🧬 Pioneering Nanopore Tech: A Deep Dive with Kyle Briggs

Unravelling the Fabric of Nanotechnology: Kyle Briggs' Journey from Lab to Market

I’m thrilled to share a conversation with Kyle Briggs, the founder of Northern Nanopore Instruments and a key player in the nanoscale biophysics field. Kyle’s path from a PhD student at the University of Ottawa to leading a pioneering company in solid-state nanopore technology offers valuable lessons for founders interested in the intersection of science and entrepreneurship. His work in developing applications for genomics, diagnostics, and data storage demonstrates the practical impact nanotechnology can have on various industries.

In this discussion, Kyle shares insights into the early stages of his startup, from the initial idea to navigating the complexities of bringing a scientific innovation to market, and the challenges faced along the way. Whether you're a founder looking to dive into nanotechnology or simply interested in how scientific research can be translated into successful business ventures, Kyle’s experiences offer a roadmap for turning innovative ideas into reality. Join us as we explore how Kyle combined his scientific expertise with entrepreneurial acumen to create a leading-edge technology company.

---

1/ Could you share what sparked your interest in nanoscale biophysics and led you to found Northern Nanopore Instruments?

My interest in nanoscale biophysics started pretty early, as a co-op student in undergrad, when I joined the lab of Vincent Tabard-Cossa at the University of Ottawa. His lab does research with solid-state nanopore–tiny holes in thin membranes that can be used to detect single copies of biomolecules, with applications in DNA sequencing, medical diagnostics, even the next generation of digital information storage using DNA as a hard drive. It is exciting technology with broad potential for disruption, but the problem at the time was that making them involved drilling them with the beam of an electron microscope - in other words, it was slow, expensive work.

As I joined I was involved in the discovery of a new way to make solid-state nanopores that replaced the TEM with basically a 9V battery, reducing cost and complexity by orders of magnitude. My introduction to biophysics was then exploring a novel technology that was obviously of high value, and the intention from the start was to try to commercialize it when it was ready to do so. That long-term vision for practical translation of the technology, combined with the fact that Vincent is an excellent and supportive mentor, set the stage for me staying long term in his lab, all the way from undergrad through PhD and then postdoc, specifically with the intention of spinning out what later became Northern Nanopore Instruments (www.solidstatenanopore.com) to commercialize the technology.

2/ Tell us about your experience in licensing the patents behind Northern Nanopore Instruments? What did you wish you knew at the time that you learned later?

Licensing was a long process for us. The early academic work was supported by a multinational diagnostics company, and uOttawa has a university-centric IP policy, which meant that the related patents were licensed to them by uOttawa from the start. It took several years of work from us to get back the rights to the patent portfolio from that multinational, and another eight months to license them from uOttawa. In the end, we negotiated a set of licensing terms that I think everyone was happy with. Our situation was somewhat unique so I don’t expect it to be that long a process in general, but you should plan for the worst and assume it will take several months when mapping out your road to market.

One of the big lessons I learned from that process that seems fairly obvious in hindsight (and this applies in many other contexts as well) is to always go into a negotiation knowing what you want the outcome to be, and knowing where you are willing to be flexible.

My experience of university tech transfer offices generally is that there is rarely a long-term mission driving the negotiations from the university side, and the focus is mainly on making sure that they are getting compensated for their patent-related costs, but what this means practically varies tremendously from tech transfer office to tech transfer office. As a result, within Canadian tech transfer, every licensing agreement is a bespoke thing that can take a very long time to nail down and it is largely on the startup side of the conversation to have a clear picture of their priorities with respect to licensing terms that will enable their growth and strategy long term. At the time I was not prepared for that unconstrained approach to license construction, which slowed us down as we had to carefully think through the long-term implications of a menu of options for compensating the university and understand how they might affect our development roadmap and investment prospects in the long run–a significant challenge for someone with no prior business development experience.

It is an ongoing pet peeve of mine that this process has not yet been standardized across Canadian institutions, as I think this lack of standardization is to the detriment of literally everyone involved.

3/ In the early days of Northern Nanopore Instruments, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in bringing solid-state nanopore technology from the lab to the market, and how did you navigate these obstacles?

