I read an article recently in which rare earth metals are counter-intuitively held to be relatively abundant, but their extraction is described as “expensive, difficult, and dangerous”.  The article also contends that “in mining, there are just two things: dirt and ore” and that the difficulties and costs of extraction determine whether or not you end up with dirt or an extractable ore.

Analogies inform us

The distinction between dirt and ore reminded me of the challenges we face in the discovery, development, and manufacture of new pharmaceuticals.  Whether a new candidate is sourced naturally or synthetically, we may need to isolate, show safety, efficacy, and cost-efficiency through a careful series of steps in a transparent process.  It’s only after carefully executing this process that we may be able to claim our candidate deserves to be called a pharmaceutical drug.

The dirt-ore and candidate-pharmaceutical examples are also somewhat analogous to the challenges we face in commercializing life sciences companies.  We may passionately believe in our new organizations, but unless we can show market fit, customer acquisition, and real sales growth, we may just have created a promising science or engineering experiment.

Market fit, customer acquisition, and sales growth

Commercializing a Life Sciences company requires that we execute and measure the success of a structured process in which each step is informed by the one before.  Such a process consists of:

• Executives and high-performing sales professionals engage constructively with their best customers

• Sales, marketing and operations groups align efficiently with those customers

• Market fit is defined

• Consistent sales growth is demonstrated

The commercialization process for Life Science companies has been described here, the reasons driving the need for such discipline are described here, and the success of such a process in successful technology companies is described here.

Turning dirt into ore, a candidate into a pharmaceutical drug, and an interesting experiment into a successful Life Sciences company all have two things in common.They are all quite difficult and they can all be managed by people committed to executing a transformational process.

Mike Butler, Ph.D.
Founder and CEO, Unit Life Sciences.