Valor For Invention

By Wayne Koberstein, Executive Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @WayneKoberstein

This must be the day I write another blog. Just back from my third trip in two months, I have prepared for an interview tomorrow and otherwise tidied my desk. Other projects loom, but I am claiming this brief period, however illusory, as a time to think and write freely.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant die but once.” This line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is also in the last words of a condemned prisoner who has just hid his true identify from his long-lost little sister to protect her, in The Valiant, a one-act play in which I once played the prisoner. (I was 16.) Those words keep coming back to mind as I think about the life science industry. They help clarify a consistent pattern I perceive in the wild, almost quantum-like dynamics of contemporary discovery and development in the industry. There are many elements required for innovation to happen, many of them intangible, but I believe one essential ingredient is courage.

Fear is as endemic as boldness in this industry, but it lives in the shadows of investment jargon, disguised as “risk assessment” or, my favorite euphemism, “risk perception.” Then there is risk reduction, a catchall term I must confess to using often. All of this assumes risk is always a finite quantity subject to measurement or calculation, so you can somehow know how much risk there is in a venture and how much you are reducing it by one means or another.

Economists have elegant algorithms for grinding through the constants and hard variables and cancelling out the soft ones to produce predictive risk quotients. But I’m not so sure the so-called soft, or intangible, factors can be so easily balanced. Moving ideas, technology, and compounds from an inventive state into the business sphere can be a downright frightening experience for company founders, and even for seasoned executives brought in to run young startups. It takes courage to confront the uncertainties at every step of bringing innovative creations into the world.

My favorite photo from my recent trip to Biocom’s Global Partnering Conference in the life science hub of La Jolla, California. A shadowy figure swims along a mesh of lights on a long hallway ceiling, greeting passengers at the nearby San Diego airport.

Out on the road, most recently at Biocom’s Global Partnering Conference in San Diego (see #BiocomPartnering or @WayneKoberstein for related tweets), I’ve heard a lot of discussion about large companies’ continuing inability to deal with risk. I’m not reflecting public perception here, but the opinions of people in the industry, in companies large and small. One old-timer in Big Pharma R&D, now running a small company, listened to a panel of business-development heads from several industry giants, then turned to me and said, “Wayne, it is your duty as a journalist to understand how much [bleep] is coming from that stage! These groups exist for one purpose only — saying no to anything that is truly new, and therefore risky! Innovation is, by definition, full of risk. If it were not, it wouldn’t be innovation.”

As a journalist, it is not my place to judge whether the industry veteran and the multitudes of others who share his views are correct. After all, even a large company can do only so many projects and must say no to many if not most opportunities that come its way. But here is the question: is the company reaching for the highest heights or picking the low-hanging fruit of external R&D? Everyone in this debate has a self-interest, of course, so to suggest who might have the better case, let us remember which side of the industry has been the most productive. Small life science startups and academic labs now discover and champion the majority of new approved medicines, despite dealing with a much higher level of risk than do large companies with their “therapeutic focus” and “critical mass.”

This is not to say large companies lack all courage. They typically contain many individuals who show their mettle by pushing the corporation to do its very best. Sometimes they succeed spectacularly, as in the historic push to introduce the first HIV drugs, or the miraculous development of the polio vaccine. But looked at from the outside, some of the biggest companies in the industry often look like the proverbial elephant balancing on a stool to escape a mouse. Risk-taking is punished, not rewarded; internal champions are moved up the ladder or out the door; external opportunities outside a strict therapeutic focus are excluded from consideration.

It is not unusual to hear a Big Pharma BDer apologize for the company’s bureaucratic shortcomings in one breath and claim certain faith in its systematic partnering approach the next. I’m sure many of us who hear this feel like the old party-animal movie character, wanting to shout something like, “Can’t you loosen up for once and just let something happen?”

But in truth, it takes more than loosening up to consciously ponder the deep abyss of unknown risk, feel the fear, and plunge in anyway, for the sake of true innovation. Of all the intangibles in translating science to business, valor and may be the most difficult and yet most available one to produce, because it can be summoned only from one’s own heart. I say this with a high sense of irony, knowing one company has assumed an eponymous spelling to suggest it possesses the right stuff, yet seems to feed solely on the courageous efforts of others.

The valiant die but once.