This article first appeared on Authority Magazine.
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As a part of our series called “Meet The Inventors”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Sungwon Lim.
Sungwon Lim is the CEO and Co-Founder of ImpriMed, Inc., which uses artificial intelligence on live cancer cell analytics to predict how a patient will respond to cancer therapy drugs before taking them. Sungwon received his PhD degree in Bioengineering from Stanford University and a master’s degree in Translational Medicine from the UC Berkeley–UCSF Joint Bioengineering Program. He is a bioengineer and entrepreneur with 20 years of collective experiences in academia and biotech companies, especially focusing on the development of novel cancer therapies. He is a strong advocate of functional precision medicine — personalizing a cancer treatment regimen based on each patient’s cancer cells’ functional responses to anti-cancer drugs, beyond cancer genetics.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I clearly remember the first time that I saw how scary cancer is. When I was eight, my grandfather died of cancer. He was not too old at that time, and he was very healthy when I was younger. It was very aggressive, so soon after he died of cancer. Even after that, however, I was not planning to go into cancer research. I wanted to be a computer game programmer; I fell in love with coding and making a product. That was from elementary school until my freshman year in college, but my first major class in college was very frustrating — the academic subjects in Computer Science were completely different than I imagined. I felt like I was digesting an indigestible food.
I just started to think about myself and what I really wanted, then read some books. And one book actually emphasized building a sustainable company from a startup to a big company. The author stressed that the company should have long-term values that cannot be disturbed by external obstacles or situations. I’d never thought about that before. And it made me think that maybe everyone is a startup CEO. You’re the CEO of yourself — you are the company.
I started to look into myself and think about the values I’d like to keep throughout my lifetime. After three and a half months, I found out that the first value is to help as many people as possible. The second one was to develop a core technology that other people can add to and build on to make it bigger and better. Using core technology, we can help so many more people. These lifetime values suddenly changed my career path to becoming a bioengineer to save lives.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“A physician can treat a number of patients throughout his career. Yet one powerful medicine or technology can save millions of patients throughout the world.” This is from Professor Sang Yup Lee, my advisor for my master’s degree at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), who is also my lifetime teacher and mentor. Every day I remember this quote.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
One movie that made an impact on me is an old film called Jerry Maguire, starring Tom Cruise, Renee Zellweger, and Cuba Gooding Jr. I’ve watched this movie repetitively throughout my life, and it provided me with different impressions and perspectives throughout my teens, 20s, and 30s. When I was a teenager, it was just a fun movie about sports business that my favorite actor Tom Cruise starred in. When I was in my 20s, this movie taught me what true love is. When I watched it in my 30s while I was seriously preparing for my startup, it gave me so many more lessons. I learned that:
- The people in your team are the most critical factor for success
- Building trust and friendship between coworkers is critical
- There will be a lot of ups and downs throughout the startup journey
- There will be many disappointments and failures, so persistence is essential
- It is never easy to convince other people of what you believe
- To accomplish the company goals, I need to have a strong belief in myself and my team
- The rewards after all these hard things will be sweet
All of the above lessons are essential to building my company.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. What was the catalyst that inspired you to invent your product? Can you share the story of your “ah ha” moment with us?
Immediately after I went into the bioengineering field, I started to study cancer because I wanted to save cancer patients. I truly enjoyed cancer research; I developed various types of anticancer drugs and enjoyed seeing that those drugs shrink down large tumors on mice. But I realized that it would be very difficult to have my own novel therapeutics to actually help a human patient because there are a lot of processes you have to go through that require tons of money and a long time with a low success rate. If you look around, so many cancer patients are suffering from this life-threatening disease and desperately need treatment right now. They don’t have the money or the time to wait. So the more I studied this field, the more I thought about how I could help improve the treatment of the current cancer patients by using the tools we already have.
In 2012, when I was in the second year of my bioengineering Ph.D. at Stanford University, I went to a conference where all the speakers were the professors at Stanford School of Medicine.
One doctor mentioned in his presentation that combination chemotherapy is better than single-agent chemotherapy. It sounds like common sense, but what he really emphasized was that even though you may have success with particular combination chemotherapy with one patient, it might not work for other patients, so a selection and combination of drugs should be personalized. Chemotherapy should be varied, depending on the individual. That was my “ah-ha” moment. So I was just like, wow, what if we can personalize a combination for each individual patient by testing the patient’s cancer cells against various drugs before injection? Suppose we can find out the personalized best solution for each patient by utilizing what we currently have in our medical toolbox. In that case, we can provide immediate help to those cancer patients.