The biggest challenge early in the process relates broadly to communications. I am a physicist by training. The rest of my team were similarly scientists and engineers who primarily communicated in academic contexts. Expressing an idea to an academic audience is fundamentally different from expressing that same idea to a business-oriented audience, and our first attempts at pitching our vision were truly terrible. Scientists are not trained in effective communication outside of science, and it is quite literally like learning a new language.

The big shift that enabled more effective communication was to move away from explaining how we did it to explaining why the audience should care that we did. It seems a minor thing, but when you try to refocus the perspective on why over how, it changes the story completely and enables wider comprehension of the important methods.

The other big early hurdle that I expect is fairly common among academics trying to be entrepreneurs is acceptance of a much higher level of uncertainty. In science, we do not publish something until we are sure of the results and we understand 80% of them. In business, if you wait for 80% certainty, you’re too late to be relevant. You need to act at 20% certainty. That mental shift took me and the team a long time, and we made the shift at different rates, which made for communication challenges both internally among the team and externally with various stakeholders like investors and advisors.

4/ Any tips for founders on finding that sweet spot between innovation and market demand?

If you’re coming out of a university lab with a patent ready to commercialize, chances are your tech is low-TRL and probably ahead of broad market demand, but you will have an existing network of colleagues in the same subfield of science who likely have similar pain points. Use it.

We found our niche early on in the form of other researchers who shared the same pain points we did, who knew about our work and trusted us to deliver what we promised. That kind of niche market is probably not one that can sustain a business long term by itself, but it’s an excellent beachhead to show traction, get feedback, and refine your offering while building a brand that can reach a broader market.

The second part of developing early stage technology is to not underestimate the importance of branding and marketing. The best technology and product in the world are worthless if nobody knows you exist, and this is something that founders fresh out of university often struggle with, given that effective communication with non-STEM audiences is generally not taught in STEM settings. If you have an all-technical team, as many university spin-outs do, strongly consider finding a co-founder with a background in communications. Effective communications skills tops my list for the qualities I would look for in a co-founder, were I to do this again.

5/ Assembling a team capable of tackling the complexities of nanotechnology is no small feat. How did you go about finding the right talent, and did any of the original researchers join you in this venture?

We were lucky in this regard. The core team was formed by myself, my former PhD advisor, a colleague from the same lab, and a consultant to the lab with whom we had worked in the past, meaning that by the time we incorporated we had known one another and worked together on that specific technology for close to a decade. While that is obviously a rare situation and not much use as advice, the lesson that does generalize is that the most important qualities in co-founders is to have established deep trust before starting.

Our first hires were people we had worked with in the lab as well, so we knew ahead of time that they were excellent. If you’re spinning out of a lab, in particular, I strongly encourage staying in close touch with that lab. The research and talent requirements on the technical side will remain well-aligned, and is a great place to recruit as students graduate already trained on the relevant technology.

6/ Did you find it practical to leverage the labs at uOttawa to continue developing Northern Nanopore Instruments?

In the very early stages it can be critical to keep a footprint in the lab that spins out the company. Often there is purpose-specific equipment that would be difficult to find otherwise. We were able to lease space from uOttawa for our R&D efforts, which was key to the early stages of building for exactly that reason.

While access to lab space is a key component of any STEM-based commercialization effort, using it comes with some challenges. When interacting with a university in this way, especially if there are co-founders who are both employees of the startup and the university, it is critical to carefully and transparently manage conflict of interest issues that can arise. The startup cannot benefit from public grant funding, and the intellectual property developed by the startup needs to be carefully separated from the intellectual property developed by the university. These are all manageable challenges but they require an open and transparent dialog between the startup and the university at all stages.

7/ For founders looking to license IP, what's your advice for doing diligence on the field before approaching a research lab? Any advice for how they should prepare before reaching out to a researcher looking to license their IP?

