One pattern that emerges over and over in our interviews with scientists involved in biotech is that ideas for companies often involve scientists creating something — a method, a reagent, a type of molecule, etc. — for use in basic research, finding that they are using it more often than they thought, that other people are asking them for it, and in the end the requests become frequent enough and the volume large enough that someone within the lab suggests founding a company to produce them and sell them to other scientists. This was the case for Stony Brook chemistry professor Glenn Prestwich, who in the course of a collaboration with a neuroscientist colleague worked out a way to produce a specific kind of molecule labeled in a specific way that was useful to huge numbers of researchers. In the late 1990s, he and a colleague at the University of Utah ended up founding a company, Echelon Biosciences, “to make these molecules that biologists needed. Our postdocs were getting tired of making them over and over again.”
