By Diagnostics World Staff
August 4, 2015 | How refined is your elevator pitch? Can you attract investors in ten minutes? Five? With hundreds of people watching and a huge clock counting down the seconds, can you sell your technology?
That’s the challenge for companies entering the Swimming With The Sharks competition at the annual Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco. And for the 2015 winner, Fluoresentric, it’s already paying off.
Fluoresentric isn’t a new company. It was founded in 2003 by Brian Caplin, a biochemist and molecular biologist, as a PCR services company. In 2007, Caplin filed a patent for XCR, a novel nucleic acid amplification chemistry ten times faster than PCR. The company had success packaging the chemistry with a detector device—it was tested as a tuberculosis diagnostic at a mission clinic in Nakuru, Kenya—but the company had a “restart” in 2013, when Caplin took on the role of Chief Scientific Officer and serial entrepreneur William Olson came on board as CEO to recapitalize the company. Olson’s goal is to transform Fluoresentric into a startup chemistry company and monetize its XCR technology portfolio globally.
The plan comes with a tight timeline. To kick off its reinvention, Fluoresentric launched XCR Dx in May, to license the technology alongside a handheld diagnostic device running the XCR chemistry. Next will come a “modest financing round of about $1.5 million,” and then another push to license both the chemistry and device for human diagnostic applications, Olson tells Diagnostics World. If everything goes smoothly, he plans to engage the FDA for a clinical trial by December, have the technology approved in mid-March, and secure a CLIA waiver for use at the point of care by the summer of 2016.
“With that CLIA waiver we’ll have the industry’s first, less than 15-minute, sample-to-answer molecular diagnostic solution at the point of care,” Olson said. “That’s the holy grail within this industry.”
It’s a well-executed pitch, and one that convinced the judges at the Swimming With The Sharks event this February, in the first of what will become an annual feature at the Tri-Conference. The panel of judges comprised Mark Boguski (Genome Health Solutions); Paul D. Grossman (Telegraph Hill Partners); Stan Rose (Transplant Genomics); Enrico Picozza (HLM Venture Partners); Harry Glorikian, Healthcare Consultant; and Chris Heid (Berkeley Angel Investors). They unanimously selected Fluoresentric as the 2015 Tri-Con Most Promising Company.
The competition doesn’t include a cash prize, but winners do have access to a consulting package and benefit from the exposure, which Olson believes is extremely valuable.
“The first thing I saw was that every one of the judges who are filthy rich venture capitalists in the PCR industry came to me with their business cards in hand and were interested in doing business with us,” Olson said. “We’ve since followed through on a couple of those cases, and one of their investment firms is interested in placement on the first round of financing.”
The experience was also a lot fun, Olson said. (The judges agreed; each one is returning to judge the 2016 competition.) When asked for advice for the 2016 contenders, Olson distilled his message to one word: “Practice!”
“I thought there were several companies with very, very interesting and commercially viable technologies that did not present well. They did not keep to the timeframe, their slides had too many words, and they did not have an ability to communicate the message adequately,” he said. “I think it was apparent to me and several of the judges that some of these technologies were extremely good technologies, but the pitch and the presentations just didn’t add up to the technology’s significance.”
That penchant for highlighting the essential value of a new technology is what turns promising science into a promising business. Companies planning to test their mettle in the 2016 competition will have some time to work on their presentations before the Tri-Conference in March, but the deadline for entries is around the corner, on August 28, 2015.
From the submissions, twelve semifinalists will be chosen to give five-minute presentations to the judges live at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco, on the morning of March 9, 2016. That afternoon, five finalists will give ten-minute pitches, and two winners will be named immediately.
While a new batch of companies refines their slides, Fluoresentric is now focused on orchestration. Within the tight business plan for the XCR Dx spinoff are some open scientific questions ― like what disease indications should lead the company’s assays, and how to design the handheld instrumentation to be simple and repeatable enough to win a CLIA waiver.
“In order to meet our timely deadlines, a lot of the development of our instrumentation is going to have to be conducted by parallel groups,” said Olson. “My hope is the integration of those efforts can be managed effectively. We are excited about the impact this chemistry will have on the industry.”