The myth of biotech uniqueness

Every biotech is unique in some way, but biotechs have far more in common than most care to admit. In this Kaleidoscope blog, we explore why broad claims of uniqueness can be detrimental to a biotech's path to market. If anything here resonates, please reach out!

Whether you’ve read the novel or not, you’ve likely heard the opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

And if you’re in tech, you’ve also probably heard Peter Thiel’s application of this in his own book, Zero to One:

“Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”

While we agree with the general sentiment, one of the most pervasive myths in biotech is that all happy companies are different. Most biotech companies - at least those within specific categories - are far more similar than they are unique. This may ruffle some feathers in an industry that prides itself on innovation. After all, aren't we all striving to do something that's never been done before? Go to any biotech website, and you'll see the same phrases peppered throughout: "breakthrough treatments”, “best-in-class", "multi-disciplinary approach" (just to name a few examples). 

These claims of uniqueness are made with genuine belief and enthusiasm. At Kaleidoscope, a large portion of our week is made up of meetings and conversations with biotech leadership teams. We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve heard a team say “we are very unique, so we do things in this XYZ very different way” – except that ‘XYZ’ differentiator is something we heard the previous week from another biotech team in the same space.

More often than not, the core processes, challenges, and structures across the biotechs we work with are strikingly similar, and it’s not surprising. Consider the typical biotech pipeline: from initial discovery through preclinical testing, clinical trials, regulatory approval, and finally to market. This general structure is nearly universal, regardless of whether a company is developing small molecule drugs, biologics, or gene therapies. Similarly, many of the "unique" challenges we hear about in biotech are actually industry-wide issues:

• Scaling up production: Whether it's a small molecule drug or a complex biologic, the challenges of moving from lab-scale to commercial-scale production are remarkably similar across companies.
• Navigating clinical trials: The complexities of patient recruitment, trial design, and data management are shared across the industry.
• Attracting top talent: In a competitive field, every biotech company struggles with how to attract and retain the best scientists and leaders.

There are countless more examples: managing design run cycles, navigating regulatory hurdles, consistently fighting to secure rounds of funding - these are all common threads that run through the fabric of the industry. 

On the one hand, the drive to be unique in biotech is understandable and deeply rooted. Building a company is a singular experience that is markedly different from the conventional careers most people pursue. And, when you make the decision to build an early stage company or to join one, you’re generally motivated to do so by a desire to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved before.

To add to this, biotech is an inherently competitive industry that doesn’t incentivize sharing information, be it struggles or successes – we’ve even met companies who don’t want to share information between their own internal teams because ‘Chinese Walls’ fuel more competition! All of this can easily lead to the belief that your company faces unique challenges that no one else could possibly understand.

But this perspective is a double-edged sword. While it can sometimes encourage innovation, we’ve found that – by viewing common challenges as unique experiences – companies can isolate themselves, missing out on chances to learn from, or alongside, peers in the industry who are going through the exact same thing.

Over-indexing on innovation can also lead to a "not invented here" syndrome, where companies insist on developing everything in-house – because, in their thinking, unique problems call for unique solutions. For instance, a company might spend years developing a proprietary lab information management system when several off-the-shelf solutions already exist. Or they might insist on creating unique clinical trial protocols when standardized approaches could speed up the process. Always trying to reinvent the wheel is a dangerous game. It absorbs time, human resources, cash – not to mention the opportunity cost of all the other meaningful initiatives your team could’ve been working on instead.

We’re growing more and more convinced that the most successful biotech companies don’t try to be unique in every aspect, but know where and when to differentiate. They concentrate their uniqueness in their core science, and aren’t afraid to partner or adopt industry standards and best practices everywhere else. Not to mention, acknowledging the similarities between biotech companies can open doors to more meaningful collaborations and knowledge sharing. Industry consortia like the Innovative Medicines Initiative in Europe show how companies can work together on pre competitive research, solving common challenges more efficiently than any single company could alone. In turn, this culture of open exchange can accelerate innovation across the entire industry. When companies are willing to share learnings about common challenges - be it in manufacturing, regulatory affairs, or clinical development - we all stand to benefit.

So, the next time you hear a claim of uniqueness in biotech, it might be worth asking: is this truly a novel challenge, or an opportunity to learn from and contribute to the collective wisdom of the industry? In doing so, we might find that we're all more alike - and more connected - than we initially thought.

If you want to chat more about anything we wrote, or you’re interested in finding a way to work together, let us know!