Biopharmaceutical Initiative

Conrad Chua:

Welcome to Careers Takeoff, where you learn the latest about how you can get ahead in your career. I’m your host Conrad Chua.

Today we’re talking about the biotech ecosystem and I think it’s no exaggeration that without the vaccines developed by the biotech industry the world would be in a very bad position today. In just over a year, the industry produced vaccines which helped countries gain control of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. To help us understand more about the biotech industry, why is it successful, and can we continue to pay for more innovation, we’ve got a great panel today, First we have Aris Oriaopoulos. Aris is a faculty member here at Cambridge Judge Business School, and recently co-wrote a book called Breakthrough to Blockbuster. We also have Karl Bergman. Karl is a bioengineer by training and he dabbled in several industries several things like consulting in areas like healthcare and he likes to say that he came to Cambridge where he saw the light, found a way, and he’s now been CEO of Elypta, a multi-cancer early screening test company based in Stockholm, for the last five years.

So first, Aris, congratulations on your book. One of the things that you wrote about is how the biotech industry is so much more innovative than big pharma. Can you tell us a bit more about the difference between that kind of innovation engine?

Aris Oriaopoulos:

In general, saying that someone is more innovative than someone else is very hard because there is no objective measure of innovation in other industries. So the study that we did and sort of which motivated the book which we started 5 years ago was to look at a very objective measure of innovation which is basically to be granted a priority review status by the FDA, so that’s how we define a novel medicine. If you have priority view status that means basically that if a patient gets sick and if they go to the pharmacy there is no medicine for your condition. If you look at the graph, at the slide with the green and red colours, what we tracked for pretty much the last 18 years or so, starting from 1998 to 2016 (but we can talk what happens after 2016 as well); in red you see that almost consistently in the last 14 years at least the biotech industry originated – so they filed the application for the FDA as the owners of the molecule for 138 drugs – while the pharma industry collectively originated 99. So of course the first reaction when we show this graph to people is that yes you’re talking about thousands of small companies versus a few dozen big ones, so you would expect the thousands to develop more, but what makes that even more interesting is that they did so at almost one third of the cost. So what you see in the third column or on the second column of this table is the total cost spent on R&D over those 18 years, and it’s 1.6 trillion dollars for the pharma industry, and less than 700 billion dollars for the biotech industry. That’s what we meant by “more innovative”, that collectively the smaller companies have been more innovative than collectively the industry of the largest companies, at lower cost.

Conrad Chua:

Karl, what’s your reaction when you see this chart – does it gel with what you’ve seen in your experience?

Karl Bergman:

Yes, and I’ve seen this general trend before. There are many reasons that I can think of from my experience and from dealing with companies in the space. You know a startup can inherently take a lot more risk, so you can actually be much more innovative, you can be much more focused on the thing you need to do and get it towards market. There are lots of efficiencies being a small group, a focused group, a knowledgeable group, trying to bring something forward, versus being one part in a very large organisation where you’re dependent on many, many departments. We’re not in in the drug space, we’re developing diagnostics, but we often hear the same kind of thing surprise when others are looking at what we do; there’s amazement that we’re so few and we are where we are, and we don’t expect to be that much larger until we’re on the market, maybe 30 people or something like that when we launch, and that that’s just a testament to being able to collaborate better in a close group. The last thing that I’m thinking [might be a cause] is that when you have a startup you are dependent on fundraising all the time, and fundraising is difficult. The investors have a fairly stringent criteria – you could think of them as the gate keepers that you would have in a former pharma company where you need to pass through a certain toll gate, and the toll gate for us is probably the funding rounds – and that kills off a lot of projects (maybe too many I would argue) but also perhaps ensures efficiency on some level.

Aris Oriaopoulos:

An interesting point in the chat that I can see in the comments is by Elizabeth (who writes “because there is a lot more process in large companies, I can speak from experience”). That’s really important to know, that the decision-making process [affects how innovative a company can be]. That’s what we find by interviewing people, by looking deeper into the data. It’s not just these smaller companies have let’s say better access to universities (large companies have access too), it’s not because they have better people (there’s a lot of turnaround in this industry, people go from small communities to large companies, and I would definitely argue that they’re all equally smart and capable of the science), but there’s something about the process that perhaps we can do better to promote these novel drugs.

