Careers in Deep Tech: One young scientist’s journey at a fast-growing biotech startup

I joined Carcell Biopharma more than a year ago as a scientist from the platform team. My role is to come up with and develop a new class of drugs, so, to put it simply, I’m engineering red blood cells (eRBC) that can be used as a very specific drug to modulate the immune system in the human body. Our eRBC have close interaction with immune cells, which makes them selective, potent, alternative and ready-to-use cellular therapies for treating diseases arising from immune dysregulation, including several autoimmune diseases and cancers.   

What attracted me to a smaller biotech firm is that I have a lot of opportunities to try different things. At my age, that’s very exciting because it gives me a way to grow! So far, Carcell has given me lots of opportunities and empowered me to enhance my skills – they've even implemented some of my ideas, which is very rewarding. 

Militsa in the lab, looking through the microscope and studying the histology of tissue samples.

As a kid, I always questioned how and why things were happening. Over time, I developed an interest in chemistry, and I went on to pursue a bachelor's in chemistry at the University of Edinburgh. After that, I wanted a more big picture understanding of how to apply what I learnt, so I did my master's in medicinal biological chemistry, which provided a bridge to biology and biotech. 

While I was completing my Master's Degree, I did a research assistant internship in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) under Professor Anh Tuan Phan, who later became my PhD professor. Here, I worked on inhibiting gene expression, which was my first time working on a more applicable real-life project. As a chemist, I was involved in engineering different parts of this project, creating tools to stabilise easily degraded single strands of DNA. I enjoyed this experience so much that I decided to do my PhD in chemical biology at NTU. 

A group photo of NTU's Prof Anh Tuan Phan’s students and visiting Professor Dr Marie-Paule Teulade-Fichou (on the right) from Institut Curie, France.

I went into biotech because I wanted to work on applied research and development for a new generation of drugs that can help people one day. I strongly believe that extracellular vesicle-based gene therapy is the new modality in medicine. Working in biotech gives you the chance to work on fast-tracked, cutting-edge technologies with the hope that whatever you work on will enter the market someday. I find that application of knowledge extremely motivating!

In biotech, product development is heavily regulated, so everything takes a long time. But this team has been great. Within a short period of a year, the company has made a lot of progress and we reached our goals earlier than we expected.

Militsa (centre) with her team at Carcell Biopharma engaged in a discussion with Prof Harvey Lodish (on the right), who is the chair of Carcell’s Scientific Advisory board, over tea and coffee. 

We are where we want to be with our product, and we are going to file for clinical trials this year. That is an extremely short time for such a young company, so we should be very proud. Everybody was on board, excited and motivated. It’s just fun to come to work and see that kind of environment in a startup. I'm very proud that we managed to get a product within a year, and we are working on expanding it to other disease targets. That's pretty awesome.

We have very tight deadlines. One thing we cannot control and causes quite a bit of stress is our supply chain, which consists of different vendors and distributors. We rely on a lot of raw materials to be delivered to us fast, but the pandemic caused many disruptions to our supply chain. Some materials can take months to reach Singapore. For instance, we received a package we had ordered in October 2021 at the end of 2022. So that's a bit of a challenge, but we just try to think of alternatives so that we can meet our deadlines.

This is easy to say but hard to do sometimes: Try expanding your network as much as possible. Meet as many people as you can and go to workshops and conferences. Having a strong network of people in the science world is good not only for those who need a job but also for collaborating with other scientists. We cannot do everything ourselves, so we need partners for various aspects of our work.  

People may not be very comfortable with this, but it's very useful. The best thing you can do in a fast-moving industry like biotech is to get comfortable with always going out of your comfort zone. Always try to learn new things. Get projects where you don't know everything and don't keep doing the same repetitive work, or you won't grow career-wise.  

It's also important to always find time to go to conferences and do public speaking. I need to keep repeating to myself, “I know this week I’m tired, but maybe I can make time to go to that conference. I’m going to come out of it with something good for sure.” You never know when you’re going to make a new connection or find an opportunity for collaboration.  

Learn more about how you can be a part of Singapore’s fast-growing Deep Tech sector here.