Business Plan, Part 1

I have been discussing the future of my life a lot with my friends as of late and we have been working on a business plan for the next few years. The following are my ideas for how our business will materialize.

The idea for our business:

A biotech/pharmaceutical company that will develop two types of drugs and will work on gene-therapies. The first, and foremost priority, will be the profitable drugs that work on human aesthetics and anti-aging, such as hair loss drugs, wrinkle creams, etc. Through my years of research, and particularly my work in Seattle with skin diseases and wound healing I have worked out the molecular mechanisms that I believe are highly important in management of aging skin. A lot of those molecular signals in the skin and hair do not have drugs that have been created yet to mediate the effects and those drugs will be worth multi-billions of dollars. Developing these drugs by first determining the structure of the important molecules by utilizing biophysical techniques such as x-ray spectroscopy and 3D-NMR will be my goal in the next several years of my PhD program.

The second set of of drugs will be cancer drugs. I have been very closely working with stem cells and cancer for the last few years here in Boston and have come to a few conclusions as to where the future of cancer technology is going and I plan to exploit this knowledge for use in drug therapies. The cancer line of work will help in getting initial funding for the start-up through governmental grants.

So that is the basic idea of what we will be doing but how are we going to get it going? Well, luckily, I have a head start on that as well. First of all the company will be co-founded by Ian and myself. Ian will be spending the next two years or so getting his MBA from Yale, MIT, or Duke. During that time he plans on acquiring the connections to get a lot of start-up funding through venture capitalists as well as the skills to manage a business such as this (and a lot of international business skills, which he is personally interested in, which can only be beneficial for us).

The next advantage we have is my father who has been working in the biotech industry and has a lot of connections with many companies, particularly on the west coast and has expressed interest in working with me to develop this company.

Ian's brother is a patent lawyer and will be extremely helpful in helping us patent our drugs and techniques (even if he doesn't want to be our lawyer he will certainly help his brother out in whatever ways he can).

And lastly, but definitely not least, our friend Seth has shown an interest in being our political lobbyist on the Hill in DC. He could potentially help get us pushed up on the list of FDA reviews and make our name more visible to grant agencies like NIH and NSF.


An ideal time line for getting the business going:

-In two years Ian will get his MBA, we will begin filing for business licenses and searching for venture capital.
-In four years (or so) I will get my PhD and hopefully have solved the structure of several important molecules in our body for which we will continue researching and developing drugs.
-Five years we will have our own lab space with the initial grant money and whatever capital we can muster.
-Ten years, our first drug will have passed clinical trials and be on course for FDA approval, we will have several other patents as well. The value of the company will start appreciating.
-15 years, we will sell the company for $800 million, at least.

Please help me along in this endeavor, if you have any suggestions or comments or would like to be apart of the whole start-up process then let me know.