Conrad Chua:

Thanks very much Elizabeth for that that comment, and again for the audience, if you’ve got any experience, whether in big pharma or in a biotech startup, please feel free to put those in your comment in the comments.

Aris, you’ve got a framework to think about this sort of “gate” process?

Aris Oriaopoulos:

Karl mentioned about killing projects, and we do think that that’s the strength of the biotech ecosystem: they’re very good at killing projects. Perhaps too many. They’re good at two things. They start too many projects because they’re decentralised. We’re not talking about a specific investor or VC fund; collectively, because there’s thousands of investors, they start a lot more opportunities than the few big companies and in doing so of course they also kill a lot. For everybody that has worked in a large organisation, one of the hardest things is to kill an ongoing project. One of the executives that we interviewed for this work said that basically it requires an act of God to kill an ongoing project, especially if it is halfway through. The framework in this simple dots diagram says that precisely because you have many gatekeepers (again we’re talking collectively about the ecosystem, and you can see the gatekeeper as the gaps in the system), a lot more of those bouncy balls would go through the system but also these gatekeepers, because they are investors, will have very stringent requirements about what eventually gets approved, and they’re very good at doing this. The so-called “killer experiment” in the industry is when you give an idea a chance but then you try to kill it; you try to kill it, and once it survives you try to kill it again. Rather than supporting an idea and try to keep it alive, you are trying to kill it; it’s the opposite of confirmation bias in a way.

Karl Bergman:

That makes me think of another factor that could drive some efficiency here: the investors can kill it by not funding it in a sense, but for the entrepreneurs and the people in the company, like in my case me and my colleagues, we lose our jobs if we don’t succeed. That kind of driving force you might not have in the pharma community, [where] if you kill the project you can do something else.  For us it means we go to long lengths to find a way to make it work. So you have a harder thing to pass through but we also spent much more effort perhaps. I shouldn’t speak for pharma companies, I don’t want to sound like I don’t think they do good work, but saying that we lose our jobs if we don’t pass through the gate will probably make us try a bit extra perhaps.

Conrad Chua:

There’s a comment here by Rosalia: ”Bureaucracy can be a hinder to innovation”. I think this really pertains to that side of large big pharma organisations and the kinds of decisions that they take. I guess Aris what you’re saying [in this lower half of this chart] is that big pharma don’t kill a lot of the duds and they keep these zombie projects keep going on and on, and drain lots and lots of those sort of resources. Did you and your co-writers look into these kind of bureaucratic processes or the processes within big pharma?

Aris Oriaopoulos:

We did, and as Karl was saying, this is not a criticism of any pharma organisation. The point here is that there is an aspect in decentralising decision-making versus centralised decision-making which is basically fewer people making decisions, and the problem with large organisations (and I think this is true in any industry) is that you have this pyramid where very few people make important decisions for the company, as opposed to a more decentralised structure that allows more things to grow and gives more ownership, as Karl was saying before. It is about this focus on decision making and ownership; as a root cause it basically comes down to incentives, and often the incentive structures are such that they focus too much on individual performance, on the unit performance, but it doesn’t necessarily look across the portfolios and when it does it’s often not transparent. It’s a hard problem to solve. One thing that I should mention is that often when we describe both the results and our thinking to some executives in large companies they’re not surprised by this; it’s not that they have an a-ha moment and their bubble is bursting. But it’s a hard problem to solve, and if anybody from the audience has good ideas, we are actively trying to see what’s the right structure and how what can you do as the organisation grows in size. If you’re a small company it’s an easy problem, because you have 5, 20, 30 people in the room, but what happens when you have thousands of employees; how do you achieve this balance between coordination and autonomy?

Karl Bergman:

One way that the industry has been solving it is by acquiring companies at a later and later stage, so they acquire them before they maybe had a very large R&D and then gradually they have brought that external to the company by collaboration and partnership and in licencing.

I see a comment here that I think is important as well from Dominique: ‘could we say that finally it is “the best presented project (marketing / financial criterias)” which is funded instead of an excellent but not “well-presented” project?’. That’s the downside or the risk here as well of course, and I think there is some truth to this. I often thought in my previous jobs when I was a consultant and supported investors in various ways, that to get funding all the way you need all the pieces in place. Great science is unfortunately just not enough most of the time; if you don’t manage to show the value to investors throughout the journey, good projects could be cut. That’s sadly probably true; I think there’s great innovations that are in the drawer because they didn’t find a good home before the patents became too old.

