Life as a biotech entrepreneur: Yen Choo
What do you do?
I start biotech companies based on my inventions and oversee the business and scientific strategy.
What do your companies do?
I've started three companies. My first company was Gendaq, which was eventually sold to a US company called Sangamo. This company was set up to commercialise methods for engineering zinc finger proteins.
I then started Plasticell, which created a technology to produce stem cells for research purposes or manufacture cells for therapy. Unlike Gendaq and most other biotech companies, it wasn't a spin-out of any academic institution or any research that had been previously ongoing. The company was founded without a single experiment having been done, and concurrently with the company we invented the technology and provided proof of concept and got patents granted.
More recently, we've spun out another company called Progenitor Labs that uses technology from Plasticell. Whereas Plasticell produces cells as the product, Progenitor will produce drugs as the product. The idea behind Progenitor is that we're going to find small-molecule drugs that regenerate particular tissues that are damaged in disease.
How do you split your time?
Being CEO and chief scientist of Progenitor takes up 99 per cent of my time. I previously did that for Plasticell, but I'm now Executive Chairman. With the other 1 per cent, I direct Plasticell's scientific and business strategy, but with a helicopter view.
What was your academic path?
I did the International Baccalaureate at the United World College in Singapore, including biology and chemistry at a higher level and physics, English and French at a standard level. I did a BSc in biochemistry at the University of Bristol, and then a PhD and a postdoc at Cambridge.
Did you always know you wanted to work in science?
When I was younger, I thought being a lawyer would be good fun. Then, when I was about 13, I had an exciting biology teacher at O level. He was really good at explaining at how biological systems worked, and I really enjoyed that; there was a lot of explaining how bits of the body work, so I loved his descriptions of the kidney, the heart and so on. And then I wanted to become a medical doctor.
When did you realise you wanted to work in scientific research?
I didn't get into medical school. At that time, very few positions were available for overseas students, so that's when the career change happened. But, in parallel, I realised that if you were to do medical research you could potentially affect more people than if you were a regular doctor, so by the time I came to do my PhD I was quite thrilled by the idea of doing that.
And then, of course, once you study in a place like the LMB (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology) in Cambridge, with all the history of it - the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, the nine Nobel Prizes, and so on - that simply becomes more reinforced.
How did working at the LMB influence your eventual career choice?
While I working there as a postdoc, Aaron Klug [winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and then-director of the LMB] became President of the Royal Society based in London. I then became more active in running our lab at LMB, building up a team and directing the research there, which was great at what was essentially a very early point in my career.
When Aaron came back, I felt I had to make a decision: stay at the lab and carry on at the LMB, or go and do something completely different.
We know what you decided, of course. Were you worried about the risk?
It was a big step, but I'd gone through a 'mini' group leader phase, if you see what I mean. There were four postdocs in the group, one PhD student and a technician, so it was a decent-sized group by LMB standards.
I figured there wasn't all that much to lose by setting up a company. I wasn't a tenured scientist, so I wasn't going to lose that. There was the prospect of learning all sorts of new things, particularly about biotechnology and business and so on, which I thought would be instructive. So I figured, just go and do it - if it turns out that it's not your thing or that things don't go well, you can always come back.
What does a typical day as head of a biotech start-up entail?
It's partly science and partly business. On the science front, I'm now more withdrawn from the process [in the lab], so a typical day will mostly involve talking with the research director. It will also involve reviewing reports and frequently just going to the individual scientists, looking at their data and talking to them directly, asking questions like "Do you think you could do this?" or "Do you think you could do that?" or "Where are you stuck?". I do that to help, but also to understand the mood of the company.
The business side entails getting the money you need to run the business, talking to shareholders and business development, such as talking to potential clients, attending conferences, finding leads and getting the word around. It also involves figuring out marketing strategy, making sure that your press releases are written the right way and that the outward-facing image of the company looks good. In addition, there's corporate governance (such as making sure the board minutes are written up) and figuring out strategy for intellectual property protection and patent applications.
You didn’t have any background in business. Did you have to learn on the go?
Definitely.
You don’t need a science qualification necessarily to be an entrepreneur. But in your view, what biology skills are essential to do this job?
