RI Life Science Hub is Bringing Innovation to Market

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Today on the Angel Nest, we’re talking about how to get innovative technology and life-saving medical solutions to market faster. We’ll meet the people behind the Rhode Island Life Science Hub and the founders they’re supporting. Thank you for joining us.

I’m David Hemenway. I’m a five-time founder, now an active angel investor, and my mission here is to introduce the innovators and the businesses that are leading the way to the future. Academically rich Rhode Island and its capital city of Providence have traditionally excelled in research and innovation, but now there’s a new catalyst to create businesses and jobs and to bring new technologies to the marketplace to help solve some of society’s most vexing problems.

Investors are taking note and getting involved, so today we’re delighted to begin a series of episodes about the Rhode Island Life Science Hub, an organization created and funded by the state to spur innovation. A little later, we’ll speak with one of the founders of Lilac, one of the companies the Rhode Island Science Hub is supporting, and they’re doing work to combat disease and aging through a better understanding of RNA. We’ll also speak with Katie Elias.

She’s part of the team at Rhode Island Life Science Hub who will help these ventures scale by finding investors, partners, and markets. But first, we’re going to speak to Dr. Mark Turco. He’s the president and CEO of the Rhode Island Life Science Hub.

Trained as a doctor and with experience in academia, he’s been a CEO and an investor in medical device companies and medical solutions. Mark’s also established the Center for Pentech Health, so he’s an expert on commercial collaboration. Mark speaks to us today from CIC Providence, which is a state-of-the-art innovation center downtown.

Welcome, Mark. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you, David.

It’s great to be here and look forward to our discussion. So now, you’re making an investment in this Rhode Island ecosystem with your talent, your professional expertise. If you would, tell us why now is the time for this venture.

Absolutely. My hope is really to try to leverage some of the diverse experiences that I’ve had, David, to help drive innovation and technology development right here in my home, the state of Rhode Island. And Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country, but we’re hoping to basically play big and really be a part of what many states are doing around the country to drive these ecosystems in life science innovation.

It is so critically important to have the states involved because of where we are on the federal side right now with federal funding being reduced at the NIH level and some of the tension there, and I suspect we’ll get into that in a little bit. But I’m very excited about what we have to possibly offer here and what hopefully I can help bring to the table along with our very dedicated team and our academic partners here in the state of Rhode Island. Like you, I’ve spent a lot of time in Rhode Island, and it always seemed like it was a great combination of academic excellence and research and innovation and, by the way, pretty good geography as well.

This is a lovely state to live in, and from a quality of life standpoint, you can’t beat it, although we have a bridge that’s under construction that is causing us a little angst from a traffic standpoint. But it’s a lovely state and, you know, getting back to my earlier comment about being small, that should play to our advantage because we should be able to be very agile. You know, one of the, I had a discussion not that long ago with some folks because I was wondering why is Raleigh-Durham area, for example, very successful in their recruitment of biomanufacturing and biotechnologies in that triangle, that research triangle.

And the response that came back was because they say yes, and then they execute on that yes. And that’s a little bit of the culture that we want to try to establish here in Rhode Island and bring that can-do attitude to this endeavor so that we can really help build and be successful in growing life sciences here in Rhode Island. So tell us how the Rhode Island Life Science Hub is going to help these ventures grow.

Yeah, I think we have an opportunity to help on many levels. One, we’re going to try to provide resources through non-dilutive funding that we have to help companies get to certain levels that they want to get to. So non-dilutive funding is one area.

We’re also going to wrap around other support initiatives here, whether that trying to bring in executive in residences to help with business side of endeavors. You know, it’s pretty clear academic individuals are amazing at the science. It’s not that easy sometimes to ultimately spin technology out of our academic institutions and then ultimately move them to commercialization.

And that’s the ultimate goal is getting all of this great science into the clinic so that we can improve patient care. So let’s talk about that. We’re going to hear from Katie Elias in just a minute about your efforts to commercialize these great ventures.

