"In the future, medical science will become the most promising frontier for entrepreneurship. The reason is that human health and happiness actually depend on whether every organ in the human body 'takes a backseat' or not. The body's organs can't interfere with you, so that feeling, strength, vigor, and creativity can 'run to the front'." At noon on January 17, Xu Xiaoping, founder of Zhenge Foundation, shared his thoughts on the potential of medical technology at the luncheon of the second edition of "ZhenPlanet ZhenPlanet".
Zhenge is translated from the English word "Integrity". The word "Integrity" means the state of being, the state of being a god, the state of being a human being, and the essence of being "true". The True Grit Foundation was established in 2011, and up to now, the total size of the cumulative funds under management has exceeded 1 billion U.S. dollars, with the ambition to be the world's "largest small fund".
In the hot medical track, Zenith has laid out 64 projects, of which 19 have entered the B round, the main areas include innovative drugs, medical devices, medical services, etc. Zenith's investment in the medical industry has been very successful in the past few years, and the company is now in the process of developing new products. Chen Gaopeng, vice president of investment of Zenith Fund, introduced at the opening ceremony: "Zenith pursues both the professional prudence of medical fund 'looking at clinic' and 'looking at data', and the 'people + track ' as the core, with a greater tolerance for technology risks." In September 2020, Jingtai Technology, which completed a financing of $318.8 million, is a case representative of Zhenge's bold layout of the AI+ pharmaceutical field. As early as 2017, when the industry was generally skeptical of the track, Zenge became one of the early investors in Jintai Technology.
In order to allow more medical technology young talents to have the opportunity to expand the exchange of ideas and direction of technological transformation, from January 14 to January 17, Zhenge Foundation and MIT Technology Review China*** organized the second phase of the incubation program for cutting-edge technological talents, "ZhenPlanet ZhenPlanet" - a medical technology startup camp. The program is designed to help people to develop their skills in the field of healthcare and technology.
The 26 selected participants visited Merck China Innovation Center, ATLATL Dart Accelerator, and Yiming Oncor Biomedical during the four-day event, and exchanged ideas with 16 life science entrepreneurs, industry pioneers, and investment experts, and faced the real stories of entrepreneurship.
What are the special characteristics of the medical technology track? What are the necessary questions when starting a business? The collision of research and entrepreneurship is sometimes surprising and sometimes frightening.
For example, one of the most common bottlenecks for scientists to start a business is to translate good research into industry, only to realize that the market they imagined doesn't actually exist. In the mentor sharing, we also heard a similar story: due to the development of the product is too advanced, resulting in the company once in financial difficulties, in the throes of business transformation before finally back to blood success. Since then, the founders have learned from the setbacks, in the process of building business logic, began to attach great importance to thinking about how to take into account both self-blood-supporting ability and forward-looking business layout, and now the company has been able to ride in the industry.
Of course, entrepreneurship is not just about "making the product the best it can be and selling it to the market" - how the company's equity is distributed, whether a large company comes to the door to sincerely cooperate or to extract information, and whether any of the founding partners have changed. How to do, how to recruit and manage talents better than themselves, how to negotiate with investment institutions to maximize the benefits for the company, these seemingly unrelated to technology and products, often take up the most time of the founders, and determine the survival of the company, because these things represent the founders can fight for the company's how many resources, avoid how many fatal risks.
Fourteen mentors from domestic and international medical technology industry veterans, expert advisors, and battle-hardened founders of vertical track headquartered companies made sincere confessions on the spot, and unreservedly engaged in in-depth exchanges with the participants on the above issues.
Q: How do you understand "founders need to have rich industry experience, but not too rich"?
Tian Wenzhi, Founder, Chairman and General Manager of Yiming Oncor: It is recommended that in the early stage of a startup, founders build up the company by themselves first, and then look for partners to supplement the differentiated resources and capabilities when the business logic and basic framework have been built. If there are two or three partners at the early stage of the venture, it is easy to disagree on the development route and finally go their separate ways, and such examples are common. In this process, the founders need to fully understand the industry situation and business logic, which requires rich industry experience; but having too much industry experience may also make the entrepreneurs overthink and be indecisive, affecting the decision.
Q: How do you define your role, entrepreneur or scientist?
