Hi, I'm Anatol Kreitzer.
I'm an investigator at the Gladstone Institutes
and I'm here to talk about how
concepts from business development
can be applied to your academic laboratory.
So you've learned about the definition
of business development, and how businesses
use business development
to fill its pipeline, to bring the next products
to market to serve their stakeholders.
And now we're going to elaborate a little bit more
on how laboratories actually use many
of these same concepts.
So in the first half of the presentation
you learned about how companies identify
various gaps that can hinder
the development of their products.
Now, in academia, we can actually
use very similar concepts
because the development of an academic lab
actually has many parallels to the
development of a company.
So, for example, it's important for
an academic lab to continually
survey the field and identify
gaps that can be met by the laboratory.
So for example, one of the major goals
of going to scientific meetings
is to actually become aware of the very latest
research and to think about how one
might apply the strengths of one's
own laboratory to actually meet
some of these needs.
Similarly, it's very important
to review manuscripts for journals
because you then become aware of
a sort of very recent up and coming
topics that can also help guide
the laboratory. And similarly,
serving on grant review panels
can serve much of the same goal.
So, it's very important as a primary
investigator, to actually keep a breadth
in the field and consider strategically
the next five years what sorts of areas
should the lab think about moving into.
Now, within the lab, there may also be
gaps, particularly in the beginning
of a laboratory, you may not have all
of the requisite techniques
available to address the questions you're
interested in. So you need to think very carefully
about how you can bring these techniques
to bear, and of course there are
various ways to do this.
You can either finance the acquisition
of various tools and methods,
or you could actually partner,
and we'll talk about that a little bit later.
And of course, financial gaps, now
I think that most laboratories are familiar
with the concept of financial gaps.
But of course, it's very important to
continually be surveying RFAs
from granting agencies. It's also important
to establish connections to disease foundations
and also, sort of consider other sources of funding
that may be available.
Now in the second half of the presentation
you learned about how companies actually
determine which vehicles can best fill a
particular gap, how they execute
that particular deal and then measure
the success.
So, when considering parallels to academia,
it's important to think about what
sort of vehicles a laboratory can actually
bring to bear to meet its goals.
And I think that one of the most important
vehicles is the collaboration, or essentially partnering.
So this is in concept quite similar
to the type of partnering that companies do.
It's based on when a laboratory has a
particular need that they cannot address internally,
either due to cost or lack of expertise.
And so, it becomes very important
to actually consider which other laboratories will
one might consider partnering with
to achieve goals.
Now, establishing collaborations is a
tricky business, one must again,
go out, give seminars, go to meetings,
and meet with people. And really discuss
various ideas and pitch your project
to people, because in the end you're going to have
to ultimately convince someone else,
another laboratory, to actually take time
and effort and money to actually partner with
you to achieve goals.
And so of course, an ideal collaboration
actually involves benefits for both parties.
So, how do you negotiate such a collaboration?
Well, in principle, in academia these negotiations
typically tend to be fairly casual.
On the other hand, this can often lead to problems.
So, whereas in industry, these deals
are actually explicitly written out
in the form of contracts, typically
academic deals are essentially oral agreements.
Now, this can lead to deals gone bad.
I can give you one example from my own experience.
I established a collaboration
with a postdoc in another lab,
and this collaboration was going to be of limited scope
initially. And I actually put this postdoc in touch
with somebody in my lab and I let them go.
And a month went by, another month went by,
and actually, ultimately, about a year went by,
and this project was still ongoing.
And this particular postdoc had been transitioned
to actually become a principal investigator
themselves, and was continuing to use the postdoc
in my laboratory to conduct experiments.
And at some point, I recognized
that this deal needed to be renegotiated
and so at that point, I actually stepped
in and said we need to step back,
the situation has changed significantly from the
conception of this collaboration
and things need to change.
So it's really important, I think,
to continually reassess these type of collaborations,
particularly in the absence of explicit milestones
and contracts.
So, on the other hand, I think
good deals can actually be a huge benefit
to the lab, so if you can find
a laboratory with complementary
expertise that share similar interests
and ideally, a collaboration can actually
lead to papers from both laboratories.
So that, essentially, both laboratories can
get senior author papers out of the deal.
This is really the ideal collaboration.
It's sort of everybody's a winner and
there's not this sort of one-sided
deal where one lab wins and the other lab
loses. So I think this is really the best
way to structure such academic collaborations.
So with that, I want to thank you for watching.