The Bottleneck

WHAT ARE WE GOOD AT?:YOU HAVE an idea. A new approach that could cut drug-manufacturing costs or spare millions of patients misery. Maybe you have spotted a problem-solving medical device. Or perhaps you have a new functional food ingredient with particular health-giving properties.

Good ideas have long abounded in Ireland, but the route from notes on a napkin to products on the market has not always been so straightforward. Maybe it’s a lack of time, an unwillingness to take the leap or, at a later stage, the lack of space to grow.

Government agencies such as Enterprise Ireland are smoothing the path for inventors, but some bottlenecks remain. Yet one of the biggest bottlenecks on everyone’s mind – the recession – may actually give the route to commercialisation in Ireland a boost, according to experts.

“We have a strong culture of innovation, but we haven’t got a great culture of commercialisation. There’s still a certain reluctance in academic circles to move over to the dark side,” says Dr Keith O’Neill, the newly appointed director of life science and food commercialisation at Enterprise Ireland.

“It’s waning, but there still is a section of the academic community that is not too keen on the whole idea of mixing research and commercial interests.”

For others, the jump can still be intimidating, he adds. “In some cases people are in a very secure environment, they are in a tenure-tracked career, and it’s really difficult to walk away from that. Our universities aren’t really set up to facilitate short leaves of absence for senior researchers who might want to take some time off and start a company. People just see it as such a leap from where they are now – they are not sure how to quite go about it.”

There's also the concern that commercialisation will mean fewer scientific publications, or that the parent university will take all the profit from an eventual product. But O'Neill moves to dispel those perceptions.

" [Publication and patents] are not mutually exclusive paths. In most cases all it's going to take is a short delay to allow you to protect your best ideas before you publish them," he says. "And one of those common misconceptions [is] that the inventors feel that the university owns the intellectual property and therefore there's no real benefit to going down that road. But in any cases I am aware of, there's a compensation routed back to the inventor should there be any commercial benefit."

Nor should the cost of taking out a patent be a barrier, he adds. "For most academic groups within our universities it's not really a problem, because Enterprise Ireland can provide support for patent costs. Then at some point in the future, should that research prove to have some commercial value, those costs can be recouped by EI at that stage."

But as inventors move along the commercialisation line, other hurdles can appear. Recently the University College Dublin start-up Celtic Catalysts had to move abroad to find "wetlab" space to develop a specialist product for the pharmaceutical industry.

The company employs 17 people and is currently based in UCD's chemistry department and at NovaUCD. They wanted to expand within Ireland, but to start production they had to go to the old ICI plant outside Newcastle in England, which leases wetlab facilities to emerging companies.

Having few available wetlabs equipped to handle chemistry is creating a bottleneck for Irish companies, says Dr Brian Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Celtic Catalysts.

"There's a small amount of space available within the universities, but then the growth of the company is beholden to the goodwill of the university and restricted by the space. It's the major gap that exists," he says.

"There has been a will from the Government to support companies and they have made a big effort on behalf of the early-stage companies, supporting them through the incubation phase, but after that there's nowhere to go. And that creates another problem – a bottleneck – because if the emerging companies are in the incubation stage then there's no room for new companies to incubate and nowhere for existing companies to grow into."

Kelly wants to see more purpose-built wetlabs in Ireland, or the recruitment of existing facilities if they become idle. "Most of the big pharmaceutical companies are here doing chemical manufacturing, and my view on it is that if the Government is pumping all this money into incentivising large companies to move their operations here, then, if they leave, the Government could maybe take these facilities back and allow emerging companies such as ourselves to have access to [them]," he says.

"It's not all doom and gloom – there could be a tremendous opportunity if such space were to become available for the expansion of the post-incubation life science companies. And we could be attracting companies from outside into Ireland."

The wetlab problem has not been lost on Enterprise Ireland, says Dr O'Neill. "We started a process of consultation with the broader client base, particularly in the life sciences, late last year and then had a public consultation process with some of the public bodies who might house a new wetlab facility," he says.

"If the need is there it would certainly be in EI's remit. Our experience from other countries is that the only way space like this can be provided is with some State support, just because of the cost and complexity."

O'Neill also sees the recession as opening up opportunities, particularly around entrepreneurship. "In the most general terms the biggest bottleneck on the life science side seems to be the lack of experienced entrepreneurs to physically run with the ideas," he says. "The best teams have experienced management as well as the technical know-how to bring things across the line."

Decreased job security in industry could provide business-minded people with the impetus to move out of their comfort zone and link in with what's coming out of universities, according to O'Neill.

"We have seen this massive investment from government broadly in research infrastructure in the last 10 years and a lot of that research is starting to yield some really good, innovative new ideas, so that pipeline is pretty well primed," he says. "We might start to see some more business-minded people moving back from industry into the entrepreneurial space – people with management and business development and sales experience who are willing to take a punt.

"So the hope is now there's a bit more pull on our bioincubator facilities in universities and we could start to see some of those more established companies move out into a bigger space and make room for new companies coming through."

To encourage the process, EI set up the Business Partners Programme last December, drawing in 190 applicants from business to consult research-based projects in the hope that the exposure will keep the commercialisation stream flowing.

"The business people can advise how to move the project forward or partner with them themselves," explains O'Neill. "It's to partner business people with the best new ideas that are coming out of our universities.