Aris Oriaopoulos:

I fully agree with Dominique. One common misconception or mistake that some scientists or project managers in general often make is that they expect the senior executive to just see the value of their project and just prioritise their project, but they don’t see the perspective of let’s say the vice president, where there’s a lot of different pitches even internally within the company and it’s often not so easy to separate the signal from the noise; everything looks like a good idea, everything might have robust data, so there’s some extra work that’s required for the idea to succeed. Often they just assume that people will see it and they know what’s good or bad the moment they present it, but it just doesn’t happen so easily.

Karl Bergman:

And it’s also true that probably the most challenging environment for investors is in the very early stages. That’s when the investors need the most domain expertise because they will be confronted with an early stage project where all the value is in the science and the technology, and there’s a lot of demand on them to understand that environment. At the same time they need to span all sorts of fields. When projects are more mature you can start to look at product development milestones, other people, partners, all these other validation points, and eventually sales. When you’re on the market it’s just about whether it’s selling or not, and that’s relatively easy, and it becomes more of a financial thing. So it’s perfectly understandable why it’s difficult for the good projects to always get funding.

Conrad Chua:

Karl at this point maybe if we can take this comment from a LinkedIn user: ‘There seems to be a bureaucracy, risk aversion on both sides. For start-ups, though there’s a pipeline for ideas, VC financing is problematic because there’s a risk that they’re just throwing their money away. For Pharma, it seems to be hindering in forming the right innovation strategy for opportunities that are safer.’ I just wanted to see your reaction to this, because we’ve been talking bureaucracy and we assume it’s big pharma that suffers from bureaucracy, but this person on LinkedIn says there’s also risk aversion on the VC side, right? So for startups there’s a pipeline of ideas but he or she feels that VC financing is problematic because they also think, ‘well are they throwing their money away?’ What’s your response to this part of the equation?

Karl Bergman:

Well I mean, are they risk averse, yes of course. At the same time they are the ones taking the risk. It’s investing in a private sector startup, a venture where the statistic will show that even though it’s more efficient than biopharma it’s gonna be most likely to fail. I mean early stage companies are most likely to fail, that’s the truth. So they are inherently taking huge risks and the consequence of that is that they’re looking for any way they can reduce the risk. Then the sense everyone else gets is that ‘oh they’re completely risk averse’, but the way I hear it from all the fundraising we’ve done is they [the venture capitalists] want to understand the risks they’re taking, they want the risks to be very clear and packaged [so] that you could take [the risks] deliberately. That’s how I would phrase it.

Conrad Chua:

Aris, what’s your reaction to this? There’s a perception that VCs invest in 10 projects, and they’re prepared that 6 of them will fail, maybe 2 or 3 of them may make some money, and they just want to get that ‘blockbuster’, as you mentioned in the title of your book. Did you see this sort of risk aversion or better sort of risk appetite from VCs?

Aris Oriaopoulos:

I think that’s true that there is better risk appetite, but it’s not like it’s an individual’s characteristic or because they are more thrill-seeking, it’s the incentive structure. Let’s say you are a VC fund or a VC partner, then yes you might fail and you risk losing some of the investment money, that’s the risk – but there’s a tremendous upside in that you have equity. So there is a balance between the upside and the downside, the benefit and the risk. Now often in companies what happens is if the project fails you don’t necessarily lose your job but you might lose the promotion or a bonus or something like that, but you also don’t have a massive upside. The upside might be the bonus, but of course it’s not comparable to the upside that you would have as a VC investor. So again, it’s not about individuals it’s about the incentive structure that makes the risk appetite and the risk tolerance different between the organisations and the venture, and perhaps that’s the way it should be. And there’s different structures for different types of investment. But I’m looking at a comment you know by Rosalia about female entrepreneurs: ‘Now I may be a little controversial. What happens if the entrepreneur is a female trying to get funding and the investors are all men. Any prejudices […]’ And that’s a good segue to the point that VC investors are also biased. No matter whether you are in a big company or a VC investor you do have your own biases and actually there’s some research (though I can’t recall the authors at the moment) where they saw for example that that you are less likely for your venture to receive investment if you are a female entrepreneur, but this likelihood actually improves if the VC partners have daughters, which is a really interesting finding that mitigates the bias. But biases are everywhere, that’s the one thing that we understand, and what the decentralised system with multiple decision makers allow you to do is to overcome collectively those biases.

