Company Bridges Gap between University Lab and Marketplace (Nov 15, 2005)
For Immediate Release
Contact: Andrew Cohn
608 263-2821
MatriLab, a biotech start-up company with one foot in Madison and the other in Milwaukee, is part of the new "tech corridor" taking shape between the two cities. The company, which makes an innovative drug delivery product for wounds, is the outcome of a partnership that includes scientists, clinicians and management consultants. Providing the link between all parties is a management consulting company called TechStar Early Ventures of Milwaukee.
While conventional bandages cover the surface of an injury, the MatriLab technology conforms to the irregular, "English muffin"-like contours of a wound. The next generation of the product may deliver drug compounds to the wound site that would promote healing. While the basic scientific research is being accomplished on the UW-Madison campus, clinical work is taking place in Milwaukee.
Matrilab is just one of a handful of dynamic new biotech companies in the TechStar portfolio. "We formed the partnership with MatriLab to bring this new technology closer to maturity and to prove its commercial validity," says Brian Thompson, managing director of TechStar.
TechStar was formed to stimulate entrepreneurship, facilitate corporate development, and fund new companies in order to attract more venture capital to the state. The relative lack of venture capital has been sited by organizations such as the Wisconsin Technology Council as one of the primary reasons Wisconsin's economy lags behind other states in the Midwest.
The MatriLab technology was patented by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, but because it was in such an early stage of development, it was difficult to match the new tool with the needs of an existing company. Dick Leazer, a special partner at TechStar and former director of WARF, says university scientists who invent useful products are prime candidates for TechStar services.
TechStar brings inventions that may otherwise languish in university laboratories into the public sector, where they can be put to use. This enables taxpayers, who pay for the lion's share of university research, to enjoy more benefits of their investments.
"Taxpayers fund a lot of university research, some of which has significant commercial value," Leazer says, "but big investors won't fund technology that's in the very early stage of development." He says this results in a major gap between university inventors and large companies who have the money needed to take inventions from the campus to the marketplace.
In the case of Matrilab, the inventor created an exciting prototype product, but it wasn't until TechStar introduced the inventor, John Kao, a pharmacy professor at UW-Madison to a clinician, Jeffrey Niezgoda, director of the Center for Comprehensive Wound Care at Aurora Health Care and St. Luke's Medical Center, that the commercialization of the product took off. Once those essential connections were made, the company was able to validate the efficacy of its product and enhance it with qualities that would make it even more useful to doctors.
"TechStar found the clinician who could validate the need for the product and put a market-place focus on the science," says Leazer. "Essentially, we provided a bridge between the scientific thinking and the industry application."
The partnership is especially exciting to Kao, who invented the technology. Kao says he has learned a lot from interacting with the business experts at WARF and TechStar, and the doctors who may someday use his product. "We need strong business partners, and we need clinicians who are willing to try the product," he says. "Good science has to be coupled with marketability."
Kao says the cadre of experts formed by WARF and TechStar is an excellent starting point on the sometimes bumpy road to market.