It seems to me pretty unique that you’re placing so much emphasis on that and actually dedicating staff and resources to making sure it happens. Yeah, again, it gets back to my earlier comment. That should be the goal of where we move with our innovative efforts.

If you think back to where we were when the United States first started to work with academic institutions back just after World War II and really push for innovation and IP and all of those sorts of things, the concept was funding through federal dollars those kind of endeavors. So they ultimately then were translatable into the clinic and helping improve innovation across the United States and quite honestly across the globe. We are the leader in innovation here in the United States.

We want to maintain that leadership. And the way to do that is to continue to fund, support, and then advance the technologies out of the academic institutions into our communities. So Mark, are there specific areas that the Rhode Island Life Science Hub is focusing on?

Absolutely.

When you try to build out an innovation system like this, you don’t want to start anew. You want to play to your strengths like any company or corporation. So how can Rhode Island play to its academic and scientific strengths? Well, there are many here, as I found in my short period of time.

One is in the neuroscience and behavioral health area. We have amazing technology and amazing expertise and work being done throughout our academic systems in behavioral health and neuroscience. And as you well know, that’s a big unmet need in the world we’re living in today.

Second is in the area of RNA research. And I’m not just referring to what most people know as mRNA from our COVID vaccines. I’m speaking to all of the other aspects and families within RNA as a nucleic acid.

And these are very important technologies that will help with gene sequencing and protein synthesis and help treat all kinds of diseases that we need to try to treat. We also have to unlock the RNA genome a bit. And as you well know, DNA went through an extensive evaluation process through the Human Genome Project.

And what we hope to replicate with our expertise here in Rhode Island is really an RNome project, is unwrapping RNA. And we’re really excited about the opportunity to do such. And I believe over time, hopefully you’ll hear from some of our companies that are involved in that area.

I think the other big area now, health and aging. How can we age better and how can we improve health? And we have great expertise in our academic centers in the areas of health and aging. And it’s a very hot area where a lot of venture funding is moving into.

And we hope to basically be a part of that sector as well. And then lastly, is metabolic disease and oncology. Two big areas.

As I think you know, we have Vertex here in our backyard. They are working on encapsulation therapies. We hope to continue to work through other areas of metabolic disease, whether it be lipid disease or whether it be other areas in the diabetic field.

And our engineering folks at Brown and throughout our academic institutions are very, very strong in the metabolic area. You’ve got an ambitious and a big to-do list. Tell us what the next year looks like, if you would.

Sure. Well, the next year is going to be very busy for us, but it’s also a very, very exciting year. So this coming January, we should be opening up our incubator called Ocean State Labs here in the state of Rhode Island.

This will be the first incubator in the state of Rhode Island. And this will allow for all of the new company formations that come out of our academic institutions and health systems to stay here in the state, as opposed to moving out and to go to other regions. So we’re very excited about that opening.

We’re also, with that opening, partnering with an international firm called Portal Innovation. Portal Innovation will be the executive managers of Ocean State Labs. And they’re based in Chicago.

They’re managing incubators in South Boston, Atlanta, Houston. And they recently had a collaboration, I believe, with Robert Wood Johnson and here in Providence, Rhode Island. And they also have an incubator that they manage in Chicago.

So I have been incredibly impressed, and it’ll be fabulous to have Portal Innovation and that organization really embedded here in our ecosystem in the very near future. They’re two big ones. We’re going to continue, though, to build out the base of what we need to build out and continue to concentrate on some of the strengths that I spoke to.

We, as the Rhode Island Life Science Hub and here, want to be and add that value to our stakeholders, all of our stakeholders. And we’re going to continue to do that. I also need to raise the awareness of all of the good work that’s being done here.

So I appreciate this opportunity to speak with you on this podcast, because there is great work being done here in Rhode Island. Sometimes it’s going under the radar, and it’s my job to help try to advance that and make that into everyday language. I also hope we can work with venture and biopharma and other industries to recognize what we have here in Rhode Island and bring those entities here into Rhode Island.

