makes it more likely an outsider can contribute.
The attitude of many responses in this thread reminds me of the culture/class gap I've seen between lawyers and legal IT analysts (one person I worked with had a degree in biology as it happened).
In all seriousness, you are going to need a PhD if you want to truly understand all of the background of the field. Human biology/biochemistry is just about the most complex thing humans have ever studied. It would surely be easier to just find people with the requisite skill sets.
Even if you just want to start a company, I feel that it would be really hard to pick out a scientific direction/what your company is going to do, without a rigorous scientific background
It is important to have a fundamental understanding of biology and chemistry, and ability to critically evaluate data, but once you have that, its more important to be able to find people with the right domain expertise and have productive interviews with them about data. If you are a neuroscience PhD you should not be evaluating a cancer assay or a GLP tox study on your own, you should read enough to have a productive interview with someone with more expertise, then go have that interview
You need a rigorous science background to start a company but that is not sufficient. Many projects are just not fundable. For non scientists, id recommend learning how the industry works and how value is created, because that complements the expertise of scientists who know the science but dont know the right clinical applications
Is that the need, though? Few SaaS CEOs truly understand all the background of computer science. They do understand the problem space, but they leave it to the experts in the organization to get into the details of applying computer science to the problem.
Is biology different, where the level of expertise needs to be at a more detailed level in order to lead an organization?
To found a company? How do you know where to start? If you are hiring PhDs to come up with the idea for you, how do you if their ideas are novel or worthwhile?
Not to disparage SaaS founders, but I think it's somewhat easier to look about and say "there is no app for sending texts via REST API" and do that, than it is to look at say "no one has found a way to selectively target cancer cells for CRISPR" and then go do that.
But its rubbish.
Speed + onus behind learning > everything.
Also note the self-serving bias where Phd's swear:
"You need a phd"
If you want to have a decent shot at getting funding from biotech VCs, the team overall needs experience in biotech AND startups, and the less experience the founder has in biotech the more the team will require to compensate for the deficiency. And vice versa for business experience, a freshly minted PhD is going to need team members with significant biotech BD experience.
A PhD or MD counts towards experience in biotech. MS + years of industry experience also counts, as would BS + many years of industry experience.
A PhD is nice because because it demonstrates deep experience in a narrow field plus an understanding of context. The context part is key. Autodidacts tend to miss out on the context, and their learned knowledge tends to be more fragile as a result, so there is a slight bias towards advanced degrees.
Insufficient experience is a hard no for biotech. Nobody wants to see another Theranos, and notably biotech VCs didn’t put any money into Theranos. We’d like to keep it that way.
I studied Genetics and CS. What you can do instead is reach out to the PhDs and gather information from them to start getting a general sense of the direction.
This is easy some schools allow you to sit in on lectures / come to events. Most PhDs are usually off working independently though. Make friends with the competent PhDs gather info. Hack the system you don’t need a PhD you can hire one later.
This is all assuming you have the raw talent of product and can lead well, and can convince people exceptionally well, otherwise disregard.
God knows they'll work for 3rd-world labor rates.
The question is if the methods are complex. AFAIK computational biology involves statistics, statistics and statistics. The systems themselves are incredibly complex and interconnected , but the abstraction levels of the math involved are not incredibly high.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23287718
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/...
When a new biotech product team is getting formed get yourself on the project.
Whatever you do, don’t compete with biologists.... there’s just too many of them and the lab skills are valuable but in abundant supply.
I know quite a few bio/chem people working in pharma as well. That industry is booming but mostly for the people that own pharmaceutical companies not their employees. There's a reason that most biologists from good school would rather be bad data scientist that good lab workers in pharma/bio tech. The pay is much worse and pharma/bio tech don't treat there employees nearly as well as big tech companies do.
All of the interesting jobs around that space are still largely tech jobs.
yep, that's why i left the industry. the companies know that the science staff are willing to work for less, so long as they have the opportunity to do what they're interested in. so they end up working for much less.
Everyone I knew that had halfway decent programming/math skills ended up leaving eventually. The pay differential for what your skills can bring you in other industries is massive.
