What you need to know about securing investment for your spin out

"How did you do it?" Whether in the tea room or on a conference panel, as someone in academia who’s founded a biotech company, this is one of the most frequent questions I’m asked. 

People want to understand the journey from being a purely academic researcher to an entrepreneur raising money for a commercial product. It’s a path that feels shrouded in mystery for many academics, and I’m still learning, but my answer is that it starts with a fundamental shift in perspective. If you believe in the potential of your research to change lives, you have to be the one to ensure it doesn't get lost once the initial clinical trials conclude.

My team and I develop new radioactive drugs that reveal the features of cancer in living beings. I have a background in biochemistry, and I remain fascinated by how cells in our body work and what goes wrong in disease, but my primary motivator is patient benefit. My lab’s spinout, Nucleate Therapeutics, has evolved into a clinical-stage theranostic company. We are at an incredibly exciting juncture, with clinical trials set to open this year.

In healthcare research, academics are exceptional at exploring the biological mechanisms of disease and advancing novel drugs towards the all-important first-in-human clinical trial. However, that is typically where the academic endeavour ends. I realised that if you truly want to help patients, you cannot stop at the discovery phase; you must commercialise and scale the product you’ve created to ensure it reaches all the people who need it. 

Starting a business is like parenthood: you cannot really know what it’s like until you are doing it every day and learning on the job. However, you don't have to navigate commercialising your product alone - our universities want to help us succeed. At King’s, I found great value from its Innovation Catalyst support teams and its MedTech and Entrepreneurship Accelerators, as well as external support from the Nucleate Activator programme. They helped to take our team from being a "collection of academics" with a good idea and great data to thinking and acting like a company. 

Venture capital: a steep learning curve for academics

One of the steepest parts of the learning curve was understanding that Venture Capitalists (VCs) are completely different beasts than academic grant bodies. They often lack deep expertise in your specific niche, which means you must grab their attention immediately.  From the very first sentence, you need to provide the "so what?". Why should they care? You must be prepared to transition quickly from the science to the commercial reality: how this innovation will ultimately make money. This may feel jarring to most academics, but it is the essential language of the commercial world. 

While the language of business was new to me, I was surprised to find that many of my academic skills were transferable. Science is fundamentally a human endeavour. If you have spent years collaborating, attending conferences, and talking to other scientists, you have already developed the skills needed to network with investors. The key is to not be intimidated by talking to strangers. Whether you are at a conference or in a boardroom, it is about having the confidence to deliver an elevator pitch to someone who might hold the keys to your funding. Like everything else in research, it takes practice. The more you speak about the work you are passionate about, the easier it becomes.

Securing investment can be a difficult journey. The reasons why investors pass on an opportunity can feel opaque and there is rarely a straight “no”; rather, there will be requests that they are kept in the loop for when the next data readout comes, or similar phrasing. What we initially lacked – and needed - was the harsh truth. Perhaps you had the wrong founding team, the technology wasn’t mature enough, or the investment was too risky. By bringing a VC onto our advisory board, with skin in the game and decades of experience, we were able to start unpacking areas needing improvement. But good advice isn’t enough. You need that special combination of great data, momentum in your target market, and the right founding team. 

There needs to be a connection with the person you are pitching to, so getting your presentation deck right, is vital. A bad pitch is fatal, so you need to be on your A game each time you talk to an investor. It’s important to remember that investors speak to each other, and a good pitch builds excitement – you need to create a sense of urgency and an opportunity that they don’t want to miss out on. At Nuclide Therapeutics, we created a company that was “pregnant with possibility”, which just needed that initial capital to make a difference.

The opportunity to transition from pure academic to entrepreneur is a real privilege. If you find yourself wondering if your research could be more than a paper, seek out the resources available at your university and start that journey with the same simple question I am asked: “How do you do it?” 

The path from the lab to patient benefit is long, but it is the best way I know to ensure your discoveries achieve their potential.

Tim Witney is professor of molecular imaging at King’s College London and co-founder and chief scientific officer of Nuclide Therapeutics, a new biotech company recently spun-out from King’s.  

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