Author Archives: Bernard Dichek

Challenging Israel

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abstractIsraeli biotech could soon be playing a much greater role in finding health solutions for the world’s poorest peoples.

A new government-funded initiative, modeled after the Canadian Grand Challenges (CGC) and called Grand Challenges Israel (more information here), was launched January 19. Dr. Peter Singer, who heads the $235 million Canadian program and who has been advising the Israeli government on its nascent plans, noted in a recent talk in Israel that some Israeli technologies were already being widely used in the developing world, but said that “the potential for applying them to healthcare was not yet tapped in a systematic way.”

The goal of the CGC program, which is similar to the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiated by the Gates Foundation, is to spur scientists and companies to come up with innovative ideas that can improve healthcare in the developing world. Twice a year, the Canadian government-funded program selects, on a competitive basis, about 100 proposals and provides them with $100,000 in proof-of-concept grants. Other CGC programs provide larger matching grants for more mature technologies.

Some recent grantees include a rapid, highly sensitive single diagnostic assay for active, latent and drug-resistant Tuberculosis, developed at GIOSTAR Research in India; biomarkers for diagnosis of infectious diseases in children suffering from malnutrition from the Kenya Medical Research Institute; a simple yeast-based blood screening assay from the University of Toronto; and the analysis of anti-diabetic compounds in opuntia plant species and camel milk in arid and semi-arid lands of Kenya at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute.

The Canadian program spends about $55 million a year to support the innovative programs. Applicants must be either Canadians or residents of developing countries. Grand Challenges Israel, however, will be giving grants of up to 500,000 shekels for proof of concept, with a first deadline of  March 31, 2014.

“Some of the Grand Challenge projects have moved quite quickly from lab to the field,” noted Dr. Singer, citing as an example a high-throughput approach to discover a new dengue vaccine that is already undergoing small field trials in Vietnam and is close to public health use.

Dr. Singer’s talk took place under the auspices of the Pears Innovation for International Development Program at Tel Aviv University and IsraelDev. Dr. Aliza Belman Inbal, who heads the TAU program, noted that there is a “huge potential for applying Israeli know-how to the needs of the developing world.”

Bernard Dichek

Into Animals

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dogsMan can also be a dog’s best friend.

That’s what entrepreneurs in the growing field of animal biotech are finding out.

Until now, many have considered pre-clinical trials conducted on animals as just a necessary stage required before products could be used in the clinic.

But if the products benefit animals why not market them to the veterinary market?

As it is often considerably quicker to get regulatory approval in the veterinary market than in the human market, more and more companies are discovering that there can be commercial opportunities available either by targeting  the veterinary market first, or by adapting human health products for animal uses.

Regenecure discovered during a pre-clinical trial on pet dogs and cats that the company’s regenerative bone membrane technology reduced healing time in severe bone fractures by more than 40 percent.  Veterinarians involved in the study reported that pet owners, who may have been reluctant to have their pets remain injured for lengthy periods of time, were more willing to proceed with the surgery on the basis of the accelerated recovery time.

Following these successful results the company decided to move ahead on two fronts: initiate a clinical trial in humans for using the technology as a bone stimulating aid for patients requiring dental implants, and begin to market the product to the veterinary market worldwide.

Recently founded Gour Medical  is a portfolio company working along similar lines. The company is actively in-licensing existing human biotechnology products that can be converted to the animal health markets. As founder Serge Goldner notes, the animal health industry is growing rapidly, with about 60 percent of products currently aimed at livestock and the rest at companion animals. Consulting firm Vetnosis reports that this global market represented a total of $22 billion in 2011 and is expected to grow by 6 percent each year in the near future.

Bernard Dichek

Into Classrooms, and Beyond

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classThe next big business opportunity for biotech researchers may be quite close to the classroom. The Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) revolution is here and it is bringing with it many new possibilities.

As organizations like the Coursera consortium have already shown, there is a huge potential for reaching a mass market through on-line learning. Coursera is a private, for-profit entity that partners with universities and organizations to offer educations courses online, for free. It was founded about a year and a half ago, and since then Coursera-affiliated educators have taught more than 300 courses to more than 4 million students around the world, including one course that attracted a whopping 180,000 students.

Its main source of revenue is tuition fees from students who take the courses for credit (without credit, courses are free). But these are the early days. There are already a number of additional revenue generators such as affiliate marketing with publishers and other organizations. One can expect many innovative business models to emerge as this unprecedentedly large, global and internet-savvy market becomes more and more engaged.