Dr. Mark Turco, President and CEO of the Rhode Island Life Science Hub. Thanks so much for joining us. We’ll be checking back in with you soon.

Thank you for having me, David. It’s been a pleasure. Now on to one of the companies that the Rhode Island Life Science Hub is already supporting.

We meet Dr. Anubhav Tripathi, who is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Brown University. His company, Lilac, is working on the early detection of RNA modifications in the body. It’s a way to detect early disease.

They even have a kit in beta testing with potential clients. Dr. Tripathi, welcome, and thank you so much for joining us today on the Angel Nest. Thank you very much, David.

What are the advantages of your RNA 6MA modification kit? Yeah, so I think the most important advantage is providing a kit that can detect modification or various modifications while preparing for new drug targets and also understanding how RNA works in our body. There is a huge research coming in academic, also in the commercial, where to understand how RNA works in various disease and other events in our body. And that’s where we are targeting our RNA modification kit.

This is our first product. We have also products lined up for RNA stability, RNA identity, RNA purification, and integrity. But modification status is very, very important because it’s very costly right now, and it’s very long.

And the current kits are basically are not that robust. By providing this solution, basically, we are empowering our researchers, for RNA researchers, as well as drug development process, a tool by which they can go faster to their missions. Can you tell us what the ultimate impact of these kits will be to patients? It will provide drug manufacturers or pharmaceuticals or therapeutic people to go faster to those solutions.

And that is where actually the bottleneck is. The bottleneck is not about the price at the end of the day. It’s the robustness, the input RNA amount which you take.

If you require a high input RNA amount, which is in hundreds of nanograms, obviously, the process slows down and there’s no multiplexing. But Lilac provides actually at very low input, less than nanogram to detect any modification RNA. That basically empowers everybody to do breakthrough applications.

So, since you asked that, I would like to provide one breakthrough application, which is single organoid epitranscriptomics. So, organoids have been established as a patient-derived organoids and organoid evolutions people would like to do to understand how disease progress, how disease occur. And that’s very important.

And based on that, drug screening happens, which is high throughput for many, many drug candidates to do that. And then thereafter, there is an in vivo evaluation with the animal model. In the entire process, if you take a single organoid, the amount of RNA you get is only one nanogram.

What about that? And now, our technology uniquely, actually, there’s no other technology in the world which can take this much amount of RNA and do the epitranscriptomics, which is something which is breakthrough. And that’s something which we are empowering our community, our scientific community and also commercial community to use this kit to move forward. And Dr. Tripathi, how has the Rhode Island Life Science Hub helped you get Lilac to market faster? Well, Rhode Island Life Sciences is a very, very crucial and a good thing happened to not just Lilac, but all the startups in Rhode Island.

They provide not only the financial support such as WeGuard, but also logistic supports, also addressing some of the initial concerns we have in terms of lab, lab location, in terms of connecting to investors, in terms of finding proper user base or customer base. So Rhode Island arrives actually is a key, encouraging us to move forward even faster than we thought. It is something which I think that also helps the university to take a step in that direction to commercialize some of the innovation much more easily, actually, than we thought about.

And that is something Rhode Island Life Sciences have provided us actually and we are the personal experience from Lilac. We hear a lot these days about budget cuts to the work around mRNA vaccines, but Lilac is different, right? Can you tell us how Lilac fits into this landscape of mRNA technology? So, recent budget cuts is more about the vaccine and the vaccine implementation to particular age group or thing. I think I understand that the vaccine has not been implemented to kids and all that, but the mRNA market is still in, it’s a major growth area.

It’s like it’s going to become a bit around 70 to 80 billion by 2030, just in five years. And there’s diverse applications where the research has to happen, which is we don’t know much about RNA. We know a lot about DNA.

We know a lot about protein, but we don’t know much about RNA. So if you take oncology or personalized cancer in immunotherapies, the RNA is being studied. Gene editing, mRNA for advancing in cell gene therapy is studied.

