It’s Almost Here: Reserve Your Tickets for IndieBio NY Class 4 Demo Day

IndieBio is proud to announce its Demo Day for New York Class 4, taking place at The Gramercy Theater Wednesday June 29, 2022. Doors open at 5pm EST! Reserve your tickets here.

IndieBio is the world’s leading biotech startup development program, which supports founders tackling the biggest problems facing human and planetary health. Startups develop scientific projects into products that will transform our food, therapeutics, biomaterials, and diagnostics industries–and more.

This is your opportunity to celebrate with these incredibly talented teams, as they highlight the many milestones achieved during our four month intensive program.

Interested in learning more about what they are working on? Get a sneak peak of the startups that will be presenting here.

An Interview with John Mendelson of DxRx

“Rehab on Your Phone”

dxrx medical

Photo: John Mendelson (center) and the DxRx team.

Not everyone who occasionally overdrinks is seen as an alcoholic in need of help. DxRx is a service for people who want to manage their alcohol consumption using an app, a breathalyzer, and medication if needed. DxRx wants to break the stigma of alcoholism and make treatment obtainable for people who can’t deal with traditional rehab or Alcoholics Anonymous, in terms of financial and social cost. We asked one of the company’s founders, John Mendelson, a few questions:

Tell me about your background, how did you become interested in public health?

My father was one of the first scientists to study alcoholism. His enthusiasm led to my interest in alcohol, opiate, and stimulant addiction, which blossomed into a career in clinical research for addiction treatments. Besides conducting research, I also treat patients. I have been in practice for 30 years and have had the extraordinarily good fortune to watch addictive diseases go from untreatable severe diseases often ending in death to manageable problems.

What problem are you working to solve with DxRx?

If you ask the average American to list the most deadly diseases, alcoholism doesn’t make the cut. Yet alcoholism is a devastating disease that destroys lives and kills more people then diabetes. Despite the toll of alcoholism, most people have no idea what makes a person an alcoholic, how to identify early problem drinking, or treat the disease. Part of the problem is that alcoholism is often viewed through binary lens – you are either a flawed person or the inevitable victim of a purely biological disease. In fact, like most important problems in life, voluntary choices combined with biologic vulnerabilities lead to the eventual disease state. Both my approach and DxRx’s philosophy is to provide tools to enable better choices of when and how much to drink, while also addressing underlying biological motivators of behavior.

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

Of all the progress we have made over the past four months at IndieBio, there is one thing that convinces me we are on the right path. Our customers use a breathalyzer every day to measure their blood alcohol content so they can track their progress. When we average the results from the first dozen patients, the results are astonishing. The average patient at DxRxMedical is able to cut their drinking in half in a month.

How do you think success can change your industry?

At present there is no cure for alcohol addiction so treatment needs to be one day at a time. Our light, daily, empowering touches support patients for the long haul. 34 million Americans are estimated to have Alcohol Use Disorder yet only 2.5 million get treatment and only when the disease has done much of its destruction. The costs are enormous with an estimated $16 billion being spent to treating this small proportion of people in need. Success means 34 million people with AUD can get help and prevent hitting rock bottom.

How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

Our team is successful, experienced and creative. I am a practicing physician and NIH-funded researcher with 30 years of experience treating patients and developing treatments for addiction. David Deacon, our CEO, has launched four companies of his own and helped found 20 others. Bob Nix, our CEO, has been a software architect at Athena Health for the last nine years and has been VP of engineering for nine start-ups.

Our Scientific Advisors are all leaders in addiction science. Chuck O’Brien developed naltrexone for addiction and is the leading academic physician in addiction. Ivan Diamond founded the UCSF Gallo Center, edits Alcohol Clinical and Experimental Research and is the leading academic expert in the biology of alcoholism. Warren Bickel is a Psychologist whose works pairs psychological interventions with technology. 

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

To be concise! I try!

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

There is a lot of stigma associated with addiction, which fuels denial, and deconstructing this stigma and empowering our patients to take charge has been a big challenge we are quickly learning to overcome. 

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

Over the last month we have enrolled our first group of patients and have launched demonstration projects with key stakeholders in medicine including a Yale-associated hospital, researchers at the NIAAA, and the largest hospital chain in California – Dignity Health. The team at DxRxMedical is now rolling out our solution to everyone in California, starting with employees at a few key companies, and hospitals that need a solution for their patients. If we are successful in California, we will scale up by hiring physicians across the country to deliver addiction treatment in every state. 

An Interview with Francia Navarrete Utreras of GEA Enzymes

GEA Enzymes

Liquid Dark Chocolate Is Now a Reality.

