Turn Your Bench-Top Idea into a Reimbursable Diagnostic | Laurel Nelson

LifeSci Continuum with Bill Schick

In this episode of LifeSci Continuum, I sit down with Laurel Nelson (Founder, InnovexDx), who breaks down how diagnostics and life-science start-ups can actually commercialize when cash is tight and timelines keep slipping.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:10 Laurel Nelson’s Career
02:50 Launching a Product with a Limited Budget
06:01 Common Founder Challenges
14:22 Founder Scientists vs Marketing
16:00 How to Build Credibility with Investors
21:15 Preparing a Good Idea for Commercialization
26:01 Phase Gate
28:26 How to Find Market Data
32:14 Market Access
35:25 Being Transparent with Investors
39:50 3 Tips for Founders
41:04 Wisdom for Younger Self
She explains why constant “lab tinkering” kills launch velocity, how a lightweight phase-gate process forces objective kill/keep decisions, and where founders routinely underrate market-access spending.
We also dig into her favorite “pressure-tests” for product-market fit, why external verification must precede scale, and how to recut the business case at every milestone so investors stay onside.
Three Commercial “Gotchas” That Sink More Lab-Startup Launches Than the Science Itself
Most first-time founders pour their energy into perfecting assay sensitivity or edge-case workflow hacks, yet overlook the far less glamorous forces that actually determine market uptake— reimbursement math, risk-gated execution, and supply-chain resilience. Laurel Nelson’s work with diagnostics start-ups shows the same three blind spots cropping up again and again, each capable of halving a valuation before anyone discovers an analytical bug.
Start with reimbursement, not with the prototype. The CPT or PLA code you intend to bill against—along with its evidence requirements and likely payment rate—quietly dictates half of your design envelope: sample-to-answer time, staff touch points, throughput thresholds, even consumable cost ceilings. Founders who “figure out coding later” end up redesigning hardware to hit margin, or worse, they head to market trapped under a price cap that investors immediately factor into a down-round.
Next, enforce micro phase-gates—even if that’s nothing more than three Google slides and a Slack channel. Moving an idea through quick feasibility, alpha verification, and an external beta test surfaces killer assumptions while the fixes are still cheap. These lightweight gates catch the moment a clinician says, “Great data, but my lab would never change this workflow,” before you’ve ordered production molds or spun up a $200 k validation study. They also give boards the proof points they need to keep financing flowing without funding every shiny R&D tangent.
Finally, lock dual-vendor coverage for every critical consumable as soon as verification passes. A single polymerase lot that fails QC can stall trials for months, derailing a Series A timeline and torching your credibility with early adopters. Qualifying at least two suppliers—complete with incoming QC specs—turns supply hiccups into routine purchase-order swaps and lets you scale when that first major hospital system says yes.
None of these moves are exciting science, and that’s the point. They remove the non-scientific landmines that so often explode after launch, allowing the real innovation to speak for itself—and to get paid.
#Commercialization #MarketAccess #ClinicalUtility #BootstrappedLaunch #InvestorReadiness #ReimbursementStrategy #LifeScienceStartups