BioFinland Pitching Competition motivated Arina Värä to develop and pitch her business idea based on her iCANDOC doctoral research project – with winning results
Arina Värä, a doctoral researcher at iCANDOC Doctoral Education Pilot in Precision Cancer Medicine studies Boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) induced immune responses and novel opportunities for combination therapy in HNSCC in the oncogenomics research group led by Outi Monni, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki.
The BioFinland Pitching Competition was organized by the Finnish Bioindustries together with Terkko Health Hub, and HiLIFE for students across Finnish universities to pitch their ideas in biotech and life science fields. For Arina, the competition sounded like a great way to try something completely different from purely academic pitching and presenting, especially since she had been incubating her idea for possible business pathway from her PhD project since last December. Arina tells that the whole process started from a simple thought exercise she got during her brief Winter break. Arina has been involved in BNCT research since her MSc project and she thought about how her research findings could contribute to society. Arina explains that BNCT is not a mainstream cancer treatment, but it has a lot of potential as a combination treatment, because it is targeted to tumor cells and therefore, the treatment saves normal cells unlike many other cancer treatments. She had realized that the more involved you are in the academic world, the narrower your perspective related to your research area can become, confined mainly to pure academic research. As a thought, she started evaluating how her PhD project could be more useful from the business perspective, and from here the idea of a biomarker-driven decision-making platform started.
Arina describes that although she does have previous experience in pitching and presenting her research, preparing a pitch for the competition was a completely different task. Thankfully, Terkko kindly organized a pitching workshop with a couple of one-to-one coaching sessions to refine the speeches, and their insights turned out to be invaluable! Arina argues that the best advice ever given for any type of pitch would be: “know your audience”. Indeed, the task was to prepare a presentation for three jurors from different backgrounds, including business, investments, and science. All in all, the pitch should have contained both scientific reasoning and market insights. For this task, Arina conducted her own brief research on market profile, competitors, and risk assessment, which helped her to identify where BNCT currently stands as a therapeutic approach. Another main component of the pitch is identification and effective delivery of the key message. Arina says that one can think of it as a main aim or reasoning for the project, whether it is a research or business project. For her pitch, the message was to emphasize early response prediction for patients to eliminate the risk of costly and ineffective treatment with BNCT and its potential combination with immunotherapy.
In contrast to the other four teams, my pitch did not present a ready product but did contain a strong justification why the idea is worth the pursuit”. Despite a joking comment by one of the judges: “You lost me at the scientific part”, the comments at the winning moment emphasized innovativeness and scientific approach. “The most memorable moment, however, was after the pitch, when I exchanged few words with the key speaker of the day, Manlio Fusciello, who emphasized that you should not give up on your idea, because science is the way that drives technologies further”.
Arina says that during the next couple of days after winning the competition, her LinkedIn notifications blew up with mentions, contact requests, and reactions to posts with mentions. “To be fair, for a not-so-active social media poster, that moment was a bit overwhelming. But the amount of support and interest I got, even via personal messages from people I did not know beforehand, gave even more courage towards developing a business idea from my research project. And indeed, the belief in science as a fuel for business, technology, and societal progress got even stronger in my worldview! That’s why I think iCANDOC, our doctoral pilot program, holds a crucial role as an avenue to encourage career planning and entrepreneurship at an early stage, as we are strongly encouraged to think outside of the box and explore as many possibilities as possible in scopes of our PhD projects”.
Her supervisor, Outi Monni appreciates Arina’s courage and forward-looking mindset. “I am really proud of Arina, and I believe it is important for students to consider a wide range of career opportunities. Carrying out research with societal impact or combining research with tasks benefiting society adds a lot of meaning for your work.”
iCANDOC thanks Arina Värä for sharing the story behind her winning pitch and her experiences from the competition.
See the full program of the event.
Organising team: Piia-Riitta Karhemo, Mila Hyytinen, Marketta Liljeström, Otto Mäkelä, Elena Kremneva, Fatemeh Seyednasrollah, Dicle Malaymar Pinar, Anna Laury, Ehsan Zangene, Milos Gojkovic, Sara Kuusela, Surachet Imlimthan, and Natalie Fernandes
Photos: Marketta Liljeström