“There isn’t one valley of death. There are many.”
Bruce Tromberg’s words drew murmurs of recognition from a crowd at the Photonics West conference in San Francisco, US, where he opened a packed Saturday afternoon of talks on entrepreneurship in healthcare photonics. As the director of the US National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), Tromberg is familiar with the effort required to transform scientific discoveries into clinical products. Many promising ideas never make it, which is why the phrase “valley of death” gets bandied about; it’s a catch-all term for a whole range of problems (scientific, engineering, regulatory, financial, clinical, and so on) that can derail a breakthrough on its path from lab to clinic.
Bridging this valley of death – or, rather, valleys of death – is a challenge for organizations like the NIBIB, Tromberg explained, because so many different issues contribute to the problem. In his talk, he highlighted the need for continued development of novel materials and physics simulations of biological systems. Beyond that, though, he also identified a need for more engineering work to translate those developments into practice. “The kinds of things we aspire to really can’t be done without a heavy lift from the engineering community,” he concluded.
The panel discussion that followed Tromberg’s talk offered further insights into how the valley(s) of death can be bridged. All the panellists had founded start-up companies in biomedical photonics, and I was interested to see a couple of familiar names among them. Photonics West brings thousands of industry experts and academic researchers to San Francisco each year, and for the past several years it has hosted a competition for start-ups alongside the usual round of talks and poster sessions. Saturday’s panel featured a few previous winners of this competition, including Brittany Berry-Pusey, who took top honours with her company Avenda in the 2019 contest; and Ryan Shelton, who won with PhotoniCare in 2018.
On the surface, these two companies are very different. Avenda is using machine learning to help surgeons distinguish between tumours and healthy tissue in patients with prostate cancer, while PhotoniCare has developed an optical coherence tomography instrument for diagnosing ear infections. Nevertheless, the advice they offered on overcoming the “valley of death” was striking in its similarity. After Berry-Pusey pointed out that it is easier for a scientist like her to pick up business skills than it would be for a businessperson to learn the technical details, Shelton chimed in to say that his strategy for developing business skills was “basically to buy coffee for anyone [around me] who looked like they might be knowledgeable”.
My favourite advice piece of advice, though, came from the panellist Zach Helft, who co-founded a company called C Light Technologies that develops eye-tracking systems for neurology diagnostics. After explaining that many scientist-entrepreneurs get so enamoured of their technology that they lose perspective, he advised the audience to take a step back and ask “So what?” If you can answer this “so what?” question five times, at successively deeper levels, Helft explained, you may have the proper distance from your work to go out and try to sell it to investors – and eventually to customers.
