Business investigations of Rig
We evaluated the feasibility of building a business case and commercializing our conditional RNAi system. This started with our interview with several experts in this field. Based on their suggestions, we then tried to add a mathematical model to simulate the progression of liver cancer and the cost-effectiveness of our product. And we have drawn up a business plan to summarize the points we considered of the entrepreneurship of our project.
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Step 1
Interview with Professor Yongjun Liu
Professor Yongjun Liu is an MBA supervisor at Nanjing University, graduate supervisor in Pharmaco-Economics at China Pharmaceutical University and was a visiting scholar at North Carolina State University. He also manages an investment company here located in Nanjing. He is experienced in industrial economics research. Professor Liu’s team is currently promoting CAR-T therapy for solid tumors, including liver cancer.
We interviewed Professor Liu on campus on June 25th
Topics include:
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Q: What do you think are the economic characteristics of modern gene therapy and biological therapy?
A: They are expensive but can be very effective. One must judge a product by both its price and its effect. To fully consider this, a cost-benefit analysis is sometimes necessary. For example, if a drug can prolong the patient’s survival time by three years while another can do ten years, it makes such a great difference for the patient that even if the latter product is much more expensive, he/her would probably still favor it. As for the affordability, modern biologics’ prices are getting lower and lower each year as the technology is improving so fast, medical insurance system also adapting, so I guess we shouldn’t consider this as a significant problem.
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Q: How do you choose projects for investment?
A: We try to avoid projects that are too popular when selecting projects for investment.
During the interview, we also asked about the future of genetic drugs. Professor Liu affirmed the prospect of synthetic biology and showed enthusiasm towards the future development of genetic drugs. Currently gene therapy has only been applied in rare diseases or lymphomas and there remains a big gap for genetic drugs to be ever used against solid tumors. This project shows our effort toward filling such a gap and in theory it is a promising strategy for the treatment of liver cancer.
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What did we learn?
The pharmaceutical industry tends to avoid investing in over-popular products as to reduce the intensity of competition and to keep the profits as big as possible. This indicates that newly-developed, investment-seeking projects need to be unique and innovative.
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As a matter of fact, our project has been retrofitted to the possible side effects of canonical RNA interference and has adopted a new target, which is at the forefront of current gene therapy.
Professor Liu also told us that it is very important to look at the market and competitors when evaluating our own project, during which adjustments should be made according to the current demand of the market.
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What did we add?
Indeed, only by conducting a complete cost-effectiveness analysis can we evaluate whether the project would be cost-effective. It also would allow us to have a deeper understanding of the current situation of liver cancer treatment. Therefore, we decided to establish a mathematical model to summarize several existing liver cancer drugs and to set up a reasonable price range for our project.
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According to Professor Liu's suggestion, it is critical to improve the project towards the market’s demand. Only projects that are accepted by the market are worthwhile for further development. Therefore, we needed to systematically identify our own strengths through the comparison with existing drugs.
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Step 2 Write a business plan
Interviewing the entrepreneurial tutor Pengbo Shang
In the process of writing a business plan, we interviewed the entrepreneurial tutor Pengbo Shang. Pengbo Shang is the deputy secretary of the China Education Innovation School-Enterprise Alliance (Production Alliance). He’s also a career coach of Tsinghua University and a Distinguished Research Fellow of London Business School. He himself has been engaged in health care and medical device industry for more than ten years.
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Since currently no genetic drug is available for the treatment of liver cancer, we found it difficult to make a reference when analyzing the market. In the interview, Professor Shang told us that we should instead focus on the existing chemotherapies and make comparison with them. We can also analyze the general situation of genetic drugs, from which we can learn about patients receiving such drugs (their feedback, etc.) and the general market. By summarizing the information, we would still be able to somehow predict our products’ development in the market.
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At the same time, he emphasizes that timing is the key when it comes to medical products. We need to carefully consider the time required for every step (research, clinical trials, marketing, etc.) and include them in the scheme. The consequential timetable then becomes an important item for investors to evaluate the efficiency of our team. To attract great market share, we would also want to make the development cycle as short as possible.
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The second stop is the venue of molecular biology. In this level, you can engage in Dodgeball of gene. Choose a theme, then knock the uncorrelated cups down with a ball. For example, in transcription theme, there are seven cups marked with telomerase, enhancer, promoter and so on. So you need to knock down the cups labeled with telomerase.
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At the same time, he emphasizes that timing is the key when it comes to medical products. We need to carefully consider the time required for every step (research, clinical trials, marketing, etc.) and include them in the scheme. The consequential timetable then becomes an important item for investors to evaluate the efficiency of our team. To attract great market share, we would also want to make the development cycle as short as possible.
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Now, we arrive at outdoor venue of the biochemistry theme. There are two tasks, Draw something and Bio-hopscotch, that you need to accomplish. Draw something is the game that one person draw some required biochemical terms like t-RNA, chromosome, and the other guess what the picture is. One who paints can't speak or write any words. Bio-hopscotch test the gamer's knowledge of biochemical reactions. You can choose lower difficulty of Draw something for five questions to match higher difficulty of Bio-hopscotch of glycolysis and Kreb's cycle. Or higher difficulty of Draw something for eight questions match lower difficulty of Bio-hopscotch of Hatch-Slack Cycle. This outdoor activity also attracted many passersby to engage in it.
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What did we achieve?
We completed the business plan in which we conducted an analysis of the market as well as possible competitors and a cost-effectiveness analysis. We understood how high-tech products could stand out from the liver cancer drug market, and saw some unexpected strength and potential of our project.
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