Getting the entrepreneurial bug into NZ biotechnology industry

By SIMON COLLINS, Science Reporter


Entrepreneurship is a bug, says Dr Aris Persidis, a Greek-born American who has helped to found five biotechnology companies on two continents.

"Once you are in an entrepreneurial environment, you can't help yourself," he says. "It's like an entrepreneurial bug - if you get it once, it's very difficult to let go."

Creating that environment in New Zealand is the focus of a unique series of public lectures on biotechnology and "bioentrepreneurship" which opens at Auckland University tonight.

Business leaders such as Ted Greene, the founding chief executive of United States diabetes company Amylin, will tell scientists how to get their ideas to market.

Scientists such as melanoma researcher Dr Rod Dunbar will tell budding entrepreneurs what biotech is all about.

Persidis, 38, is one of the business leaders, but started out in science. Born and raised in Athens, he went to Britain at 18 to study biochemistry, and to the US on a Honeywell fellowship "to study anything I wanted for a year" at the Wharton Business School.

Guided by Professor Wendell Dunn, now professor of entrepreneurship at Auckland University, he organised teams of MBA students to take bundles of technology from the local medical school, analyse the markets and create business plans for companies to commercialise the ideas.

"I was there three years. I'm aware of two or three business plans that made it," he says.

He went into business himself in 1997 when he was recruited by Sheridan Snyder, a "serial entrepreneur" who has founded more than a dozen companies since 1964 including the world's third-biggest biotech firm, Genzyme.

Persidis is now senior vice-president for research and product development at Upstate, a Virginia maker of cell signalling products which Snyder bought in 1996. It employs more than 250 people and earns revenue of US$45 million ($68 million) a year - an enviable record in the biotech industry where companies such as Auckland's Genesis R&D, with 150 staff, are still spending tens of millions more than they earn.

Persidis says small countries such as Greece and New Zealand should focus their limited research funds in a few key areas.

"It's better to marshal resources around three or four schemes with very high probability of success and ensure they succeed, because success begets success," he says.

He also recommends merging businesses that have alternative approaches to solving the same problem, so that no business becomes dependent on a single product.

"Instead of a bigger slice of a small pie, you have a small slice of a bigger pie that will ensure the company has a better chance of success."

Lecture series details