When doing scientific research, you must pick the most difficult problems in your professional field to overcome, and when starting a business, you should pick the easiest part to do, so that it is most likely to transform scientific research results into actual economic benefits.
As the highest hall of science in the world, the Nobel Prize has begun to look more to the industry in recent years. With the breakthroughs of technology, many scientific theories have eventually developed into useful technologies and applied to industry; more and more Nobel Prize winners have also founded businesses when they win the award. This also shows that the integration of science and industry is accelerating.
It is worth noting that behind the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Chemistry, biotechnology companies have become a rapidly emerging force.
In the new round of life sciences revolution, the development of science is also promoting the rise of biotechnology companies. Among this year's recipients, Fred Ramsdell, an American scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is a typical entrepreneur. When the Nobel Prize jury announced the list of winners, Ramsder's unit was shown as biotechnology company Sonoma Biothapeutics.
Sonoma is currently one of the few biotechnology startups in the world engaged in the development of regulatory T cell therapies. The company has invested more than $330 million from investments including Lilly, Arch Venture Partners and emerging cell company Lyell Immunpharma.
Last year, Sonoma received a $45 million milestone payment from pharmaceutical giant Regeneron. In 2023, Reagen and Sonoma signed an agreement whereby the two companies will develop regulatory T-cell therapies for ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease and two other unspecified diseases. Sonoma had already received an advance payment of US$75 million in regeneration yuan at the time.
Although the commercial application of regulatory T cell therapies has not yet been popularized, the market expects that as regulatory T cells are awarded the Nobel Prize, more capital will be attracted to join, which is expected to further promote the accelerated advancement of related cell therapies into clinical practice and bring new therapies hope. According to biologist Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Committee, more than 200 clinical trials of regulatory T-cell drugs are currently underway around the world.
Zhou Xuyu, a researcher at the Institute of Microbiology, China Academy of Sciences and leader of the regulatory T cell research team, told the First Financial Reporter that after regulatory T cells won the award, they had received inquiries from some partners and hoped to seek scientific research cooperation. "The current cooperation is still mainly scientific research, and there are not many commercial transformation aspects. In the future, with the further clarification of the mechanism of regulatory T cells, clinical applications will surely emerge slowly." He told the First Financial Reporter.
Zhou Xuyu said that an important academic progress in the field of regulatory T cells (Tleaves) in recent years is the discovery that the function of Tleaves transcends the scope of immune regulation and also participates in a variety of non-immune-related physiological processes. For example, research has gradually revealed the unique function of tissue-resident Tleaves. There are a large number of settled Tleaves in many tissues and organs such as fat, skin, and intestinal mucosa. They not only regulate local immunity, but also participate in tissue repair, metabolic regulation and even affect stem cell behavior, showing a more complex and diverse functional outlook.
In the fields of medicine and chemistry, Nobel Prizes in recent years have been awarded many times to technologies with clinical application prospects or scientific research value, and the number of winners from emerging biotechnology companies has gradually increased. For example, Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian-born American scientist who was one of the inventors of mRNA technology who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2023, is from the German biotechnology startup BioNTech. The mRNA technology developed in cooperation with American scientist Drew Weissman provides the basis for a COVID-19 nucleic acid vaccine. Today, scientists are still developing tumor vaccines and in vivo CAR-T cell therapies based on mRNA technology.
Taking BioNTech as an example, the company is actively exploring the effect of combining tumor vaccines with immunotherapies such as PD-1 inhibitors. This "vaccine + immune checkpoint inhibitor" combination strategy aims to activate and synergistically enhance the body's own immune system, thereby achieving the effect of attacking cancer cells.
The technologies that caused the industry to explode due to winning the Nobel Prize also include gene editing technology.In 2020, CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technology won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, promoting the rise of gene editing technology companies in large numbers around the world. Although gene editing technology was already a popular track for investment before winning the Nobel Prize, the market still has doubts about investment in this field. After winning the Nobel Prize, capital began to pour in crazily, driving the market value of the three top listed companies CRISPR Therapeutics, Editas Medicine and Intellia Therapeutics to soar.
In the field of gene therapy, the gene therapy developed by CRISPR Therapeutics in cooperation with pharmaceutical company Vertex to treat rare diseases of sickle cell disease and β-thalassemia has also been approved by the US FDA in 2023. This is the world's first CRISPR gene-editing therapy to be approved by regulatory approval, marking a historic breakthrough in the entire field from concept to market.
In July, Lilly spent $1 billion to acquire gene therapy startup Verve Therapeutics, which is developing a therapy that reduces high cholesterol in people with heart disease with just one injection. The drug is a gene-editing drug that targets the PCSK9 protein in the body. Through CRISPR gene editing technology, it accurately modifies a single base of liver cell DNA, thereby closing the synthetic path of the PCSK9 protein that causes elevated cholesterol. Verve predicts that this gene-editing therapy is expected to be launched within the next decade.
In China, gene editing technology has also been used to develop CAR-T cell therapies.For example, Professor Xu Huji of Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, who was listed on the top ten people of the authoritative international academic journal Nature in 2024, is leading the team to develop a CAR-T cell therapy for treating autoimmune diseases. The therapy uses CRISPR Cas9 technology to knock out five genes of donor T cells, thereby preventing transplanted cells from attacking the host or being rejected by the host.