GEA Enzymes

Photo: Francia (center) and the GEA Enzymes team.

GEA Enzymes engineers designer enzymes. Their first application is in food, with enzymes which reduce saturated fat levels while maintaining consistent aroma, taste, and feel. This makes it possible for a substance like dark chocolate to obtain that rich, liquid consistency that so many food companies want for their products. We asked Francia Utreras a few questions about the GEA:

Tell me about your background, how did you get interested in the biotech space?

My background is in biotechnology engineering. Our team started the company in Chile about 18 months ago. We decided to start GEA Enzymes because the three of us are incredibly passionate about nature’s architecture, and how we could adopt the same strategy that has successfully created all living organisms to solve world class problems.

What problem are you working to solve with your company, GEA Enzymes?

The classical protein discovery process is based on trial and error, taking a long time and many resources. Big companies have automated the process with robots, but it’s still slow and expensive with no rationale behind it. Due to this, we created MADI™, an artificial intelligence that allows us to create proteins for any desired industrial application.

To prove MADI™’s skills, we decided to start with a very challenging market, the saturated fats industry. Saturated fats are very dangerous for human health, because they can induce obesity and heart stroke. Due to this, our first designer proteins have the ability to take saturated fats and turn them into unsaturated fats. By applying this technology, we can create healthier and better quality food products.

This has huge applications in the chocolate, dairy, and vegetable fats industries, so we are working with large multinational companies in these fields. We know that this is just the beginning, because by using MADI™ we are exploring solutions beyond the food industry.

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

Keeping passion alive. That’s the reason why we decided to move far away from our homes, work day and night including Sundays and holidays, and accept everything that entails being entrepreneurs. We’ve learned you need to sacrifice many things, put your personal life after your company, and even not get paid sometimes. Keeping this rhythm for too long might be the main reason most startups fail. If people don’t believe in what they are doing, it is easy to get lost in the journey and all the sacrifices it requires.

How do you think success can change your industry?

Our first approach to manage unsolved problems of the industry is a set of enzymes able to turn saturated fats into unsaturated fats. This will allow an increase in the nutritional value of oils and butter. In other words we could achieve the same lipid profile of the most sophisticated plantation with more efficient grow cultures.

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

Nobody else knows the potential of your business more than you. People can give you feedback, and you’ve got to be mature enough to realize if those opinions might work for you or drive your business to its death.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

As a scientist, is it hard to understand why you are not able to close deals if the science you’re working with is so cool. As entrepreneurs we painfully learned the transition between science and business, improving the art of closing deals. To sell science to multinational companies was a real challenge.

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

In the short term we want to raise our seed round to establish ourselves in the US, grow the team, and run in parallel all the projects we are working on. I see for the future GEA diversified in fields including Food, Pharma, Healthcare, and Agriculture — all handled by the power of proteins.

Learn more about GEA Enzymes by watching them pitch on IndieBio Demo Day Feb. 9th! Register for the event or LiveStream here!

An Interview With Daniel Dempsey of Venomyx Therapeutics

Venomyx

Just like an Epi-Pen for Snake Bites.

Venomyx

Photo: Deepankar Roy (left), Daniel Dempsey, and Alexio Capovilla of Venomyx Therapeutics.

Snake bites are one of humanity’s oldest medical problems, but they’re definitely not a thing of the past—millions of people are bitten by poisonous snakes every year, and if they are lucky, those people are able to get medical attention quickly enough to not lose life or limb. The process of producing antivenom is outdated—it usually consists of injecting a horse or sheep with poisonous venom and harvesting the antibodies that the animal creates. Venomyx is using biotechnology to eliminate the use of animals from the process of producing antivenom, along with making it available in a portable, easy-to-use injector that makes it seem like the Epi-Pen for Snake Bites. We asked the company’s CEO, Daniel Dempsey, a few questions:

Tell me about your background, how did you get interested in the biotech space?

As cliche as it sounds, I got into biotech to make a difference in the world—specifically to make a difference in the lives of people. I went to school at UC San Diego and studied human biology as an undergrad and then autoimmune disease for my M.S. during grad school, I seized the opportunity to research infectious disease in the Costa Rican rainforest for a summer. It was there (surrounded by snakes) that I became familiar with the problems surrounding conventional antivenom and envisioned what modern biotech research could bring to this space. I returned to San Diego to work for big pharma developing drugs against cancer and inflammatory diseases. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something should be done for people that currently don’t have access to safe and effective antivenom so I studied it in my spare time. I finally decided that we were on to something that should be given a chance and quit my job, forming Venomyx in 2015.

