Ping Yeh was 36 years old when his doctors recommended maximum-potency chemotherapy — a treatment so strong that he may not survive it.
The dangerous therapy was his best bet against Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare cancer of the lymphatic system that was quickly taking him down. After several rounds of traditional treatments, he was bumped to maximum-potency (or maximum-toxicity) chemotherapy, despite the risks it posed to his heart.
Yeh recounts the story, sitting in a snow-covered car in Minnesota, over a spotty cell connection. It’s quieter there, he says, if not a tad chilly.
“The day of the infusion my doctor said to me, ‘the last person I treated this way is going to die,” Yeh said, a sardonic laugh crackling through our bad connection. “I guess not everybody has the best bedside manner.”
The chemo was so dangerous that it had to be administered in a hospital, and Yeh was monitored around the clock. Even if he survived the cancer, he could die from a failing heart.
Yeh said he was stunned to learn there wasn’t a better way to pre-test toxic treatments. Surely patients shouldn’t have to be guinea pigs to the treatment, not knowing if their organs would survive therapy.
Winning Pitch
Yeh’s heart did survive it and he’s cancer-free today. But the experience got him thinking about how scientists can better test drugs for toxicity.
Today, Yeh is founder and CEO of a startup called StemoniX Inc., a company that grows “micro-organs” from stem cells for drug testing.
The startup, founded in 2015, appears to be on a trajectory of rapid growth. Incubated at both EvoNexus and Johnson & Johnson Innovation’s incubator JLABs, the company grew from two employees to 20 in less than 18 months. It won the annual pitch competition at startup incubator EvoNexus in April, and later scored $2.5 million in funding from Seed San Diego, Gopher Angels, and Oklahoma Angels. To date, the company has raised $5.4 million and expects to raise an additional $3 million by January 2017.
Knowledge Is Power
Yeh attributes the company’s rapid growth to having an “interdisciplinary team” — a bunch of people with a variety of skills approaching a tough problem.
Yeh didn’t have a background in science when he began, although he became a quick study in cancer. After his diagnosis, his life revolved around studying the disease, trying to figure out how to survive it.
“It’s like going to school again, only it’s very important that you pass,” Yeh quips.
Yeh definitely has the chops to self-learn. He holds both an MBA and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a focus on nanotechnology.
“I promised myself that if I survived this, I would use my skills and knowledge for something more meaningful,” Yeh said.
So he reached out to a longtime friend, Robert Petcavich, who had a reputation for doing cool work. Petcavich was a serial entrepreneur and inventor. He holds something like 80 patents, 40 pending and 40 granted.
“You know microwave popcorn bags?” Yeh asks. “Bob invented those.”
He also invented electrostatic bags, those shiny packages electronics come in.
It turns out Petcavich was working on something quite interesting — “the best patent I’ve ever written,” he told Yeh. The work ended up being the original patent for StemoniX’s technology — a way to create stem cells on a commercial scale.
Tissue Suitable for Testing
Growing stem cells in a specific way is what StemoniX’s intellectual property is built on. The company has created a way to grow stem cells on unique surfaces, resulting in “structured” cells that look and perform more like the real thing. This means drugmakers can test their products on these cells to get a more humanlike response.
In drug testing laboratories today, most preclinical work is done on animals. And that has its downsides, said Kevin Gunderson, a former Illumina Inc. executive and co-founder of NewCo.
“Animal models are always inadequate because they don’t mimic the human physiology like human cells would,” Gunderson said.
Gunderson is an investor in StemoniX, and now serves on the company’s board of directors.
“Ever since I heard Ping’s first pitch, I was very excited about this company,” Gunderson said. “I think there’s huge value in this approach.”
To start, StemoniX is growing mature human heart and brain cells. This is big, Yeh said, as these two organs are most affected by toxic drugs, and adults (with mature cells) are the ones most often receiving treatment.
“Sixty percent of all safety failures involve toxicity of the brain or the heart,” Yeh said.
Not only is this scary for patients, but it’s expensive for drugmakers. It’s better to know your drug is toxic to humans early on, while still testing in the lab, rather than to find out in later-stage studies with humans.
“Therapeutics for the brain and heart have a success rate of around 3 percent,” Yeh said. “And when they fail late, they cost billions of dollars.”
StemoniX products could mean huge savings for drugmakers, and it could have even bigger implications for human health.
‘The Fast Follower’
Yeh said the serviceable market for StemoniX’s products is about $1.3 billion.
“We had that number confirmed by recent research, and the market is doubling every three years,” Yeh said.
StemoniX has already landed a major client: a global pharmaceutical company who buys its heart and brain cells. StemoniX also has a distributor that sells its products to academic and research institutions around the globe, and is in talks with “several of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world.”
Unlike Organovo Inc. — the local firm that “bioprints” liver and kidney tissue for drug testing, but is still bleeding $30 million a year — StemoniX expects to be cash flow positive by late 2018 or 2019.
“We’ve focused on scalability and commercialization,” Yeh said. “We thank Organovo for creating the market, but we’re the fast follower.”
