Preparing Drug Discovery Scientists for a Career in Start-Ups

The drug discovery ecosystem is continuously adapting to become more successful and to accommodate the constantly increasing need for novel therapeutics. Early, innovative drug discovery is nowadays often performed at start-ups. Founding, financing, and running a new and sustainable company requires viable ideas and concepts, experience, and specific personality traits and competences of the workforce. A couple of developments are beneficial in this regard. First, the ongoing transformation of the system is accompanied by regular company reorganizations, and experienced professionals that leave these companies are a vital source of new (ex-pharma) concepts reaching start-up phase. Second, the active academic move toward entrepreneurship and valorization has facilitated the start-up scene significantly, and academia is becoming an important source of new ideas, concepts, and talent. Important challenges remain, such as leading and managing a start-up workforce consisting of former industry professionals and academicians with different personalities, experiences, attitudes, and expectations. Nonetheless, it is expected that by streamlining academic innovative concepts and educating a new generation of start-up scientists, higher education and academic research institutions will have a significant impact on the transformation of the drug discovery system to meet the demands of a rapidly growing and aging global population for novel medicines.