What problem are you working to solve with your company, Venomyx?

We are working to make the world’s first recombinant antivenom that offers broad-spectrum treatment for bites from all medically relevant species of snakes.

Every year 5.5 Million people are bitten by venomous snakes. For the victims of snakebite, this results in disfigurement, disability, or death. Conventional antivenom has been able to approximate treatment of snakebite but is associated with limited efficacy, side effects, and a difficult production process.

Our antivenom is showing early preclinical success as a universal treatment for snakebite. It is a recombinant product which is manufactured at scale using microbial fermentation. The stability of our antivenom means that it does not require cold chain and will be available in the field for the first time ever.

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

The entrepreneurial path is not an easy onebut I think that’s why we chose it. At some point, if it seems you have the ability to do something important, it becomes almost a responsibility to act. We’ve definitely received raised eyebrows from people in the past for what we are attempting to do; but we have also received support and encouragement from prominent opinion leaders of our space and that is the most validating of all. There have been many great minds who have dedicated their lives to studying snakes and their venom, so we hope to validate them by getting our solution to market and saving lives with it.

How do you think success can change your industry?

Our product will transform a very old industry that still relies on milking snakes and immunizing horses with the venom. We plan to manufacture our product overseas or license to overseas pharmaceutical companies who are already showing willingness to change. This will lead to a shift in local jobs from animal handling to biomanufacturing and, of course, spare great numbers of snakes and horses as a result.

How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

Dan Dempsey
Deepankar Roy, PhD
Alexio Capovilla, PhD

We each have experience in both research and business as it pertains to drug development. This strong base is then differentiated further where each of us is able to lend unique perspective in the areas of R&D, project management, business development, regulatory compliance, and commercialization. Our complementarity skills help tremendously with the decision making process of an early therapeutics company where important decisions are made daily.

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

Don’t sweat the small stuffjust keep moving forward. There are so many challenges encountered as a start up and not everything goes as planned. It’s important to stay diligent and stay on your path. I’ve looked back at some of the early setbacks we’ve had as a company and noticed that it’s par for the course and we’re always able to find a way through.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

I think there is an inherent challenge associated with operating in our space which is part of the reason there still isn’t a viable solution. Snake venom is a complex drug target and requires the same scientific diligence that you would employ with any other disease indication. Traditionally, pharma companies and investors have been hesitant to venture into a space that falls outside the more widely accepted investment areas. I think we are changing that. They are beginning to see the cost and regulatory advantages of our space and that it opens the doors for our future projects in bacterial antitoxins to combat antibiotic resistant strains which is a huge and growing market.

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

We are already showing neutralization of venom from multiple species of snake and plan to finish preclinical development and enter the clinic for Vipax Asia at the end of 2017. The acute nature of our trials combined with our qualification for fast track status means we can complete clinical trials and gain approval as early as Dec 2019. Once our clinical trials are underway we plan to shift focus to development of Vipax for our other three regions (U.S., Africa, South America) as well as our bacterial antitoxin programs.

Learn more about Venomyx by watching Daniel pitch on IndieBio Demo Day Feb. 9th! Register for the event or LiveStream here!

An Interview With Hyunjun Park & Nathaniel Roquet of Catalog Technologies

Catalog is developing a DNA-based data storage platform.

Storing Information in DNA

Photo: Nathaniel Roquet (left) and Hyunjun Park of Catalog Technologies. 

As the amount of information that humans create grows exponentially, hard drives and older methods of storage are becoming obsolete. DNA has been discovered to be effective medium for storing the world’s information, and it has several advantages in terms of storage space and shelf life. Catalog Technologies is not only storing info in DNA, but making the process economically viable so that it becomes more common in the near future. We asked a few questions to the company’s founders, Hyunjun Park and Nathaniel Roquet:

Tell me about your background, how did you become interested in science?

Hyunjun: Former postdoc in Prof. Timothy Lu’s group at MIT, Hyunjun obtained his BS at Seoul National University and PhD at the University of Wisconsin Madison. While in graduate school, Hyunjun worked at the university technology transfer office (WARF) and participated in the Wisconsin Entrepreneurial Bootcamp. Upon coming to Cambridge for his postdoc, he participated in MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service, as well as StartMIT, an intensive training program for startup founders.

