Heading to Melbourne

Behind the scenes of building a biotech company: Previously, I worked with a North American startup company who decided to send their CSO on a massive, multi-month trip around Asia to get physically into the laboratories of their earliest collaborators. To me, this seemed excessive. I was dead wrong.

On that note, I’m heading to Melbourne! Not indefinitely, just for a few days (sorry Melbourne friends)

Currently, we are getting samples of our chemically defined and animal-free replacement for FBS into the hands of scientists across Australia who want to reduce or eliminate FBS in their cell culture.

🧪 We’ve learned a truly astronomical amount from this pilot phase. As expected, we’ve been able to gather some nice growth curves of cells growing without FBS which we wouldn’t have been able to test on our own.

🔬 But it’s the laboratories in which things haven’t immediately gone according to plan where the really interesting learnings from a company-building perspective have emerged.

To make a truly user-friendly product, in the earliest pilot testing stages it’s not enough to just send the product instructions and the product. This stage works best when both you and your amazing collaborator (who’s taking a chance on you!) are fully in the project together - think looking over the experimental plans and exchanging photos in real time. Or ideally, being physically in the lab together.

Now, it makes a lot of sense why that North American CSO was spending two weeks with every company that was trialing his technology. And while my own world tour is not on the cards yet, the rest of Australia is certainly within reach.

So on that note, I am heading to Melbourne with a big batch of FBS Replacement Solution (FRS) soon. If you’re a scientist interested in removing FBS from your cell culture, I’d love to hear from you, make arrangements to meet in person and see whether we can collaborate to make cell culture more reproducible, cleaner, and animal-free.

Of course, the same applies to Sydney-based scientists but you don’t need to wait until I make a special trip!

📷 Excitement at having completed manufacturing batch #1!