"The Nobel Prize is a key turning point for many technologies to grow from 'disruptive technologies' to 'mature industry'." A researcher from a domestic scientific research institution told the First Financial Reporter,"A large part of the reason is that after being recognized by the Nobel Prize, capital is more daring to invest, even though some technologies are still in the early stages of market application."
Some industry insiders said that one of the trends of the Nobel Prize in recent years has become more forward-looking. It is not to wait until technology has fully developed into a mature industry before rewarding it, but to give recognition to the mechanism behind the technology when early applications have just emerged. Recognize and commend it to let more people know.
"For example, although the award-winning regulatory T cells have not yet had reliable clinical applications, the jury recognized the theory of how regulatory T cells act on the mechanism of the autoimmune system, which will play an important role in promoting the commercialization of related therapies in the future." Wang Honglin, a professor at the School of Medicine of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, told the First Financial Reporter.
Although the Nobel Prize is not directly driven by commercial forces, the reason why many Nobel Prize-level basic research discoveries can obtain resources and mature is precisely because of the huge prospects for commercial applications behind them. Therefore, areas with large investment in industry and capital R & D are often scientific research areas where Nobel Prize-level discoveries are expected to occur.
In the United States, the ecosystem of privately funded scientific research is quite mature, and entrepreneurship by scientists is quite common. When Ramsder shared the Nobel Prize with Mary Brunkow, another American scientist from the Seattle Institute of Systems Biology (ISB), the news was also cheered by Seattle-based venture capital fund Pack Ventures, which focuses on investing in startups incubated by the University of Washington in Seattle. Sonoma and ISB are both from the region.
Pack Ventures founder Ken Horenstein wrote on social media: "Seattle's biotechnology industry is booming and two more Nobel Prize winners have been born!" If you include David Baker, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics and a professor at the University of Washington's Institute of Protein Design, three Nobel Prize winners have been born in the Seattle area in the past two years.
Before founding Sonoma, Ramsder had a deep presence in the industry. He joined an American biotechnology company called Zymogenetics in 2004, which was acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2010 for nearly $1 billion.In 2008, Ramsder joined Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk to help the company establish a new inflammation research center in Seattle and lead the immunobiology team.
In Silicon Valley, the trend of scientists starting businesses is even more prevalent. Jennifer Doudna, one of the pioneers of CRISPR Cas9 technology, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and a scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, owns several gene editing technology companies including Intellia Therapeutics. Although these companies have not yet approved their products and are not yet profitable, Intellia's share price has risen more than 110% so far this year.
It is worth noting that there are still many American scientists who are "serial entrepreneurs." For example, DeepMind founder Hassabis established an AI pharmaceutical company called Isomomorphic Labs in 2021, focusing on small molecule drug research and development. It was this three-year-old startup that together with DeepMind released the latest version of AlphaFold 3, an artificial intelligence system that predicts protein structure, helping Hassabis win the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
An investor told First Financial News: "Many Nobel Prize winners have their own companies, and some of them have already founded companies before even winning the Nobel Prize. This shows that in the path of success, innovative thinking, the help of capital and good ecology are indispensable."
In China, scientists 'entrepreneurship is also a topic of much attention.At the beginning of this year, Professor Ma Jianpeng, dean of the Institute of Multiscale Research on Complex Systems at Fudan University and computational biologist Michael Levitt, the 2013 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, founded a company engaged in AI protein research, design and industrial transformation. "I think this is a very meaningful thing to transform scientific research results into productivity." Ma Jianpeng told the First Financial Reporter.
In the past few years, there have been many companies founded by China scientists that have successfully gone public. For example,Nuocheng Jianhua,a biotechnology company founded by Shi Yigong, an academician of China Academy of Sciences and structural biologist, has its share price nearly four times higher than when it went public three years ago. In addition, China's first biopharmaceutical companyBaiji Shenzhou,which is listed in U.S. stocks, Hong Kong stocks and A shares, was originally founded by China scientist Wang Xiaodong. Currently, the company's value in the A stock market has exceeded 440 billion yuan.
However, some industry insiders pointed out to the First Financial Reporter that there are few cases of scientists successfully starting businesses. Most companies founded by scientists are not successful, which is related to the essential difference between scientific thinking and business thinking.
"So we have always called for the establishment of an ecology. With a mature ecology, scientists only need to be responsible for the scientific part of the work. The operation of specific companies will be done by professional managers. If scientists directly go to the field to do business management, the probability of success is very low."A scientist and entrepreneur told the First Financial Reporter," But this prerequisite is that there is a consensus on the distribution of interests and responsibilities, and the system is guaranteed."
The above-mentioned person also said that whether science is successful or not is not the same thing as whether entrepreneurship is successful or not. Many scientists 'entrepreneurial projects are not based on their main research fields. For example, Nuocheng Jianhua and Shi Yigong are in structural biology. Research in the field of science is not very relevant, and there is not much correlation between Baiji Shenzhou and Wang Xiaodong's research in the field of apoptosis.
In this regard, Ma Jianpeng told the First Financial Reporter: "Scientists must have challenges in starting a business. The mistake they often make is that scientists regard entrepreneurship as scientific research and ignore that entrepreneurship is a business activity. But I still believe that some outstanding scientists can achieve successful transformation."
Levitt once revealed to him the "secret" of scientists starting a business during the entrepreneurial exchange with Ma Jianpeng. Levitt said that when doing scientific research, you must pick the most difficult problems in your professional field to overcome, and when starting a business, you should pick the easiest part to do, so that it is most likely to transform scientific research results as soon as possible. Transform into actual economic benefits.
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