One new life sciences course being offered by Coursera is a good indicator of the kind of subject material that has both great educational value and entrepreneurial potential – What A Plant Knows. This course is being offered by Tel Aviv University Prof. Daniel Chamovitz, starting October 1, and is expected to reach 30,000 students.

It’s based on the bestselling book of the same name written by Chamovitz, a well-known plant genetics researcher, who was the first to discover that the COP9 Signalosome protein complex found in plants is also essential for development of animals and thereby may be involved in a number of human diseases, including cancer.

Prof. Chamovitz’s MOOC course promises to offer a kind of added value that neither readers of his book nor participants in his regular TAU course would receive: Working with a TAU video crew, Prof. Chamovitz will enable students to make virtual visits to his lab and observe on-going experiments. Future plans include actually involving the students in the research – the prospect of accessing 30,000 or so participants suggesting all kinds of tantalizing new research paradigms.

In addition to students, the course organizers, based on past experience, expect a significant number of university lecturers and researchers to also enroll, giving them a chance to see a colleague in action and to learn from his methodology. This type of demographic opens up marketing possibilities, as does information about the students’ country of origin.

In the case of What A Plant Knows, the majority of students are expected to not be local Israelis. The top four countries with students showing interest in the course are the US, India, Canada and Brazil.

Researchers who may have felt that it would be necessary to move away from teaching in order to get into the business world, may now find that being involved in this new form of  teaching brings business opportunities right into their classroom.

It is worth noting that many of the Coursera courses aren’t given by university lecturers – museum curators, for example, are teaching art-related topics. So researchers may be able to leverage this platform to teach subjects that don’t fit a normal university curriculum.

Better yet, they may find that completely new avenues are opened up to them by being able to access such a large number of people in a single virtual classroom.

And because those taking these courses without credit can do so for free, both the world of education and business stand to benefit.

Bernard Dichek

$1M Prize for Brain Research

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brain corralWhile President Obama is reported to be weighing a new American program for mapping the brain and neuro research, Israel’s President Shimon Peres is also doing his part to encourage neuro research. Peres played an active part in setting up a $1 million R&D award for a breakthrough in brain technology. This is open to applicants from around the world.

Known as the Global B.R.A.I.N (Breakthrough Research And Innovation in Neurotechnology) Prize, the award will be granted to an individual, group or organization for a recent breakthrough in the field of brain technology. The international judging committee is composed of distinguished leaders in neuroscience, technology and business, including three Nobel laureates: Profs. Eric Kandel, Daniel Kahneman and Bert Sakmann. The application deadline is March 15, 2013.

The prize will recognize an innovation on a path to commercialization with potentially significant impact to humanity. Innovations eligible for the award include:

  1. Novel technologies that can augment scientific understanding of the brain
  2. New technologies for the diagnosis and treatment of brain disease
  3. Cutting-edge technologies to enhance human brain function
  4. Groundbreaking brain-machine interface technologies
  5. Innovative brain stimulation technologies
  6. Disruptive brain-inspired technologies in computation, communications and robotics

The prize will be awarded at IBT’s Global Brain Technology Conference to be held in October, 2013. The prize is aimed at supporting further development of the winning technology. Full contest details, terms and conditions as well as an application form can be found here.

The website of the sponsor of the contest, Israel Brain Technologies, is worth visiting for anyone interested in finding a collaborator for neuro research. The website has a link listing researchers and companies involved in brain research.

Outside of New England and the Bay Area, there is probably no other hub with this much neuro research going on.

Bernard Dichek

Israeli Ag Bio

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Israeli biotech comes full circle with the recent Rosetta Green success story. Rosetta Green, a company that specializes in identifying unique genes and developing improved plant traits for the agriculture and biofuel industries, has been purchased by Monsanto for $35 million.

It is the first Israeli biotech in the agriculture sector to make headlines in a long time, but it could be the beginning of a new trend. Today more than 90% of Israel’s life science companies, including well-known ones as Teva Pharmaceuticals and Protalix (developer of a new drug for Gaucher’s disease), are all in the biomedical domain, but it wasn’t always like that, and maybe things are changing.

The country’s first biotech startup, Bio-Technology General (BTG), today known as Savient Pharmaceuticals, was founded more than 30 years ago in order to commercialize a bovine growth hormone invented at the Weizmann Institute. It was typical at that time for talented researchers to be focused on agriculture, which then made up more than 75% of the country’s economy.

