Meet the nextGEN
Sapan Gandhi - Drishti Discoveries
Who or what called you to lead?
There wasn’t one thing that called me to lead, but I can attribute my entrepreneurial mindset to three distinct experiences.
When I was about 13, my family moved to a new neighbourhood in Gandhinagar, the city I grew up in. It was a new residential development and there were no amenities such as corner shops. My father and I seized the opportunity and converted a small room in our house into a corner shop selling groceries, milk, and everyday essentials. This experience taught me a lot about entrepreneurship and since then I dreamed of starting my own company.
My father was also an entrepreneur earlier in his life but chose to become a civil servant to support his family. In India at the time, many potential entrepreneurs chose financially secure civil service jobs over innovation. I was very inspired by my father’s stories about his experiences as an entrepreneur.
In the early 1990s, as I entered school, India began embracing capitalist ideals and opening its markets to the world, marking a significant shift. Nevertheless, when I was finishing school in 1998, career options remained limited. If you were good at academic subjects, the societal expectation was that you would follow traditional career paths such as engineering, medicine, or pharmacy.
However, I came across several articles on biotechnology in career advice magazines and despite the societal pressure, I decided to venture into the emerging field of biotechnology.
I pursued a dual degree in biochemistry and vocational biotechnology, which offered many opportunities for the practical application of biotechnological principles. To give you one example: At the time, fast-food chains began emerging in India. This required ingredients that were difficult to grow locally, such as lettuce. Our lab responded to this climate challenge. We applied biotechnological methods to successfully produce lettuce, suitable for supplying local fast-food chains like McDonald's and KFC. This was the first time I witnessed biotechnology as an agent of innovation.
Towards the end of my Ph.D., I decided to take part in the Biotechnology YES competition that is run by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the University of Nottingham. This program is aimed at early career researchers to make them aware of what is involved in commercializing a life sciences invention.
The project involved all aspects of developing a hypothetical business idea and pitching the business plan to a panel of investors. I pulled together a team of scientists and we prepared a business plan for a diagnostic kit for infectious diseases. This was a turning point in my ambition to develop a career in entrepreneurship.
After doing research for three years at the University of Oxford, I transitioned from lab research to early-stage technology commercialization. I spent about four years doing that in various companies before joining Horizon Discovery in the licensing and IP management team.
At the time, I was looking at several technologies that had the potential to be commercialized. For one of the technologies, I proposed to Horizon’s management to create a spinoff company, which is how Drishti Discoveries was founded.
Sapan’s full profile is available for our members inside the community.