BioWorks 3: Biotech Incubators and the Fourth Purpose Task Force with Sam Sia

 

(J - James Bole Pan; S - Prof. Samuel K. Sia)

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J: Thank you so much for joining us, Prof. Sia! I'd like to start from where you began - how you got started on research. During your Ph.D. at Harvard, your focus was on structural biology and proteins. But for your post-doc, you transitioned into the field of microfluidics, which you have been working on ever since. What is the motivation for your transition?

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S: I started falling in love with the sciences when I was a kid. I would read really inspiring books about discoveries: books about Richard Feynman, The Double Helix by Jim Watson, Genius by James Gleick. I remember thinking about what it'd be like to make these seminal discoveries. That's what I started doing in my undergrad years by working in the labs on structural biology and analytical chemistry and continuing those works into my Ph.D.

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And then at some point, I remember traveling to a country in West Africa, Togo. It’s one of those seminal trips that makes one’s interest take a turn. This was towards the end of my Ph.D. I was supposed to be there to teach English and see the world, but I was deeply upset by what I saw: the health conditions of people were under there. I really felt that I should do something – to help global development, and I didn’t want to leave science because that’s where my training lies. So, that precipitated a pretty deliberate decision to do something different for my postdoc that is more applied. And that's why I learned microfluidics, which started my interest in using science and engineering to do something that has a more immediate impact on the world. Those started with my post-doc and continued on when I join Columbia as an assistant professor in 2005.

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J: How did you face the steep learning curve of breaking into a new field?

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S: Microfluidics was relatively new at the time, so there were a lot of exciting possibilities. There were other people working on microfluidics at that time too, and they helped me in the process of learning. Though I was very new to the field, a lot of stuff I did before proved helpful. I brought in my experience on how to work with proteins to better use them in different analytical assays. The more integrated system you build, the more kinds of science you need to incorporate into the system. Even to this day, I would often refer back to my previous work in biochemistry and my training in biophysics to help in my projects. And I continue to learn all the time: IPS cells, gene editing, ML – you got to keep learning, it doesn’t stop. These are what make it exciting.

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J: You are the founder of Harlem Biospace, a biotech incubator developed with the NYC mayor’s office that has hosted over 50 biotech companies. You must have interacted a lot with biotech startup founders. What do you see in common in the startups that achieve levels of success? And what do you see in common in the start-ups that fail? When selecting companies to incubate, what particular qualities do you look for in them?

 

S: There’re two main things.

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One is that they need to have a great CEO. I think a lot of people subscribe to the notion that the team is even more important than the idea. The right team, especially the right CEO, is so critical. The CEO is going to be responsible for everything. CEO is going to be the one to find that structure in the initial lack of structure. One needs to have a certain degree of resourcefulness, and also emotional resilience to handle a lot of adversity. A person must handle all of that. A successful venture always has that really right CEO.

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The second thing is the idea. It’s not necessarily the most innovative technology, but the idea has to fit the market. We call this the “product-market fit.” It is actually very hard to do because a lot of times people want to just keep pushing the technology that they invented even when it doesn't really solve the problem better than the competitors. You almost need those two things to do in almost every case.

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And the way that it could go wrong just could be anything. But you don't have to be right all the time in a start-up - you only have to be right once. So, it's okay to not have everything go right the first time. Maybe you are the right CEO, but maybe you are still learning certain things. You are not failing because of that. As long as you keep working at it, and put in enough time over a long period, you’ll hopefully get to a successful path.

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J: A few months ago you were interviewed by Mr.Orin Herskowitz from Columbia Technology Ventures, during which you talked about the importance of failures during entrepreneurship endeavors. Could you go into a little detail about that? Are there examples of formidable challenges you faced when running Claros Diagnostic or Rover Diagnostics?

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S: I think almost everything I've done never really worked the way I wanted the first time. But if you think that the goal is so worthwhile because you know it’s really important, then that motivates you to just keep trying. In the early days of Claros Diagnostic, we were told “no” like 1000 times, and we had to learn to deal with that. One of the challenges was to find the right market. We discovered that a lot of the investors weren't interested in our initial idea – addressing HIV in Africa – even though we thought it would bring a lot of positive impacts. We had to pivot our market selection a few times before we eventually settled on prostate cancer, which we were venture funded to do. It's almost the case that you're not going to get the yes responses the first time, but you only have to strike it right once. A lot of people can tell you no, but if you are able to find the right people to agree with your vision, back you, and work with you, you could make it a success. You don't have to have everybody in the world agree with you. Sometimes you do have to be realistic, because sometimes if somebody tells you something can’t work, then you have to really analyze their opinions to understand for yourself whether it’s true. That’s the challenge of doing a startup: it’s about being both a persistent optimist and listening very carefully to others’ words and making the right call objectively.

