Interview with Juan Carlos Lopez, Founder, and Andy Marshall, Partner of Haystack Sciences By Dennis Ford, Founder & CEO Life Science Nation.
Dennis Ford |
Juan Carlos Lopez |
Andy Marshall |
Haystack Science is a boutique consulting firm specialized in identifying and vetting the translational potential of academic projects and preclinical companies. We met with Juan Carlos Lopez and Andrew Marshall, two former Nature editors who founded Haystack, and spoke about how they help academic startups maximize their chances of success and their potential to attract seed and early-stage capital.
Dennis Ford (DF): What is the problem you are addressing?
Juan Carlos Lopez (JC): We’re interested in the disconnect between early-stage science from academic centers and the data needed to make therapeutic projects compelling for clinical development and investment. It’s the age-old problem known as the valley of death.
Andy Marshall (AM): Or the valley of debt if you’ve put your life savings into it! At Haystack, we appreciate that company building is a long and expensive road. Unless you’ve traveled that road several times, understanding the entire path for your product from beginning to end – foundational research to clinical development – can be hard. You need to think about the whole path to be successful. We provide feedback and pointers, knowing what investors and pharma think about when evaluating opportunities, so that a project has the greatest chance of attracting capital.
DF: What differentiates Haystack from other consultants in the space?
JC: Haystack’s partners spent a good part of our careers – Andy at Nature Biotech and I at Nature Medicine – evaluating a vast range of translational research and technologies from across the globe. We know what outstanding research looks like. If you want that perspective and overview of the science behind your project and where you need to take it, we are your guys. Together we’ve worked in pharma, venture capital, and foundations, so we know what projects need to be successful in those arenas.
AM: Yes. And Haystack can make introductions. We can help you find the right investors, prepare for that one interview with them (because you won’t normally get more than one chance), and maximize your chances of success.
DF: Who are you offering your services to?
JC: Our primary clients are academic founders, TTOs, and CEOs of biotech startups in preclinical development. Haystack also helps investors and foundations assess technologies and opportunities and prioritize assets in areas of interest to their portfolios.
DF: What are some of challenges for early-stage projects or biotech startups?
AM: A lot of research published in Cell, Science or Nature has that last paragraph: “And this finding may lead to the development of new therapies…” But building a successful company around that foundational science is a long haul. Experiments take long and don’t always reproduce. Competition and technological advances can make your program obsolete. It is hard to predict from mice what works in humans. You need to orient your scientific, human and financial capital to reach first-in-human studies as efficiently and economically as possible.
JC: At Haystack, we see a lot of advanced projects aimed at wrong indications, missing key data or seeking to enter crowded markets. We can highlight areas where a project needs to refocus or correct course to maximize its chances of success.
AM: Our feedback is also objective and unbiased. There’s a myth that academics and TTOs have broad access to industry expertise in their local ecosystem. Sure, they can access that advice, but the fact is that feedback is nearly always informal and cursory. Pharma and investors are not in the business of giving you detailed feedback, they have other priorities. We, on the other hand, provide formal, objective feedback that is actionable.
JC: Yes, this is a key point. There’s usually a big delta between what people in industry want and where an academic project is. Investors don’t generally give specific feedback because they don’t see the point. Telling a founder which key experiments are missing isn’t a good use of their time because these experiments are costly and take a long time. By then, the investor’s dry powder is gone, and the fund’s strategic goals may have changed. Or a pharma company may have shifted its focus away from your therapeutic area.
DF: What services are you offering to founders or startup CEOs who come to you?
JC: Part of our passion for this area is for more entrepreneurs to succeed. This is why Haystack put together our Therapeutics Evaluation Form. It asks the questions that a pharma company would ask before launching a drug-discovery program or an investor would ask before financing a project. It is a free tool, and we regard it as partly educational. Once you complete the form, we send you back a numerical score (the Haystack Score). This reflects the potential of a project to reach clinical development and to attract further investment. It consists of around 45 questions, many of which require simple Yes/No answers and will take ~30-40 minutes to complete.
AM: If, after filling out the form, you want to delve deeper into how to improve your project, Haystack can create a custom ‘gap analysis’ that will help prioritize next steps. And if the project is ready for investment, we can introduce you to investors who might be interested in your venture. There’s a direct relationship between the likelihood of clinical development and the likelihood of attracting investment.
DF: Why do you think so few early-stage therapeutic startups are sustainable?
JC: Flawed or irreproducible science, inexperienced team, lack of capitalization, attracting the wrong investors. Also, novel technologies or new therapeutic modalities take much longer to translate into products. There are just too many unanswered questions because of the novelty. Most companies run out of money just trying to answer those questions.
AM: Yes, first-time academic founders sometimes underestimate the difference between an academic project and an industry project. Academic science is all about following new findings and opening new lines of investigation. That is the antithesis of drug development. Translation is about reduction to practice. Removing as much risk as possible about the technological, biological and clinical aspects. At Nature, we used to place a great deal of emphasis on conceptual novelty. In industry, you need enough novelty to get IP protection but, for everything else, you want corroborating evidence and as little novelty as possible to reduce risk.
DF: You mentioned tech-transfer offices. What kinds of services are you offering them?
AM: TTOs at elite institutions have extensive resources to stress test their portfolios and interface with industry, especially in Boston and San Francisco. But there are a lot of TTOs that are understaffed, underfunded and underrecognized in many parts of the USA and beyond. We help those teams prioritize opportunities and provide them with an independent assessment of the technical quality, clinical potential and commercial interest of projects in their portfolio so they can prioritize which of them to move forward.
JC: Similarly, for foundations and patient organizations funding academic science, the aim is often to move translational projects to the point where they are mature enough to attract private financing. Haystack provides advice on steering projects and can help develop the right strategy for a non-profit organization to maximize the impact of its grants.
DF: What’s your plan for Haystack this year?
JC: We are seeking to get our message out to the wider startup and TTO communities. For the first part of 2025, Haystack is expanding the client base and offering some discounts on services. We’re actively looking to expand our reach beyond the US, so we’d welcome enquiries from ventures across the globe. Anyone interested in working with us can reach out to info@haystacksci.com or visit Haystack’s website.
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