Tian Wenzhi, Founder, Chairman and General Manager of Yiming Oncor: Half of the time you need to deal with investors, and at the same time serve as the company's CSO, CBO, CEO, the founders of the company need to wear multiple hats at the beginning of the company's establishment, and gradually set up a trusting and capable of matching the management team to help you share some of the work. When the company is just starting out, there is no need to hire a very nice consultant-level team, and it may be close to the time of the IPO, and then select and train and externally reserve some senior managers for the needs of the IPO.
Q: What role should scientists play in a startup?
Yao Yi, Academic Member (Foreign Advisor), Immunology Group, Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Chairman, Hong Kong Society for Translational Biomedical Research: For biopharmaceutical companies, the company's project often exists based on the technology of scientists, so scientists are a very critical role in biopharmaceutical companies. As for the mission of scientists in the enterprise, I think there are three points: firstly, it is to complete the scientific breakthroughs of taking new technologies from the laboratory to the pilot stage of CMC industrialization as well as the demonstration of animal experiments therein. The second is to do a good job of coordination to ensure that the company's research team can digest this new technology. The last is that scientists have to be innovative in the process of the company's growth, pipeline should be done well. At present, many overseas scientists who return to China are favored by some funds or policies, and sometimes they are too busy to get the best results. I think scientists should still get down to doing science, and play to their strengths.
Q: What advice do you have for grassroots entrepreneurs who have technology but no industrial background?
Yuelei Shen, Founder and CEO of BioSatu: When I first started my business, I often read the advice written by some successful people, which made me very nervous - it was completely different from what I was doing, and whether I was doing it wrong. Later in the process of entrepreneurship I felt that this is actually not the case. For example, it is unrealistic for a grassroots entrepreneur to set up a luxury team at the beginning of the business and recruit the best people from the outside, but the entrepreneur can only make more efforts to build up the business first, and then make up the team slowly. The situation is not the same for every company, so don't be too blinded by other people's experience, or start from a practical point of view.
Q: How can founders of non-technical companies better lead and manage people with technical backgrounds?
Ding Wei, Founder and Chairman of Pinfeng Medical: Let's start with an example, such as Steve Jobs, who was not purely technical, but he understood the nature of the product very well. For company founders, you don't have to know a lot about coding or hardware, but you should be very sensitive to the combination of product, market and user. This integration is a very important factor for you to outperform the technical staff and manage them well. At the same time, don't just talk about emotion. In the end, they must recognize your deep understanding of the direction of the company. This direction is not a single one, but multiple dimensions such as the client side, the market, and so on. These are the core things that make people follow you.
Q: How did you convince Bayer and other large international pharmaceutical companies to join ATLATL at the beginning of the venture?
Pengcheng Zhu, Founder and CEO of ATLATL Innovation Center: The first point is to dare to think and dare to do, don't pre-set a lot of subjective barriers to yourself before you do it, just give it a try, there is nothing to be afraid of. The second point is to be prepared and make full use of every opportunity. The third is to keep a good mindset, even if you fail, you can use it as a way to accumulate experience for the next time. But only after the first step, there will be subsequent opportunities and possibilities.
Q: What are the characteristics of the projects that have resulted in business partnerships with business units through the Merck Innovation Center?
Mr. Sun Zhengjie, Managing Director of Merck China Innovation Center and Vice President of Strategy and Transformation of Merck China: Merck Innovation Center creates opportunities for resident companies to collide and exchange ideas with business units, and more than 50% of Merck Innovation Center resident companies can reach different levels of cooperation with business units. Even if no collaboration is reached, startups can better understand the needs of their target customers, the market and the business process of establishing a partnership with a large company during the exchange process, and the Merck Innovation Center's global network of experts will also provide challenges and suggestions for the startups' technologies and products from Merck's perspective. The business relevance of the partnership is also very important as the startups typically have very solid technological capabilities, and secondly, the innovation capabilities of these companies often allow Merck to better leverage its existing products and technologies to precisely solve some of the real problems faced by Merck's customer base.
Q: What are some of the pitfalls of building a sales channel for a new product?
