Many well-known businesses have been founded by students while at university including Facebook, Snapchat, and Google, but can biochemistry students also be part of this entrepreneurial revolution?

Entrepreneurship has gained high profile with shows like The Apprentice and Dragons' Den popular around the world – and it seems students in general are embracing entrepreneurship in a big way. HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) data suggests more than 5000 graduate startups were created last year in the UK, with the COVID pandemic providing a great source of opportunities for entrepreneurially thinking students. There are many important world challenges that biochemistry entrepreneurs can tackle – from food security and green energy to recycling as well as more traditional areas for biochemistry to address such as new drugs or medical devices. Innovations do not have to come out of a test tube – they could be a service such as a consultancy business or even an app such as the Zoe app, created at Kings College London to track COVID symptoms, but which has now expanded to other health indicators. Despite some serious challenges – the need for funding and gaining credibility with investors perhaps being the main ones – students are overcoming these obstacles to set up innovative ventures.

This interest fits well with the government agenda of creating more enterprising graduates, whether they start their own business or gain employment in an existing company. This has its origins in the government’s Set for Success Report of 2002, which identified the need for STEM students to have more transferable skills training to allow them to apply their subject knowledge to industry problems more quickly. The Enterprise for All report by Lord Young (2014) went further and suggested that universities needed to instil an enterprising mind-set in students to prepare them for employment – in particular, resilience, risk taking, creativity and innovation. This has transformed more recently into clear policy and practical advice with the Quality Assurance Agency Report (2018), which advises on how entrepreneurship skills can be developed at university and the EntreComp Framework developed by a European Commission project which summarizes and describes the entrepreneurship skills that students need and categorizes them as ‘Ideas and opportunities’, ‘Resources’ and ‘Into Action’.

Academics working in biochemistry at universities are encouraged to show real-world impact by patenting inventions that come from their work, which can then be either licenced, sold to industry or used to set up a company. Sports drink Gatorade, now produced by PepsiCo, originated from research in sports science at the University of Florida, while more recently the University of Oxford’s COVID vaccine Vaxzevria was licensed to AstraZeneca very successfully. Academics can also start their own ‘spin-out’ company alongside their research – with well-known spin-out companies including Oxford Nanopore, which makes products for identifying proteins, DNA and RNA, created at the University of Oxford in 2005, while Ziylo from the University of Bristol, and co-founded by PhD student Harry Destecroix, developed a diabetes treatment with a molecule that can bind glucose in blood.

With an impressive history of successful entrepreneurship from academic staff showing it is possible, how can students get started?

There are several things you will need to think about – you will need to identify an opportunity, have some space to explore your idea further, obtain funding, gather a team and gain the personal and professional skills and confidence to take the idea forward.

Students have their in-depth biochemistry knowledge, but the key is to be able to link this to problems they see in the wider world and problems they may have seen and experienced for themselves. Universities are a mix of students from all around the world and this diverse environment is great for ‘knowledge transfer’ and creating ideas.

Any time we say to ourselves ‘there must be a better way of doing it than this’, we have identified a potential opportunity. AbCam was created when University of Cambridge biochemistry researcher Jonathan Milner became frustrated when he couldn’t find the antibodies he needed all in one place for his research – so he set up AbCam as a ‘one-stop shop’ for antibodies for researchers like himself. Green alternatives to existing materials are also an opportunity for biochemists – DeakinBio produces biocomposites which are a green alternative to ceramic tiles inspired by natural composites such as seashells. Many students are inspired by wanting to prevent serious diseases, which is how Chia Averywell founded ErleaDX which provides an early warning test for lung cancer, one of the most difficult cancers to treat.

Before you get too excited though, you need to make sure there is likely to be a big enough market to make a venture worthwhile, and the product or service must be able to be made cost effectively enough to be able to sell at a profit. Some experimentation may be required. Figure 1 is a suggested checklist to help you assess your venture's potential.

Figure 1
A checklist of things to think about when starting your entrepreneurial venture.
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A checklist of things to think about when starting your entrepreneurial venture.

Figure 1
A checklist of things to think about when starting your entrepreneurial venture.
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A checklist of things to think about when starting your entrepreneurial venture.

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Depending on your idea, you might need some space to develop your product bringing it from the page to reality. Makerspaces are the latest fashion – a chance to informally experiment with equipment in a shared environment outside of teaching time to allow your creativity to flow – and are especially popular with engineering students. Incubators are subsidized lab spaces in a purpose-built building where you can progress your business with shared resources in a community of other startups. Ozgun Ceren Avincsal, taking an MSc in Biotechnology at the University of Salford, used the Launch@Salford Incubator to set up her business Healium Health Limited, which aims to simplify the process for those setting up a lab or clinic with a consultancy, accreditation and lab consumables service. Accelerator programmes are relatively short (generally 3–12 months) organized activities for those whose idea is about to take off where you will get support and advice to progress your idea alongside a ‘class’ of similarly minded people. You can find them in universities – some are even student run such as Accelerate ME at the University of Manchester, but also externally where many cater specifically for biotech – some being run by big pharma and biotech companies such as the Qiagen Biotech Accelerator Programme and the Johnson and Johnson Accelerator. For digital ideas, the Digital Health Accelerator, London, provides help for those applying digital solutions to healthcare problems.

