The distance between a university laboratory and a company capable of running a clinical trial is often described as a valley, which makes it sound like a gap in funding. Leen Kawas, who moved a discovery from academic research at the University of Washington into a publicly listed therapeutics company, has consistently described it as something else. The gap is mostly a translation problem, and the two sides are answering different questions using overlapping vocabulary.
Different Questions, Similar Language
An academic laboratory is organised to establish whether a mechanism is real and to publish that finding in a form other researchers can build on. A drug development organisation is organised to determine whether a specific compound can be manufactured consistently and shown to help patients safely within a defined regulatory framework.
Both use the word evidence. They mean different standards by it. A result robust enough for publication may be nowhere near robust enough to support an investment, not because the science was weak, but because the questions a developer needs answered were never the questions the study was designed to address.
Where Translation Usually Fails
The most common failure Leen Kawas describes is a handoff rather than a partnership. A university licenses a finding to a company, the researchers move on to the next project, and the company discovers a year later that reproducing the original result requires details that were never written down. Reagent sources and the small procedural choices that live in a graduate student’s notebook turn out to matter enormously.
Keeping the originating scientists engaged through that period is expensive and awkward for both institutions. It is also, in her account, the single change most likely to prevent a promising programme from stalling.
Founding as a Translation Mechanism
Kawas took the more direct route, building the company around the science rather than transferring the science to a company. That arrangement keeps the person who understands the mechanism most deeply inside the organisation making development decisions about it.
The cost is that the researcher has to acquire a second profession. The gap Leen Kawas describes between academic and industrial thinking is not one she bridged by explaining her science more clearly. She bridged it by learning what a development organisation actually needs and reorienting her own work toward producing it.
What Each Side Underestimates
Academic researchers frequently underestimate the sheer volume of work standing between a validated mechanism and a candidate compound. The medicinal chemistry, formulation, toxicology, and manufacturing effort typically dwarfs the discovery work, and none of it produces publications.
Industry teams underestimate how much of a finding’s meaning is held in the heads of the people who produced it. A published method is a summary, not an instruction set. Kawas has argued that recognising this asymmetry on both sides is the practical starting point, since each group tends to assume the other’s work is the more straightforward.
Building Teams That Span Both
Inherent Biosciences’ board and the other organisations Kawas works with reflect a preference for people who have operated on both sides rather than for specialists from either. Someone who has run an academic laboratory and then worked inside a development programme can translate in real time, which removes the need for a formal handoff document that will inevitably omit something.
These people are scarce because the career path that produces them is not a standard one. Kawas has treated cultivating more of them as part of the work rather than as a hiring constraint to be managed around.
Where Capital Fits
Through Propel Bio Partners, Leen Kawas now sits on the investing side of the same gap, and her investment record is tracked on Crunchbase. Early-stage life science investment is unusual in that the diligence question is frequently whether an academic result will survive contact with industrial standards, which is a scientific judgement rather than a financial one.
Investors without that background rely on outside advisers, and they often arrive at the answer well after the point where it would have been useful. Investors who have made the transition themselves can assess it directly, which changes what gets funded and how early in a programme’s life the money arrives.
The Underlying Point
The valley metaphor implies that the two sides are similar places separated by empty ground. Kawas’s version is that they are different institutions with different incentives and different definitions of a good result. Treating the problem as a shortage of money produces funds that struggle to deploy. Treating it as a translation problem produces people who can work in both languages, and those people are what actually carries a discovery across.