Pia Keyser Photo: Malin Grönborg / Umeå Biotech Incubator

Av Samuel Lagercrantz den 27 januari 2025 13:07

In the early 2000s, Pia Keyser worked at the company Innate Pharmaceuticals in Umeå, first as a project manager and later as vice president. It was a promising company with an exciting idea. The researchers at Innate wanted to create a new type of antibiotic that bacteria would have difficulty developing resistance to.

– Our idea was to block bacteria’s ability to cause disease, their virulence, without killing them. In this way, we would reduce the risk of the bacteria becoming resistant through natural selection. It would be a completely new class of drugs called virulence blockers.

In 2009, Innate Pharmaceuticals changed its name to Creative Antibiotics. Four years later, the company was liquidated.

By then, Pia Keyser had left the company and taken on a new job as a business coach at Umeå Biotech Incubator, where she works today. In her work, she meets researchers from academia who have an idea they want to develop into a business. But the fear of bankruptcy is often holds them back.

– I notice that they are afraid of it because it would be seen as a failure. Sometimes, this fear prevents them from starting the path towards commercialization and forming a company.

You have to listen to what the intended users say, not just what you want them to say

But according to Pia Keyser, there is a lot that biotech entrepreneurs can do at an early stage to get it right. She particularly emphasizes the importance of talking to those they want to reach with their innovations.

– If, for example, you want to create medical equipment to be used by oncologists, you should talk to oncologists to hear what challenges they face and what they want from new products in the future. Then you may need to change your innovation so that it meets the users' needs.

– You have to listen to what the intended users say, not just what you want them to say. If they point out other problems than the ones you yourself thought they had, it is very important to take that into account, says Pia Keyser.

At the same time, she emphasizes that an entrepreneur should not just give up because someone is critical or sees different challenges than you do. To be successful, you have to be creative and find ways around the problems. But, Pia Keyser emphasizes, you need to take the signals you get from outside seriously.

Pia Keyser, who is a researcher herself, understands that there can be some resistance to asking for advice before starting a business idea.

– As researchers, we think we are quite good at a lot of things. We are often high performers; we can find out things. When we read something, we can translate it into ideas and practice. But developing new drugs and new medical equipment is more difficult than you think. It is a profession in itself, for example, to make a drug formulation or to design preclinical studies.

So what could have been done differently to avoid liquidation for Innate?

– We spoke to doctors who confirmed that there is a huge need for new antibiotics. But when we got further, we heard from the industry that they are reluctant to conduct trials with the type of rather nasty bacteria that we were targeting. They said that they would never develop drugs against these types of infections; it is too risky, it is too difficult and it will be too expensive.

Pia Keyser says that this prompted the company to change its indication and focus on finding treatments for infections other than those they had initially worked on. But by then a long time had passed and the money in the coffers had started to run out.

“We simply could not afford to restart the entire development process against other bacteria,” says Pia Keyser.

She adds that she was not involved in the last year of Creative Antibiotics and that there may therefore be other decisive reasons why the company went into liquidation. But she emphasizes that it would have given the company better conditions in any case with earlier input from people who worked at larger pharmaceutical companies.

In the case of Innate, it was not enough to talk to the recipients of the innovation, the doctors and healthcare professionals. Innate should have talked to industry representatives even earlier. That is why Pia Keyser tries to get the researchers and entrepreneurs who apply to the incubator to talk to people with different perspectives on their ideas early on. She would also like to see biotech entrepreneurs who have made the journey before share their experiences with aspiring entrepreneurs to warn of where they can go aground and give tips on how to get to the right place.

Having gone through a couple of bankruptcies suggests you’ve learned valuable lessons

While Pia Keyser works to ensure that the companies in the incubator minimize the risks of their failure, she emphasizes that the view on bankruptcies should change.

– In the US, investors view bankruptcy experience positively. Having gone through a couple of bankruptcies suggests you’ve learned valuable lessons, which increases your chances of succeeding the next time. It is an approach that we should also adopt in Europe.

– Imagine if we could learn from each other's mistakes, not just from the successes, she says, highlighting the Medtech4Health initiative Failure2Fortune as a positive example of when people have tried to learn from previous setbacks.

Artikeln är en del av vårt tema om News in English.