Hongzhi Zou, Founder of Comely Bio: The biggest pitfall I encountered in establishing a sales channel was actually pricing. In the beginning, the pricing of our products was too high, which directly led to the problem that patients were not willing to pay, and fewer return tests. We later adjusted the pricing of the product and the situation eventually improved. My experience is that the unit price of a screening product can't be too high, so we also control the cost end of the product. Mainly from two aspects, the first is to reduce costs from the source of design, under the premise of ensuring the performance of the product, to make the product as simple as possible, using the least amount of markers. Secondly, we also actively build our own channels in the supply of core raw materials to reduce costs. With these two we can fundamentally reduce costs and gain a cost advantage.
Q: How does EtuMed target the different needs of healthcare organizations at different levels?
Fred Fang, COO of EtuMed: For large diagnostic and treatment centers, their pain point is to improve diagnostic and treatment efficiency, to see as many patients as possible in the shortest possible time, and the other one is to improve scientific research capabilities and promote platform construction. For municipal specialized treatment institutions, attracting traffic is a relatively critical issue. They need both upward joint efforts to improve scientific research and downward diversion to recruit suitable patients. The relatively weak diagnostic and treatment capacity of primary care organizations is what they need to address the most. To address the different dilemmas of different levels, Etu Medical has prepared different solutions. For example, intelligent specialty disease database and intelligent research platform for head hospitals, intelligent clinical diagnostic system for mid-level hospitals, and intelligent screening and assessment tools for primary care organizations.
Q: How did VIVOTEK find its first paying customer?
Shuhao Wen, Co-Founder and Chairman of VIVOTEK: Going from 0 to 1 customer is critical for a company, and I think it takes solid technical skills to knock on their door. At that time, we had the opportunity to talk to Pfizer, but large companies are quite cautious, they proposed three internal drugs without any external experimental data, inviting us and the team of organizations worldwide that can do crystalline structure prediction to do experimental evaluation respectively. On Thanksgiving Day 2017, 30 or so people in the company gathered all the resources to complete this project. In the end, Pfizer's comment to us was Shock, I can't believe an early stage startup can get such good results.
Q: What do you think are the characteristics of successful and failed startups?
Pengcheng Zhu, Founder and CEO of ATLATL Innovation Center: Successful teams have a **** nature: they are "super-confident", and there are inevitably moments of great uncertainty, complexity, and difficulty in the entrepreneurial process, so if they are too "sober", they may not go on. If you are too "sober", you may not do it. Another thing is persistence, many cases of entrepreneurial failure are usually founders in addition to entrepreneurship there are many retreats and temptations, such as into a large enterprise to get a very high annual salary, then he may be very persistent. Finally, it is the ability to learn quickly and continuously, after the first step in the "lost confidence" to quickly accumulate learning, digestion and understanding of new information and experience, and ultimately become an expert in the industry.
Q: What are the dimensions to start thinking about entrepreneurial direction?
G.H. Xiao, CEO and Co-Founder, Anhalt Medical: I think there can be two perspectives, the first one is to do something very innovative. You need to have a strength or a long board first, and then keep making up for your short boards in this process of starting from scratch. The advancement of this process is certainly to have a team, the team should have all aspects of talent. The second is to find the generation difference between certain products in advanced countries and our country, to make different changes to the products of other countries in a way that suits our national conditions, and effectively apply them to our market. Such a success is basically guaranteed. Another very important point is that there must be a place in the heart of the international market.
Q: What kind of research can make a good business project?
Q: What are the reasons for the company's "US-China" model? What are the pros and cons of this model?
Yang Xing, Founder and Chairman of EconoBio: The reason is that the Chinese and American markets have their own advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of China is the large market. China is now the second largest IVD market in the world, and the future annual growth rate is still close to 20%. Sales are still mainly through the reseller model. The advantage of the U.S. is that it has a mature R&D ecosystem, which makes it very convenient to set up labs, recruit R&D personnel, and purchase reagents used in R&D. We did our product development in San Diego at the time, so we still plan to do our technology development there, but it takes a lot of financial resources to register with the FDA and set up a sales team.
Q: How do you resolve the conflict between "technology" and "product"?
Xing Yang, Founder and Chairman of EconoBio: I come from a technical background, and I am very thankful for my work experience at bioMérieux, which allowed me to learn and understand the needs of the market, and to accumulate more business experience. Ekorno's products are developed after I have analyzed the market demand, not just from a technical point of view. Nowadays, everyone is talking about microfluidics, and I was doing research on microfluidics during my PhD program in the late 90's. However, my career has not been related to microfluidics at all, because technology is not an industry. So our current products are completely defined from a market perspective.
