The hype vs reality of VR enabled learning in pharma and biotech
Pandemic induced workplace disruptions have been keenly felt in employee training across pharmaceutical and biotech enterprises. Starting in March 2020 as traditional, instructor-led (or classroom type) training became infeasible, most pharma enterprises have vastly scaled up their eLearning infrastructure and content libraries. Along with its many advantages – from universal access through smartphones to affordability, […]
Training for compliance vs. Training to think
While you read this article, about 60 deviations will be logged within global GMP environments*. Half of them would have been caused by “human error”. Most of these will end with “retraining” as one of the corrective actions. How to deal with deviations caused by human error: Option 1) Classroom Training: with a trainer using a […]
Why do so many Indian startups seem to be founded by North Indian dudes?
Something jumped out at me in Yourstory magazine’s list of top 100 Indian startups and their founders. There seemed to be more Agarwals, Bansals, and Chadhas on there than in my high school class in Chandigarh. Were north Indians really more likely to start-up than their brothers and sisters down south? Why was the south – in […]
Quality training as the anti-Jugaad
Is India really running pharma and biotech sweatshops? India is the market leader in high quality generic medicine. The drugs that people from Africa to the Americas to Japan rely on to relieve ailment. But you probably haven’t heard of India’s market dominance. Instead, what you’ve likely heard of is quality lapses, squalid facilities, and […]
Fresh Biotech grads in India are being set up for an epic fail
One of the things I enjoy most is interacting with recent biotech graduates. I still remember how lost I was when I got out of college. Thrust into an Indian employment market with no biotech industry to speak of. But that was before explosive growth catapulted India’s biotech industry to the $11B it sits at […]
Want to increase your chances of start-up success? Lack focus.
I recently had an industry watcher tell me that the key ingredient to a start-up’s success is focus. You need to be focused like a laser on your product, objectives, financial plan and execute without distractions, he said. Apparently this is especially true for life sciences start-ups. I could not disagree more. Great scientists make […]
How one start-up caused a 4% drop in biotech stocks in a single day.
Lost in the recent Volkswagen mayhem is the carnage in Biotech based holdings. The iShares NASDAQ biotech index is down about 5% in the last week or so- much of it in a single day. Even crazier is the reason behind this precipitous fall. A little known anti-parasitic drug called Daraprim is used to treat very rare […]
The fallacy of “protecting your turf”
I’ve been getting Indian CROs on CRAMbridge over the last couple of weeks and am amazed by the breadth and depth of scientific talent they have in-house. With the right amount of direction from upper management, this can be leveraged to make these guys truly innovative biotech companies. But there’s one troubling thread that’s common […]
The one entrepreneur + VC story every biotech start-up should have in its DNA
The birth of the first biotech startup The mid-70s was to biotechnology what the late 60s was to rock music (except no one knew that’s what it would be called). Crazy scientists were working on crazy ideas and getting crazy results. Among them Herb Boyer, Stanley Cohen, Arthur Riggs, and Keiichi Itakura (among others) were […]