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J: As a serial entrepreneur, you have been very consistent in generating innovative ideas. You have been named one of the world’s top young innovators by MIT Technology Review and by NASA. What do you think are the sources of your innovative ideas? Are there particular habits/things you do that help you become adept at innovating?

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S: I think there's still a lot of work to do on that front, as I keep working hard on doing more innovative things. The way I approach this is that I want to be problem-driven rather than technology-driven. Things just evolved very quickly these days. We used to work a lot on what is called traditional point-of-care diagnostics – you take a drop of blood, put it in a chip, and then the chip would run a test for you – that was a very powerful vision for a long time. It is now becoming more and more available, as we have seen in the pandemic era nowadays. While we do that, I'm not going to keep doing that forever. The bar for what is considered the forefront keeps changing. It’s about the willingness to be not being wedded to one technology. My lab started on doing microfluidics, but now probably most projects in my lab are not about microfluidics: we are working on miniaturized systems of one sort or another, implantable and wirable devices, the combination of medical devices with AI, etc. I think these are where the cutting edges are. Do we have a lot of experiences in these before? No, but neither do other people. They might be approaching it now from their own expertise, but we are approaching it from ours.

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The other thing I can say about this question is I spend an inordinate amount of time constantly revising how I spend my time. I devour a lot of books, on history, business theory, how successful people spend their time, etc. I found that as what I work on changes all the time, the way I spend my time also has to change. Another thing I think is changing over time is the way you interact with technology. Technology can really be a time sink, a distractor. I'm as guilty as anybody else when I scroll through Twitter and probably lose myself in it. But technology can also really transform the way you work, and it's up to you - how you spend your time, and how you manage information flowing in and out of you allows you to potentially do more and more things efficiently. Every couple of years I had to change how I manage my time and the way I use my technological tools, for communicating with people and managing projects in order to keep up with what I’m doing.

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J: Just earlier this year, you have been appointed by President Bollinger as the Vice Provost for the Fourth Purpose and Strategic Impact of Columbia University. Could you go into some details about what that means? How would it impact the Columbia community and beyond?

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S: It started with a vision of President Bollinger who is really recognizing that in addition to the traditional missions of the university, which involve 1) research, 2) education, and 3) service, there could be a fourth purpose: bridge knowledge and impact, to turn knowledge into action. A university should not stop at just producing knowledge but actually be a very active participant in helping to use that knowledge, work with partners, and engage with the world to actually bring that knowledge to action in a way that's going to benefit the world. When it comes to a lot of really important problems of the world, like health equity, sustainability, social justice, misinformation, and freedom of expression, what is the right role of the university in addressing these really central issues? Should we be producing some academic papers only? Or can we help translate knowledge into actual impacts? It can be done by producing products from lab research, by influencing policy, by producing great works of art that touch people – the idea is that universities can and should play a very powerful role in making social impacts. Universities have an obligation to actually help make sure that decisions society makes are based on sound information and rigorous knowledge, instead of being driven in ways that are capricious.

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J: Aside from many roles, you also work as the faculty director of Columbia Engineering Entrepreneurship. I’m sure many students are curious about the process of launching business ideas while at school. Could you go over that process? What is the pipeline?

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S: First of all, I don't think there's been any time better than now ever to be in engineering. There’re so many different possibilities now for how technology can be further advanced to help society, and the cycles of prototyping are shortened because of the variety of different resources available now. You can do that as students, and we definitely support them at Columbia. We have a Makerspace that allows you to make products based on your own ideas. We have the Columbia Venture Competition which has hundreds of thousands of dollars given to your ideas. If you come up with ideas (not a part of a research lab supervised by a faculty) and work on them, supported student project grants we give you, that IP is not acquired by Columbia. We are here only to ignite your creativity. We want to really support your education and your interest in doing things that are going to benefit the world. We're here to help you succeed and we're going to be super proud of your accomplishments. And there's a whole bunch of resources to support you, whether it's ideation bootcamps, finding partners, business plan competitions, etc. You can go to our website and see the resources available: entrepreneurship.engineering.columbia.edu. There are all sorts of places and resources, and the biggest challenges might just be to navigate all that and find the things you want to be involved in.

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J: Thank you so much for joining our conversation today! It’s amazing to learn about your path at the intersection of biological science, engineering, and entrepreneurship.

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S: It’s great talking to you, and good luck to everyone listening on everything you're doing!

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