I direct the science here, so I am obviously using all of my scientific learning. Without the PhD, without an understanding of why disease happens and how cells and genes work, I wouldn't be able to do that. You need the ability to do research and to analyse the findings, to plan ahead and at least have an idea of what comes next.
What do you prefer about working for yourself?
One of the things I was always trying to do in my research was to make things happen faster, because research is so slow. I always had a knack for thinking, "How am I going to do this experiment faster?" or "How can I do three or four or five experiments at the same time?". At the end of the day, that's what my companies have been about.
What kinds of things did you encounter that you didn’t expect?
It will sound naïve now, but I think the availability of finance is one thing. You have to procure finance to do your research, whether it's by grant writing [as in academia] or through banking and venture capitalists. It's just that with the latter you have an obligation to make a financial return.
What is the pay like for an entrepreneur?
If you're a real entrepreneur, you don't pay yourself a lot of money. In my way of doing it, you're personally invested and you show that to other people by not siphoning money out of your company. At the end of the day, you own a lot of it. The way Plasticell was set up has allowed me to keep a significant shareholding in the company.
Are there other ways of setting up a company?
Typically, other companies will be set up where the majority of the capital is provided by venture capitalists. They will own the majority of the company and the owners and/or founders of the company will own less of it but get a higher salary, and that's okay too.
What’s the most challenging part of your job?
Multitasking. You really have to understand both the science and the business and take responsibility for everything. It's all up to you, whether you're raising £10 million or need paper clips.
What’s the most satisfying part of your job?
It's difficult and you're aware that not everyone can do it, and therefore you're satisfied. Just to keep one of these little companies afloat is a big deal in itself, but managing to produce something that's of scientific substance is very satisfactory. I was at a talk recently and somebody said of stem cells, "Well, it's not rocket science". Then they said, "It's actually much more difficult". [Laughs]
You’ve started three companies so far. Do you have plans for more spin-out companies?
More spin-outs of Plasticell, maybe. Plasticell is a very powerful platform and will probably have a lot of applications, not just in stem cells but elsewhere. We could spin something out just as we did with Progenitor, which is basically the regenerative drug wing of Plasticell. There could possibly be a cell therapy wing that gets spun out.
You’re already at the top job at your company. So where could you go from here?
You can't be in a higher position, but you can be in an equivalent position in a bigger company. That would be a new look at things. I'm not saying it's what I want to do; it might simply not be suitable. But a bigger company has more resources, so to a certain extent in a small company you never know whether you're maximising your potential.
I could go back to academia, not in the short term but in the longer term. I might just pick a project that's of interest but doesn't have any specific applications and tinker around.
What is your work-life balance like?
It's nine to five. But one thing is for sure, you might go home at five but this thing never leaves you. You're thinking about it all day long and sometimes all night long as well. So, in that sense, it's a weight, it's a burden. On the other hand, if I decide tomorrow that I need to go and look at the sea or something, I'll just get in the car and do it [laughs]. But I'll be looking at the sea, and part of me will be thinking about intellectual property.
Being an entrepreneur is an uncertain business. You are very personally invested in it.
What do you do in your spare time?
I take holidays to interesting places and travel a lot for business and pleasure. I used to be a pretty serious scuba diver, but I haven't had the time lately. I used to love scuba diving with sharks - for example, diving with big sharks in South Africa.
So you’re not afraid to take risks.
Funnily enough, as I get a little bit older, I'm going off scuba diving a little bit. It's not so much the sharks, it's just sort of being 50 m under water wearing weights.
What advice would you give a young person who would like to be an entrepreneur?
Talk to some people who have done that before, because I didn't [laughs]. I think things have gone well for me, but it's been like slashing through a jungle. You never know what's going to appear in front of you. If you talk to some of the explorers who have been there before, they might tell you what you'll see out there.
PRIZES
- Winner, MRC's Max Perutz Student Prize (1995)
- Winner, GE and 'Science' Prize for Young Life Scientists (1996)
- Zinc fingers named a Top 10 Innovation by 'The Scientist' (2010)
- Zinc finger nucleases named Nature Methods' method of the year (2011)
- Plasticell's CombiCult stem cell technology awarded R&D100 Prize (2011)
- Progenitor Labs named Best Emerging Biotech, Oxford Biotechnology Network (2011)
This article is part of the online content for ‘Big Picture: Careers From Biology’.
Image: Yen Choo.