Africa Biotech Conversations

In this episode, I spoke with Raman Sehgal, serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Ramarketing, a marketing agency, which is headquartered in the UK, Northeast with a presence in Boston, Massachusetts. It is now a multimillion dollar, recently private equity backed international digital design and content marketing agency with over 60 employees and growing. They support clients in the life science space across the world to raise their profile and generate leads.

Raman is also an international bestselling author of the book, The Floundering Founder. He's a keynote speaker, a blogger as well as a member of Forbes agency council. Moreover, Raman co-founded Lead Candidate, a specialist talent acquisition partner for the pharma and biotech outsourcing space and he’s the host of the industry leading pharmaceutical podcast, Molecule to Market, where he takes listeners inside the outsourcing space of the drug development and manufacturing ecosystem.

We talked about Raman’s background and how from a very early age of 7 he got exposed to business life through his parents’ convenient store. He tells the inspirational story of how he was given the opportunity to start Ramarketing by his employers who became his first clients. After 13 years of Ramarketing, Raman shares the secret to their growth as well as some of the learnings and marketing considerations that should be made for and by biotech startups.

In his book, The Floundering Founder, Raman shares real-life, practical, doable lessons from all his learnings, neatly packaged into 24 valuable insights. The book will help founders, entrepreneurs and CEOs find focus and direction to navigate forward in their lives and business with renewed intentionality and purpose. The first 50 pages are available for free on www.ramansehgal.com.

Raman and I also talk about the value of podcasting in the life science ecosystem. His podcast Molecule to Market now has over 100 episodes of valuable content. Consistency, commitment and discipline are key to Raman’s achievements on all these fronts.

In this episode I spoke with Dr Deon Neveling, the co-founder and CEO of Biotikum Ltd, which is a spin-off company of the Stellenbosch university in South Africa, that researches, develops and produces microbial additives for the agricultural industry to promote sustainable farming.

During his studies, Deon developed a multistrain probiotic for chicken which they realized could be commercialized because the chicken industry is very well known for the unsustainable use of antibiotics as a preventative measure to fight pathogens. They observed there was a gap in the market for an African company capable of manufacturing microbial additives which also helps curb the spread of antimicrobial resistance genes.

We spoke about:

• Deon’s journey from PhD to starting Biotikum as a University spin-out company
• Skills and personality traits that enable success in entrepreneurship
• How to get around the most stated challenge to African biotech start-ups, funding
• Upcoming trend of biotechnology in Africa

Get to know the story behind the company Mzansi Meat Co. and its remarkable CFO Tasneem Karodia who combines a love for flying airplanes, rock climbing, and changing the world by changing our food systems.

A bachelor of business science in management studies, majoring in accounting and finance from the university of Cape town, South Africa, a chartered accountant qualification, a postgraduate degree in accounting, and working at Bain and company, a global management consulting firm have equipped Tasneem to excel in her role at the biotech start-up.

She shares with us how following her passion for sustainability in food systems and her curiosity led her to join co-founder Brett Thompson at Mzansi Meat to pioneer the cultivated meat industry in Africa. Hers is an example of how a company’s branding can attract remarkable talent. Tasneem recons that retaining talent also requires focus on selection for mission-driven individuals.

We discussed:

• the challenge of being a new industry in Africa
• leveraging extended timelines due to technical challenges towards public education and enabling market readiness for innovative products like cultivated meat
• the specialized skillsets required to be successful in the biotech industry especially in a start-up environment
• how the increasing need for food security in Africa makes it likely that we’ll leapfrog in the Food tech space in Africa similar to what is happening in Fintech.

Follow Mzansi Meat (https://www.mzansimeat.co/) on all social media platforms to stay updated on all they are doing in the Food tech space in Africa.

Smart biotech is a biotech startup in South Africa involved in the development of antigens and antibodies used in animal health vaccines and diagnostics as well as the commercialization of scientifically tested herbal products. The aim is to provide much more effective diagnostic and vaccine products that are specific to the strain of diseases in Africa.

