Most graduate students in the life sciences finish their training without ever having been told that starting a company is an available option. The default path runs toward a postdoctoral position, then toward a faculty appointment or a role inside a large pharmaceutical organisation. Leen Kawas took a different route, co-founding Athira Pharma out of research she had worked on at the University of Washington and taking it public in 2020, and she has spent a considerable amount of her time since arguing that the route should be visible to far more students than currently see it.

The Information Gap

The barrier Leen Kawas describes first is not funding or risk tolerance. It is simply that most students do not know what founding involves. A doctoral programme trains people to design experiments and interpret data. It rarely covers how intellectual property is licensed from a university, what a term sheet contains, or how a scientific finding becomes a business case that an investor will evaluate.

Students therefore assess entrepreneurship without any real information about it, which tends to produce one of two errors. Some conclude it is impossibly complex and dismiss it. Others assume it is mostly a matter of enthusiasm and are unprepared for how much of the work has nothing to do with science.

What Scientific Training Already Provides

Leen Kawas has argued repeatedly that the core skills of a research scientist transfer more directly to company building than students assume. Designing a study that isolates a variable is closely related to designing a business experiment that tests an assumption cheaply. Reading a literature critically resembles diligence on a competitor. Managing a project through repeated failure is most of what early-stage company building consists of.

The parts that do not transfer are learnable and relatively bounded. Financing structures and regulatory strategy can be taught, and there are people available to hire who already know them. The scientific judgement at the centre of a therapeutics company is much harder to acquire and is precisely what a trained researcher already holds.

Timing and the Cost of Waiting

Conventional advice tells scientists to accumulate industry experience before founding anything. Leen Kawas is sceptical of the blanket version of that advice. Experience is genuinely useful, and waiting also carries a cost that goes largely unmeasured, since scientific opportunities have windows and a founder’s willingness to accept uncertainty tends to decline as commitments accumulate.

Her position is not that everyone should found a company immediately. It is that the decision should be made deliberately rather than deferred by default until it is no longer practical.

The Role of the Institution

Universities control much of what determines whether student founding is realistic. Technology transfer offices set licensing terms. Departments decide whether commercial activity counts toward anything or is treated as a distraction. Advisers encourage a student exploring a company, or they make clear that doing so will cost them.

Kawas has pointed to the variation between institutions as evidence that this is a policy question rather than a cultural inevitability. Some universities produce founders steadily. Others with comparable research output produce almost none, and the difference usually traces to specific administrative choices rather than to the quality of the underlying science.

What Investors Actually Look For

A recurring source of discouragement is the belief that investors will not back a first-time founder from an academic background. Kawas, who now co-leads a venture fund focused on life sciences, describes the picture as more nuanced. Early-stage biotech investment is substantially a bet on whether the underlying science is real and whether the person presenting it understands its limitations honestly.

A student founder who can articulate exactly what their data does not yet show is often more credible than an experienced operator overselling a weaker asset. The inexperience is a real risk and it is a manageable one, addressed by building a team around the founder rather than by replacing them.

Building the Support Structure

Kawas has been consistent that individual encouragement is not sufficient on its own. EIT Pharma’s research teams and the wider ecosystem she works within operate on the assumption that founders need practical scaffolding, including access to people who have raised money before and honest early feedback about whether a programme is worth pursuing at all.

The most valuable version of that feedback is frequently discouraging. A student told clearly and early that a particular asset will not support a company has been given something useful, provided the message is about the asset rather than about their capacity to found anything.

Why This Matters Beyond the Individuals

The argument is finally about where good science ends up. A substantial amount of promising academic work never reaches patients because nobody with the relevant expertise chose to carry it forward, and the person best positioned to do that is usually the one who generated the data. Further detail on her work is available at https://www.leenkawas.com/.