Conrad Chua:

I think it’s been so unfortunate that given how few female entrepreneurs there are in most industries and particularly in biotech that the most high profile one unfortunately was Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. Hopefully that doesn’t set back the cause of female biotech entrepreneurs.

Aris Oriaopoulos:

Our co-author is Lisa Drakeman, who is a female entrepreneur and a very successful one, there are definite examples – of course not as many as we would like to see – but there are examples and they are increasingly so, I would like to believe.

Conrad Chua:

Karl do you want to talk a bit about some of these conceptual biases that you might have seen from investors?

Karl Bergman:

I agree that for sure that we all have biases, so there’s no doubt these biases will come in when you make investment decisions, which are very big decisions, and separating yourself from this is the job, to try and do that objectively in the best possible way, that’s the whole point. If I think of it as an experiment: if I go around fundraising I get a decision, no or yes; it’s not a data set that I can make any assumptions on [as to] whether there were there are any biases ever. So it’s super hard to say. You need to do research on a higher level to understand this or to even try to understand it because it’s hard to set up randomised controlled trials around this. That’s the challenge.

Conrad Chua:

Karl maybe this is a good time to sort of talk a bit about what I think is the ‘DNA’ of an entrepreneur in the biospace and I know Aris really went into some detail in his book about the makeup of entrepreneurs; people who in this space who tend to be very deep scientists to begin with and then are trying to make that transition from being a research scientist with a great finding to actually starting and growing a company. What’s your thoughts about the background of an entrepreneur?

Karl Bergman:

I think a lot about these topics actually, but I think it’s not like there’s one golden bullet here or formula for an entrepreneur. I think what matters is getting the right competences in to make the right decisions as early as possible, that’s the challenge. It’s about assuming you have a technology to start with as a spinout from university or something like that – how do you make that happen? And that’s very, very hard, and then when you do, your chances of getting funding, doing the right type of development increases, and so how do you do that? So if you’re a scientific founder you have obviously the expertise and the science domain and the technology that you’re developing perhaps and then you have whatever you happen to have based on who you are. Do you have social skills, maybe you are good at presenting. Do you care to broaden your perspectives into finance and business to understand those domains as well? Great, that’s very good if you do, and then as much of what you can accumulate then that allows you to set up a company… but if you lack things, you can still make it, you just need to make sure you get the team members on board early on and make sure they have incentives to set up the company with you. There are many ways to success, that’s kind my point, and I think university can have a huge role to play there in setting up these teams, adding whatever competencies are lacking to bring it forward, that’s a crucial thing. In my case for instance, I’m not the scientific founder of Elypta; I came in after 8, 10 years in industry, in strategy consulting, in life science, and on the healthcare provision side. Through a friend of mine who I studied with back in time, I was introduced to the scientists behind Elypta and he connected us. He said ‘you should meet’, he could see there’s gonna be a connection here, and I went to meet them and look through all the science, and we discussed what we wanted to do, and it was an easy decision. It took me a week or something to leave my quite good job at that time to join them and set up the company, and they had that view that they knew they were best at what they were doing, their scientific development etc, and in any case they knew it’s good to complement with more experiences, so they made that effort to try to find someone to complement the team. And I’m super grateful for that because it’s a super exciting journey.

Conrad Chua:

Aris, I know in your book you devoted I think one chapter to the bio entrepreneur, do you want to add on to what Karl said. especially this point about the role that universities and research institutes play, because that’s where a lot of those breakthroughs start?

Aris Oriaopoulos:

Yes, absolutely. I think a common misperception about the industry, and one that I had myself, is that only if you are some kind of top-notch scientist can you enter that industry, but that’s not necessarily true because if you think about the drug development process, yes it starts in a lab, but it’s a very long process and the commercial aspect involves marketing, it now involves computer science almost in the entire spectrum of this process, so there’s so many talents that one is required to have. Being in Cambridge I’ve been very lucky to meet some of the most pioneering people in that industry, but even they aren’t masterminds that can see everything, know what’s going to work, and see the process from end to end. So to Karl’s point, I couldn’t agree more that the biggest skill that you need as a CEO is to be able to put those pieces together and find the right person for running the specific trial, for example the right person for your business development. There’s just so many different skills that are required. But it is a fascinating industry; for people that are considering it, it’s definitely one that you should at least try to see. Universities obviously have a huge role, especially our university, because I think it’s safe to say we are perhaps the biggest biomedical campus in Europe, for sure across [certain] metrics. We do have a lot of responsibility in educating scientists, educating business people from the science side, and that’s definitely happening, but of course there’s always room for improvement.

