Andrey Samsonov, PhD

      I have more than 20 years of rich experience in academia and in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Why have I decided to found a pharmaceutical start-up company? The reason is simple: during the last 10 years (since 2011), I was a member of the InnoCentive community of Solvers. Since the start, I have solved 21 challenges (complete list) and was InnoCentive Top Solver for five years (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2020). Currently I have world rank # 12 among InnoCentive Top Solvers for All Time (select All Time). Recently I started to solve challenges in other crowdsourcing platforms such as IdeaConnection and HeroX.

The competition is enormously strong there, and Solvers with good solutions are submitting their ideas from all across the globe. The winning of award money was never paramount for my participation in InnoCentive crowdsourcing and open innovation platform. The most attractive part is the feeling of knowing that you won a competition with the world's greatest minds (especially when you were the only Solver that was awarded by the Seeker. My favorite challenge was "Early Detection of Inflammatory Bowel Disease" from the Cleveland Clinic. They asked to design a system or algorithm to provide clinicians with a way to detect IBD before development of overt clinical manifestations, when the disease is already chronic. The challenge was in the area of my expertise which is biology, biotechnology, biophysics, chemistry, biomedical problems etc. I was a sole winner in this challenge and got the full award from the Seeker. However, it was not the reason that this challenge became my favorite one. During intensive research of looking at the challenge details to generate more information for analysis, I suddenly realized that even if my solution really worked for early detection of IBD in individuals at risk, there was still no cure for this disease. Medicines are mostly palliative and can reduce inflammation and increase the number and length of periods of remission. As a result, IBD patients will only have periods of remission when the disease is not active. Therefore, I got another challenge for myself – since I already have all available information about IBD etiology, I can try to propose a method or medication that will cure this terrible disease. The challenge was awarded in 2014, but only recently I got some good ideas about how to cure or at least to alleviate IBD.

        Sometimes I knew who were the Seekers who bought my ideas/solutions; sometimes they were anonymous. When you sold your idea, you never knew if it was realized or not, i.e. became new methods or products. It is really a sad situation for any inventor - you know that your idea was good, in many cases the Seeker awarded only your idea with the full award, but since you sold your idea you will never be notified whether it was realized in practice or not. Moreover, even if it becomes a great product or method some other name(s) will be on the IP/patent. At some point, I decided enough with that approach, and we founded start-up Samdolite Pharmaceuticals. Since that moment, I can try not only to generate new ideas but also to realize them.

John Fetter, PhD


I have over 25 years of experience in the Pharmaceutical and Biotech industry. My undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral experience was in the field of biochemistry. I then moved into drug discovery R&D in industry where I worked in the areas of inflammation and oncology, developing biochemical and cell-based assays for screening. This led to an enriching experience for 15 years at Sigma-Aldrich which later became MilliporeSigma through an acquisition. For the first eight years, I worked in R&D developing drug screening assays as products for customers. Then I moved into product management for seven years to have more influence over the introduction of new products. As a Product Manager, I searched for and developed innovative products and technologies across the chemistry and biology space within the chemical synthesis portfolio. I developed products in the crosslinker space, probes for measuring biological activity, and most recently DNA-encoded libraries for drug discovery screening. This also gave me more experience in considering the financial aspects of making and selling products. During my time at MilliporeSigma, I enjoyed the creative aspects of research and received eight company awards for innovation. I now would like to use my experience to help Samdolite become an innovative drug discovery company.