Nate: Nate is a PhD candidate in the Harvard Biophysics program, conducting his thesis research in Prof Timothy Lu’s lab at MIT. He received his BA in physics from Princeton University. Nathaniel has a deep passion for fostering STEM education, especially with underprivileged or underrepresented youth, participating in various education outreach programs including serving as a teacher/mentor for Science Clubs of Mexico, Science Club for Girls, Citizen Schools, and the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunity program.

What problem are you working to solve with Catalog Technologies?

As our tagline “Infinite Data Archives” suggests, we want to leverage the inherent characteristics of DNA to preserve humanity’s knowledge forever, in a very sustainable way.

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

We want to make the greatest possible positive impact through our activities. If we are able to show that we are making a bigger positive impact through a startup than through other means, we would know that we are doing the right thing

How do you think success can change your industry?

DNA information storage has been talked about for several decades for the following reasons: 1) DNA is extremely information dense. For a given volume, DNA can store ~1,000,000X more information than SSD. 2) DNA will retain the info for thousands of years under the right conditions. This compares to decades in magnetic tape. 3) It is essentially free to copy DNA, making it possible to make many redundant copies of the information you want to archive. One of the biggest reasons DNA is not yet a major information storage medium despite these advantages, is the high cost of synthesis of DNA. If you try to store information at the point of synthesis, the cumulative cost of synthesis would get prohibitively high for large data sets. This is why our technology has the potential to disrupt the industry.

How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

We are pioneering a paradigm shift in information storage that was invented in house. The fact that we are using DNA molecules to do this means that we can draw on our own expertise as highly trained scientists, as well as from a pool of world-leading experts that we are closely affiliated with. When it comes to the team make up, the two of us have highly complementary skill sets and have a deep level of trust in each other’s abilities.

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

We learned that many things we’ve picked up as scientists, such as logical and quantitative analysis skills are very useful as entrepreneurs. At the same time, we felt an immediate need to learn how to communicate our long-term vision with a general audience.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

Public speaking, social media, and engagement with the press.

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

Our external milestones are set as the ability to encode a given amount of information within a day. In the immediate term, we are shooting for a megabit stored by Demo Day. In one year, we aim to get to a gigabyte.

Learn more about Catalog Technologies by watching them pitch on IndieBio Demo Day Feb. 9th! Register for the event or LiveStream here!

An Interview With Brendan Griffen of Scaled Biolabs

Scaled Biolabs

A Biomedical Lab the Size of Your Phone.

Scaled Biolabs

Photo: The Scaled Biolabs team – Brendan Griffen (left), Justin Cooper-White, and Drew Titmarsh.

Biological experiments are time-consuming, and space-consuming, while requiring repeated manual motions from lab technicians. But technology has allowed Scaled Biolabs to shrink down the entire system of experimentation down to the size of your phone. Using microfluidics, scientists can conduct thousands of individual tests in one fell swoop and accelerate the rate of discoveries. We talked to the company’s CTO, Brendan Griffen, a few questions about how this all came to be:

Tell me about your background, how did you become interested in biotech?

My academic background is in computational physics with an specialization in astrophysics, theoretical physics, and cosmology. I’ve spent the last ten years working on large projects trying to understand the origin of our universe, the evolution of stars, and galaxies.  From these experiences, I’ve seen first hand the power of a supercomputer in solving some of the most complex problems in the world. This is fundamentally because we’ve been able to control the flow of electrons through circuits at increasingly smaller scales. Biology is similar in many ways but instead of mixing and moving electrons from point A to point B, we’re moving fluids. This is the fundamental way biomedical research is currently done so it always perplexed me as to why we continue to use clunky equipment to interface the human scale with what we’re actually interested in (e.g. cells interacting). This is what excited me about the future of biotechnology, our ability to do biology at nature’s scale. The potential to miniaturize most of biological research means that in the next 50 years, we will likely transform our lives even more dramatically than what computers have done in the past 50 years.

I’ve always been interested in biotechnology but never had the opportunity to apply myself to developing these ideas. When I saw the technology my co-founders Drew Titmarsh and Justin Cooper-White had developed, I immediately understood that a microfluidic approach to experimental biology is exactly what’s needed to make the aforementioned future a reality. In order to be part of this exciting future, we formed our company Scaled Biolabs.

What problem are you working to solve with Scaled Biolabs?

We are accelerating discoveries in biology. We’ve taken the functionality of a modern biomedical R&D lab and shrunk it all down on a system the size of your phone. By shrinking things down we rely on less expensive materials, less highly trained manual labor, and most importantly we can execute numbers of experiments on an unprecedented scale. We can run nearly 10,000 experiments on a single system and additionally resolve every single cell in every one of those experiments. Why is this important? If a biologist can run down every single possible path in a maze of possibilities faster, then they can find the optimal solution which gets them to their desired outcome sooner rather than later.