There's so many interesting things going on in biotech, but they're always on the horizon and are likely decades from any commercial product (synthetic bio, DNA as data storage, etc). On top of that, no one gets super rich from equity at a start-up unless you are an exec. If you're lucky and pick the right pony when it's under 30 employees and spend a decade there until a massive IPO, you'll at most get a couple 100k's. Employees in biotech are not valuable enough to get big paydays.
Also, you're likely working on products, that if successful, will help people live longer. So when you're already not paid enough to buy the cheapest home in your city, you're at best ensuring those old folks who already have homes will live longer and make your home ownership dream less likely.
here's my advice: unless you have friends who can set you up with the right VCs and ensure that they will be willing to overlook your lack of experience and IP, don't bother.
you're not going to get up to speed working in the lab on your own in any short amount of time. learning the theoretical stuff that you need to know won't take long, but you probably won't understand how to use the theory to make something novel until you've spent time in the lab. and you won't know how to vet the ideas of people with phds, either.
then there's the elephant in the room: risk. biotech is extremely risky because drug development is difficult even under ideal conditions. making "niche drugs" is even more difficult than making drugs for the mainstream because niche diseases won't have as much of the scientific background already researched when you sit down to try to come up with a useful therapy concept.
if you want to talk in more depth about the skills which are actually needed to get into the field in a scientific or a business capacity, i've advised someone who reached out to me here on HN about that exact topic in the past, and i'm more than happy to discuss it with you via email. check out my profile if you're interested.
Is a hamster wheel. Your skills are valuable only while you are running. If you stop, your huge time and money investment loses their value gradually, and if you stop for too much time (getting pregnant, suffering an accident or having small kids) you are out of the game. Thus, for many researchers cheap work is better than none.
And there are the stupid artificial constrains, a damocles sword in the shape of a clock. Scientist work is related with Universities schedule. They can expect to be hired mainly at the beginning of the year or in summer, hired for the next year. If you miss the train you will need to wait for another year.
Scientists are expected also by society to produce X discoveries at the interval of age Y and have a limited time for that. This is really idiot. Would be like expecting Leonardo painting the Monna lisa in three years maximum (and exactly between 27 and 29 yo), or stop painting.
And there is also a huge vanity factor. To be associated with an university or big brand even if you just make the coffee there, is good for the ego and help constructing your identity and selling you better later.
None of those have any relationship with what science really is, a method to solve problems, of course
To use an analogy, game developers. Plenty of supply because of everyone wants to be game developers. The work is difficult, pay is bad, work-life balance non-existent. Not to mention the economics are brutal. Are individual game developers valuable? Certainly. Are they cheap too? Yes. The problem is structural (big AAA firms as gatekeepers on the high end, tremendous amount of competition on the indie end).
The problem with Bio/Med/Pharma is also structural. Med school supply is capped by forces like professional associations (fancier terms for doctor unions/lobbies), hospital supply is also capped by the similar forces, with perhaps some contributions by the pharma industry. As for pharma, I think enough people has complained about it that it's not worth elaborating here. There has never been a shortage in bio talent or consumer demand. The bottleneck is due regulatory and policy reasons.
HN treats computing and software like how certain groups treats guns. This is the exception not the norm. Most other industries have tremendous oversight/interference by authorities that the move fast break things method is difficult to apply. In practically any other field, the barrier of entry is artificially high and information is locked-in, not open and shared.
Imagine if you create a new Kubernetes load balancer and to get it deployed you need to have it "approved and certified". You pay perhaps 4 figures to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation who is "accredited" by the Association for Computing Machinery to certify software. Sounds ridiculous? This is the way of life for practically everything that is not generic software (embedded automobile/medical/aerospace software is the exception)
Need a leftpad library? Be prepared to discuss licensing for "intellectual property". No fixed pricing on page, a salesperson will contact you and negotiate.
If you are really serious about starting a biotech company, you will need to get a PhD in an applied or natural science or work at an immature startup with a team of PhDs thats needs programming help and you can hopefully learn the 'scientific' skills you need along the way. If you restrict the space of companies you want to start to be strictly in the bioinformatics space, then you can probably bypass the PhD route, but you'll need to get a job doing that sort of work at a startup. Job descriptions for those roles should tell you what specific skills you would need for that. Also, I would highly recommend becoming good at stats. Thats fundamental to any path you go down, and can be another way for you to provide immediate value to others.