Iorns: Biotech spinouts rely too much on figurehead principal investigators for funding
Elizabeth Iorns · A Conversation with Elizabeth Iorns - Advice for Biotech Founders · Y Combinator · Oct 3, 2018 · at 10:29
Elizabeth Iorns, co-founder and CEO of Science Exchange, discusses the barriers PhDs and postdocs face when spinning out startups from academic research labs without principal investigator involvement.
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“I think that's still very difficult for scientists, particularly PhD and postdoc scientists, so they actually make the discoveries in these labs, so they're the ones doing the work but a lot of the time for them to actually be the ones to be the founder of the company is pretty challenging and usually what you'll see is a well-established, famous PI, so principal investigator, Kind of being a co-founder of that company, just to give it legitimacy, and then that usually allows people to bring in funding, but, you know, I think that's also kind of sad, like, why do we have to have these sort of figureheads who own large stakes of these companies in order for them to get off the ground and get started, and I want to see that change.”
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