Stem cells are one such maze and a very active area of research right now — how do we turn stem cells, the ‘blueprint cell’, into different parts of the human body? Our collaborators have already grown human kidney and beating heart tissue in our system because they found the optimal method for getting to those outcomes faster than traditional methods. At Scaled Biolabs, we enable these kinds of breakthroughs by allowing scientists to get more done, cheaper and sooner.

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

All discussions of “what has value?” tend to link back to a basic notion of health and wellbeing. I personally believe that our team really does have the potential to deliver fundamental improvements to human health. Take just one example — in 2005, 65 million people died from kidney disease. Being able to regenerate a patient’s kidney from their own stem cells, which won’t be rejected by their immune system, will literally save lives. If we had to boil it down to a single reason for doing all of this then it’s that — accelerating the advent of regenerative medicine to meet the needs of millions of patients who can’t be helped by a pharmaceutical drug.

How do you think success can change your industry?

Apart from meeting patient’s needs, success to us is creating a new status quo in our industry. Biological research is in desperate need of an upgrade, and should our approach be successful, we would be enamored to see it more widely used. We don’t want to stop just there though. Unknown problems on the horizon will require solutions not yet invented, and so being successful will mean not just creating a new status quo, but also continually creating novel technological solutions.

How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

We’ve got complementary talent trained around the world.

Our CEO, Drew Titmarsh, is a trained chemical and biological engineer and co-inventor of the microbioreactor technology which is the workhorse platform of Scaled Biolabs. He has coordinated multidisciplinary projects at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnogy (Brisbane, Australia), and the Institute for Medical Biology, A*STAR (Singapore) in the areas of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Our CSO Professor Justin Cooper-White is a global leader in tissue engineering and microfluidics, and co-inventor of our microbioreactor technology. With 20 years of expertise in running and funding large research programs, he currently holds the positions of Professor of Bioengineering in the Australian Institute of Bioengineering & Nanotechnology and the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Queensland, Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility-Queensland Node, and Office of the Chief Executive Science Leader within CSIRO, Australia’s federal research institution.

I’m the CTO and have ten years in computational physics employing a wide variety of hardware and software tools to create solutions to big data problems. My previous four years research as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT has provided me with a wide range of interdisciplinary skills which are well suited to our challenges ahead.

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

It’s been quite a dramatic transition. The following three areas are where we’ve found the biggest lessons:

  1. Being OK with moving more quickly than you’re comfortable with. Academia tends to have a perfection focused mindset because the operational timescales are much longer. In industry, things are measured in days. The closest analogy I’ve found is it’s like morphing from a mammal into an insect — your priorities certainly change!
  2. As the phrase goes, “it’s not what you know, it’s who who you know”. Academia tends to (in the ideal case) be more of a meritocracy where what you know really does give you the greatest return. In industry, having strong relationships with people you can lean on for help or to stage a warm introduction often converts into something of great value.
  3. Follow up. No one cares about your business more than you, so you really have to make that extra effort to follow up with people if an email or call thread goes cold. Even if there is not a quid pro quo to be had on the business side, it is always very useful to keep all learning opportunities available. There are large number of tools online now which allow you to maintain several hundred conversations at once and ensure that you don’t let potentially important relationships go cold.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

Our biggest challenge has been our messaging and identity (i.e. “what are we?”). This is often the case for platform technologies — you can address multiple problems but the key is to find the underlying compelling narrative which brings it all together. Thinking more fundamentally about our technology and which direction we are heading has really helped us solve this problem. Traction also does wonders to identity woes because you get validation that what you’re building is something people want, so it’s much easier to speak to that than just a lofty garage band idea.

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

At the moment we are focused on providing value to customers who seek the advantages of our technology. We are in the early stages of our long term goal of placing our system in every research lab around the world. These are primarily companies either creating high quality stem cells or turning stem cells into different tissues of the human body. In the very long term we want to place our instrument in all doctor’s offices so that unfortunate folks who are diagnosed with cancer can get personalized treatment plans tailored to their own immune system and cancer type. With this two pronged approach we aim to become industry leaders in both regenerative medicine and personalized medicine. We’ve got a long journey but we’re making good strides.

Learn more about Scaled Biolabs by watching them pitch on IndieBio Demo Day Feb. 9th! Register for the event or LiveStream here!

An Interview With Arshia Firouzi of Ravata Solutions

Ravata Solutions

Electronic Embryo Alteration.

