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[Colin Miller]

Hello, you're tuned in to SNiPs, a reoccurring special segment from our ongoing series, Fractals: Life Science Conversations. Bracken is the professional services firm for life sciences and digital health organizations. Our intelligence ecosystem fulfils consulting, regulatory, marketing and analytics, an integrated and strategic approach.

When you approach and see other companies or when you're brought in to help consult with other organizations, is there an area that you take a look at first and or is there an area that you regularly see seems to be missing in that integrated approach?

[Graham Lumsden]

I would say the most obvious one, Colin, to me over the last several years has been the number of times where I've interacted with really, really smart scientists who've developed what they think is the next greatest thing since sliced bread. But they're asking for help in how do we get this to market?

And I was on a call with an investor a couple of weeks ago and she asked me, “how are you putting together what you're doing now in terms of a pipeline of assets?” And I explained that the first thing that we did was looked at the marketplace and identified the most compelling unmet medical needs. Then we went and looked for assets that we would be able to develop to satisfy those unmet medical needs in a commercially attractive way. And this is the foundation of marketing.

I have a postgraduate diploma in marketing and one of the things that we drilled into us is marketing is all about understanding, but perhaps more importantly, anticipating customer needs and then satisfying those needs profitably. And so, if you always start with the customer in the case of human or animal health, what are the unmet medical needs? Can you find something that's going to satisfy those unmet medical needs, and can you do it in a way that's going to be profitable? And so many times I interact with scientists who've started the other way around. And I said “I've been working in my lab for the last 10 years and I've got this great stuff, but I don't know if there's a market for it.”

And that's really, really challenging because the first question an investor asks is how much are you going to be able to sell of this and how quickly can you get to market? So, I would say that's the biggest opportunity I've seen to help people try and accept that there's a whole lot of other things you have to do rather than just have great science. Great science is the foundation, but there's a whole lot more to it for it to become a successful product.

[Colin Miller]

Yeah, interesting. Very interesting. Fascinating that you still see that. It would almost, maybe that's because of the environment we live in, but appreciate that we're still walking into that a lot of the time and the commercial opportunities have not been thoroughly investigated before starting on a pathway.

[Graham Lumsden]

Correct. And as I said, I was talking to an investor a couple of weeks ago, quite a famous group in the Philadelphia area. And when I said that we started with unmet medical needs and then looked for assets, she said, “Oh, how refreshing. I don't usually come across that.” Yeah.