I ran up to the speaker after the talk and shared my idea. He said, “yes, of course, that would be really great, but how can you test all the different drugs? There are so many drugs available, and then there are so many permutations and variations there.” Well, I did not have the answer at the moment, but it was when I found the crucial clinical need that triggered the birth of our company’s idea.
There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How did you overcome this challenge?
Yeah, I think the best way, and the only solution, is to find good, talented people with good minds and a passion for working with you. I know I’m not a genius, but I know what I do best. I’m confident that I can get great people together and make a project successful. You cannot make your idea real by yourself. It is nearly impossible. Even if you are a genius, you still need a good team. I think that’s the only way, and that’s what I did.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
It’s essential to research if your idea has already been explored by other people or somewhere else — it’s really important to do that research. You rarely find you are the very first person to think of something. So don’t be disappointed if someone else has come up with your idea, especially if the problem you’re trying to solve hasn’t been solved yet. Research in depth what others have done so far; look at the strengths and weaknesses of other people’s work. Learn from them and establish how you can do better.
When I first came up with my company idea — analyzing a patient’s ‘live’ cancer cell responses to anticancer drugs outside of the patient’s body to find the most effective therapeutic options for individual patients — I received lots of negative feedback from experts in the field. Mostly, the feedback was: “It would be phenomenal if you could do it, but it’s impossible because cancer cells easily die when they are taken out of a patient’s body. How can you test drugs on the cells that are already dead?” When I researched publications, I found that it was true that many failures were reported. However, at the same time, several scientific papers reported promising results. Thanks to this negative feedback, I set the highest priority on finding a solution for this problem immediately after incorporating ImpriMed. After almost five months of dedicated research in the lab, I was fortunate to invent the ImpriMed Optimum Culture Media for cancer cells from lymphoma and leukemia patients. Combined with the ImpriMed Transport Media that we use for sample delivery, we now keep up to 80–90% viability of the blood cancer cells for 5–7 days, which enables all the downstream steps in our commercialized service workflow.
Did you have a role model or a person who inspired you to persevere despite the hardships involved in taking the risk of selling a new product?
Elon Musk is my role model for how he does his business: he thinks about a new idea and then makes unrealistic, futuristic products real even when he gets pushback on the direction. I remember that he got a lot of pushback from the investors and other stakeholders when he first tried to initiate the SpaceX project. Many people thought that he was crazy. When a reporter asked him, “why are you so obsessed with doing this, even though there is so much opposition?”, he said, “this is what we need.” And then he just does what people need.
My company’s product is also based on a new technology, but we know that this is needed by so many people and even more dogs who are suffering from cancer. We save our dogs first and then also humans later. Because we know there is a critical need for this, and because we know we are the right team to provide solutions for this, we just do our best to make it happen.
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For the benefit of our readers, can you share the story, and outline the steps that you went through, from when you thought of the idea, until it finally landed on the store shelves? In particular we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
Our co-founders all studied human life science, so it was natural to target human patients first. We started to develop our technology targeting humans, but it was really, really hard to get hospitals to send us a single clinical sample from actual human cancer patients. It required a lot of paper documentation, and it wasn’t easy for us, as a small startup, to get the attention of hospitals who might be able to send us the very precious cancer samples from the operating room or the pathology lab. We didn’t receive any sample at all for seven months, we ran out of money in our bank account, and some potential investors were waiting to see test results from at least one or two actual patients. We were very desperate at that point.
Fortunately, there was another startup in our incubator program that was developing software for veterinary clinics. The founder’s mom was a veterinary doctor, so we learned through them that dogs have a lot of cancer issues — there are so many dogs diagnosed with cancer every year — and we did more research on that.
We discovered that the pet cancer market is big. There was no competitor at that time. With a lot more simplified regulatory pathways, we could move a lot faster with a lot more data. Our new plan was to develop our technology in the veterinary space and move on to the human space later, because there are remarkable similarities between dog cancer and human cancer. That’s how we pivoted our market from human cancer to pet cancer.
Once we made the transition, reactions from investors completely changed. We received 20 samples immediately in the first month, veterinarians were willing to work with us, and pet parents were kind enough to provide their dogs’ information to us and donate their samples to our research. We were able to make a prototype, which enabled our first round of fundraising to be successful. So just that one transition made a huge impact. We still have the same vision for our company: to save lives by innovating cancer care using science and medicine. We just expanded our target: not only humans, but any animals, including dogs and cats.
