Preserving the Promise: Improving the Culture of Biotech Investment critically examines why most biotech startups fail, as they emerge from universities into an ecosystem that inhibits rather than encourages innovation. This "Valley of Death" squanders our public investments in medical research and with them, the promise of longer and healthier lives.
The authors explicate the Translation Gap faced by early stage biotech companies, the result of problematic technology transfer and investment practices, and provide specific prescriptions for improving translation of important discoveries into safe and effective therapies.
In Preserving the Promise, Dessain and Fishman build on their collective experience as company founders, healthcare investor (Fishman) and physician/scientist (Dessain). The book offers a forward-looking, critical analysis of "conventional wisdom" that encumbers commercialization practices. It exposes the self-defeating habits of drug development in the Valley of Death, that waste money and extinguish innovative technologies through distorted financial incentives.
- Explains why translation of biotech discovery into medicine succeeds so infrequently that it’s been dubbed the Valley of Death
- Uncovers specific decision-making strategies that more effectively align incentives, improving clinical and financial outcomes for investors, inventor/entrepreneurs, and patients
- Examines the critical, early stages of commercialization, where technology transfer offices and Angels act as gatekeepers to development, and where tension between short-term financial and long-term clinical aspirations sinks important technologies
- Deconstructs the forces driving biotech, recasts them in a proven conceptual framework, and offers practical guidance for making the system better
Dr. Dessain is the scientific co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Immunome, Inc., a cancer immunotherapy company. He is currently an associate professor at Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR) in Pennsylvania and an attending physician at the Lankenau Medical Center, where he specializes in medical oncology, runs an immunology research laboratory, and teaches in the Hematology/Oncology fellowship program. He earned an undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Brown University and then M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. He was an intern and resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a Medical Oncology fellow at Dana Farber/Partners Cancer Care in Boston. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working in the laboratory Dr. Robert A. Weinberg, an internationally renowned cancer researcher. He has lectured on biotechnology innovation at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Harvard i-lab, and the Yale School of Management.
Scott Fishman has more than three decades’ experience as a strategic advisor to the medical technology and pharmaceutical industries. He founded and was CEO of Research by Design (RBD), a healthcare consultancy he grew to one of the foremost names in the medical information industry. He has counseled virtually every major pharmaceutical company, as well as a wide spectrum of biotechnology and medical device companies. He is currently President and CEO of Ethos LifeScience Advisors and Envisage, consultancies that provide market analysis and commercial guidance for healthcare entrepreneurs starting new ventures and for new product developers working within pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies.
Fishman is an enthusiastic angel investor who focuses on medical technologies. He previously chaired the Life Sciences screening committee for Robin Hood Ventures and sits on the Life Science Investment Review committee for Ben Franklin Technology Partners. He co-created and serves as program executive for the Commercialization Acceleration Program (CAP) at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a consultancy focused on the development and funding of technology-based start-up companies. Fishman holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and The University of Texas, teaches in the MBA program at Philadelphia University, and is an in-demand speaker at biotechnology development events around the United States, including recent engagements at Yale’s Healthcare Colloquium, Harvard’s i-lab, and the National Science Foundation.