Ravata Solutions

Photo: Arshia Firouzi (left) and Gurkern Sufi.

There are numerous reasons why new therapeutics take so long to become accessible to people suffering from life-threatening diseases. Many lab animals which are used in the testing of new treatments, most notably mice, often need to be genetically modified in order for them to best represent the condition that needs to be treated by new substances. The process of altering mouse embryos is extremely manual and time consuming, which is why Ravata Solutions has developed a new device to cut the process down to a fraction of its original time. We asked the company’s’ CEO and founder, Arshia Firouzi, a few questions:

Tell me about your background, how did you become interested in biotech?

I grew up in Southern Illinois and moved to Sacramento, California in late 2001. In 2011 I began my education at UC Davis where I studied Physics and Electrical Engineering. Following my graduation in 2016 I teamed up with my long-time friend and housemate Gurkern Sufi to start Ravata. We were and continue to be very excited about the intersection of electronics and biology. It is our view that the union of the two can accelerate achievement and advances in both fields.

My personal interest in public health stems from my experiences with my epilepsy. I am fortunate to have my seizures controlled but I continue to visit a neurologist and interact with many people having various neurological diseases. One of my favorite moments at Ravata was seeing the neuroscience research being done in mouse models. Knowing that our success means the success of neuroscience has fueled my passion for our work.

To an extent I almost feel like biotech became interested in me. I ended up with friends doing research in bio, professors working with biotech entrepreneurs, and then eventually a research project in biotech that led me to Ravata.

What problem are you working to solve with Ravata Solutions?

We are working to solve the limitations surrounding embryo engineering. Our technology is opening a bottleneck in the way genetically modified animals are created. Today, the process of transforming animal embryos is a manual one. As a result, animals used in medical research and preclinical trials can take over a year to produce. Furthermore, many times these animals are not good models of the disease they are meant to represent. What we are doing at Ravata is providing a cost effective and time efficient method to create quality animal models.  

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

The fact that we have a technology to make a difference and a focused team to bring it into reality is how I validated forming a startup.

How do you think success can change your industry?

Our success means that the rodent model industry can produce better animal models for medical research and preclinical trials faster (up to 100X) and more efficiently than ever before. This will significantly shorten the research and drug development timespan.

How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

Our technology involves the intersection of electronics and biology. My team has the necessary experience with electrical engineering, biology, and material science to tackle the challenges associated with the science.

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

The biggest lesson I have learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship is that having a great idea is only 1% of having a successful business. There are many great people with many brilliant ideas. It takes a combination of a large network, hard work, and strong mentors to be successful.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

The biggest challenge I have encountered so far is learning how to manage my bandwidth. There are always urgent tasks needing to be handled, many of which I have no experience with. In order to get through everything requires a new understanding of what is necessary, how to delegate tasks, and time management.

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

In the short term, we are looking to finalize the designs for our current system and enter the rodent model market. In the long term, we are aiming to adapt our device to work with other animal models and eventually other cell types such as plants, fungi, and even human cells.

Learn more about Ravata Solutions by watching Arshia pitch on IndieBio Demo Day Feb. 9th! Register for the event or LiveStream here!

Magnetic Pulses to Combat Depression: An Interview With Mehran Talebinejad of NeuroQore

NeuroQore
NeuroQore

Photo: The NeuroQore team (Mehran on far left). 

Depression is a major burden in many people’s lives who we know. Some of the treatments that are prescribed, like medication, are not always effective or without major side effects. Drug-resistant depression is sometimes treated with electroshock therapy, which is risky, despite being the gold standard. In comes NeuroQore, a new device that aims to treat depression by sending magnetic pulses to a small region of the brain, which is safer than electroshock therapy. We asked NeuroQore’s CEO, Mehran Talebinejad, a few questions:

Tell me about your background, how did you get interested in the biotech space?

As a teenager I was fascinated with brain machine interfaces (BMI) and mind uploading. This drove me to study Biomedical Engineering and go towards neural prosthetics and brain surgery. Fast forward 10 years after getting into the university, and I did my first brain surgery. During this surgery I realized the brain is so extremely complex, and machine BMIs have a long long way to go before being publicly available. I also realized non-invasive brain tools and neuromodulation is super important since we don’t have easy access to the brain while the skull is blocking us!

So how did you try to turn that complexity into something practical you could work on?