We expanded from one veterinary hospital to local veterinary hospitals in the Bay Area. What we did was just walk into the offices, as well as make many cold calls and cold emails. Starting from scratch and hustling — that’s how we started to build the network. I clearly remember that my co-founder and I drove four hours, in heavy traffic, to a hospital that had a new sample. Those were the old days, but those kinds of efforts were rewarded. We expanded, a lot of doctors loved our product, and they are our customers now.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
During one of our financing rounds, I was scheduled to meet a big-name venture capital firm located in San Francisco. Our company’s advisor connected me to the managing partner of the firm. I drove up to SF following Google Maps and arrived at the destination five minutes early. I was supposed to visit the 8th floor, but strangely, the building had only six stories. Well, it was the wrong address. I soon realized that I’d made a typo when I manually input the address on Google Maps. Due to the traffic, it took 20 minutes to get to the correct destination. I just threw my car in street parking in front of the building and ran up to the 8th floor. The managing partner and another partner were waiting for me. I was out of mind while pitching to them. Of course, there was no follow-up email from them. I blew up a really great opportunity. After that, I never manually type addresses into Google Maps again. And to top off the day, my car was towed from street parking that day.
The early stages must have been challenging. Are you able to identify a “tipping point” after making your invention, when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
I clearly remember our first success case. An eight-year-old dog was suffering from lymphoma and had not shown any improvement even after five doses of chemo drugs. This dog’s mom emailed us directly. She told us she’d read about our company and badly wanted to use our service. She connected us with her vet, and we persuaded the vet to use ImpriMed, which was in the research stage at the time. The doctor used two doses of the drug that ranked the highest in our test and immediately shrunk the tumor. The doctor was excited, and then the dog’s mom sent us a happy thank you email. That was a kind of tipping point for us that, wow, this actually works in the real world.
Of course, after that, we started receiving a lot more exciting cases, but I clearly remember that was the first case. Those kinds of feedback give us the biggest reward for what we do.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Invented My Product” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
1. “Today’s Pre-seed round is 10-years-ago’s Seed round.” What I learned about an early-stage biotech startup’s financing round from a business class at UC Berkeley became largely different when I went out for my company’s first round of fundraising seven years later. Even for the first round of fundraising as Pre-seed, a company needs to be much more mature, and the founders need to show a lot more progress than they did in the old days. Especially for a life science startup, investors may want to see a preliminary result from actual clinical samples as well as lab test results using a prototype.
2. “You need to find an investor whose investment theme fits your product.” Every VC firm and its fund has an investment focus. For example, if you are a hardcore biotech startup, you may want to talk to the investors who have domain knowledge, whether in-depth or not, and prior investment experiences in the field. Otherwise, people will not recognize the true value of what you build and the practical obstacles you would encounter as you develop your products and go to market. Right after our first demo day pitch in front of over 120 Silicon Valley VCs (when we first targeted human applications), we were so excited to receive more than 80 calls requesting 1:1 meetings. Among the 80+ VCs, about 60 were non-biotech investors, who all passed after in-depth one-hour meetings. Surprisingly, many of these investors did not expect that we are a deep tech startup in oncology and had to be regulated by the FDA (again, this was when we were aiming to go into the human cancer market). Every time, it was a big disappointment for both parties. To save everyone’s time, it’s necessary to look into whether my company is a good fit for the investor’s investment focus and their check size and see if there are other companies in a similar field in their portfolios before the meeting. These days, I typically ask these things up front in my email replies when I receive interest from a new investor.
3. “Once you graduate from your school, you’re going outside of its protective, amicable barrier.” When I was a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, it was easy to suggest and run collaborations with people in different labs, even in other departments. Once I became a founder of a private company after graduation, I was viewed differently. I was expecting that it would be harder to work with the people who I know from my school due to a possible conflict of interest between an academic institution and a for-profit company, but I realized that it is even more complicated. Usually, we need to work with a school’s technology licensing office first.
4. “It will require a substantial amount of effort and time to receive human clinical samples.” When we were focusing on human cancer applications, several investors said that they would invest in our company once we showed preliminary data using the clinical samples provided by actual human cancer patients. I was confident that we would have easily gotten a few samples from the professors at Stanford School of Medicine I worked with as a graduate student. I was wrong. Clinical samples, especially patients’ live cancer cells for our case, are very challenging to get when you’re not on campus. It took two months to meet a professor who showed a great interest in writing a clinical study proposal together, and he was expecting 4–6 months to get approval from the internal review board. At the time, we had money in our bank account sufficient for only two months. That was the point where we pivoted our company towards the veterinary cancer space.
