Christopher Porter
As the inventor of over 15 patent families, Professor Christopher Porter knows a thing or two about pursuing enterprising avenues to optimise research outcomes. By stepping outside of academia to leverage industry knowledge and expertise, Professor Porter has both supported the development of trailblazing innovations in the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences and advanced his own efforts to find solutions to problems surrounding the absorption of poorly water soluble, highly lipophilic drugs.
What does it take to be an entrepreneurial researcher?
Firstly, be an excellent researcher.
My experience has been that our best entrepreneurial researchers are our best researchers, full stop. The idea that researchers are either entrepreneurs or fantastic basic scientists is – I think – a furphy.
Entrepreneurial researchers often have an additional lens that they look through when thinking about their data and ask slightly different questions on top of the fundamental science. Often this requires them to look at much longer timescale and much broader audiences.
Planning and forethought are really important alongside the spark that can identify and be passionate about product opportunities that no one has thought of before.
What were the stand-out moments in your career that spurred enterprising collaborations with industry?
I was lucky to be engaged with industry early – my post doc was sponsored by GSK. I was also pre-conditioned in some respects to work with industry as my career ambition through degree and graduate school was always to go and work in Big Pharma (as most of my PhD peers did).
As I advanced in my academic career, I moved from working with industry on their challenges, to looking to invent new technologies and then work with industry to progress them.
When it comes to entrepreneurship, it’s very true that you can’t be what you can’t see. I was inspired to see innovation and spin outs happen from within the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences relatively early in my career. When I was establishing my own lab, I shared space with the group that spun out Acrux in the late ‘90s and it was fascinating talking to the scientists that were taking that path.
What challenges did you have to overcome at the beginning of your journey?
When I started my career as a drug delivery scientist, there was the perception that working with industry was ‘soft science’ and not what the smart people did. That attitude was wrong then and still is – and thankfully is less prevalent now.
Having worked with Pharma for 30 years, I can tell you they are very smart, and academics who always think they are the smartest voice in the room are usually wrong! A little humility goes a long way.
What advice would you give to your young self on how to have an enterprising mindset?
Getting outside the typical academic bubble is very important, otherwise it can become all consuming.
I was lucky to build my networks outside of academia and within industry pretty early in my career – but if I was to give myself one piece of advice it would be to talk more to the folks in the start up sector and build those networks. They will help provide the advice and encouragement to look seriously but carefully at innovation opportunities.
What’s the best lesson you have learned on your journey?
Your reputation is everything. You need to be brutally honest with yourself about whether something really works and does so robustly. Validate everything.
The first thing most external groups will do if they are thinking about licensing, partnering or investing is to go repeat your experiments in another lab. Your whole program is then dependent on how reproducible it is. This is a long pathway and you don’t want to get to the end of it and realise something was flawed early and you didn’t push because you were so keen for it to succeed.
There are many studies that have shown that the majority of ‘breakthrough’ findings published in the top journals were not able to be reproduced when industry took them on board. This is not to say that they were wrong or made up – but that they were probably dependent on variable models. That can be enough to get a paper published - but a company looking to invest upwards of $10 million on an idea is going to prod it very hard before taking the leap.
That said, if you are very rigorous with your data, and in building confidence in your students and postdocs to give you the bad news as well as the good, then you can build a reputation that will pay off time and again.