Among non-invasive approaches to brain stimulation or neuromodulation there are only two very promising approaches: the first is electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) or electroshock therapy. This is the gold standard for treatment of drug-resistant depression. The second is the magnetic brain stimulation or repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), which emulates ECT in smaller brain regions without convulsion. ECT requires hospitalization, anesthesia, and has severe cognitive side effects (memory loss) and a risk of death. Less than 1% of patients are willing to endure ECT! On the other hand, rTMS is outpatient, has no systemic side effects and is widely accepted by patients. I saw the potential of rTMS and I had a vision to make it more accessible and more effective for treatment of drug-resistant depression and a range of other brain disorders (psychiatric and neurological).

What problem are you working to solve with your company, NeuroQore?

TMS is a platform tech with a range of applications, but we are focused on drug-resistant depression at this time. Over 16M patients are diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) every year in the US, and more than 4M remain drug-resistant. Which means they do not get satisfactory results from drugs in the first line of therapy. There is an option for them to do ECT, but as I mentioned less than 1% willing to endure ECT (still over 100,000 patients/year). So there is a large unmet need, or I would say crisis, for drug-resistant depression. Depression is among few disorders in medicine where a patient says “I rather die than have this”! NeuroQore is set to make TMS accessible and more effective as an alternative option to ECT.

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

The indicator is being able to execute on my own vision and feeling satisfied after seeing patients getting into remission. Patients bring us all types gifts and flowers in the last sessions of their treatment, and almost all of them have been super satisfied, which is very fulfilling for me.

How do you think success can change your industry?

NeuroQore is set to change mental health care and psychiatry as we know it, a condition that has been relatively unchanged since the 1960s. Patients with depression will be able to go to our centers (i.e. the “Apple Store for Depression”), monitor their depression with physical evidence (biomarkers not just anecdotal questioners), and finally get effective outpatient treatment! Today mental health care and psychiatry both suck, it is literally depressing to get depression treatment.

How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

We have a great multi-disciplinary team and have been working together for over a decade. My academic background is in biomedical engineering, neuroscience, and technology management. I was selected as a rising star CEO by Invest Ottawa and I have been recognized and awarded many times for my work at NeuroQore as a co-founder and CEO.

Adrian is my co-inventor and co-founder, and has been working with me for over 14 years. He is an award winning expert in scientific research and development, with academic background in electrical and biomedical engineering specialized in non-invasive approaches.

Jonathan is a pioneering rTMS clinician/psychiatrist. He is very well known and well respected in the psychiatry society, and has had amazing contributions to improve clinical rTMS for depression treatment. He has experienced over 2,000 patients in his practice to date.

Brittany is an angel, she is our anticipatory patient service expert, with an academic background in psychology and mental health neuroscience. Her role is crucial in patient experience, which is very important for mental health. She is helping us change mental health care as we know it with her innovative service approach.

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

Life can be very exciting and fulfilling, but as an entrepreneur I must be ready for anything above and beyond what I know and have learned. I must be ready to learn on the fly and adapt to new situations.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

Educating the government, the public, and clinicians about rTMS and non-drug depression treatment… and removing the stigma of depression.

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

In 2017 we will have four centers operational/active in California (SF, LA, Oakland, and Long Beach), and in the long term we are planning to repeat this model across the US with over 100 centers in the next three years.

Learn more about NeuroQore by watching Mehran pitch on IndieBio Demo Day Feb. 9th! Register for the event or LiveStream here!

Doctors Meet Data Science: An Interview with Karim Galil of Mendel Health

Mendel Health
Mendel Health

Photo: The Mendel Health team with Karim in the center.

Do you ever feel your medical records are an unorganized mess, making it impossible for doctors with their busy schedules to match you with the latest treatments that are most optimally matched to your needs? In comes Mendel Health, a way for your data to be “in the driver’s seat”. Thousands of treatments for cancer and other diseases are in trials, and few doctors know about them… which is something Mendel Health is working to solve. So people do not lose their chances of beating disease. We asked the company’s CEO, Karim Galil, a few questions:

Tell me about your background, how did you become interested in public health?

I went to med school and got to practice medicine for a couple of years. I was very frustrated with how the practice of medicine was immune to the rate of advancement in technology.

What problem are you working to solve with Mendel Health?

We are trying to stop needless deaths in medicine. Every day thousands of patients pass away. It’s all too common that after their death we learn about a clinical trial that would have saved them. This is due to the huge increase in the rate of research, and the inability for any human to stay up to date. To make the promise of precision medicine real we have to find ways for doctors to keep up with all this research and data.

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

Our success metric: Number of  patients matched to a new trials or research which was never mentioned to them before AND it saves their life!

How do you think success can change your industry?