Q: What are the most critical elements of entrepreneurial success?
Ding Wei, Founder and Chairman of Pinfeng Medical: I think there are three dimensions: right place, right time, and right people. When I was twenty years old, I thought that people and harmony were the most important, and after a decade, I thought that timing was the most important, and I was talking about going with the flow, but at this age now, I think that timing, location, and people are all important. Timing and location can help you to rush up quickly in the short term, but in the end, it is the people and the harmony that determine whether your company can succeed or not. For investors, it may be more important to look at the right timing, if you only look at the right people, but the timing is not right will not work. For the enterprise itself, the people and the relatively more important.
Q: What are the main reasons why Gemtech has grown so quickly to become a leader in its field?
Wen Shuhao, Co-Founder and Chairman of Gemtech: As a headline company, what are your anxieties? First of all, the external timing of entering the industry is very important, and it just so happens that there is also a founding team with matching capabilities and mutual trust. In addition, at that time we chose large foreign pharmaceutical companies as the entry point, they are both customers and teachers for us, we have accumulated a lot of experience and capabilities in the process of cooperation. Recently, the greater anxiety is to compete with the Internet giant companies for talents, we need to maintain the ability to gather talents in the market.
Q: What are the new trends in the in vitro diagnostics market in light of the epidemic?
Jingbo Xu, a veteran in vitro diagnostics practitioner and independent consultant in healthcare investment: The in vitro diagnostics industry is growing very fast in China. Its market opportunities and momentum come from several aspects: large space for development, import substitution, a wide range of application scenarios (diagnosis throughout the entire process of medical treatment), a variety of new technological advances, policy dividends, and new crown epidemics. The current market hotspots are mostly focused on molecular diagnostics (such as the new crown virus), import substitution, POCT, laboratory automation, mass spectrometry, microfluidics. The new changes occurred in these two years also have a great impact on the in vitro diagnostics industry, and even reshape the market. For example, the new coronavirus outbreak, DRGs, the construction of a multi-tiered healthcare system, innovation support for localized products, and the possible decoupling of the healthcare sector between the US and China.
Q: How do you choose a startup product in the in vitro diagnostics industry?
Jingbo Xu, senior in-vitro diagnostics practitioner and independent consultant for healthcare investment: For the design criteria of in-vitro diagnostics products, the following aspects should be considered: technological development, disease screening, guidance for medication, personalized treatment, public **** and environmental health testing and the extension of the product's function in medical activities. The simplest principle, that should be faster, more accurate and smaller than the existing products to achieve detection. For the choice of entrepreneurial products, it is recommended that the main reference to the market (clinical needs), technology and policy three oriented. Among them, the market (clinical needs) as the core, the first clinical (doctors, laboratory) needs for dialectical screening, the preferred high incidence of disease, while quickly follow up on the in vitro diagnostic industry giants, in accordance with the profitability of the arrangement of the order of product development, and choose easy to get the certificate of the product and try to micro-innovation, and finally there must be the concept of the international market.
Q: What are the challenges in translating medical-industrial cross-innovation?
Beihang Institute of Robotics Professor Wang Tianmiao: mainly includes three aspects: First, the medical-industrial cross-cooperation problem: China's science, engineering, medicine, etc. are independent of each other, do not cross, and these disciplines need a long time of integration and infiltration in order to collide with the spark, the need to cross in order to bring value to the method, product and innovation results. Secondly, the issue of the initial spirit of cooperation: in the early years of medical-industrial crossover is not for economic contribution, in this field, it takes 5 years to prove the initial spirit, 10 years to validate the growth, aiming at the contribution to the economy, etc., before it will reflect the corporate responsibility and sense of mission. Third, the issue of combining business, technology and clinical: the long cycle of R&D and clinical trials, the difficulty of medical products, the need for companies to continue to operate, investors continue to invest, in order to develop and grow.
Q: What are the breakthrough ideas of medical-industrial cross-innovation transformation?