Conrad Chua:

I wanted to go on to a big topic which Aris touched on in his book towards the end: the biotech industry is churning out innovations, but how are we going to pay for all of this? Aris, do you want to talk a bit about this slide which you call ‘pricing a cure’?” [The slide shows the cost of various one-time therapies, ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars, to 2 million dollars.]

Aris Oriaopoulos:

This is a slide that was picked up by Bloomberg, and you can see the website link at the bottom (https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/gene-therapy-was-hailed-as-a-revolution-then-came-the-bill). The point here is that it is extremely expensive, and when we were first said ‘okay now it’s the last chapter of the book, what should we talk about’, I thought we were going to talk about AI machine learning, all that cool stuff happening in their discovery, but what my co-authors pointed out (correctly, I realised in hindsight) is that yes, there’s a lot of amazing stuff happening in drug discovery and the science is there, but you need someone to pay for it. If you read the last column (which is in red because at the time the price was an estimation), actually the actual price for this drug, for Zolgensma [produced by Novartis], turned out to be 2.1 million dollars. It’s an amazing drug  – [these drugs] are for gene and cell therapy, what they call ‘one and dump’, so you just do it once and you have a cure for the disease – but it’s 2.1 million dollars, it’s not a trivial amount for our system to cover. I think the NHS pays for it [in the UK], but not every country will be able to afford it, and you know the financial side of our healthcare system is also not great, so there is a discussion to be had and we need to think more about the cost, because it’s not just us as patients that we are worried about (that’s like at the personal level, whether my insurance would cover this), it’s also the investors that we were talking about earlier – if they don’t feel confident that the healthcare system will pay for it they’re not going to invest no matter what how promising the science is. I think companies like Karl’s have a lot of promise in terms of bringing those costs down, because a lot of those drugs are for cancers and it’s just really tough to treat that at the late stage, but if you move earlier and you’re able to detect it earlier, the cost for treatment dramatically goes down.

Karl Bergman:

There’s a term I think – ‘financial toxicity’ – if you think of the society level. There are diseases that are dangerous, but it’s sad when there are solutions but you can’t afford them. There’s no one easy to blame here, it’s just a fact that many of the therapies are too expensive. I think what you see here are that many of these specialty drugs that you have for rare diseases but also for cancer therapies, where the technologies get much more complex with combination immunotherapies etc, it could be 300,000 dollars for a treatment, which is a lot, and if people are not insured or you don’t have a healthcare system where it’s paid for (and even if you do the costs go to taxpayers etc), it’s a huge challenge. We believe finding the cancer at an early stage, which we’re focused on specifically, can help with that because treatments are often a lot cheaper when you do that. [A slide shows the cost of care and mortality rate for the four different stages of cancer diagnosis; the more advanced the stage, the higher the cost of care and the higher the mortality rate.] So one of the reasons for Elypta to exist is that we want to enable a test that detects cancer, any cancer really, ultimately, so it is a bit of a moon shot that we’re doing here, and that we think we have a great chance of achieving, is one test to catch cancer, a screening test. If you can do that you see on the left side [of the slide] here the different stages of cancer – stage I, II, III, IV, and of course the smaller tumours that you might not have symptoms from are in stage I or possibly stage II and if you do detect them there the chance of survival is much better, the mortality is a lot lower than if you detect it in stage IV when it’s metastasised to different parts of your body. The bottom part of that graph is the treatment costs; in this case it’s the first year treatment costs as an example, and of course it’s much less if you have a small tumour that you might take out with a minor surgery. Today we are at a stage where roughly half of the cancers are found in stages I and II, and leaving a lot to later when the prognosis is much, much worse. We often showcase the fact that NHS has this strategy where they want to find 75% of cancers in state I and II, by 2028 I think. They’ve set this as a goal to try and make this happen and that’s super inspiring to us because that’s what we want to try and help them do.

