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The concept of de-risking a supply chain when you’re an early-stage biotech startup might seem silly, but it could make all the difference to your company’s long-term success. Let’s say you have a single supplier from India for a critical raw material, and a monsoon wipes out their warehouse. Are you prepared with contingencies in place to avoid months of production delays and timeline setbacks? Have you explored alternative suppliers or ordered an excess stock inventory to avoid catastrophe?

As you’ll recall from my previous blog entry about mitigating regulatory risk, the importance of reproducibility in biotech cannot be understated. Reproducibility outside of the bench translates to building redundancy and risk mitigation plans. You may be years away from commercialization but thinking about this kind of safeguard framework in your Research & Development (R&D) supply chain is critically important to the efficiency of your long-term scientific execution. It not only ensures that there’s a plan B (or C, or D, even E) for your experimental execution, but it ensures that you have market resilience and thus increased value to investors and potential acquirers.

To further ensure market resilience and appeal to investors, you must address risk reduction at the other end of the supply chain. This can look like evaluating the landscape your product will launch into. Entering a crowded product market slows enrollment and can make a clinical trial drag on, delaying your overall go-to-market timeline. Thinking about your clinical protocol prior to animal proof of concept might feel counterintuitive, but going through this process means you can avoid or pivot from a crowded disease area as you make your way towards the clinic.

Exploring the competitive landscape also enables you to begin to identify key opinion leaders (KOLs) at hospitals and institutions across the country that may be a good fit for your scientific advisory board. Finding these folks now and making those connections early on makes the site qualification and site initiation process much easier when it comes time to start your trials.

Mitigating risk by implementing supply chain redundancies and researching the state of the competitive market is a crucial stratagem to building a solid foundation for your biotech startup. You can never account for all possibilities, but simply applying the basics of these de-risking processes provides you with protection against the unpredictable and increased trust with investors.

At LabCentral we offer an array of resources to help our companies explore supply chain alternatives and support scientific market research via our programming and network connections. I cannot preach this enough to our residents: Avoid a risky business, do your due diligence today!