You have promising science. But is there actually a commercial opportunity behind it?
And if you’re considering moving from scientist to entrepreneur, how do you know whether your research has the ingredients for a biotech company?
Dr Laura Issa has spent years evaluating science through an industry and business development lens.
She is the founder of Bespoke Genetic Medicines and co-founder of Facio Biotech, with experience across pharma, biotech, research commercialisation and rare disease.
In this conversation, Laura gives us a practical framework for assessing the commercial potential of scientific research.
We start with what she looks for when academics pitch their research to industry. Good science alone isn’t enough.
Researchers need to understand what makes their approach meaningfully different, the competitive landscape, their intellectual property strategy and the evidence required to support their claims.
We also discuss when to seek industry feedback, why talking to patients, clinicians and payers early can change your research strategy, and when market research should begin. Spoiler: probably earlier than many scientists think.
Then we tackle the biotech spin-out question.
Laura shares five factors she considers when assessing whether academic research could become a viable biotech company, including unmet need, intellectual property, capital requirements, stage of development and the people needed to take it forward.
And importantly, starting a company isn’t automatically the answer. Sometimes licensing, partnering with industry or remaining in academia longer is the better development strategy.
We also explore why Laura remains optimistic about drug development in neurology despite its history of clinical failures, including the growing role of human-derived models, biomarkers, genomic and clinical datasets, and new approaches to generating evidence.
Finally, we move to a very different commercialisation problem: ultra-rare genetic disease.
Laura explains why conventional drug development economics can break down when a potential treatment may serve fewer than 100 people, and why these therapies may require completely different funding and development models.
In this episode:
This episode is Part 3 of a six-part series exploring the path from academic research to biotech and drug development, based on conversations from the 2026 Drug Discovery Forum in Sydney.
Across the series, scientists, biotech entrepreneurs, industry experts and technology transfer professionals unpack what it takes to move promising research beyond the lab and towards patients.
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