For faculty who want to translate basic research findings into applications for health, environment and agriculture, moving ideas from concept to application presents a real challenge. Even the most promising findings face hurdles. Mikael Elias knows from experience how difficult it can be. Now, as the new Cargill Chair in Biotechnology Innovation, he hopes to help clear the path for others to do the same. For Elias, it comes down to connecting scientists with entrepreneurial aspirations to the right information and resources at the right time.
Elias, a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics and affiliated with the BioTechnology Institute, is uniquely positioned to lead in this critical area. His credentials as an innovator are well established. He received the University’s Early Innovator Award in 2017, and he launched a successful startup acquired in 2021. More recently, he helped start the College’s popular biotechnology minor with an eye to supporting the next generation of scientific innovators. He is also lead scientist for the Minnesota BioInnovation Accelerator (MnBA), a technology maturation hub that funds translational research. He is currently wrapping up a doctorate in business administration to round out his expertise. He shared his vision for biotechnology innovation and education.
Q: As the new Cargill Chair, what contribution do you think you can make toward building the University’s biotech ecosystem?
A: My goal is to clear the path for other faculty and students who are looking to translate their findings into real-world applications. I want to leverage my own experience navigating these waters to connect researchers with the right information and expertise at the most critical times. Essentially, I want to help colleagues avoid "reinventing the wheel" by reducing many of the barriers to commercialization.
Q: What are the most significant hurdles you see researchers facing when moving from the lab to commercialization?
A: There are many barriers, and unfortunately, most of us in academia have no formal training on how to handle them. Beyond managing intellectual property, funding acquisition, training and expertise gaps, major hurdles for biotechnologies are to delineate clear paths toward scaling and regulatory approval. Because many of these issues are unique to the specific technology, they can be very difficult to navigate without prior experience and connection with relevant resources and experts.
Q: You’ve argued that the traditional "linear" model of technology transfer doesn’t accurately reflect how translation works. Why is that?
A: The traditional theory follows a linear path from lab work to prototyping to scaling, and finally regulation. The problem is that if you wait until the end to think about the last steps, you may realize you’ve invested time, effort and resources using a sub-optimal system. For the production of a molecule or a protein, this could be the use of a host organism that isn't recognized by regulatory agencies, or a purification strategy that does not scale, for example. This can force you to redo years of work. I believe we must ask scaling and regulatory questions as early as possible to ensure that the research is designed accordingly from the very beginning. Even when doing fundamental science unrelated to any direct application, I think about scaling right at the design phase of our experiments. I ask: "Could this be scalable? Is there a foreseeable path to regulatory approval?" The important thing is not to have everything figured out from inception (it’s not feasible), but to think of plausible trajectories that will guide research.
Q: You talk about the need for faculty with experience translating their research to act as mentors for researchers just starting out. Why is that important?
A: Since our primary mission is to train and mentor students, we perform research differently from industry. This has unique strengths, but also unique constraints to ensure students' success that industry peers might not fully understand. We also work within an institution with specific requirements around intellectual property, and often the vocabulary used by industry and by academics is quite different. Faculty who have successfully navigated these hurdles are better positioned to advise colleagues on how to align commercial goals with our academic mission, and we are fortunate in CBS to host numerous talented faculty-entrepreneurs.
Q: What are your thoughts on how to prepare students for careers in the biotech industry?
A: I helped launch the biotechnology minor because it is crucial to integrate business and project management, among other skills, into the biology curriculum to best prepare students to enter the biotech workforce. Moving forward, I hope to help develop a more integrated experience for students that covers an introductory course about the business of biotech to pitching projects to investors. I believe that students express interest in the biotech industry, and such a curriculum would both convey how research is performed in industry and allow students interested in going deeper to explore potential projects. For example, after a business of biotech intro course, they could take the Headwaters healthcare startup course where they learn the foundations of planning and launching a healthcare startup while applying the learning to their own startup. From there, they could tap into existing programs such as MIN-Corps to develop their ideas further. There’s so much opportunity here at the University of Minnesota. My goal is to help connect the dots.