Of course, finance is one of the key barriers to starting a business, especially in the biosciences. It’s admittedly hard to find funding as a student due to the high technical risks and the lack of credibility you have with investors – it is unrealistic to expect significant venture capital money for an untested idea, and a new business is unlikely to get any debt funding from banks with no assets to be used as collateral – but there are options available.

Grants are a good place to start as they give you money without the need to pay back or give away any share of your company to others, their aim being simply to stimulate innovation. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust offer grants for ideas that address contemporary societal needs. Often grants target particular problems, like the need for new antibiotics, biofuels and sustainable agriculture.

Most universities have business plan competitions where you submit your detailed proposal or pitch to a panel of judges for the opportunity to win money – prizes range between £10,000 and £100,000. But that’s not all – you are likely to get access to experienced mentors who can help you, a space to base your business and help with filing patents or other intellectual property. There is a psychological factor also to winning a competition – winning often attracts other funders. This ‘seed funding’ can be used to advance your idea, and even if it’s not enough to fully launch, you can achieve milestones like filing IP or completing a market report which can be used to tempt new investors. Biorelate used their win at the University of Manchester Venture Further competition to forward their idea curating vast quantities of data to allow researchers to find information they need for drug discovery. There are also other seed funds at many universities – your technology transfer office would be a good place to contact for details.

Early on, you may need to get used to having little money and trying to advance your venture in small steps, and free help and support from the university wherever possible. Unfortunately, there are more good ideas out there than money to support them!

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You also need to gain skills and confidence to give it a go. Not all of us are born with the confidence required to start a business. Extracurricular activities are a great way to get bespoke training, and you will find workshops on many different aspects of starting a business. Bright Biotech, which uses chloroplasts in plants to express high-value proteins for both therapeutic and food use, was started by a University of Manchester PhD student Mohammad El Hajj – and he took short courses at the Business School to help him. Understanding intellectual property is important for bioscientists – knowing whether you can patent your invention or can trade without infringing someone else’s patent is crucial. Universities run workshops on this, but you can get bespoke advice from your technology transfer office or your local Chamber of Commerce – Manchester Central Library runs a free monthly patent clinic with expert lawyers. Networking is also important – it might allow you to find expert advice or even a co-founder for your business. The idea of an entrepreneur working alone in their shed is rare and generally a startup company will be a team. Speaker events with startup founders or industry professionals are common and can be inspiring and confidence boosting. Data suggests that diverse founding teams with a mix of skills tend to have more success than those with similar backgrounds, so it could be worth joining your university entrepreneurship club – often among the most popular clubs at the Students Union. Organizations, such as Nucleate, as well as offering their activator accelerator programme for biotechnology startups, place an emphasis on helping you find team members and mentors you might need for your business who bring complimentary skills. Joining groups like the Northwest Biotech initiative can also help you find support, as well as enjoying a strong networking and social programme of events. Outside of your university, the Biotechnology YES competition is open to postgraduates and postdocs and gives you the experience of pitching a plausible but fictional bioscience idea to a panel of investors with an emphasis of understanding the process from labs to market.

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One of the key reasons for unleashing your entrepreneurial spirit while at university is that it’s a relatively risk-free environment to try your business idea with lots of support available, and if you fail, you can still take a regular job (or try a new business idea!), but you will certainly have gained useful skills which are very valuable to employers. It is well documented that larger companies tend to lose their entrepreneurial spirit as they grow, so recruiting students with an enterprising mind-set can help offset this. In particular, the ability to spot opportunities from research – understanding the market, who the customers might be and what the existing competition is – and a willingness to work with a diverse range of people are skills highly valued by employers of bioscience students.

Entrepreneurship is vitally important to the UK. To put into context, there are more than 1 million active startups in the UK, which are 40% of total businesses and are worth more than 10% of GDP. Technology businesses overall contribute about £1 trillion per year to the UK economy. With the UK very highly ranked worldwide for tech startups, there are clear routes for biochemistry students to become part of this success story with either their own startups or using their enterprising skills to apply their subject knowledge to create innovative industry solutions.

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Dr Robert A. Phillips has an M.Sc. in Biotechnology from University College, London, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Southampton. He has worked in both academia and industry as a scientist and is now senior lecturer in entrepreneurship at Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester where he runs both on and off curricular entrepreneurship courses for students. Twitter @DrRobPhillips Email: [email protected]

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2023