Sometimes tangents can lead to promising new science, as well as fresh career opportunities. That's the lesson learned by Renos Savva, this year's winner of London First's Young Biotechnology Entrepreneur Award, announced last week.

When Savva was doing his PhD at University College London, he was mostly concerned with how cells repair their DNA after it becomes damaged. But when he joined a research group around the corner at Birkbeck College in 1999, his colleagues directed his attention towards structural biology — a step away from the linear world of genetics and genomics into the three-dimensional domain of proteomics.

At the time, the group was developing technology to clone and express proteins. Traditional methods emphasized bioinformatics to guess how differences in sequences could result in different protein shapes and folds. But Savva and his colleagues felt that the approach was incomplete, because it was only educated guesswork. So they found a way to randomly sample the genome — using damaged DNA, Savva's speciality — and then clone a library of proteins that would better represent these changes.

The work had only “tenuous links” to Savva's PhD work, he says, but he nevertheless was prepared to take the plunge and follow in the footsteps of his father, also an entrepreneur. After the university helped the group obtain patent protection, the researchers spun out a company, struggled for seed money, then searched for clients. Now Savva splits his time between being research director of the company Domainex and as a research director at Birkbeck.

Savva's experience shows that left turns can lead to profitable places. But he says that tangents alone are not enough. Scientists who want to enter business also need to be comfortable with risks, and to have infrastructure in place to turn academic ideas into business opportunities.