Dr Sibongile Gumbi, founder and CEO of Smart Biotech saw that it was important for Africa to build the capacity and the capability of manufacturing some of the technology needed to address the animal and human health diseases that are prevalent on the continent. She also believes biotech like other technologies has the capacity to improve a country’s development. Some of her tips to be successful as a biotech entrepreneur include:

• Having a healthy appetite for risk taking
• Enjoying entrepreneurship
• Have an open-mind and be open to new learnings
• Meet each challenge as it comes along and keep trying new ways to solve problems
• Rely on your team
• Have healthy team dynamics

As a former academic researcher, the operations manager Dr Carin Basson recommends building a network of diverse expertise and personalities while you are in the university environment and learn how to work with people. In her experience, a PhD equips you with the mentality that problems are surmountable, the skillset to learn new skills smartly by relying on other people's experience, and being able to request input from your network.

Smart Biotech is owned 100% by black women, the investors are women, and they rely on black women owned businesses as service providers because Dr Sibongile believes she gets 110% from women. She is intentional about giving women a space to demonstrate what they can do in the biotech industry.

Setting up a biotech lab is very costly and can be the bottleneck to start something new especially in LMICs in Africa. BioCiTi is taking that off the hands of prospective biotech entrepreneurs to make sure that businesses can transition the so-called chasms of product development and the business cycle.

I interviewed Anesu Conrad Moyo (PhD.), Laboratory Manager at BioCiTi Laboratory, and Dheepak Maharajh, BioCiTi executive cluster head on this episode of the Africa Biotech Conversations podcast.

From a joint desire to create a biotech future for South Africa, ONEBIO (a previous guest on the ABCs podcast) and CiTi, the oldest tech incubator on the African continent created the nonprofit company, BioCiTi in 2019. The shared model with the open access labs has been a game changer for the biotech ecosystem, as it's the first open access lab on the African continent.

As an open access lab they do not take equity nor look to take any of the intellectual property of their tenants. If startups go to a university, they need to look at sharing the intellectual property. Contract research organizations tend to charge them a substantial amount of money to do the research on their behalf.

BioCiTi is making impact not only to startups and entrepreneurs, but across the entire length and breadth of the biotech ecosystem in South Africa. The BioCiTi model makes it easier for biotech entrepreneurs to pay rental access to their lab, have full access to all the equipment and have a freedom to develop and refine their products and concepts in their own timeframes. BioCiTi also offers contractual research services to people that do not have the scientific technical know-how but have an idea. The other emerging need is that larger businesses, SMEs, and even medium-sized businesses have a need to access a lab, but they don't need to have their own lab. BioCiTi can partner with these businesses in research and development without having to outlay that large amount of costs.

Thanks to the amount of innovation that is coming out from universities, the increased interest in setting up biotech businesses globally post-COVID, and with a lot of businesses using the COVID vaccine development in the Western Cape province of South Africa as a springboard for emerging into the biotech sector, BioCiTi has seen massive growth over its 3 years of existence.

BioCiTi will be moving to bigger and better premises on the 1st of June 2022 to expand their labs even further and also add additional equipment that can help entrepreneurs navigate to the next level of their business. Their continuous growth is dependent on securing funding. Dheepak aims to grow open access labs outside of the Western Cape province, as well as into the African continent. Mzansi Meat and De Novo Dairy are two of many tenants at BioCiti currently.

Listen to this episode of the ABCs podcast and find out about:

• internship opportunities,
• criteria to become a tenant, for graduating from the program, and to access their thriving alumni post-graduation,
• models for purchasing niche equipment by incubatees or tenant,
• what skills and personality traits are required to thrive in a biotechnology environment,
• some of the trends that Dheepak and Anesu see coming up in biotech in Africa, and
• the existing gaps in South Africa’s biotech ecosystem that you can fill to enable a thriving bioeconomy.

How do you go from a full-time academic researcher and lecturer to the CEO of a biotech company in Africa?

Dr Mauritz Venter found a way of combining his passion and curiosity for both science and business by co-founding a biotech company, Azargen biotechnologies, following a successful career as an academic lecturer and researcher. His exposure to business magazines from his father who worked in the corporate sector and an internship in a business consultancy after a course for bioentrepreneurs by the then Cape biotech hub allowed him to pursue this entrepreneurial journey. He recounts how they were able to establish the company before the advent of incubators and accelerators and shares valuable skills that allowed them to succeed. I like that he mentioned how he followed the emotional pull that business and genetics had on him without necessarily having clarity of where this would lead.

He believes in hands-on learning from real life experiences provided you take time to reflect on feedback you receive from colleagues, investors, mentors and even family members. Also important to his upskilling was continuous education by immersing himself in business literature and taking short courses at business schools.