Protein replacement for therapies for the rare disease or chronic disease. These are very, very important and that’s what’s going. If you take international focus that even the US is readjusting to the new financial model and all that, there’s a heavy investment in mRNA technology in Europe, in UK, in China, and everywhere.

The US companies should not lag behind taking that market because there is a lot of, lot of potential for Lilac actually to provide our kids, which is our first product, to those companies and also partner in the manufacturing of that. So while you see budget cuts are there for the vaccine oriented, but the mRNA research in academic, in startups, also in the pharma, there’s a lot of work to be done for the future in drugs and research or even understanding how actually the therapies can be created. And that work has just started.

We have actually next 20 years to completely understand RNA. And that’s why Brown took a great step, thanks to our Dean Mukesh Jain, to create our NOMES and RNA Center. And we have great experts, world experts coming to actually support our trust for the RNA science and fundamental science, how RNA works in our body.

Dr. Anubhav Tripathi, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Brown University. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you so much, David.

The best technology is only as successful as its ability to get to market, of course. And that’s where Katie Elias comes in, with a background in venture capital, business development, and marketing, specifically related to biotech, pharma, medical devices and digital health. She’s working with the team at Rhode Island Life Science Hub to find markets for some of these amazing innovations.

Welcome, Katie. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me.

So as an investor, I often feel there’s not enough emphasis on getting to market, but it sounds like you and the team at the Rhode Island Life Science Hub are putting that front and center of your strategy. You know, I think ultimately the best way of bringing technologies to patients in the case of life science is just to really think about the patients and the unmet need up front. And that has to do with not just the theoretical unmet patient need, but really ultimately the problem in the healthcare setting that we’re trying to solve, how you get therapies to the clinic, to patients and to their clinicians, and how it’s going to be used in practice.

And so really imagining these ideas as, you know, the final version of what they’re going to be helps you think about the steps along the way and understand which pieces of the innovation or the process you’re going to go through are the most critical and which are things that are maybe nice to have or, you know, steps along the way that could be saved for a future generation. Now, I know you’ve done a fair amount of this. Can you give us some examples of how you think these innovations can find markets? Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, you have to start with looking at the technology platforms themselves and then help categorize them into whether this is a tool or a service, or it’s a standalone product at the end.

Is it a single product or is it a portfolio of products that meets the needs of multiple different patient indications and who the users are? So I think, you know, in some examples, we’ve seen ideas coming out of early stage startups from the academic setting where, you know, there’s already investors who are interested in how they could implement that technology directly into their existing portfolio companies or to set up a new company around it because the need is so clearly defined. And obviously those are situations which are a little bit more straightforward. They also may have more quick path to market because there’s sort of capital coming along with the idea.

There are investors who are sort of tracking what’s happening at the university setting and interested in kind of building that journey from day one. In other situations, I think, you know, you have to do more of that work internally in the academic setting or, you know, before you bring in institutional venture money. And, you know, I’ve seen companies that are doing work at either local hospital systems or in the university setting that get all the way to, for example, a development candidate stage before they go ahead or even, you know, IND enabling packages for the life sciences biopharmacide before they really raise their first capital from outside investors.

And so it really depends on the situation, you know, which is more appropriate for the company, right? Well, there’s the ultimate fit, right? And that’s what investors are concerned about, but they also worry about the time that it takes to get there. So I’m wondering if your approach, given how much of this you’ve done and all the resources you have at your disposal to help companies find partners and markets and investors, can it shorten the timeframe or maybe even more importantly, can it just make the timeframe more certain? Yeah, I mean, I think I’ve done work from the investor side, you know, looking into early stage opportunities, whether they’re, again, academic or from other sources from sort of first time or repeat entrepreneurs. And then I’ve also spent time and I’m doing some work right now with other universities, for example, University of California in San Francisco, UCSF, where they have a whole XIR, EIR program and entrepreneur in residence.