But BTG soon realized that there were greater opportunities in the human health market, and that its core growth hormone technology could be readily adapted to treat dwarfism and other disorders. As BTG began to develop the first human growth hormone, more and more researchers from Weizmann Institute and other Israeli universities began to work on drug-related topics, including the inventor of the growth hormones, Prof. Haim Aviv, who became a serial entrepreneur and founded several biopharm startups.

So perhaps it is not surprising that Rosetta Green is a spin-off of a parent human genomics company, Rosetta Genomics. Rosetta Green’s location in Israel works to its advantage, as plant genomics is heavily dependent on skills related to algorithms and other mathematical areas in which there is an interface between high-tech and biotech, and Israel has a growing pool of researchers who have acquired these skills in the country’s dynamic high-tech industry.

There is a second success story in the ag field: Evogene. Like Rosetta Green, it was created as a spin-off from a parent drug development company – Compugen, which specializes in bioinformatics. Evogene has a number of collaborative agreements underway with Monsanto and provided its investors with one of the highest returns for a biotech over the past year, as shares rose about 25%. These two companies might be at the forefront of a wave of successful, ag-biotech Israeli firms.

Bernard Dichek

Alma As Example

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Biotech entrepreneurs looking for new ways to start a company on the global stage may find the example of Alma Bio Therapeutics inspiring and instructive.

The start-up with a platform technology in the field of auto-immune and inflammatory diseases was established in December 2011 by Irun Cohen, a professor emeritus at Israel’s Weizmann Institute; Raanan Margalit, an expert in preclinical drug development; and Dr. Binah Baum, an experienced biotech executive who is well-networked in the European bio-community.

The three Israeli founders established their business in the Basel Biotech Incubator in Switzerland and financed a preclinical trial out of their own pockets. In doing so, they have shown it is possible to establish a company outside of one’s  home turf and get to proof-of-concept without relying on outside investors.

Baum explains the choice of the Swiss location as being related to access: several big pharmas that are likely candidates for collaboration are in that area or nearby in Germany, Austria and France. Also, the European venue increases the startup’s visibility among angels and private investors. In Israel, by contrast, she notes that VCs are primarily focused on medical devices rather than early stage biopharma, though she says it’s possible they might establish a presence in Israel later on.

The company’s IP is based on original research by Prof. Cohen at the Weizmann Institute. Several years ago, that IP was reassigned back to the inventor by the Institute’s technology transfer agency.

As a combined result of the previous and current studies, Alma has already obtained six major patents. The company chose inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) as its initial autoimmune indication. At a later stage, it plans to apply its platform to chronic pathological inflammatory diseases.

Alma’s technology is built around leveraging heat shock proteins (HSPs) that are implicated in the immune system’s control over inflammatory diseases. Discoveries made in this area by Prof. Cohen have already led to the development of a drug by Andromeda Biotech for Type I Diabetes; it is currently in Phase III.

Alma’s goal is to treat IBD in a curative and non-toxic manner by introducing heat shock proteins in the patient’s body that can regulate the level of inflammation in a controlled manner. Rather than use recombinant proteins, the HSPs are introduced through changes in the DNA coding.

The entrepreneurs note there is no disease-modifying therapy available for IBD, a condition currently attracting intensive R&D efforts in the pharmaceutical industry.

Upon reaching Phase I/II, Alma’s founders are confident that investors are likely to gain a relatively fast and high multiple return once a deal is made with a pharma company.

Bernard Dichek

Lithuania: The Next Start-Up Nation?

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Lithuania could become a new hotbed of biotech activity,  with job opportunities and fresh domains for outsourcing and clinical trials, if the country is able to maintain the momentum it set into motion during the first Life Sciences Baltics Conference held in Vilnius in mid-September.

Lithuaniais hoping to jump-start the country’s nascent biotech industry. Lithuania’s  leaders, having  singled out Israel as a small country that has developed a successful biotech industry in a way that they would like to emulate, invited  a 120-member Israeli delegation to help provide content for the meeting.

The keynote speaker was Nobel-prize winner Prof. Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute. She was followed by  Israeli researchers and business people who led sessions on everything from the latest in stem cell technologies to different entrepreneurial models.

Will the Lithuanians succeed? Could they become the next ‘Start-up Nation’?

