Starting a biotech company is challenging at the best of times. In her book “How To Start A Life Science Company”, Dr Leah Cannon describes some of the business challenges that biotech companies face: the attrition rates for drugs remain high, the regulatory requirements are continuing to grow, and finding the right investors and partners continues to be challenging.
One of the biggest success factors for biotech companies; however, is the ability to leverage your local community to find the resources you need to advance your drug discovery programs. And after months of conversations with local biotech companies, we’ve built a new web app called Pharm2Market to help connect people in life science communities.
In this article we’ll take a look at two-sides of the networking table:
- the founder/innovator responsible for bringing that new medicine to the table;
- the business development professional, responsible for providing a product or service in support of a drug discovery program.
Pharm2Market started as part of our own internal business development effort. We found ourselves collecting a wide variety of information on potential customers in the communities we serve — San Diego, San Francisco, and Boston. Everything from basic business information like address and contact information to funding and pipeline information.
Pharm2Market represents a different approach to helping customers connect the dots — by helping them identify the resources, investors, networking opportunities, and news that helps drive their business. Pharm2Market is business intelligence for biotech communities.
What Can Pharm2Market Do For Founders?
Let’s say you’re the founder of a drug discovery company, you can use the Pharm2Market to identify investors by comparing your company to similar companies, and looking at their funding sources.
We also help you find the resources you need to advance your drug discovery programs. Everything from finding legal advice on company formation and IP, to finding lab space, lab instrumentation and reagents.
Pharm2Market connects you with professional societies to help expand your network and keep track of all the local networking opportunities.
Pharm2Market keeps you up-to-date on the latest news in your community, industry and field of study by providing news from sources like the San Diego Union-Tribune, Xconomy – San Diego, FierceBiotech, Genome Web, STAT, Genetic Engineering News, Drug Discovery News, New Scientist, In The Pipeline, wire news services and much more. The Portfolio feature allows you to track the news on a specific set of companies.
What Can Pharm2Market Do For Business Development Professionals?
If you’re a business development professional, Pharm2Market contains information on over 200 local San Diego drug discovery companies. We track the projects, targets, therapeutic areas and therapeutic classes, pathways, and clinical trials that companies are involved in. This makes it easier for you to identify potential business opportunities, and helps insure that when you walk into a meeting with your next customer, you do so with a better understanding of their business.
If your company provides lab space, construction or facilities services, you can use Pharm2Market to identify companies in need of expanded lab space, or lab remodels. If you provide contract research or manufacturing services, Pharm2Market can help you identify customers with Phase 2 and 3 projects who need your services in order to complete their clinical trials.
Pharm2Market helps you keep track of news and tweets of companies in your communities.
Concierge Services
Sometimes it’s not enough to simply provide people with access to a database and hope they’ll be able to connect. You have to take the time to understand their business and help them connect. To help make that happen, we’re launching a concierge service. We will work with you to define the target market you’re trying to address, and then do the detective work for you to help you connect with the right people.
The Road Ahead
Pharm2Market is a very community-focused application. We’re launching with support for the San Diego community first, followed by San Francisco in the January, and Boston in Q1 of next year.
We’re also looking at ways to use Google’s machine learning service (known as “ML Kit”) to help identify new potential partners for our customers. You can think of it as Match.com for drug discovery communities.
Our initial packages were designed to help founders and business development professionals connect with one another. As we’ve been building out Pharm2Market though we’ve had a few inquiries from individual scientists wanting to connect local companies. We’ve been thinking about creating a package specifically for them — with news, company profiles and job search features. If you’re interested in helping us think through the feature set, you can reach out to me at one of the SDEE Happy Hours or connect with me.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aspen-biosciences/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aspenbio
- Twitter: @AspenBio @Pharm2Market
- Email: info@aspenbiosciences.com
How can I get started with Pharm2Market?
You can sign up for an account at https://pharm2market.app