I come at this from the perspective of a researcher who licensed my own IP, so it’s a bit different. But if I were to put myself in the position of having someone external approaching me about commercializing (and if I was the one who ultimately made the decision–remember that often it is the university tech transfer office that gets final say) then I would be looking for someone who had done their homework and wasn’t asking me to educate them about the technology. In my role both as an academic and a founder I’ve been approached more than once by people wanting to collaborate or undertake development projects together who are clearly missing a basic understanding of the technology they are interested in and who had wildly unrealistic and optimistic outlooks as a result.

Recall what I said earlier about scientists and business people needing different levels of certainty. If the approach is made from someone who is 20% sure of their plan to someone who needs 80% certainty to make a move, there are going to be issues. If you are planning to approach a researcher, be sure to understand at a minimum the current state of the art in the field and the potential for the technology, but more importantly, have a realistic and measured understanding of the challenges that will need to be overcome to get there, and clearly communicate that you have thought about them and that you have at least the broad strokes of a plan to mitigate them. Inviting input from the researcher on these mitigation steps is a great way to get a productive conversation rolling; asking the researcher to do your homework for you in suggesting solutions cold is not.

8/ Where do you see the field of nanotechnology and nanopore applications heading in the next decade, especially in areas like genomics, diagnostics, and data storage?

Speaking strictly as a researcher here rather than a recently-exited CEO, most of the promise I see for nanotechnology lies in the idea of personalized medicine. The core idea here is that if you can assess the biological state (genomics, proteomics, etc) of an individual in real time, you can predict how they will respond to a disease or a particular intervention. This moves away from treating people at the level of their disease and toward treating them at the level of individuals.

Molecular data storage is a concept that has fascinated me for some time: the idea that DNA is essentially just a biological hard drive, and that any data can in principle be written to it (or synthetic molecules like it). Nanopores are one of the ways that information could be retrieved, by reading back that information bit by bit.

9/ For individuals eager to dive into nanotechnology or another high-tech field, what advice would you give on navigating the complexities of patents, technology development, and market entry?

Patenting is a very expensive activity. A patent will typically cost $20,000 per jurisdiction in which it is filed. For Canadian businesses it is often important to be an exporter from the start, which may require patents in multiple jurisdictions. At a minimum, patent in the United States, possibly even over patenting in Canada. It is often possible to defer costs by filing provisional patents, which give additional time before the main patent must be filed while still giving priority date at a fraction of the cost.

There are (relatively) new initiatives in Canada to help with IP costs: IP Ontario, Innovation Asset Collective, NRC IRAP IP Assist, CanExport, and others all have funding for patent- and IP-strategy related costs. Educate yourself around their requirements and engage early. These programs often have educational components as well.

As things progress, it is important to be careful with the results of IP development. Academic researchers have a mandate to publish, but making something public before patenting it renders it public domain and unpatentable. If you are working with a university, ensure that you have in place a clear framework for review and protection of IP prior to paper submission and make sure that nothing done by the university can interfere with your freedom to operate.

10/ You're currently writing on the topic of innovation in Canada on CanInnovate, what inspired you to start CanInnovate and what would you like to achieve through your writing?

Early in the process of building Northern Nanopore the most consistent piece of advice I got from mentors and advisors was “don’t try to do this in Canada”. Obviously I ignored that, but the advice was given with good reason: the Canadian innovation support structures that exist currently are generally not effective. Most government programs have minimum revenue requirements to access funding, which completely excludes deep tech and most university spin-outs in the early stages. The net result is that there exists a valley of death which begins where university tech transfer ends, and it is from this funding gap that Canada leaks valuable IP.

While there are plenty of voices that are starting to lobby for more effective innovation policy frameworks in Canada, almost none are focused on the very early stages of building out university tech. I started writing CanInnovate with the intention of shining a light on some of these issues in the hope that the next person to try to build something similar to what we did at Northern Nanopore will have a slightly smoother road to walk.

I hope you enjoyed this interview with Kyle. If you’ve got any more questions, please share them in the comments and/or reach out to Kyle via CanInnovate. I’m looking forward to doing more interviews, are there any industry experts that you’d like to hear from? Share in the comments below.

🎨 About the artist

Gennady Golobkov, a talented Soviet fiction-artist, bed-ridden for 26 years following a spinal injury, considered to be the founder of psychological fiction in painting.