5. “When you add someone to your team, always do reference checks even for a person who you think you know quite well.” When you become friends with someone else, you might think you know the person very well. However, ask yourself: have you ever worked with this person on a serious project before? If you plan to ask someone to join your team but have no prior experience working together closely, don’t skip the reference check calls. I learned this lesson the hard way. You can be good friends but may not be good coworkers. Listen carefully to what people say about the candidate when they worked together before.
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Do the research I mentioned earlier. Research pre-existing attempts and your potential competitors and learn from them. And then, of course, in parallel, find the good people and make a great team. And I think one of the most important things to do is to collect potential customers’ feedback, as much as possible, up front. Just talk about your idea, approach, how you can do better than the others, and then just listen to how people react. Of course, be open to their suggestions too.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
I don’t think you need to hire someone as a consultant to discuss your new idea. Start talking about your idea with your best friends. I think they would have very fresh eyes and give you honest feedback. Also, just look around to find people already working in startups. The most helpful people are existing entrepreneurs; they are willing to listen to you and help you. That’s what I experienced. I didn’t think they would give us valuable feedback or advice for free, but they are paying it forward. That’s the culture of the Silicon Valley startup space. People give you advice for free because that’s what they received from their elders, the previous successful entrepreneurs.
One advisor actually told me that. When I asked him what kind of compensation he wanted for the help he gave me, he said, “Oh, I received that kind of good advice from other people when my company was young, what you need to do is not pay me. Rather than that, just do the same thing to the next young entrepreneurs. That’s how you can pay it forward.” I think that’s the most powerful culture in the United States’ Silicon Valley startup field. Developing the idea and then making it real is your and your team’s job. Hiring a consultant can come later.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
Well, everyone may have different thoughts on this, but in my opinion, if you are not a serial entrepreneur, or if you are not a big name, I think you need to be ready to bootstrap for a while. Raising the first round from VCs is definitely not easy. And then more and more, early-stage VCs would like to see a lot more than before for the first round.
So you might have to expect bootstrapping until you are ready to go out for fundraising. That’s what we did. But if you can do the bootstrapping with sufficient finance from good resources or other good situations, including that your founding team can stay super enthusiastic and passionate with no or very low salary, that’s a good situation. But in most cases, bootstrapping is not easy at all.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
We are saving dogs from cancer and helping them live a longer life with their human parents. I think that’s already meaningful to the world, but we will save our pet parents, the humans, next.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I would like to encourage us all to work together to help our dogs and cats fight against their cancers. Similar to humans, cancer is the biggest life-threatening disease to our furry friends. 50% of their disease-related death is due to cancer, and 25% of them develop cancer during their lifetime. In the US, six million dogs and six million cats are diagnosed with cancer every year.
However, the treatment cost is high. It can go up to several tens of thousands of dollars. During our survey with pet parents who had dogs with cancer, we had a chance to talk to a lady who had just sold her house to pay for her dog’s cancer treatment. When we expressed concern about spending so much money on the treatment, she asked us: “How much money do you think your parents spent on you throughout your life? Compared to that, the amount I’ve spent on my dog is significantly less. This could be the only and last chance that I can do my best for my dog. I will do whatever I can do.” Basically, our dogs and cats are our families.
When we try to encourage more cancer treatments, the biggest hurdle is the treatment cost. To reduce the financial burden on pet parents, we all need to work together. First of all, insurance companies can provide substantial financial aid. The good news is that more and more pet insurance companies are financially supporting cancer diagnosis and treatment. Big players in the human insurance space are also creating their pet insurance plans. Second, pharmaceutical companies and veterinary clinics can work together to cut down the drug prices. Pharma companies can optimize the manufacturing processes to lower drug costs, and veterinary hospitals can lower the margins, at least for the first-line chemotherapy drugs. Lastly, a precision medicine company like us can help cut down the overall treatment costs by excluding out ineffective drugs and shortening the treatment period by using only effective drugs for each patient.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Businesswise, Elon Musk, as I mentioned. But if I can pick another person from sports, Steph Curry, definitely. I have played basketball for the last 25 years. And basketball is the engine that makes me keep my inspiration and motivation fresh. As a three-point shooter myself, Steph Curry is my role model in basketball.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
