How Biotech Startups Are Creating COVID-19 Vaccines cover art

How Biotech Startups Are Creating COVID-19 Vaccines

How Biotech Startups Are Creating COVID-19 Vaccines

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 Akshaya Bansal finished a PhD studying how to use light to destroy cancer, joined Entrepreneur First to try her hand at entrepreneurship before joining Esco Ventures as an Associate. Learn about Esco Venture's venture programme for biotech experts, the biotech system in Southeast Asia, and about biotech approaches to developing COVID vaccines.https://www.escoventures.com/CompanyCarmine Therapeutics (https://www.carminetherapeutics.com/)BookAge of StagnationToolsAirtable[00:00:00] Alvin: Hey guys, welcome to Abyss Gazing where I interview entrepreneurs on how they are building their companies in a post COVID world. If you like the topic, but you can't stand the length, check out the website, abyssgazing.com that's a, B, Y, S, S, G, a, Z, I N, g.com where I post show notes and full transcripts of all the episodes.   Okay. Three, two, one. Welcome to Abyss Gazing.Joining us today is actually Akshaya Bansal, a venture fellow ESCO ventures, where she does technology scouting and venture building. For biotech startups in Singapore and Southeast Asia. So, uh, actually, can we start off, like, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got into biotech investments?Akshaya Bansal: Sure. Thanks Alvin. So, um, I did my PhD from NUS in biomedical engineering and nano medicine. And then I did a two, two and a half years of a [00:01:00] postdoc work as well, which is basically research. And then I got into, um, entrepreneur first where I had my first taste of entrepreneurship and it was a completely different world.Now she got me really interested in the venture capital space itself. And then I also realized how different software and biting investing is, which is why I wanted to see for myself how biotech investing works. And that's how I landed up at Esther ventures and their amorphous program. I can tell you more about it later.So. Oh, yeah. That's how I landed up. So it was, I'm a part of the Marcus's program, a venture fellow at Esquire ventures. And we are when you build up and the focus on biotech companies only, um, yeah, and we work with BIS from the very beginning and help them start a company. Alvin: So there's been a lot of attention on biotech recently because a lot of VC's on Twitter and so on, they are saying that.There's going to be a Renaissance in the biotech investment field. You [00:02:00] do like attention from COVID and so on. So it can tell us a bit about the differences between biotech ventures and software ventures, which is a more common form of startups that you see on there. Akshaya Bansal: Sure. So, um, biotech actually has been a very hot space for investment in the last five or six years, I would say, um, more so in the U S where like billions of dollars of funding, um, Go into it every year in Asia, it is catching up.It is inherently very different from how software companies work. Um, in a software company, you would have a minimum viable product, which you can deploy easily. You can do several rounds of testing and you can have a product out there and reading the new in a fairly short period of time. Um, but in biotech, it's very different.Um, product life cycles can be very long. Many many years to develop something. So when you first put in money into an idea, you don't, you might not actually have a product. You might not have bought it for years to come, but you [00:03:00] bet on the science and you bet on the people doing the science and that's where the difference lies.So you identify a problem and then we move to the solution. And if it's good enough, you spend a lot of time and effort and energy into developing that. So essentially the defense would be itself at companies. You could see a product. In a fairly short period of time. But, um, for, by the companies, the investments are, are very long term and you might never get a product.Um, and the two have to be from the science and also the regulatory approvals around biotech products are very different from those in a software company. So for biomedical products, especially drugs are, you have to go to drinking, testing, um, Phase one phase two and phase three, you have Googles to deal with.And that can take a long time and the drug can get killed at any stage of that process. So it is a risky business, but it's very rewarding because in the end you will end up helping millions of people at your product success. Yeah. Well, [00:04:00] Alvin: there's one thing you mentioned, uh, in your description of the differences that they struck out to me.So you said you still start from the problem and then you develop solutions. From like the biotech investment point of view, you still see, like there has to be the problem first before you come in and build solution for that. So let's say your PhD is on a new property of these kinds of enzymes, but it's just something, some interesting discovery.You, uh, what a startup being possible to be possible, make a start of that or the. Like from an investment point of view,...
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