NIPER Hyderabad Pharma Industry Summit

NIPER here held a Pharma Industry Summit on 24th March 2017, bringing together many govt, academic, industry and trade groups to speak about life sciences entrepreneurship in Hyd. It was a great initiative by Dr. Nanduri who himself brings many years of industrial experience to NIPER.

I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion on “Start Up and Entrepreneurship in Life Sciences : Challenges and Way Forward”. Our panel consisted of two academics : Dr. Suman Kapoor of BITS Pilani Hyd who has brought out a device to determine TB infection much faster, and Dr. Madhusudhan of CCMB who is currently spearheading CCMB as an incubator for Life Sciences industry.  Dr. Balaji Bhyravbhatla of Hylasco, a serial entrepreneur, Dr. Swaroop Vakkalanka of Incozen with several licensing deals under his belt, and myself as a co-founder of Sapien Biosciences represented LS Industry.

Each panelist spoke from their experience and shared some of their advice such as getting sufficient experience in one’s field before embarking on entrepreneurship, assessing your market often to manage risk, knowing your investor as well as your competitors, maintaining a diary of ideas and vetting them with experienced people, not being too possessive of one’s ideas, being willing to back out if timing is not right, forming teams of 3-4 people where 1 member is not a scientist etc.

There were many questions from the audience which made for a lively interaction.

Key action items that emerged from the panel were to

a)      Form a LS group and hold a monthly networking meeting rotating at different forums several of which were offered immediately – CCMB, BITS campus, NIPER, Madhapur. A WA group will be created soon.

b)     Create a comprehensive directory of LS companies in Hyd area

I noted that I knew all the panelists! This used to be common in LS meetings at TiE-Boston but it was nice that it finally happened in Hyderabad, a city I moved to 5 years ago.

In picture from L to R: Mr S Reddy (Registrar NIPER), Dr. S Nanduri (Professor, NIPER), Dr. J Jain (CEO, Sapien), Dr. S Vakkalanka (CEO, Incozen), Dr S Kapoor (Professor BIT Pilani Hyd), Dr. B Bhyravbhatla (CEO, Hylasco), Dr. Madhusudhan (Professor, CCMB).