According to Dr Venter, if you decide to get into the industry with the highest risk but also the highest reward, which is the biopharmaceutical industry, you need to find like-minded people who are willing to work hard and give it their all. It would develop your character and you should infuse your values and make sure it is meaningful and worthy. The most important skills you will need are:

• to tolerate uncertainty
• the willingness to embrace complexity
• not to depend on textbook frameworks and theories, but to really be rooted in reality
• to have a deep understanding of risk
• relationship management
• understand how innovation works in other countries, but also in Africa
• get clarity of the desire of what you want to achieve and address the question on why did you are starting
• keep up your mental and physical health

Some of the achievements of Azargen to date include a patent for a therapeutic candidate for respiratory disease which they have been able to express in a plant-based system. And the other one is a licensing candidate, a monoclonal antibody for auto immune disease that they've just completed a preclinical phase in the US. They are one of a few African biotechs that received feedback from the US FDA. In parallel they have entered the synthetic biology space with a platform technology for scalable manufacturing of biologics in therapeutics, biofuels and the cultivated meat industry.

We also explored the trends that are likely to impact biotech in Africa in the near future such as bio-manufacturing capability, digital health, precision medicine, synthetic biology.

Listen to find out Dr Venter's answer to my question on what role an MBA plays in becoming a biotech entrepreneur? At what stage do you need that certification? Is it when you're starting or in the course of it? Do you absolutely need it?

In the build programs they co-create concepts with founders, offering a lot of support while in the scale programs they act as an accelerator for already established businesses at the scale stage. 

Information on how to apply to the programs is available on the FFA website. They provide cash, training, mentorship, and coaching. 

Sona also has a blog called "Biology by Code". Her blog is about biotech in Africa, startups, health tech, entrepreneurship and a little bit of philosophy. 

I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation on

• What startups and entrepreneurs are of interest to FFA?
• What areas they are interested in investing in?
• What skill(s) are most useful to possess as a biotech entrepreneur in Africa?
• What trends are currently having the most impact on biotech in Africa and how is that likely to play out over the next few years?
• Why and how investors should prioritize biotech in Africa

In this episode, I spoke to Atherton Mutombwera, CEO and founder of Hutano diagnostics Ltd about his journey from Zimbabwe, through a BPharm degree and a MSc in Nanomedicine in South Africa, to an MBA at the University of Oxford, UK. He told stories about how he was inspired by a sick parent and his desire to get out of the shadow of a sibling combined with his curiosity and ability to collaborate with others, to how his MSc research project formed the basis of his company. The company aims to develop a modular configurable platform using aptamers in lateral flow devices.

Aptamers are attractive because they are easy to make, stable and can be reliably produced without batch variation. The company is currently focused on developing techniques to immobilize aptamers on nitrocellulose which is the main technical hurdle to widespread use of aptamers in lateral flow devices.

Atherton offered his views, wrapped in personal stories, on networking and relationship building as a useful skill for entrepreneurs as well as the trends that are likely to impact the biotech space in the medium to long term.

In the first episode of the ABC podcast for 2022, I spoke with the co-founders of the AOM group Brett Lyndall Singh and Clarisse Manishimwe, as well as David Songotu, the Administrating Manager of AOM Group’s Internship program.

We discuss how AOM Group aims to resuscitate African healthcare innovation and create SDG youth employment by transforming life science on the continent through research & development.

Power couple Busi and Neo Moloi of Sawubona mycelium, a biotech startup in Centurion, South Africa, spoke with me on:

• How they make their relationship work as husband and wife as well as CBO and CEO respectively
• Capitalizing on their knowledge of mushrooms and experience with fermentation technology to make natural products at large scale, low cost, and sustainably such as beta glucans useful in the cosmetic, nutraceutical, and pharmaceutical industries.
• Opportunities to leverage the gap in the supply chain caused by the Covid-19 pandemic
• Collaboration with state-owned research platforms like the CSIR and TIA (technology innovation agency) for R&D.
• How to raise stage-relevant funding
• Leveraging collaboration and networking in the biotech ecosystems in South Africa for support and resources
• Making use of the department of trade, industry and competition for market research data
• What are the most valuable skills to be a biotech entrepreneur in Africa?
• Making use of coaching and accelerator programs to gain entrepreneurial/business skills

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