Dermot Tierney: How FOMO became the driving force behind going all in on a university spinout

In this episode of The Research Adventure Podcast we speak with Dermot Tierney, Co-Founder and COO of Amply Discovery, an AI-driven drug discovery company spun out from Queen’s University Belfast. Dermot shares his unusual journey into deep tech entrepreneurship — from growing up on a farm in Northern Ireland and studying English, to working across media, business development, university accelerators, and technology transfer before eventually stepping into the startup world himself.

He reflects on what he learned from more than a decade inside university tech transfer, why strong relationships between academics and TTOs matter, and how his experience as a “commercial foil” helped shape Amply’s path to spinout. The conversation explores the realities of building an early-stage biotech company, raising pre-seed and seed investment, and the challenge of translating university research into therapies that could one day improve patient lives.