Continue reading →

Carving a Niche

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The success story of Yosef Behrend suggests an unconventional, though seemingly straightforward way to create a biotechnology business.

In order to set up new companies, biotech entrepreneurs often look for groundbreaking technologies and unmet medical needs but Yosef Behrend has carved out a thriving  niche business in what is probably the oldest branch of biotechnology – fermentation.

Behrend decided to set up his own company, Fermentek, after studying and teaching industrial microbiology at the Hebrew University and working in R&D for the Sigma-Aldrich Corporation in Israel and the U.S. He  observed  that the commercial application of fermentation products  created by microorganisms was an underexploited field

Today Jerusalem-based Fermentek markets more than a hundred products – all based on biochemicals that Behrend and his staff have isolated and identified as having commercial applications.

Setting up the company was not expensive, Behrend explains, because he initiated his operations through conducting literature searches based on his expert knowledge of the microorganism field. He also saved on marketing expenses by establishing international distribution deals with leading companies like EMD Biosciences, Apollo Scientific, Enzo Lfie Sciences as well as  Sigma-Aldrich.

By pinpointing products not listed in the catalogues of the global biochemical providers, and by enabling the large companies to market his products under their name, Behrend worked out a win-win proposition for both sides. He has been able to leverage  the extensive sales forces of the international players, while  maintaining his own  independence and grow his business as he sees fit.

Currently Fermentek has 12 employees and more than $2.5 million in annual sales. The company is moving into new fields as it unveils a number of biochemicals with active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) that originate from microbial fermentation. Products being developed in collaboration with drug companies target oncological and dermatological indications for drug development.

Still, the main users of the antibiotics, enzyme inhibitors, ionophores, signal transduction agents, mycotoxins and other  biochemicals developed by Fermentek are researchers at life science companies, universities and government institutions.

Bernard Dichek

Creativity at the Interface of Academia and Industry

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Aspiring biotech entrepreneurs often try to find a novel technology of their own that will lead to commercial success. But, as the career of Itschak Lamensdorf suggests, sometimes the best way to be both innovative and successful can come from facilitating the projects of others.

When Lamensdorf completed his post-doc studies at the NIH in 2000, like many other young grads, he plunged into the business world with the ambition of using basic research that he had worked on as the foundation for a commercial start-up venture.

The company he initiated was based on a modified antisense platform technology for CNS drugs. But after several years of work in a business incubator, he abandoned the project when the funding ran out.

“If I had the managerial skills then that I have now, I would have been able to raise the money,” he observes with hindsight.

However, instead of giving up on being an entrepreneur when his start-up closed, Lamensdorf decided to develop a business based on providing a service that his fledgling company had been unable to find.

“There was an unmet need for a CRO (Contract Research Organization) with a completely different model than any that existed at the time,” he explains.

“What was missing for me was a company that could provide not just technical services but a body of knowledge that would include all the scientific, regulatory, pre-clinical and clinical consulting services and ‘execution’ tools that meet the specific needs of a company,” he recalls.

Starting out by working from the living room of his apartment, Lamensdorf founded Pharmaseed, a company based in Ness Ziona, just south of Tel Aviv, that today comprises about 40 employees, with more than half of the staff Ph.D.s.

“Instead of providing technical services like a commodity, we developed a model that leverages the power of a highly knowledgeable and experienced staff with creative and innovative ideas of their own,” he says.

He notes that he has not been afraid to take a stake in some of the inventions that Pharmaseed has nurtured. “We now have equity in one company that is repurposing drugs for Parkinson’s disease and in another with an innovative drug for ischemic stroke.”

Lamensdorf does not regret foregoing a career in either academic research or with a biotech company working in a single area.  “What I find exciting about being in a company of this kind is that as I am at the interface of academia and industry. Consequently I work in a sort of bilingual way in the languages of both worlds. It’s true that I don’t have the singular focus that comes with an academic career but I get a lot of satisfaction out of being exposed to a broad range of fields.”

Pharmaseed today offers specialized expertise in a number of areas such as CNS diseases, inflammatory diseases, oncology and stem cell research. Lamensdorf points out that the company is constantly moving into new areas and offering new services “as more and more of the tools of the high-tech world are incorporated into biotech studies.”

“I envision a day when a sponsor will be able to conduct a pre-clinical trial with us through cloud computing interphase,” he says.

Bernard Dichek