Taryn Adams speaks about her passion for driving science and business innovation in Africa.
Innovation tends to be about finding the next new thing, but in a resource-constrained region that might not be possible. We can, however, innovate by taking something that already exists and applying it to a problem it has not been applied to before.
Taryn Adams
Taryn Adams has long been interested in bridging the gap between science and business in order to ensure science has practical, useful applications. Coming from South Africa, she says the innovation that results from linking science and business, particularly in biotech, is still in its early stages, but she feels there is room to make a difference through applying existing technology to new fields.
She hopes her MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise will help give her the skills she needs to apply lab-based science to real-world scenarios in her country. She says: “Innovation tends to be about finding the next new thing, but in a resource-constrained region that might not be possible. We can, however, innovate by taking something that already exists and applying it to a problem it has not been applied to before.”
Early years
Taryn [2024] was born and grew up in Johannesburg and comes from a business background. Both her parents are business owners – her father has moved from music to logistics, and her mother in healthcare-related products.
Her parents placed a big premium on education for her and her younger sister as a result of their own experiences and sent them to a girls’ school which placed an emphasis on supporting both education and cultural activities.
Taryn excelled academically, but also trained hard in contemporary dance, going to many competitions for a large part of her early life. She felt torn between her interest in science and her love of dance. However, she found that, as she went for auditions for dance jobs, she began to enjoy it less. Covid played a big role as there were fewer opportunities to perform and the dance space became very commercialised. “I wasn’t able to do what I wanted to do as a performer,” she says. On the other hand, her research work was ramping up and it gave her more autonomy and a sense of purpose. In 2021 she decided to focus all her efforts on her scientific interests and to forego her life as a professional dancer.
University
At school Taryn had been very interested in STEM subjects, particularly Biology, and, at 18, she was offered the chance to do a collaborative research project in Plant and Environmental Sciences with the University of the Witwatersrand. It looked at the ecological impact of water hyacinths, an invasive species in the region. The project gave her a taste of life as a researcher and introduced her to the scientific process.
In 2018, after leaving school she went straight to the University of the Witwatersrand to study Biological Science. Taryn got a scholarship for both her undergraduate and master’s degrees, doing a bridging year in infectious diseases in 2020 between the two courses. Over those years she gravitated from Plant and Environmental Sciences to Biochemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology. Her honours project morphed into her master’s research project over that period. She was looking at HIV and drug resistance. “We came up with more strategic ways of targeting proteins as more resistant strains popped up,” says Taryn. The research project she was working on had a lot of information on virus mutations, often in people who were not yet on HIV drug treatments, meaning the researchers could eliminate those drugs which did not work against particular strains of HIV. Taryn was researching the role of peptide drugs in stopping the virus’ life cycle.
Entrepreneurship
Having contributed to scientific publications, she felt the academic environment might not be the best fit for her. “The focus seemed to be on knowledge acquisition and publications and not always about the application of the research in a real-world setting,” she says. She found the lack of investment in innovation and turning academic research into tangible improvements in people’s lives frustrating. “There needs to be a greater focus on start-ups spinning out of academia in South Africa,” she says. She wanted to contribute to that.
Earlier in her career she had met Professor Lynn Morris, now Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Innovation at the University of the Witwatersrand, who had set up an innovation hub and was running pitching competitions. Using her knowledge of peptides, Taryn pitched a platform company which could bioprospect and rapidly synthesise antimicrobial peptides for use in agriculture as opposed to excessively using antibiotics as currently happens.
Through the process of pitching, however, Taryn realised that she was still thinking like a lab-based academic, focusing on the technical side and not seeing the nuances of how it could be applied to agriculture and veterinary science. “It was a good idea, but it wasn’t feasible in the real world,” she says.
One of the judging panel had started up a small biotech company which focused on genetic testing. Taryn was interested in their work, given that the biotech market and biotech expertise in South Africa was relatively undeveloped. The company was able to apply genetic testing to different areas. Taryn got a job there working as a design and development scientist across the stem cell banking facility, biologics wound care manufacturing unit and genetics laboratory. Her role morphed from one of only technical focus to evaluating current and new products and services from both a business and regulatory lens.
The role also allowed her to get experience of thinking about the real-world applications of science, for instance, how South African biotechnology businesses could leverage their expertise and capabilities to expand products and services. “It was a good exposure to the regulatory environment and offered a crash course in science and business,” she says, adding: “It was very different to the academic environment. My thinking as a scientist became more practical and holistic.”
Cambridge
She was keen to extend what she had learned in order to be able to improve the interface between academic research and business in South Africa. So she looked around for interdisciplinary training, but couldn’t find anything in South Africa. Then she heard of the work the University of Cambridge was doing. She notes that she has spent much of her science career attempting to bring science and business together. During her honours and after she had, for instance, reached out to science alumni who had opted not to go into academia in a bid to open up a conversation about science innovation. She also engaged with the public and organised workshops, visited science fairs and made videos. “I was interested in the crossover between science, business and society,” she says.
For her MPhil, Taryn hopes to hone her business skillset, particularly in relation to Molecular Biology which she says is relevant to so many different industries.
She has already linked up with fellow Cambridge students, including Gates Cambridge Scholar Kerem Citak, whose background is in bio-materials and who is researching tissue engineering scaffolds for regenerative medicine. “The aim is to combine our skills and come up with products that are more reliable than what is currently available and more affordable and scalable,” says Taryn.
With access to such a diverse Gates Cambridge community, she says she will use every occasion to probe opportunities to develop a biotech enterprise that provides value to everyday lives and to engage current Cambridge biotech accelerators and enterprise development organisations to look to the African continent.
She loves meeting other Gates Cambridge Scholars and says it opens up new perspectives that she had not considered. Being a Scholar means she also has a community of people to support her. She hopes to return to South Africa after her studies and disseminate what she has learnt. “This kind of innovation is in its infancy in South Africa,” she says. “I want to help advance it.”
*Picture credit: Robyn Rose Photography
