Some of life’s most significant meetings are serendipitous. So it was for Livio Valenti. He was working in Cambodia with the UN when he met a professor from Tufts University, Boston who was developing ways of using the protein in silk for medical applications.

When Mr Valenti subsequently took up his place at Harvard’s Kennedy school to study public policy, he caught up with the professors conducting the silk research at nearby Tufts’ biomedical engineering school – David Kaplan and Fiorenzo Omenetto are leaders in the field.

Events snowballed when Mr Valenti then met fellow students in a Harvard Business School class called “Commercializing Science”. They drew up a business plan to develop a range of vaccine products that could potentially save thousands of lives. Mr Valenti is now vice-president of policy and strategy for Vaxess, the company they created.