Conrad Chua:

I think [commentor] Elizabeth Horsley picked up on your point about the toxicity of the pricing side with a rather notorious person [Martin Shkreli] who really bought the patents and just jacked up the treatment prices, so I think everybody is rooting for people like yourselves Karl to really drive down those costs not just for patients but also for entire countries, because somehow as you say ultimately somebody has to pay, whether it’s individuals, whether it’s taxpayers, and ultimately if you don’t have a properly functioning and financed healthcare system then the economy also suffers.

Karl Bergman:

And the ironic thing here is that I look at things as it’s just that everything is a cause and effect. We all know the reason some drugs are super expensive is because there are very few patients that benefit from them, so whoever develops that drug need to go through all the things that we’ve discussed – they need to get the venture capital, motivate the investments, [accept] the risk of failure, and then there has to be a big price tag in the end. That happens in pharma, because those negotiations have been ongoing for a long time and then you get these weird effects with some extremely highly priced drugs so there’s actually a lot of innovation coming forward and then the challenge is how do we pay for it. But the message here, the long-term solution, is that if we all agree that early detection is good, then incidentally we actually have to pay for that early detection because the cost will overall get lower, but we need to pay someone to develop those types of tests. If we think what a blood test costs, it’s not $300,000, so that’s the challenge – you have to shift funding from pharma to diagnostics, that’s how we lower the total cost of care in our view (and I’m biased here of course!)

Conrad Chua:

It’s a good point, because then people will invest right, the VCs will see the money coming in.

Aris Oriaopoulos:

There’s an important point here, those people that they invest, for example hedge funds or VCs, they have other options. They’re not like some kind of saints that said ‘okay we’re just going to invest all the money of our limited partners into pharma’. If tech offers the highest returns, they would move to tech. They are investors driven by finance and performance, and if they don’t see their returns the money will just move to other areas, and that’s going to hurt the entire value chain of the pharma industry. The example mentioned by Elizabeth about the ‘pharma bro’ is a terrible example, but we should point out that this is an outlier. Often when we see the prices of drugs going up, the supply chain is not just the pharma companies at the end, often it’s the middle people in the value chain that drive it up (and you know we can provide the reference about that, it’s not a personal opinion). But it’s [usually] not as simple as that some executive like Martin Shkreli will just increase the price. Most companies at least they don’t just do that.

Conrad Chua:

Since we’re on the topic of pricing, let’s take this question from Selina Greuel who says ‘as therapeutical costs are steadily increasing (especially in the US), I think that lowering[/raising] the threshold for cost-effectivessness is being discussed currently’. Any reactions to this?

Karl Bergman:

This is going on for sure, yeah, it’s always a discussion, and I guess the UK has been a frontrunner here for a long time with NICE, and I think that’s coming to the US as well in different ways. It’s hard to say anything conclusive, but yeah for sure it’s ongoing, with the current administration in the US that’s my understanding.

Aris Oriaopoulos:

It’s a huge concern for everybody in the value chain, even for very early stage companies.

Conrad Chua:

If we just take one last question, I think this is from Rosalia Da Garcia. [‘At times government-led initiatives can help. For e.g. mainland China the focus to be the world leader in AI can promote new startups to seek funding. Do you know of any such initiatives that have made it easier for entrepreneurs to become more experimental and creative?’] This goes back to something we talked a bit earlier on where she talks about these government-led initiatives, and of course a lot of the biotech breakthroughs come from universities, from public-funded research institutes. Do either of you know of initiatives that support entrepreneurs in the biotech side from the public sector point of view?

Aris Oriaopoulos:

Absolutely. The starting points of all of these discoveries are the universities. So the universities are the ones that will perhaps identify some kind of potential target and then either the biotech or the pharma companies will read the paper (the vast majority of time published by faculty in the medical or biological department), and that’s how they will start. There is a very, very complementary and symbiotic role. [In terms of] public funding, I can’t recall the exact numbers, but [in terms of expanding] the NIH, the National Institute for Health in the US, [and] how much it has contributed to patents, there are studies that have directly linked this money to breakthrough discoveries. But everything starts at the university level. Obviously private companies also fund studies in universities, but the starting point is the university for this research.

Karl Bergman:

I think to get entrepreneurs to become even more experimental and creative, grants can obviously fill a role. There are plenty of grants. That’s a way for a company that maybe has to focus on its core project all the time and just leave everything aside, but if you can have access to funding to do some more things, that that could bring out innovation that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

Conrad Chua:

Thanks very much. We’ve reached the end of our episode today and it’s been a great pleasure speaking to you Aris and to Karl.