Wang Tianmiao, professor and blogger at Beihang Institute of Robotics: First, find the direction of breakthrough, proactively get acquainted with influential tertiary hospitals and major department heads, and communicate with them in a continuous iterative manner, to identify the pain points and high frequency of the track, and to help confirm the direction; second, look for excellent business partners, credibility and patience are the most valuable qualities; and lastly, start with the end in mind, and take licenses as the goal, and start with the requirements Start to proceed. If you want to break through commercially, there are two possibilities, first, to contact small B-side organizations, such as clinics, third-party imaging, chain; second, to go to the tertiary hospitals. These are two channels to break through from technology to business.
Q: How will the tiered system of China's hospital system develop?
Zhang WeiYi, Head of External Innovation Cooperation Center, Boehringer Ingelheim China: We all say go to the community for minor illnesses and go to the hospital for major illnesses. This is also what the country has been vigorously promoting, including some models like online hospitals and online consultation, with the aim of trying to make some connections. For example, in the past, the proposed five key regions, like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, the municipal hospitals within the radius of these cities will be united. Generally only those suffering from important diseases will be treated in these five regions, and chronic and long-term diseases will be treated back in their own municipal areas. At the same time, the process of building this system is also the need for some digital tools to help companies to operate specifically.
Q: What do you think is the key to the problem of patent protection?
Zhang WeiYi, Head of External Innovation Cooperation Center of Boehringer Ingelheim China: In the past, because of the evaluation system and other problems, many products entered the Chinese market relatively late, and the patent protection time is short, which may be due to the fact that in the past, China was mainly in the role of a follower out of the need for development; and at present, in the general environment began to embrace the innovation based on the fundamental principle of innovation is to maintain the exclusivity of the patent itself. Exclusivity. The entire value of a patent lies in its exclusivity. It is said that the new patent law will be finalized in June this year, and we can look at the requirements of the relevant regulations at that time.
Q: How do you think about digital security, and how do you think about joint data projects across countries and regions?
Fred Fang, COO of EtuMed: Data security is a very important issue, and the permission to use data is also related to the application scenario. For example, in a clinical environment, data is not allowed to go abroad or to the cloud. However, if the data is used for scientific research, it can be used for cross-country and cross-region projects after it is desensitized and entered into the public **** database and approved by relevant departments, such as the Hospital Ethics Committee and the National Health Commission. Many of Etu Medical's product data are highly confidential, for example, cancer screening platforms in China are multi-center across the country, and the data needs to be highly confidential, therefore, the data servers in the hospitals belong to the private cloud rather than the public cloud.
In this session of the MedTech Venture Camp, the 26 Zhenge Planet students have different entrepreneurial directions, but they all have the ideal of changing the world with technology: working on the development of gene therapy drugs for a variety of ophthalmic diseases, crossing the border from condensed matter physics to clinical medicine, y applying intelligent computation to the diagnosis of screening for and rehabilitation of senile degenerative diseases, and developing a wearable device that can continuously monitor blood pressure 24 hours a day. ...
During the Ice Breaking session, participants got to know each other quickly, from unexpected mentors and brothers, to people in the same industry who had briefly interacted with each other before, and more often than not, partners who brought to each other new areas of domains, different interests, cross-cognition, and knowledge.
During the visit and in the classroom, they had various passionate brainstorming sessions around their own development directions and interests, from proposing ideas to building teams, from product prototypes to commercialization, and listening to the insights and gains shared by their peers to their mentors on that day.
Late at night, ZhenGePlanet also organized a relaxing ZhenRefelction session, where participants drank beer and talked with their peers all night long, sharing their passionate imaginations of the future, as well as possible dilemmas and wanderings at the moment.
The road to entrepreneurship is full of uncertainty, and every day is a tightrope walk for founders.
"Accepting risk and challenge is no longer a virtue, but an inevitable consequence of survival. When people want to take the first step to start a business, risk is no longer the most important factor to consider, but Just do it." Wang Qiang, co-founder of Zhenge Foundation, gave his insights on the topic of "uncertainty" during the startup camp.
Entrepreneurship is indeed an adventurous journey, which requires not only unique technology, sufficient funding and a constant flow of talent, but also the courage to embrace the challenges of uncertainty.
Last but not least, let's meet the "Bravehearts" of this issue of True Planet.
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