If you run through the ~15 years of my blog, Fight Aging!, you'll find scores of promising lines of work that never made it much further than the initial reports. Medical science has a huge chasm of death between research and commercialization. It is comparatively rare for failure to proceed to be a matter of technical failure. Other causes are, I think, more common.

Part of this is that researchers don't know how to launch it, and most are not entrepreneurial. Part of it is that many technology transfer groups are like dogs in a manger, toads squatting atop things they'll never put any effort into helping along, and whose job in life is to make it slow, expensive, and hard to deal with their IP. Part of it is that funds, VCs, and to some degree entrepreneurs sit around waiting for something to be handed to them, nicely packaged.

I think most of the fault is with the funds and the incubators. They have the money to craft a solution, to make a landing pad for scientist outreach, to give them a beacon to aim at. They can reach back into the research community to a much greater extend. They can build BDCs that increase the ratio of projects:entrepreneurs that can be tackled profitably. But very little of this actually happens.

My company, Repair Biotechnologies, has found two immensely promising technologies for human rejuvenation that have been in the first case dropped on the floor at the chasm of death, never carried forward, and in the second case died because the institutions involved couldn't convince their funding sources to back the incredible potential of the work. This happens. Many institutional sources of funding don't want to see biotech barnstorming, don't want to see imaginative, radical new directions. They shut it down.

All of this combines to form a dysfunctional environment in which knowledgable entrepreneurs can pick up truly revolutionary projects, but there really needs to be institutional change that only bigger organizations and wallets can bring to bear.