It will close the gap between research and the practice of medicine. This means faster drug development cycles and patients generating a wealth of data. All that will accelerate biomarker discoveries and curing terminal illnesses like cancer.

How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

What is unique about our team is the multidisciplinary skills. You have a physician leading a team of doctors and a technical PhD leading a team of data scientists.

The intersection between medicine and data has sparked solutions to many problem other AI companies have been facing in healthcare.

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

Move fast. The faster you fail, the faster you will succeed.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

The biggest challenge has been getting the data team to understand medicine and getting the medical team to understand AI.

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

Our goal is matching 10,000 cancer patients to effective treatment options, which was not considered possible before using Mendel.ai.

Learn more about Mendel Health by watching Karim pitch on IndieBio Demo Day Feb. 9th! Register for the event or LiveStream here!

The Bad Boy of Biosensors: An Interview With Ray Chiu of BioInspira

Bioinspira
Bioinspira

Photo: Ray Chiu (far right) and the BioInspira team. 

Every year, more than 200 natural gas pipeline-related incidents happen on average in the United States, and $5B in economic opportunities are lost as a result of gas leaks. BioInspira is aiming to solve this problem by bringing air chemical detection to the next level.

At IndieBio, we call the founder and CEO of BioInspira, Ray Chiu, the “Bad Boy of Biosensors”. Not only has he helped the company raise over $1.3M, he’s also closed partnerships with a consortium of the largest northern and southern California gas and electricity companies. BioInspira uses biology to change the economics of how we monitor our infrastructures. We asked Ray a few questions:

Tell me about your background, how did you get interested in the biotech space?

My background is in chemical engineering. I’ve had a huge passion for science since I was little, and I was always very keen on learning about breakthroughs in new frontiers of scientific research. Because of this, I made the decision to participate in this task of expanding scientific knowledge. Biotechnology is a relatively unexplored area filled with unknown potentials. Whereas the microelectronic revolution has come and gone with the projected bottleneck from Moore’s Law, there are still many secrets we can still learn about biology, biochemistry, and how they can change our way of life. This wealth of potential for discovery and impact on our life is what propelled me into the biotech space.

What problem are you working to solve with your company, Bioinspira?

Billions of dollars worth of economic opportunities are lost because there are currently very ineffective ways of tracking our infrastructures. This is a huge problem. We envision that, by combining network connectivity with powerful sensors, we can eliminate waste that is generated by the use of Earth’s natural resources. Take natural gas leaks, for example. BioInspira can save as much as 40% of the gas that is leaked from our gas infrastructure while cutting the leak inspection time in half.

Such engineering marvel, if successful, will also provide unprecedented data and insight and lead to a safer smarter world. However, current sensing technologies can’t achieve this goal due to their power consumption, size, cost, and accuracy. BioInspira believes a new revolutionary sensing mechanism is required. And we aim to solve this problem with our technology.

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

Passion. I firmly believe that the technology our team is working on will revolutionize people’s way of life and lead to a safer and smarter world. Seeing my technology become successful and actually influence society would be the single biggest indicator that I am doing the right thing.

“I firmly believe that the technology our team is working on will revolutionize people’s way of life and lead to a safer and smarter world.”

How do you think success can change your industry?

If we are successful, we will revolutionize the way in which the industry performs inspections for safety and emission control. Our customers will have constant and real time information on leaks in their systems, leading to efficient leak repair processes. This would help reduce waste and save lives.

How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

We have more than 20 years of professional sensor research experience. We are experts in phage sensor engineering. Our sensor research goes back more than 10 years with more than $2M research funding invested to date. We also have industry experts, thought leaders, and the chief inventor of our technology forming a powerful advisory board. In addition, we have partners with OEM partners on device manufacturing that will ensure the quality of our solution.

Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

Do not take anything for granted. Besides changing our R&D plan to meet the customer’s schedule and needs, we invested most of our time to grow relationships with potential customers and end users. If we do not turn these into a potential sales channel or investment opportunity, or we ruin our relationships, all our time will be wasted.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

As this is a completely new sensing mechanism, one of our biggest challenges was to explain the technology to potential end users as well as investors. Most of the end users are experts in sensors, but do not know much about biotechnology. On the other hand, most of the interested investors are very familiar in biotechnology, but do not understand much about the sensor industry.

What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

Short term: successfully deliver our sensor development kit and complete field tests with customers. Long term: overhaul the sensor industry by providing a revolutionizing sensor platform with improved combined capabilities.

Learn more about BioInspira by watching Ray pitch on IndieBio Demo Day Feb. 9th! Register for the event or LiveStream here!