So You’ve Got a Cool Biotech Platform. Now What?
I’ve had the chance to work closely with academic founders who are spinning out biotech platforms — smart, ambitious teams with real science behind them. But I’ve also seen a pattern: once the core IP is published, patented, and even licensed, the next steps get… fuzzy.
A lot of early biotech spinouts hit a wall not because the science isn’t promising, but because they don’t know how to move from research to real development.
So if you're sitting on a cool enzyme, molecule, delivery system, or other platform technology — here are a few questions worth asking early on:
1. What’s your first real use case?
Platforms are great. But they don’t sell themselves.
Investors, partners, and even grant reviewers want to know:
What’s the first product or indication you're going after — and why?
That decision doesn’t have to limit you forever, but it should be grounded in:
Unmet need or urgency
Known market dynamics
Clear scientific rationale
Feasible development path (not just best-case scenarios)
If you're trying to be “pan-everything” from the start, you’ll struggle to gain traction.
There is no substitute to extensive customer discovery.
2. Do you know what success looks like (in real-world terms)?
In industry, people talk about a Target Product Profile (TPP) — a simple doc that outlines what the product is, who it’s for, and what performance/safety metrics it needs to hit.
This isn’t just for the FDA. It’s for you.
A TPP helps you stay focused, define “good enough,” and avoid chasing marginal data that won’t actually matter to your eventual users, payers, or partners.
3. How are people solving this problem today?
This is where scientific founders often lose the plot. Just because your mechanism is novel doesn’t mean there’s no competition.
Customers — whether patients, doctors, or pharmaceutical partners — are already doing something to address the problem you're targeting. That might be an old drug, a workaround, or just “do nothing and wait.”
If you don’t understand the status quo, you won’t know how to position your product as better.
4. What’s your path to IND (or equivalent)?
Once you have a lead candidate and a use case, what’s the actual plan to get to first-in-human?
This doesn’t need to be overbuilt, but you should know:
What studies you still need to run
What regulatory pathway you’re aiming for
What technical risks still need to be de-risked
Startups that can't map out this path often get stuck in "interesting research" mode — and that's not investable.
5. Who do you need on your side?
Even the best science needs translational help. That might mean:
A regulatory consultant to map your FDA/EMA path
A contract lab for in vivo work
A strategic advisor who’s taken something similar to market
Someone who can build a real budget and run a grant process
The sooner you start identifying these gaps, the more fundable and focused your story becomes.
Final Thought
There’s a lot of great science sitting in labs right now — and plenty of teams eager to make something real from it.
But building a biotech company is not the same as publishing a paper, filing a patent, or even licensing IP.
If you’re spinning out a platform, the sooner you can shift your mindset from "look at what this can do" to "here’s how we’ll prove it and deliver it to someone who needs it," the better off you’ll be.