And that’s really around thinking about which of those ideas are worth prioritizing and which have the kind of best product market fit at the outset, defining those ideas more clearly, making sure that the IP is set up properly from the beginning and, you know, having a clear vision for if you did go ahead and raise capital from external investors, you know, what would you go and do with that? And what is the business plan? And I think sometimes too much of that work is happening kind of real time as you’re talking to investors. And what the hope is, is that by the time you’re going out and talking about external funding for your opportunities, where you’re doing company creation stage, you’ve already got some opinions about, you know, what would this look like in terms of a product development strategy and maybe ultimately a clinical development strategy. So, you know, partnering with PIs or early stage entrepreneurs who are coming from, you know, a very nascent stage and getting them to think about those questions at the outset, I think is what helps provide some of the, you know, potential shortening of the learning curve because you’ve already gone through that thought process.

And again, evaluating sort of what are the critical steps along the path and what are the nice to haves. One of the things that we often see kind of generally in academia versus on more of an industry setting is, you know, I’d really like to know the answer to XYZ questions. And the challenge is in the academic setting, you have the luxury of time to do that.

In the commercial setting, you really have to decide what is the killer experiment? What is the thing that I’m going to do that’s either going to boost my idea or tell us that we shouldn’t work on this idea anymore. And let’s do those as soon as possible, not to the point where you’re going to fail things that don’t need to fail because you don’t know enough to run a proper experiment. But kind of the name of the game is always about failing fast and making sure that you sort of have that insight around what’s going to make this into a really differentiated product as soon as possible so that we’re not throwing good money after bad.

And I think that’s sort of where you need to make that translation. Are there general areas or maybe even specific verticals where you think it’s easier to get to market than others? Are there specific kinds of ventures that attract you more than others? You know, I don’t know that I have a favorite. I mean, I’ve spent time for the last number of years working in the type 1 diabetes space.

This is a large autoimmune condition affecting more than a million and a half people in the United States, a number of whom are adolescents or pediatrics. This is a really important indication. It has a lot of impact on patients’ lives.

But thinking about running trials in a pediatric setting is hard. And the length of time to run a trial for different patient populations, this is an autoimmune disease that progresses over time. You’re looking at clinical endpoints that are not three to six weeks, but that are one to two years.

And so when you think about picking opportunities where you can get some early proof points around whether the mechanism or the product is working, I think it’s really important to think about kind of racking and stacking those different potential market opportunities and indications based on how much time and how much capital it takes to figure out if your product works the way you think it does or not, even if the market that you go after with that is not the ultimate goal of the market. And so, you know, I think it depends on the appetite of the investors coming around a company, whether they have the patience and the amount of capital it takes to go for kind of that longer term outcome. If we look at things in the neurodegenerative disease space, you know, you have to wait a number of years to see if disease is progressing or not progressing versus, you know, acute conditions.

You can often gather that data right in a matter of days or weeks as opposed to months and years. And so I think you have to right size those indications for the type of opportunity. Then you also have tools that people are using during the development of other medicines or therapies.

And, you know, that’s something that we’ve talked about earlier in this conversation is if you have a set of drug development tools and processes that can be put into use right away from a drug development standpoint, you know, those may have kind of quicker opportunities to get to the market and have paying customers essentially versus developing a de novo medicine. Makes sense. Katie Elias, she is the person at the Rhode Island Life Science Hub who will help ventures find partners, investors, and ultimately define markets.

So very important. Katie, thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much.

Great to speak with you. So sounds like the state that actually started the industrial revolution is well on its way to a more prominent position in the tech and the biotech revolution. You can learn more, connect with Dr. Mark Turco and the rest of the team at RILifeScienceHub.com. You can also reach today’s guests at TheAngelNest.com or I hope you’ll get in touch with me if you know of an interesting story or a company we should be talking about.

We produce The Angel Nest with help from Rob Higley and Charles DiMantebello. He’s at the controls of CDM Studios in the historic Art Deco Film Center building just west of Times Square in New York. I’m David Hemingway.

Thanks for listening. So long until next time.