'QB3 Startup in a Box' helps UC entrepreneurs launch companies
Biophysicist Adam Abate, PhD, showed up seven months late to his new faculty position at UCSF with an unusual excuse: he was busy setting up the technology for a new company based on one of the 10 patents he had received as a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard University.
Five months later, the 31-year-old physicist-turned-bioengineer was ready to start a second company, applying the science of microfluidics—a combination of engineering, physics and the chemistry of fluids on a sub-millimeter scale—to creating low-cost cancer diagnostics. This time, though, he was on his own. He had no money to start it and no legal support, and as a faculty member, he couldn’t even call himself a chief executive officer to apply for funding to hire a real one.
“In your training as a postdoc, you learn a lot about science, but you don’t learn much about commercialization,” Abate said, noting that he was lucky to have studied under a business-savvy professor, who had pushed him to patent unique inventions. “Now, I’m a professor – I want to spend my time doing research and building my lab and teaching. Unless I was willing to spend 100 percent of my time on the company, I wouldn’t even know what to do to start it.”